Should FDR Have Stepped Down in 1944? Joseph Lelyveld Takes 340 Pages And Never Answers That Quesion

 

In July 1920 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson's assistant secretary of the Navy was nominated to be the Vice President of James W. Cox of Ohio. By that point his uneven relationship with the President had turned chilly when the brash 38 year old had exaggerated about his duties in public.

By that point Wilson had been incapacitated by a series of strokes that had first taken his mental clarity and then paralyzed him so badly that he had essentially been hidden from the public the last year of his administration. He had so lost touch with reality that he had spent the entire lead-up to the  convention entertaining the fantasy that the Democrats would nominate him for a third term despite his inability to campaign or govern.

FDR hadn't seen the President in ten months and couldn't maintain his normal ebullient behavior seeing his left arm covered by a shawl, unable to move. Cox managed to say that he admired Wilson's fight for the League of Nations which earlier had not been passed by the Republican opposition in the Senate. "Mr. Cox, the fight can still be won," Wilson said with a weak voice and an urgent conviction out of touch with reality.

FDR would never again see Wilson in the White House and while he campaigned for the League avidly he tried his best not to mention his boss. The November election produced the biggest electoral landslide in history with Harding beating Cox by a margin of nearly 2 to 1 in the popular vote.

This story is mentioned in one of the chapters in Josephy Leylveld's His Last Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt. In it FDR is recounting Wilson with a cousin Belle and mentions that small stroke that FDR says robbed his former boss of his mental clarity. The following line is: "It is a meditation stuffed with portents. But there's no evidence the President saw any parallels between himself and Wilson twenty-five years later. Unfortunately Lelyveld is similarly unwilling to draw the parallel himself about the delusion FDR was maintaining just before he is about to fly off to Teheran to meet with Stalin. That delusion is that FDR not only plans to run for reelection but serve his entire term when there is already ample evidence that he was suffering from the congestive heart failure that would eventually kill him a little more than a year later – and six months after he has been reelected for the fourth time.

 

After enough time passes historians are frequently willing to reassess the greatness or flaws of a President. When he left office LBJ was considered a complete failure, he's now regularly ranked among the near great Presidents. By contrast the prejudices and rigid autocrat like ways Andrew Jackson and Wilson himself ran the country have led them to fall from the all-time greats to at best above average, if not lower in recent polls.

Yet eighty years later, rare is the historian who will argue that FDR was not practically perfect in every way. They acknowledge that he made mistakes in his administration – the Court packing fiasco in 1937 followed by his failed effort to purge the Democratic party of his opponents in 1938 – but by and large they tend to leave them as minor blemishes.

The truth is while FDR was one of the greatest Presidents of all time, he was far from immune from the kind of flaws that if anyone else had been guilty of them, they would be called out for it. I'm previously written about how FDR's misunderstanding of Stalin was the greatest flaw of his career during World War II and Lelyveld is willing to acknowledge it was a mistake but in his book seems more inclined to argue its part of a grand plan that the master had.

Yet this is forgivable considering what I still consider practically dereliction of duty on FDR's part. By the spring of 1944 it was practically the worst kept secret in Washington that FDR was dying and that if he ran for reelection, he wouldn't survive his term. So you'd think any real look at the last full year of FDR's administration, combined with his decision to run for reelection, all of the international conferences, his election campaign and victory would at least confront this question head on. And yet somehow in over 300 pages Lelyveld can't bring himself to say what Robert H. Ferrell concludes on page 4 of his The Dying President, that in 1945 "FDR was in no condition to govern the Republic."

Now it is one thing to celebrate the accomplishments of FDR, but there are countless books on the subject already. Lelyveld claims this book is about. Instead he seems more fixated on this statement which he makes in the first chapter:

The fascination of Franklin Roosevelt's final months…isn't that they proved final. It lies in the way his restless imagination continued to range across the oceans and battlefields…to the all-too-familiar political scene he'd dominated for so long, now waiting for his signal, to a deepening sense of isolation and exhaustion in the midst of all these storms and contests, to his cloudy hopes for an outcome worthy of the huge, immeasurable cost.

All that is well and good but if you're going to talk about FDR's final years you have to be willing to at least ask the question: did FDR know he was dying, did he choose to run for reelection knowing he likely wouldn't survive his term, and was his decision to do so a breach of his office? Lelyveld manages to write 338 pages and seems to have unprecedented access to the details of the period, yet at the end of the book he either doesn't answer the question or if he does it's "Stop harassing the man, he had a heart condition!"

