Transcripts For CSPAN2 His Final Battle 20170625

Good afternoon, everyone. We had a great day so far, welcome those who are new to the fdr president ial library and museum, our 14th annual roosevelt reading festival. We have already had 14 authors speak today. I dont want to disparage them. We kept the best for last, we will end on a high note. I appreciate you all coming. Those who are members raise your hand. Look at that. That is fantastic. I appreciate you being here and your support, two trustees today, jack goodman says supporting the library for 35 years. [applause] one of the most interesting parts of working here at the library is even though it has been 80 years, new material comes up all the time and new researchers find new things to talk about and expose new aspects of this story, this incredible story. Our incredible speaker has focused in on the final era, 12 days of the era and has written a book that will go down as one of the finest descriptions of this period. He is a pulitzer prizewinning author and one of our great journalists, serve four years as reporter, editor at the New York Times, i followed his career closely as a journalist at the museum, truly a great writer, a great eye for detail and the perceptions all investigative journalists have, he is also written a great soul, Mahatma Gandhi have struggled with the and omaha blues, a memorial loop, which i have to read. I cant remember why but i have to read it. The last months of Franklin Roosevelt, his final battle, looks at the final period that is so important to understand the entire roosevelt legacy. Is laid the foundation for the Truman Administration and the entire postwar world. Please welcome joseph lelyveld. [applause] thank you very much. I have heard some very good talks here today. I dont know if you will end on a high note. It is nice to be back here. I spend perhaps not as much time as a conscientious biographer should spend in the archives over here but once i learned how to use franklin, the Search Engine on the website, i took some shortcuts. I never came up with a satisfactory answer to the question of how i got interested in roosevelt in the first place and why i was writing about him. I was mainly a foreign correspondent, overall editor and i have not been that drawn to american politics so when people ask me that question as they often do, the flippant answer was it is the right exit on the throughway. I have a house on the other side of the river. I could get here in 25 minutes door to door. When i tried that no one understood what i was saying. I gave up on it. The awkward truth is i couldnt and cannot today remember exactly what drew me to fdr in the first place. I was thinking of researching and writing about it. These days i have to confess i forget a lot. At some point four or five years ago after my previous book on gandhi came out, something pointed me to this very different, not conspicuously spiritual figure. It wasnt an entire book i can be sure. I hadnt read enough dr book in years. It may have been nothing but a paragraph or sentence. At least it was something approaching a thought. Whatever it was, it started me thinking and poking around in libraries, looking through books i could have, should have encountered earlier. Eventually it led me here to the reading room adjacent to the archives next door. What drew me on and i found intriguing was a faint notion that i might uncover clues to the famously elusive figures most intimate thoughts on the ultimate existential question, the question of his own mortality. More down to earth terms, the question of what it was that kept our longestserving president going after all those years of stress in the midst of the most destructive war in human history, within his sense of duty, selfsacrifice, was it overweening ego, political enemies and later scholars routinely suggest . Or was he as we sometimes now say on this very sensitive topic in denial . It is fair to say most of us are day in and day out. Not to be morbid, there was one fact i couldnt ignore. I was all ready when i started thinking of fdr years older than he was at the end of his life. He was just 63 the day he died, april 12, 1945. I am old enough to remember that day the many that is the way many of us remember never been 22nd 1963 and all of us remember september 11, 2001. Days when our consciousness and private preoccupations were, for a time, smothered and taken over by shocking events in the public sphere. On that day, that longago april day, one of my favorite radio serials, pretty sure it was captain midnight, was interrupted by something from warm springs, georgia. That was how they did before social media. Deep disembodied voice came out of a box and said we interrupt this program to bring you an Important News bulletin. President roosevelt is dead. Or words to that effect. Followed by slow, doleful orchestral music, more bulletins and more said news music. Captain midnight was banished from the airwaves for several days. Could be my interest in the subject started there. I dont really think so but i think i was reflexively doing what i had done through a long career as a reporter and editor. I was beginning to sense a story that had to be told. Times that i cover in this book is limited, just 17 months as i finally conceived it from the day the president left the white house in november 1943 to sale to the mediterranean en route to to run to meet the soviet dictator and tyrant joseph stalin, until that fateful day in warm springs. 