'FDR's Final Campaign' Review: Presidential Race Against Time
By: Edward Rothstein (WSJ)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
"All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River," President Franklin Roosevelt declared on July 11, 1944, as he announced that he would do the opposite and run for a fourth presidential term. Now the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum is offering a 3,000-square-foot exhibition, "FDR's Final Campaign," providing insight into the decision's stakes, the courage and stubbornness required and the costs incurred.
Some aspects of that campaign, which pitted the 62-year-old president against the 42-year-old New York governor, Thomas E. Dewey, reflect an almost routine political calculus. Missouri Sen. Harry S. Truman displaced Vice President Henry A. Wallace as Roosevelt's running mate in order to appeal to the political center. Here we see buttons, posters and Roosevelt's "lucky" hat that he wore in presidential campaigns. After 1940, he donated it to a Hollywood fundraiser, where it was bought by the actors Edward G. Robinson and Melvyn Douglas; they returned it for his final campaign.
This fine exhibition—created by the museum’s staff and its supervisory curator, Herman Eberhardt—makes clear, though, that Roosevelt was waging many campaigns simultaneously; he could have used a milliner’s rack of lucky headgear. One poster shows Uncle Sam in a recruiting pose: “I WANT YOU F.D.R. / STAY AND FINISH THE JOB!” That job was, of course, World War II’s military campaign. Reproductions of newspaper pages show the war’s progress. June 1944’s D-Day landings and August’s march into Paris might have made the end seem near, but battles in the Pacific loomed and the Nazi winter offensive confounded hopes. The last year of the war was America’s bloodiest.
Another campaign was also urgent: It was against mortality itself. In 1944 a team of doctors examined Roosevelt. We see some medical reports here: He was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, an enlarged heart and dangerous hypertension with blood pressure levels around 236/120. His condition was, at the time, untreatable; he was futilely instructed to work no more than four hours a day. His illness was also kept secret—some information not emerging for decades—while the public was consistently reassured of his excellent health. His death on April 12, 1945, came less than three months after his inauguration.
Campaign memorabilia PHOTO: FDR PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY
The secret must have been aided by an almost willful widespread blindness—a bit like the way Roosevelt’s wheelchair was never openly acknowledged. An Associated Press photo shows him accepting the Democratic nomination in a remote broadcast. Readers, we learn, “were startled by this image of a gaunt and slack-jawed President.” Another image shows Roosevelt speaking from a Navy destroyer on Aug. 12, 1944. Mid-speech, his daughter, Anna, leans forward, sensing something awry: Roosevelt was hiding a painful angina attack. His cardiologist later said it “scared the hell out of us.”
But illness did not modify Roosevelt’s high-handed style. Roosevelt never informed Vice President Truman about postwar plans or atomic bomb development. And a display case here dramatically demonstrates “Truman’s isolation.” Roosevelt’s appointment calendar is open to one of only two times he met his Vice President while in office. And on display is their “entire correspondence.” One of two notes from Roosevelt tells Truman only to bother him with “absolutely urgent messages” while he is at Yalta (meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin). After Roosevelt died, Truman met Eleanor Roosevelt and asked if he could do anything for her. She replied: “Is there anything we can do for you , for you are the one in trouble now.”
Objects on view at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, including his hat PHOTO: FDR PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY
The exhibition is haunting, accompanied by audio excerpts of speeches, Roosevelt’s typescripts, and touch screens of documents, creating a powerful supplement to the main exhibition’s encyclopedic survey. It is also informed by research into this fraught period. There have been two illuminating books by Joseph Lelyveld and by David B. Woolner, one of the exhibition’s “historical advisors”; and in 2012 the once-secret diaries of Roosevelt’s distant cousin Margaret Suckley were edited and annotated by Geoffrey C. Ward, the show’s other adviser. Pages from the Suckley diaries are on display.
One area where there has long been debate is whether Roosevelt’s illness hampered his negotiations with Stalin in Yalta in early 1945. The exhibition notes that “conservative critics” argued FDR “gave away” Eastern Europe but a “more balanced view . . . has emerged over time.” We sample arguments on a touchscreen without reaching conclusions.
Left unexamined are the consequences of another “final campaign” emphasized here. The creation of the United Nations is called Roosevelt’s “greatest goal” of his final year. It was alluded to in his final inaugural address and the subject of the speech he was writing when he died. At Yalta, we are told, Roosevelt’s “single-minded pursuit” was to gain Stalin’s support for the U.N.; Roosevelt’s success is called “his greatest achievement.”
That ideal is celebrated, but its costs go unmentioned. Roosevelt, partly because of his “single-minded pursuit” (and partly to guarantee Stalin’s entry into the Pacific war), was far more willing than Churchill to skirt challenges to Stalin’s designs on Poland and Eastern Europe. As one American document here shows, he was even prepared to court Stalin by subtly undermining Churchill. It would have been worth pointing out in this otherwise excellent exhibition that despite Roosevelt’s internationalist ideals, the United Nations, founded soon after his death, was an irrelevant force, less than a year later: Churchill, out of office, visited President Truman and declared that an “iron curtain” had descended over Europe.
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He was obviously in no condition to lead the country. We are fortunate it turned out as well as it did.