1.
On Easter morning, 1885, a young family of three was in their cabin aboard the Germanic, returning from a trip to Europe. It was a frequent privilege for the wealthy Roosevelts. All at once, the cabin grew dark. A viscious wind howled. Waves crashed loudly over the bow. After a while, water seeped into the cabin. A puddle slid from one side of the floor to the other as the craft wallowed. Then it was deep enough to slosh.
"We seem to be going down," said Sara Delano Roosevelt.
"It does look like it," replied her equally calm husband James. Sara wrapped her fur coat around her toddler son Franklin.
"If he must go down," she said, "he is going down warm."
He didn't go down. This was just a brush with death. Likely Franklin did not even remember the occasion, or he'd have made a good story of it. As a man he loved to tell stories--often increasing his role in them. But he would inherit the emotional trait his parents displayed that night: the skill of remaining imperturbable, even in a storm that threatens to swallow you whole.
2.
Young Franklin had gashed his head with a steel rod. He might have gone crying for sympathy. But when he was eight, his father had suffered a heart attack. The family now organized itself around preserving James's health. The boy knew nothing should upset his father. He pulled his cap over the wound and pretended nothing had happened. This was the near-death of his youth.
As an only child in patrician surroundings he had developed the skill of hiding his true feelings. Of leaning back and observing others, then shaping his actions and even his emotions to suit the occasion. It made him inscrutable. It made him devious. It made him resilient.
3.
The typhoid fever was brutal. Franklin could barely leave his bed in his New York City townhouse. His wife Eleanor blamed it on contaminated water they must have drunk on the steamship from their summer house on Campobello Island. Now the New York state senator from upstate was laid low just at the end of his first term, just when he should be campaigning for his re-election. The typhoid might spare his life, but it looked like the death of his fledgling political career.
Franklin loved politics. He loved talking to people, speechifying, working behind the scenes to get things done. He wasn't well-liked. He was arrogant and sometimes inept. He showed little evidence of his future convictions. He didn't seem committed to labor, or public works, or women's rights. But he did have an instinct for what worked. He told Eleanor to call in the reporter, Louis Howe. Louis was a brilliant political operator. He would prove to be an invaluable asset in Roosevelt's political life. Howe designed policy, wrote letters, took out ads, and traveled the countryside as Franklin's surrogate. He pulled Roosevelt's career back from the brink. Franklin was re-elected without ever visiting his own district. Howe never worked for anyone else.
4.
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt was on his way home from inspecting ships and troops in Europe. It made him long to resign his post, as his cousin Teddy had, and actually enlist. But he had been convinced his duty lay in Washington, under President Wilson. It was September, 1918.
On the voyage home, his ship was swept with the Spanish flu. Franklin went down with it, like everyone else. As many victims were buried at sea, Franklin lay weakly in his berth. When the boat docked in New York, Eleanor met it. Her husband was carried off the ship.
At home, he was too weak to unpack his own suitcase so Eleanor did it for him. She found a packet of love letters from another woman, Lucy Mercer. This was the near-death of his marriage. Eleanor was devastated. But the couple was convinced not to part. His mother Sara had a hand in it, as did Louis Hyde, who convinced Roosevelt that the death of his marriage would murder his presidential aspirations. A deal was struck. Franklin agreed not to see Lucy ever again. Eleanor agreed to stand at his side, to continue their partnership. She would continue to raise their five children. There would not be any more.
It was no longer the love match she had wanted. But in some ways, the near death of her marriage was the beginning of her life, her life as a woman with opinions and aspirations of her own.
5.
Franklin arrived at Campobello Island eager for the things he loved: swimming and fishing and sailing and romping with his children. But after just one afternoon, he was exhausted. He went to bed with a chill. The next morning, he awoke with a fever. He could not use his legs. Before long, he could not control his own bladder.
It took time for the doctors to understand what was happening. Eventually he was diagnosed with polio, probably picked up at a Boy Scout camp. The scourge of America's children had captured the politician at age 39. For weeks, he struggled for his life. His muscles atrophied. Eventually the paralysis left his arms and back and he worked as hard as he could to build up their strength. He was fitted for leg braces and learned to walk on crutches and eventually, with just a cane and another person.
