Look at FDR asks big questions
There is a point, not very far into David B. Woolner’s excellent accounting of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s last months in office, where one realizes that this history — intentional or not — is going to be a presidential death watch.
“Was he too ill during these last months to properly carry the burdens of office?” the author asks in his preface. “Did Stalin dupe him at Yalta because FDR was too weak to resist? Should he have run for a fourth term? Did he ever admit to himself how unwell he was? What role did the members of his family or his closest confidants play — if any — in his ability to lead despite his reduced capacity for work?”
The questions are all valid, and Woolner seeks to answer them in “The Last 100 Days,” a remarkably well-researched book on the president whom Americans consistently rank among the greatest.
Indeed, Roosevelt had an amazing ability to maintain a herculean schedule. The self-described juggler handled domestic pressures in addition to, later, a twofront world war that would have taxed the abilities of mere political mortals.
As Woolner notes, Roosevelt kept up this work ethic almost to the moment of his death in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945. ■ What is not so clear — how could it ever be? — is whether the work kept Roosevelt going or proved to be his undoing.
Certainly, many critics have doubted Roosevelt’s capacity to lead in his diminished state. One charge that still has sticking power is that he gave away the ship at Yalta, subjecting Eastern Europe to decades of communist tyranny and an ensuing Cold War.
Woolner acknowledges the critics but offers a morenuanced view that Roosevelt got most of what he sought at the Big Three summit in Crimea in February 1945, primarily an agreement for the establishment of the United Nations.
Moreover, Woolner analyzes Roosevelt at Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake after the Yalta summit, where the president tried to broach the question of Jewish immigration to Palestine with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Like most of the presidents who followed him, Roosevelt was rebuffed.
But the telling of the fiveweek, half-a-world-away voyage by ship and airplane to Yalta is the most fascinating aspect of this book, in which Woolner displays his historian’s chops.
The trip itself was the stuff of legend, an especially dangerous ocean crossing at a time when German U-boats still prowled the Atlantic. Then there was the return trip, as equally fraught but now with growing alarm over the president’s condition.
“This is really a ship of death, and everyone responsible in encouraging that man (FDR) to go to Yalta has done a disservice to the United States and ought to be shot,” Alexander Kirk, the U.S. ambassador to Italy, put it in a sentiment that others, perhaps not as crudely, expressed upon seeing Roosevelt in his sickened state.
To make matters worse, Roosevelt’s personal secretary, Gen. Edwin “Pa” Watson, had taken ill and died aboard the USS Quincy as the ship made its voyage back to the United States.
Still, the president soldiered on.
Woolner writes: “Perhaps the most remarkable odyssey the president took in the spring of 1945 was not his trip to Yalta but his journey down the center aisle of the U.S. House of Representatives on the morning of March 1, where in full view of the packed and wildly cheering chamber, he made his way in his wheelchair.”
This, according to Woolner, was Roosevelt coming to grips with his disability: Labor Secretary “Frances Perkins found this ‘casual, debonair’ reference to his disability, ‘made without self-pity or strain,’ deeply moving. Choking up, she, like Eleanor (Roosevelt), realized that what FDR was admitting — not only to the audience but to himself — was ‘You see, I am a crippled man.’”
Disability acknowledged and his health still deteriorating, Roosevelt was nevertheless looking forward to addressing the initial conference of the United Nations in San Francisco and even hinted to associates that he and Eleanor would visit England. Neither came to pass. This book is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Roosevelt.
Its focus on his last 100 days allows the author to explore Roosevelt’s presidency when he was most vulnerable, diagnosed with a failing heart but still holding the fate of the world in his hands.
That he saw this challenge through to the end helps explain the juggler in him, as well as his complexity.