Seventy years ago this week, on April 12, 1945, while he was sitting for a portrait in Warm Springs, Georgia, President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke what were probably his last words—“I have a terrific headache
Seventy years ago this week, on April 12, 1945, while he was sitting for a portrait in Warm Springs, Georgia, President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke what were probably his last words—“I have a terrific headache”—and fainted. He died two hours later, of a cerebral hemorrhage. After F.D.R.’s Vice-President, Harry S. Truman, a former senator from Missouri, got the news at the Capitol, the Secret Service rushed him to the White House, where he was sworn in by Chief Justice Harlan Stone. “I felt as though the moon and the stars and all the planets fell on me last night when I got the news,” Truman told reporters the next day. “I have the most terribly responsible job any man ever had.”
Those sentences, much quoted since, were an understatement. At the time, Hitler was still alive in his bunker and the battle for Okinawa was under way, and although Truman had chaired a Senate committee looking into the domestic defense program, he was almost entirely unprepared for the job. He was nearly two weeks into his Presidency before Secretary of War Henry Stimson told him, “I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter”—the development of an atomic bomb. Truman knew next to nothing of what F.D.R. had discussed with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin when the Big Three war leaders met in Crimea, in February, until Roosevelt spoke to Congress on March 1st, the day after he returned. In fact, from the time that Truman was chosen as the Vice-Presidential nominee, in July, 1944, replacing Henry Wallace, until Roosevelt’s death, the two met only eight times, and most often in the company of legislative leaders. “I was handicapped by lack of knowledge of both foreign and domestic affairs—due principally to Mr. Roosevelt’s inability to pass on responsibility,” Truman wrote in his diary. He told Jonathan Daniels, who worked as an aide to both of them, that “Roosevelt never discussed anything important at his Cabinet meetings. Cabinet members, if they had anything to discuss, tried to see him privately after the meetings.” It’s painful to consider the leaps he had to make. He had hardly had time to be Vice-President. Three months after taking the oath, Truman was in Potsdam discussing the fate of postwar Europe with Churchill and Stalin, relying on briefing books and a small group of advisers, most of whom he barely knew.
The possibility of a sudden succession now plays a larger part in the selection of Vice-Presidents, but not always. Truman himself, when he ran in 1948, chose