His mother Sara thought he should retire, settle into the life of a wealthy invalid. Eleanor thought he should continue with his political career. Louis Hyde agreed. He wrote letters touting Franklin's recovery. Eleanor took speaking gigs as his surrogate.
After experiencing polio, Franklin became a different person. People thought he seemed warmer, humbler, more empathetic. His exertions to regain what strength he could were seen as inspiration, proof of his indomitable spirit. Enlisted to make a speech in support of candidate Al Smith at the Democratic convention of 1924, he painfully struggled to the podium then flashed his trademark grin. The crowd went wild. Did he hear in that sustained roar his election to the governorship of New York, his nomination for the presidency, his election in 1932? Certainly he knew one fact: his legs were withered but his political future was revived.
6.
President-elect Roosevelt sat in the back of his convertible. It was one of his favorite ways to address crowds: to hoist himself to the top of the backseat: no walking involved. He was in Miami, about to take a relaxing Caribbean cruise aboard a friend's yacht before taking office. He had agreed to address the annual American Legion convention before departing.
He had made his remarks and settled back into his seat, where he was chatting with Chicago's mayor Anton Cermak when he heard what sounded like firecrackers. The mayor and another woman nearby fell to the ground. The Secret Service, one of them bleeding, began shouting. FDR sat still. He did not duck. When the chauffeur started the car and began to leave, FDR insisted he stop. He had Mayor Cermak put in the back seat with him. He held the mayor, feeling for his pulse, as they drove to the hospital. There, he waited until Cermak was out of the emergency room, then spoke with him. Then he visited the three other victims. The assassination attempt was on him, but it wasn't just about him.
FDR went back to his boat and went on his cruise. His companions reported that he seemed unperturbed by his latest brush with death.
7.
The 1936 presidential campaign: the New Deal had enraged Roosevelt's critics, even as it was broadly popular. He had put millions of people on relief, stood up huge public works programs to employ the jobless, created the Civilian Conservation Corps, begun electrifying rural America and passed a labor relations act.
The changes were so sweeping that bombast overheated. The right's political attack dogs went nuts. "I'll teach them how to hate," bragged Reverend Gerald Smith, a Southern evangelical preacher: "Religion and patriotism, keep going on that." His Catholic counterpart, the virulent racist Father Coughlin, blamed "Jews" for Roosevelt's policies. FDR, he said, was "the dumbest man ever to occupy the White House." He called him a Communist, a liar, an "anti-god," and an "upstart dictator," and insisted that bullets were permissible to get rid of him when the ballot proved "useless."
The vituperation proved ineffective, and FDR easily won a second term, but the campaign was a near-death experience -- if not for Roosevelt, for civility in political discourse.
8.
Alexander Sachs, banker and economist, was a friend of the president. That's why the scientists chose him. In October 1939, he visited Roosevelt in the White House. He had a letter from Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein, along with his own summary of what it said. But he began by warming up Franklin with a story. Napoleon, he told FDR, had once turned down an offer by two Americans to build him a steamship fleet because he thought that ships without sails would never work. This letter, he told Franklin, was like that offer. It was about steamships in an age that only knew sails.
Instead of engaging with what Sachs said, FDR sent an aide to get a very expensive bottle of real Napoleon brandy. Sachs took his glass and drank, but he carried on with his summary. Atomic fission, he told the president, was not only possible, but the scientists believed the Germans were already working on it. Suddenly, Franklin seemed interested.
"Alex," he said, "what you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up."
"Precisely," his friend replied. Something clicked in the president's brain.
"This requires action," he said. And in that moment, the Manhattan Project was born.
9.
FDR's children were going wrong. Everything was going wrong in his second term. His ill-conceived attempt to pack the Supreme Court had rightly failed. His attempt to cut spending to rebalance the budget had plunged the nation back into recession; he was forced to reverse it. Congress was no longer rubberstamping him and now it seemed his eldest two sons were taking jobs and deals that suggested they were profiting off family connections. His third son, Franklin Jr. had taken part in a foolish fraternity prank that nearly caused an international incident.