17 months cannot begin to tell the whole story of the man or the war. It is necessary to unfold the chronology. Bending it forward and back to see the bigger picture. If you cannot fully understand roosevelts determination to engage stalin facetoface as he did for the first time in tehran without referring back to his experience as a secondtier official in the Woodrow Wilson administration during world war i which left him with a determination this time around to shake the postwar order as he believed wilson failed to do in his day. Even before pearl harbor and therefore before our formal entry into the war, roosevelt was preoccupied with the question of how this might be accomplished. He had no pat answer. This was the president who didnt dealing pat answers but the question how he could succeed where wilson failed was seldom far from his mind. We think of wilson and roosevelt as being in separate historical eras. Each has his own world war, yet when you think about it, the Wilson Administration ended just 12 years before the Roosevelt Administration began. They are as far apart as george w. Bush and donald trump are not timescale. The presence and experience of world war i and our efforts to stay out of it, were on many minds but principally on the president s. I think i can handle stalin better than your Foreign Office or my state department, roosevelt wrote to churchill early on before we were formally at war. Properly handled a dictator might be the key to victory in the postwar world. Wasnt a sure thing. It was a proposition to be tested. Tehran was to be the first test. Similarly the chronology, the back story sketched in, if we are to find meaning in the place he made in his crowded life, lucy rutherford, lucy mercer, in his last months. The drama inherent in the fact that it was lucy who was with him when he was felled by a hemorrhage on the brain in warm springs, as eleanor discovered, only that evening to her bitter and lasting chagrin. Beyond that, 17 months packed with history with h involving this president. The dday landings in germany, the largest Amphibious Assault likely to remain so. The decision to proceed with building the atomic bomb, fdrs long postponed decision to stand again for fourth term in the election of 1944, still the maneuvers to drop his starry eyed Vice President , Henry Wallace after whom the center is named. Which would be a very rooseveltian thing, name a center and drop him from the ticket. Sorry. From the ticket his starry eyed Vice President Henry Wallace from the ticket in favor of a littleknown missouri senator, a hardfought campaign at a time when the weather democrat was given a chance of winning, which is a point people often forget when they talk about how roosevelt made up his mind. He was really deciding whether thomas dewey could be president. Soon followed by the battle of the bulge, hitler big counterattack in belgium which turned out to be his last desperate throw of the dice militarily. Roosevelts perilous trip on the black sea for the second summit meeting with stalin and churchill leading to agreement on the United Nations and soviet intervention on our side in the pacific war and crucially a compromise on poland that had little or no chance of holding, roosevelt recognized since the red army had already occupied the entire country. A few highlights. Here is a sideline. By picking harry truman as his understudy, and earlier Dwight Eisenhower to be Supreme Commander in europe, both were surprised choices. Fdr in effect shows not only his successor but his success of successor. All these matters were written over and over, more than if you have given rise to controversies that still cant be deemed settled but roosevelt himself came to feel, as i burrowed into my reading, to receiving many of these narratives, he was too easily presumed long after the effect, or prospectively to be a dying man and therefore any factual, fate about fading out and losing grasp of these big events. After all, he did die. Somehow it seemed he managed to remain a convincing president to the end or very nearly so. His actual medical condition was never disclosed in his lifetime and his medical records disappeared and presumably were destroyed afterwords. He took care as he always had, to cover his tracks and not just on matters medical. Some historians and biographers had fallen for interpretation that says roosevelt didnt know his condition. I found it hard to believe, he was inhabiting the body that was failing. He had been very sensitive to his medical conditions when first struck by polio, in that. Go. He was accompanied every day in the last year of his life by cardiologist who gave ekg tests once or twice a day, he wasnt a dim man. He could add all that up and plenty of evidence that he did. I think the answer to that line of interpretation. This is the most private of public men, charming, loquacious, exceedingly guarded to the point of making the likes of Hillary Clinton and donald trump seem by contrast fonts of self revelation. Roosevelt kept no diary, for bad taking of notes in his meetings, retained the White House Press corps regularly, usually twice a week but almost always on and off the record basis. Very few contemporaries who were later thought to be his confidants got peaks into his thinking for the simple reason it was in a constant state of flux and revision, never static, situations in the Political Climate changed. Dedicated to keeping his political and diplomatic, personal option open as long as he could. He could stand on all sides of an issue when it suited his purpose, highly principled, he was routinely duplicitous in his tactics. A juggler, roosevelt himself once acknowledged, ready to lie if it would help win the war. The bridge military historian john keegan called him by far the most enigmatic leading figure of world war 2, inscrutable might be another word. I said i started off by wondering how i thought about his basic situation in life, mortality and what he was facing and how he made his choices but in the end seemed an Impossible Task because he confided so little but i was more struck and drawn by this enigmatic quality. He was not and is not a simple man to understand but that is what pulled me along in this enterprise. His duplicity