While resting at his private
retreat of the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, to
renew his energies before the UN Conference on International Organization in
San Francisco in the coming weeks, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
announced, "I have a terrific pain in the back of my head." The
president went quiet and his body convulsed. The others in the
room hurried to his side and tended to him until doctors arrived. Due to
strain from his many years of political work and high cholesterol
combined with a predisposition to the same congestive heart failure that ended
his father's life, Roosevelt suffered a terrible, but not debilitating,
stroke.
The president's health had been
troubled for some time. Rumors about illness circulated widely during the 1944
election, but the press seemed to steer clear of the issue, potentially due to
orders from the Office of Censorship that had also kept reporters off the
battlefields as the war dragged on. His doctor ordered bed-rest, but Roosevelt
took it upon himself to exercise more regularly, even though his bout with
polio left him confined to a wheelchair and steel braces. This time, he lost
much of the use of his left arm, but was fortunate to keep his abilities in
speech.
As with his previous illness, Roosevelt
soldiered on. News of the stroke was controlled by the White House, simply
stating that he still suffered from the affects of fatigue. He managed to be in
San Francisco for the organization of the United Nations, a term he had created
from the Allies who signed the Atlantic Charter in 1942. While the papers
stated he was in attendance, he spent nearly all of his time behind closed
doors with only a few select meetings.
Through tenacity, Roosevelt
continued to work as president. Upon the collapse of Nazi power in Europe,
Roosevelt gave a radio address to Americans pronouncing Victory Day, though
others such as Vice-President Harry S Truman became the faces seen in photos
and movie reels. Roosevelt saw out the end of the war, skillfully defending the
use of atomic weapons to end the war with Japan early, though there were some
who said that the declaration of war by the Soviet Union was what had truly
brought Japan to surrender unconditionally.
Roosevelt, who had long trusted
Stalin, had begun to doubt his trustworthiness as the war began to come to a
close and the Soviets’ plans to set up puppet governments began to show.
Churchill had long warned Roosevelt about Stalin, seeing him as at-best a
necessary evil until Hitler was destroyed, and soon warned of an Iron Curtain
behind which Stalin plotted. Britain edged Churchill out of office in 1945,
looking to break cleanly from the troubled days of the war. Roosevelt pressed
on and, though his widespread popularity, managed to keep the nation voting
Democrat while the Republicans cried for change.
Roosevelt promised change and
continued to campaign for his Second Bill of Rights, completing the work he
felt he had begun with the social measures of the New Deal. Echoing the
measures of the first Bill of Rights, Roosevelt argued that the right of “pursuit
of happiness” had not yet been fulfilled. Gradually, programs came into play to
employment in CCC-style grants and organizations, housing, education, and
medical care. With enough Democrats in Congress, he was able to push through
legislation blocking the powers of big business and monopolies, reversing many
of the anti-labor policies that had been in place due to necessity of
production during the war.
Abroad, Roosevelt kept up pressure
on Stalin and refused to allow Communism to spread. While many of the soldiers
from WWII returned home, much of the materiel and provisions were shifted to
the KMT forces of the Republic of China, finally squashing Mao’s armies in
1947. It became painfully clear that the Soviets would not remove themselves as
the Americans, British, and French were doing. Roosevelt began to threaten use
of atomic weapons, which outmatched anything the Russians had in their arsenal.
Stalin tested Roosevelt again and again with false deadlines and empty promises
until the tension burst in 1948 in Berlin over Soviet restrictions over passage
to Berlin. Through the UN (which Soviets increasingly called a “puppet of the
West”), Roosevelt demanded Stalin pull Soviet troops out of all occupied areas
by that fall. Stalin refused, so Roosevelt began a bombing campaign targeting
the Soviet military.
Republicans noted that the bombing
began shortly before the election and accused Roosevelt of starting another war
so he could maintain control of the White House as well as flat-out tyranny.
Roosevelt replied that he was doing what he felt best and would understand if
the American public trusted him. In the narrowest election of his career,
Roosevelt won yet another unprecedented fifth term in 1948. As in 1944, much of
the campaigning was done vicariously.
War with the Soviets finally drove
them back to the borders of Russia in 1949, which was when Stalin announced the
USSR had successfully developed its own atomic bomb in Kazakhstan. An uneasy armistice
began even though much of Europe had been liberated. Preparations were made for
peace talks, but the travel to a neutral summit proved too taxing for FDR, who
died before he could meet Stalin face-to-face again. The war was never
officially declared over, leaving a huge demilitarized “Iron Curtain”
surrounding the Soviet border.
At home, the Democratic Party lost
its driving force, and, in 1952, the consolidated conservatives from the
Republicans pushed out the moderate Republican choice, General Dwight D. Eisenhower,
calling for an end to America’s militarism with a return to isolationism within
the UN. Democrat Estes Kefauver of Tennessee was no match for Robert Taft in
the polls. As the new conservatives attempted to break down the New Deal in the
1950s, however, public outcry began a new era of reform, including new rights
for minorities and women, furthering Roosevelt’s Bill of Rights further than he
had ever imagined.
--
In reality, Roosevelt died on April
12, 1945, of a large cerebral hemorrhage after following orders of two hours of
rest a day and no lunch meetings. Only a few weeks later on May 8,
Germany fell, ending the war in Europe. VP-turned-President Truman pronounced
the day in honor of Roosevelt's efforts and wished publicly that "Franklin
D. Roosevelt had lived to witness this day."