Roosevelt in 1940 looked like a long shot for a third term. He had transformed the Democratic party into the party of progressivism, but the Republican candidate Wendell Wilkie, made sure there was little light between his positions and Roosevelt's. And he promised to keep America's boys out of the disastrous European war. Roosevelt's policy of making America the "arsenal of democracy," providing weapons and ships to the Allies, made him look like he was moving the nation toward war. He was forced to respond to Wilkie's attacks by promising not to send America's boys into foreign wars. Note the word "foreign." The election was close, but Roosevelt had avoided political death once more.
10.
On August 3, 1941, FDR left on the presidential yacht for a fishing trip. The boat putted around Cape Cod, FDR on the deck with his fishing pole and his cigarette holder. He was having a great time, reports said.
Except it wasn't FDR but a pince-nez-wearing decoy. The president had slipped onto a naval cruiser that steamed toward Newfoundland and history. For the first time, he was meeting Winston Churchill.
In reality, it was really Churchill's brush with death, as he risked German U-boats to cross the Atlantic. He and Roosevelt had already forged a military alliance through words; now they would forge a personal connection. Churchill urged Roosevelt to declare war but FDR resisted. He was never one to get ahead of public opinion. He did agree to let American naval ships escort British ships as far as Iceland, and to continue supplying the British with the tools and weapons of war. The two leaders agreed to support Russia in its battle against Hitler. They forged the terms of a postwar world order committed to peace--assuming of course there was a postwar.
What FDR didn't know was that while he was meeting with Churchill in a harbor on Newfoundland, his own brush with death was being prepared. In direct contradiction of official policy, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson had cut off the flow of American petroleum to Japan. The State department had slapped the Japanese with a freeze on assets, as punishment for Japanese aggression in China and the Pacific. But Japan got 80% of its oil from the United States. An outright embargo could provoke war. So workarounds had kept the oil flowing. Until Acheson, a hawk, stopped it.
When he returned from meeting with Churchill, FDR found the wheels in motion. There was nothing he could do to stop it without looking weak. So on December 7, 1941, Acheson got his wish. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the war in the Pacific was no longer a foreign war. It was America's now.
11.
The president clung to the lectern aboard the destroyer. It was in port, but there was a high wind and as he spoke, the ship pitched and rolled. Across the nation, people were listening. His speech, atypically, was faltering. He wasn't far in when the chest pains began. He could barely continue for the pain. He continued.
It was August, 1944. He was running for his fourth term, but he felt like hell. His daughter Anna had already insisted he be seen by a heart specialist, who was alarmed at his blood pressure, his enlarged heart, his labored breathing and the blue tinge of his fingernails. He thought Franklin should be told that he was suffering advanced heart disease. FDR's regular doctor disagreed. And Franklin didn't ask. He took the medicine they prescribed and went on with winning the war. But now he was not just near death; he was already dying.
12.
Niels Bohr was concerned. As a physicist, he understood the atomic bomb would change the world. As a philosopher, he knew that before it was revealed, it was critical to put systems in place to ensure that atomic energy was used for the good of humanity. To prevent the nuclear arms race that would result if it wasn't.
Bohr could not get to President Roosevelt. But he knew Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Frankfurter did not officially know about the Manhattan Project, but he understood what Bohr was talking about when he mentioned "X," a project that might become mankind's great boon, or its greatest disaster. Bohr believed information about "X" should be shared with all the Allies--including the Russians--to create a spirit of cooperation in dealing with it afterward. Justice Frankfurter agreed to talk to the president.
President Roosevelt was just six months away from his death. What he said to Justice Frankfurter is not authoritatively known, since he denied reports of it later. But what Felix reported was that when he raised Niels Bohr's concerns with the president, Franklin agreed with all of them. He too believed that solving this problem might be more important than anything else they faced. This may have been Roosevelt being Roosevelt--giving the impression of agreeing with the person at hand even as he planned something completely different.
Justice Frankfurter claimed to remember one phrase vividly from his conversation with the president. It stood out for him, coming from the president who had calmly faced down the Great Depression, who had carried the nation through the war, who had sat stoically still as an anarchist shot at him, who had said the only thing to fear was fear itself. When Frankfurter raised the question of what might come from America's use of the bomb, FDR said that the whole issue "worried him to death."
32: Franklin Delano Roosevelt