on the political front as well. The same few months, days, july of 1944, he simultaneously left a pair of would be candidates to believe he had support for the nomination while working to block them on behalf of a third man to whom he never directly spoke. In his diary Henry Wallace called him a water man capable of looking and in one direction while rowing and another. Among the best descriptions there is. These wartime months, his instinct for secretiveness could be justified on the grounds of National Security under a supposedly voluntary censorship agreement with reporters covering the white house, the actual whereabouts retreated as a state secret, not just when he traveled abroad to casablanca, cairo, taiwan but also abroad in the United States, he was actually aware 20s away from the white house more than in it. Public cabinet members didnt know where he was let alone where he was going. He made 21 trips of varying lengths to hyde park in the final 17 months. On a president ial train the departed late at night from the basement of the bureau of engraving and printing across the mall from the white house riding in his own specially outfitted army pleaded railway car called the Ferdinand Magellan which if you have any thoughts of heading to the Sunshine State can be visited just outside the miami zoo at what is called the golf course railway museum. You can learn a lot about Franklin Roosevelt by spending some time in that car because he thought nothing of spending a whole week in it. In april 1944, as the day approached, he spent a month in rehab at a plantation in the low country of coastal south carolina. All that time, the closest the New York Times came to disclosing his whereabouts was to say in a subordinate clause tucked in the middle of a short inconspicuously placed dispatch on an inside page, the president of the United States was, quote, somewhere in the south. A line in David Herbert donalds biography of lincoln inspired me finally to give this elusive subject a shot. It had been his ambition to produce a biography written from lincolns point of view using information and ideas available to him, seeking to explain rather than to judge. After months of intermittent exploration i concluded with a reporters opportunism that there was ample room for another book on roosevelt. To which this day is witness. There seems to be ample room every other week for a book on roosevelt. The opening was there in part because some of his most industrious and ambitious students never got to the end of his life. s lessons ares was in the 1930s when it broke off, Kenneth Davis died after his first three volumes. The earliest scholar to plan a multivolume treatment did the research for a fifth but left it unfinished. New information and insight surfaced over the years. There were clinical notes, roosevelts cardiologist, new york specialist named howard bruen eventually published a medical journal 25 years after his patient died. With a letter, frank leahy, a noted surgeon who was a consultant on the roosevelts condition after prosperity, a letter dictated a day before fdr finally declared for a fourth term and found he wouldnt be able to survive it. Much later after prolonged court battle that went to the highest court in massachusetts, the fool leahy letter came into the public domain, 2007. I think that is hardly mentioned in previous biographies because scholars doubted its authenticity. I went into that hoping to make some stunning discovery. I didnt make a stunning discovery but convinced myself it is undoubtedly authentic. Leahy went down to washington the weekend before he dictated that letter, for one night just overnight, saw ross mcintyre, roosevelts physician, hoped to see roosevelt but roosevelt was with lucy rutherford. And didnt have time for him. Mcintyre clearly told him there would be an announcement the following monday or tuesday and he went back and dictated his letter to posterity saying this was a mistake. I am convinced that letter is significant and gives you an insight, when you think about it, as to who was really managing the disclosure of information on the president s medical condition. More helpful, daisy was a Hudson Valley neighbor and distant cousin who spent more private time during the war years alone with the president than anyone else including his wife. She survived by half a century, always insisting that she saved no notes, no correspondence. After she died in her 100th year in 1991, a battered leather suitcase was hauled from under the bed in her familys dilapidated mansion on the banks of the hudson, restored and open to the public, just north of here. Inside was her diary which jeffrey ward himself, the author of three outstanding roosevelt books masterfully edited into a volume appropriately titled closest companion, in conjunction with the day by day white house logs online at the roosevelt librarys website, providing the mood music for the president s last month, up and down recipe in which his hopes, worries and calculations find highly variable expression. These and similar late discoveries made it possible to adapt professor donalds standard, and attempt to book a climactic period of his life and presidency from roosevelts own point of view to explain his thinking rather than judge him and in simplest terms, to tell a story. In viewing his choices through his eyes, became clear to me that they didnt often appear to him as choices. At the end of 1943 on his return from tehran he appeared to be in radiant good health, his crippling infirmity notwithstanding. At that time the person everybody was worried about was Winston Churchill who was down with pneumonia in north africa. Churchill was so sick the british flew his wife to his bedside thinking he might not recover. Roosevelt in a speech on christmas eve, talking about tehran said we all pray for the health of Prime Minister churchill, three