Transcript: Chapter 2.10

Narrator: June 6, 1944 -- D-Day. After more than two years of waiting, the cross-channel invasion of Europe had finally begun. FDR had sent into action 400,000 men and more than 5,000 ships of every kind. It was largest armada in history. That evening, the president led the nation in prayer.

President Franklin Roosevelt: Almighty God, our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a might endeavor, a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion and our civilization and to set free a suffering humanity. They will be sore tried by night and by day without rest until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again, and we know that by Thy grace and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

Narrator: Within a year, the Germans would be driven back to Berlin. Roosevelt had taken a weak, ill-prepared nation into battle against the mightiest war machine the world had ever known, but now it was no longer clear that he would live to see the final victory.

Eleanor Roosevelt, Niece: He got thinner. His doctor was more often in attendance. He never said, "I'm sick." He might say he was tired or he might say he didn't want to come to lunch that day, but he never said he sick. He wouldn't say that.

Dr. Howard G. Bruenn: He never inquired about what I had found, what the medication I was giving him, and literally, he passed it over very quietly.

Photographer: Mr. President, would you just give me one full profile? Will you give us a full profile to your left, sir? A little bit more.

Geoffrey Ward: I think he didn't think there was any need to brood over things over which he had no control.

President Franklin Roosevelt: I can keep on looking at him.

Photographer: No, no. No, we want you out here.

Geoffrey Ward: I think polio had taught him a certain fatalism about health. I think his father's heart attack long before had given him some fatalism, I think it was just better not to look into these things. Carry on, do your duty, remain cheerful.

President Franklin Roosevelt: "Cost of production is a stock argument of the stars, but control of prices by that means is illogical and to the scientific money and the prevention of combines and monopoly practically impossible." Another great thought.

Photographer: What book is that?

President Franklin Roosevelt: I don't know. "And the possessor of money is entitled to a certain amount of worth as divided by money." Now, don't forget it's divided by money.

Hugh Gallagher: At the end during the war years when he began to lose his muscle power, when he got so he could no longer stand without great pain and spasms and things, he never once mentioned how he felt about that.

He was told to eat in his bed alone and not to socialize and to cut down on his smoking. Well, what he loved most of all in life was the dinner parties, making the martinis, the cigarettes, the badinage, the conversation. And he was reduced to having a milk toast in bed and talking to Grace Tully, his secretary, and she was a very nice woman, but she was no conversationalist.

I think he was a very lonely man. All his support system in the White House had dissipated. His mother had died and the children, who had been in and out of the house with their family and kids, they were all off at war, and Eleanor, by that time, had evolved a separate orbit of her own and she was traveling all the time on the war effort.

Curtis Roosevelt: I think FDR was very disappointed in his relationship with my grandmother, just as disappointed as she must have been in him. There was a lot of duty exchanged and an enormous amount of respect for each other, but the love, the kind of intimacy, the touching didn't really exist. He really had nobody to love.

back to top