This is not something that Lelyveld keeps secret: there is an entire chapter titled 'His Enormous Heart' which deals with the discovery of the condition that would later be known as congestive heart failure. A treatable condition today; in 1944 it was almost unheard of and no medicine was available to treat it. The only palliatives, as various doctors made clear to multiple sources, were for FDR to essentially stop being President, something he made an attempt to do early in 1944 when he essentially disappeared from sight to Warm Springs not long after he vetoed a tax bill that he gave a message that it provided 'relief not for the needy but for the greedy'. This last bit, clearly designed for the public, seriously irked his majority leader Alben Barkley to the point that he would take the unprecedented step of resigning his office. He was then overwhelmingly reelected and FDR's veto was overridden by 204 votes in the House and a more than 3 to 1 margin in the Senate. Lelyveld accurately points out that this demonstrates how much goodwill from Congress FDR had used up by this point in his third term and implies that FDR reacted to this by essentially deciding to cross Barkley off his list of potential vice-presidential candidates that year.

Under other circumstances this could have toppled FDR's presidency, at the very least endangering any chance he had of reelection in the fall. But because Barkley refused to be the voice of a potential stop Roosevelt movement and because FDR's press secretary framed things by sending a letter urging if Barkley resigned, the Senate should unanimously reelect him as well the fact that FDR was commander-in-chief in a time of war, Congress chose not to revolt. This maintained the possibility of FDR being able to run for a fourth term should he choose – though yet again Lelyveld demurs from arguing whether he should have.

There are constant snapshots of FDR's appearance in any given day over the last several months leading up to his decision to run for a fourth term, from reporters, from his chief of staff, from his constant companion Daisy Suckley, from Admiral Leahy his chief physician, who went out of his away to constantly quell the rumors something was wrong with the boss. Absent from this is a question that would be framed nearly thirty years later: "What did the President know and when did he know it?"

It seems that FDR's deteriorating condition was kept from not only the world and America but critically the President himself: there's still no evidence even now that Roosevelt was ever told of his condition or how serious it was. As to the question above Lelyveld either has no information or doesn't want to assume, which for a book on Roosevelt's last year is a curious omission. He maintains the argument held by Roosevelt's defenders that he was so focused on winning the war and bringing about a lasting post-war world he didn't consider his own mortality. The problem is this runs against the biggest problem with FDR's presidency.

In the opening chapter Lelyveld gives various impressions that FDR's colleagues had to try and describe his approach to the Presidency. Omitted from this is the blunt phrase from the man would succeed him, Harry Truman: "He lies." The plain-spoken Man from Missouri is not wrong: that is very much how FDR describes the way he would discuss his approach to even members of his inner circle and on any given day. But the larger problem was that he chose by and large not to delegate the major tasks of his administration to his cabinet. This was a flaw that ended up bringing down Wilson's administration but Lelyveld wants to see it as a strength for FDR.

That in many ways FDR was guilty of similar mistakes as Wilson going forward become clear in this book and others: Wilson abandoned much of the Fourteen Points to Clemenceau and Lloyd George in order to get them to support his League of Nations; Roosevelt was willing to give Stalin carte blanche in Poland and Eastern Europe to get support for a post-war United Nations. The latter case it was even more derelict because many of these meetings continued while the fighting was still going on and many of Roosevelt's most loyal followers were willing to defend everything Stalin did – and in many cases would do so in Truman's administration.

 

Where Lelyveld is by far the most negligent in his writing comes about the most consequential decision made in political history to that point in the 20^th century: the decision for who FDR's running mate would be in 1944. Lelyveld tries to go against the popular argument that the decision to make Truman the Vice President was done without any input from FDR is a complete fraud and that he had complete input to the decision-making process. Here he engages in the kind of deflection that would do his subject proud.