months later, his navy cardiologist diagnosed him with congestive heart failure, a diagnosis that then wasnt revealed for 25 years. There were then two months remaining to dday and six to the democratic convention. If one thinks of this timeline the big question is raised. What possibly could the president have done . What options were open to roosevelt at that point . He may have wandered earlier on, whether an end to the war in europe might give them an opportunity to bow out. But that consummation didnt come soon enough. Giving these interlocking timetables for the invasion and convention, the commanderinchief it seems to me was in no position to look for in exit or a successor. He couldnt conceivably say on the eve of the day after sending Young Americans into battle by hundreds of thousands i am getting out of here. 10 months remaining in his term, he was then serving he was then serving under our inflexible constitution, carrying on was a more obvious choice than getting out. Is not going to make Henry Wallace president on the eve of dday. He told himself and a few others he could always resign if it got to be too much. A couple of vignettes stick in my mind when i consider roosevelts valor in these months, one is a visit he paid in the hills above honolulu to the wards of a new Navy Hospital where patients including amputees survivors of the assault in the pacific, including amputees, roosevelt, who never allowed himself to be photographed in public, the narrow wheelchair he designed for himself, had the secret Service Wheel him through those wards stopping at every bed so the wounded airmen and marines could draw a measure of encouragement and solace from the example of a president who hadnt been able to take a step unassisted for nearly a quarter of a century. There is was a kind of communion. The other image involves his wheelchair. He left two days after his fourth inauguration and was gone for a month. Two days after he returned he went to the capital to address congress for what would prove to be the final time. The chamber full, he had himself wheeled down the island transferred to an armchair from which he spoke in a seated position at the foot of the podium where he previously stood uncomfortably in his braces saying without a trace of selfpity it makes it a lot easier not to have to carry 10 pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs. This was the first and only public acknowledgment in those 12 president ial years of his infirmity. Frances perkins, the first woman to occupy a cabinet office, called it one more spiritual leader victory for him in his long adjustments. John odonnell, his the fears and i roosevelt columnist in the new york daily knows wrote even his grimace political foes were stirred by the crippled president s brisk allusion to what had previously been unmentionable. It reawakens, odonnell conceded, their honest appreciation of the undoubted personal courage and fighting hard of the man who was about to tell what he had done in the name of the republic, to blow away the fumes as plumes of personal bitterness. A wave of applause rolled across the chamber, whether for the president s candor or the long arduous trip on which he was about to embark is hard to say. His stalwart miss in either case, the applause was repeated when fdr was wheeled back up the aisle. The future tv anchor and commentator David Brinkley would write he was home, victorious leader of a victorious nation. In a matter of weeks, it became an issue of bitter dispute, rewriting history. But by then, Franklin Roosevelt himself had vanished from the scene. The cheers for his last speech to congress were the last years he heard. My book takes the view that they were well and truly earned. Thank you. Strategists who wanted to get to berlin by the straightest possible line from britain to northern europe, and didnt want to send american troops into the mediterranean anymore than hey hey had to. This became a theme of the relationship that was turned on this very question, because the americans suspected, perhaps not correctly in every case, that churchill was being driven by his passion for holding on to india, and roosevelt was really anticolonial. Roosevelt wanted to create not just the system of trusteeships that came into being through the United Nations but wanted to talk about putting into china and korea under the International Trustee ship at the end of the world ask talk about taking hong kong and putting it under International Trustee ship. Never went anywhere, but in a way he would talk on those subjects with stalin as if he had a better chance of finding Common Ground with soviet dictators than he did with churchill. So, i think he was he was quite hostile to church chills point of view on that but knew there was no point in arguing with churchill about it because if he did churchill would just blow up. Thank you for writing you most excellent book. Learned a lot from it and it was a great read. Me question to you is, if you could ask Franklin Roosevelt i heard that question earlier. I ask all the fdr authors the same question, and its interesting, the responses. If you could ask Franklin Delano roosevelt one question, what would you ask what what do you think this answer would be. I couldnt ask a question i knew the answer to unless i needed a quote to a newspaper story. I think my question would be about stalin. Did he really think he had a chance of reaching some kind of post war accommodation with stalin or did he think it was worth the effort because the consequences of not reaching it war so scary and i might have asked him about the there was a lot of talk about whether it was would be a good idea to tell the russians about the bomb, and why he never did it. I have no idea what his answer would have been. One of the most interesting point in the book was had the war ended prior to the 1944 