Transcript: Chapter 26

Narrator: It was spring in Georgia. American soldiers had crossed the Rhine. The Marines had invaded Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Almost every day, the president exchanged messages with Winston Churchill about the Soviets. "We must be firm," Roosevelt wrote in his last letter to him. For relaxation, he enjoyed the company of two admiring cousins.

On April 8, Eleanor wrote him: "I am so glad you are gaining. You sounded cheerful for the first time last night, and I hope you'll weigh 170 pounds when you return. Devotedly, E.R." The next day, Lucy Mercer Rutherford joined him.

Geoffrey Ward: On the 11th of April, FDR drove Lucy to Dowdell's Knob, which was a favorite spot of his, overlooking a lovely valley, and they sat in the late evening and he talked about the future of the world and what he was going to do after the war had ended.

The next morning was the 12th. They were sitting in his little cottage, which was called "the little White House." Lucy brought with her a Russian painter, a Madame Shoumatoff, who is going to do a portrait of FDR for her. Madame Shoumatoff began to paint.

FDR signed a good many letters, had a little lunch, and then suddenly dropped some papers on the floors and reached up to his forehead and said, "I have a terrific headache," and fell unconscious.

Dr. Howard G. Bruenn: And when I got there, he was slumped over the table, unconscious, and I and his valet carried him into his bedroom, which was on the same-- just next to the living room where it happened. And I was on the bed, giving him artificial respiration -- he had stopped breathing. It was ineffective, as they say, from that time on he never regained consciousness.

Narrator: At 3:35pm, Dr. Bruenn pronounced the president dead. Eleanor was in Washington when she received a phone call asking her to return to the White House. "I knew in my heart that something dreadful had happened," she said. "I got into my car and sat with clenched hands."

She arrived in Warm Springs near midnight. There she learned that Lucy Mercer Rutherford had been with her husband when he died, that her daughter Anna had arranged their meetings.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: Eleanor went into the room where he was laying on his bed, and she was in there for 10 minutes alone. And one has to imagine her looking at his face and absorbing what she must feel is this terrible act of betrayal not only by her husband, who had promised her he would never see Lucy again, but also by her daughter.

Somehow, she was able to pull herself together in that 10-minute span so that all those conflicting emotions were pulled inside of her, so that when she emerged from the room, she still stood tall, simply Mrs. Roosevelt going forward with her public duties.

Dr. Howard G. Bruenn: We took him back to Washington on a train. It was the most moving thing I can recall. People lined the railroad tracks for miles, hundreds of miles -- sobbing, crying.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: As Eleanor looked out on the faces of her countrymen, slowly she begins to feel how much all these people -- blacks, poor people, migrant workers, labor people, women -- loved her husband. They tell her, "We loved him. He made our lives different." And I think that what happened is that inside her heart, the faces of all these people touched her somehow and somehow that began to soften her.

Eleanor Roosevelt: I lay in my berth all night, with the window shade up, looking out at the countryside Franklin had loved. I was truly surprised by the people along the way. I had never realized the full scope of their devotion to him until he died.

Narrator: On April, 15, 1945, at Hyde Park, New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was laid to rest in the center of his mother's garden where he had played as a boy.

Nothing much had changed at Hyde Park during FDR's 63 years, but the world outside had changed beyond imagining. As he led the country through the Great Depression and a world war, FDR transformed the presidency and the role of government. Now America was prepared to take the center of the world stage, the most powerful and prosperous nation on Earth. But above all, FDR's optimism inspired the American people to believe they could accomplish anything they set out to accomplish.

In 1946 Winston Churchill made a visit to his friend's grave. "Meeting Roosevelt," Churchill said, "was like uncorking your first bottle of champagne."

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