election, that people generally thought that president roosevelt might actually lose, and would you talk more about that and would you care to comment about governor dewey as a candidate. Okay. Well, roosevelt was in a situation not unlike the one churchill found himself in some months later, where people polls had reached a certain level of sophistication in those days, and you can see in the archives here polls that were made available to the white house from 43 and 44 that clearly showed that there was no other democrat on the scene who stood any chance, partly because roosevelt overshadowed everybody for so long, and that the country was really tired of the Roosevelt Administration. Roosevelt himself said this on various occasions. But that they believed in his ability to lead the country through the war, and thats what they wanted from him. It was a question of domestic if they were asked about domestic reconstruction, the percentages almost reversed entirely, and now, dewey started off with a very Smart Campaign where he more or less endorsed the roosevelt Foreign Policy and promised to continue it. Then roosevelt gave a savage speech, famous speech to the teamsters, and the fowler speech in which he said the republicans were accusing these republicans have attacked me, my wife, my sons and now attack my little dog, fowler. And wait as bravo performance if you listen to it on youtube, but it is produced fury on the republican side, and dewey came back quite savagely later. Who knows what dewey would have done. We would have had the Eisenhower Administration eight years earlier, but John Foster Dulles and allen dulles would have been important in 45 rearing than in rather than in 53. I think roosevelt died such a hero that it takes an effort of will to understand how controversial he truly was in his lifetime and how many people although he won by landslides, what a large portion of the country was unreconciled, and the idea that he could have lost if the war was ending seems to me entirely plausible, lost in the way churchill lost. [applause] thank you. Cue tell us how much eleanor knew about frap lynns physical condition pry to his bid for reelection in 1944. Her books are fairly clear on that, and her daughter, anna, talked about it. Eleanor thought it was her husbands decision to make and it was a difficult decision. And if he felt he was needed and he should continue, nobody should second guest him in the family and just support him. She also wasnt very interested in medical information. She thought that people should be strong and do their best. And anna says at one point that eleanor wouldnt have understood the details of this high Blood Pressure if somebody had tried to explain that to him. She didnt know the meaning of the word hypertension. And i think she meant that literally. So, theres no indication that they ever directly discussed it. Here and there in eleanors letters there are comments she says when he sets off for yalta, he is beginning to be really he had loss lost a lot of weigh over the previous year. Some had to do with his the diet that was imposed on him by his doctors in order to relieve power pressure on his heart but he looked pretty bad at the inauguration and when he reached malta on the way to yalta, people who saw him there staff people who hadnt seen him for a couple of weeks, like chip bolan, the diplomat, were shocked how worse he looked. Think theres a case that can be made that the trip to yalta was something that he had put a lot of stock in, and thought he had to do it, but that he knew by then clearly that he was taking a big risk just from the strenuousness of the trip, and it was a paul watson, his key aide, died on the trip. Hari hopkins nearly died on the trip. It was a dark time. I think im not dealing with the question but i forget the quit. Im just rambling. I saw in your book that you had mentioned that dewey somehow found out that we had broken the japanese code and there was pressure both ways to release that information during the campaign to see if could possibly show roosevelt up this story has been told before in buying biographs of marshall and dewey. It wasnt mine. I put a lot of stock on writing about time lynns and what was going on attachment. Roosevelt had no general marshall said to dewey, understand you have this information. He had information actually prior to pearl harbor he might use in the campaign and she said you cant use is because we broke that code years ago and theyre still using it, and some communications. Crucially communications between their embassy and berlin, and tokyo. And if you once you use it, well lose that source, which is valuable. And dewey thought this was another roosevelt trick and he was furious, and refused to go forward with the discussion with marshall. Marshall then changed the terms of this plea and dewey realized that there was no gain for him in going in that direction, so you can view it as a patriotic act or just a shrewd act but he backed off. The dewey campaign had their biggest problem was deciding that would say about roosevelts health. They in the latest biography of thomas dewey, the campaign manager, herbert brown, later became attorney general under eisenhower, was quoted as saying that we argued about this every night. Could we bring up the Health Question . And in the end they felt that not out of a matter of good taste just as a matter of would it work politically. They never did bring it up. They would say it was a tired, old administration, but they wouldnt go and say that obviously this man cant if he is elected wont be able to continue. We have another round of applause . [applause] thank you so much. [inaudible discussion] about his recent book, americas involvement in the vietnam war. Good afternoon. Good afternoon and welcome to the 33rd annual Chicago Tribune printers row lit fest. Id like to give a shout out to