He basically argues that FDR spent the months leading up to the Democratic National Convention making his decision by not making a decision and eliminating choices the same way the bosses were doing the same math. He mentions the famous White House meeting on July 11^th where FDR and all the party bosses discuss and eliminate the various contend. He tries to argue that Boss Flynn mentioned Truman at FDR's suggestion, mainly from the writing of Democratic Chairman Boss Hannegan. This version ends with Roosevelt saying: "Boys, I guess it's Truman." This is only slightly firmer a declaration than David McCollough saying in his extensive biography. "Boys, I think you all want Harry Truman."  (italics mine)

The only new evidence that Lelyveld can produce that FDR wanted Truman was that he gave messages to Hannegan to Wallace that he was not eligible for consideration and the note he wrote about Truman and Douglas being good choices that he sent his secretary to type. The latter was already a matter of public record  and the former ignores the fact that despite having eliminated Jimmy Byrnes from consideration in private, the following day he implied the man he considered 'assistant president' to run. When that famous note made the public record FDR still did nothing to publicly discourage Byrnes from running. And he does nothing to deny that FDR basically said things about both Wallace and Byrnes repeatedly in the months leading up to the convention but didn't so much as mention Truman once. There's no evidence he even spoke to the man even before the convention.

One almost prefers the version presented by McCollough in with FDR was too distracted from the war not to seriously consider who his Vice President was. In Leylveld's version of events he comes across like neither the consummate politician but the equivalent of Logan Roy, saying one thing to one heir to the throne one day and something else to the other the next. This is hardly fair to men such as Byrnes, Alben Barkley and William O. Douglas all of whom were worthy heirs to the Presidency and the definition of 'serious people'. But it speaks to a common trait that FDR had with this fictional counterpart: he couldn't imagine anyone in the White House but him. It has been suggested by other writers and some contemporaries of Roosevelt that one reason FDR never bothered to train for a successor in 1940 was because he honestly couldn't think of anyone else more qualified for the job then him. (He had toyed with running for a third term as early as 1937, according to Joseph Alsop but the events of the 1938 election had done much to undercut any real desire for it from the public. Events in Europe made it far easier for the Democrats and the electorate to accept it.)

Lelyveld also confirms that Truman had no desire for the job and the only reason he accepted was that famous conversation in Chicago. Truman did not speak to Roosevelt and never got a chance to voice his objections. FDR told him: "Well, tell him that if he wants to break up the Democratic Party in the middle of the war, that's his responsibility." Then he hung up, Truman famously asked: "Why the hell didn't he tell me that in the first place?" It's worth noting that FDR obviously could have done so at any point in the previous several months but never did.

And it must be pointed out all of this was done behind the scenes and FDR was still deflecting all the way to the nomination. He never made a public statement that he wanted Truman and despite the efforts of the convention it took two ballots and a lot of arm twisting for Truman to get the nomination over the incumbent Henry Wallace. FDR wasn't in Chicago for the convention to accept renomination; he gave his acceptance speech – less than a minute long – over the radio. His absence was not as odd as it would seem to day; FDR had been the first President to attend a nominating convention in 1932 to accept, something no previous nominee had done. A newsreel footage showed a far different picture which Lelyveld shows of FDR reenacting this speech:

"The picture that went out across the country, the president appeared gaunt, exhausted, slack-jawed; the overall impression was of a failing elder, a candidate for a nursing home, gasping out his last words"

The picture also made its subject 'to carry on look questionable'. Reading this today, it is impossible not to draw parallels to Joe Biden's appearance at the presidential debate in 2024. The photo was seen by most newspapers across the country and Steve Early would fire the photographer. One can only imagine what the delegates at the convention would have thought had they seen the speech of the man they had just nominated. It's impossible that they would not have gotten the impression that Truman did not long after they had their sole meeting before the fall campaign when he saw that the Presidents hand shook so badly he could hardly stir his coffee. "His hand was shaking and he talks with considerable difficulty…It doesn't seem to be any mental lapse of any kind but physically he's just going to pieces."

In September Truman took a friend of his Eddie McKim to the White House and McKim was so shocked by Roosevelt's appearance he actually wondered if FDR would live long enough to be inaugurated; that Henry Wallace would become President after all. As they left McKim told him to look back at the White House because he'd be living there before long. "I'm afraid you're right, Eddie," Truman said. "And it scares the hell out of me."

Lelyveld mentions Truman's visit but again ignores the obvious question: if this was the case should FDR have run for the Presidency in the first place? Perhaps he considers it not the subject of his book. A far more interesting question is raised by Lelyveld's volumes: what did the Republicans and their nominee for President Thomas E. Dewey think?

 

FDR would famous consider the 1944 campaign 'the meanest one in his life' and he had none of the respect for Dewey the same way he had some of his previous opponents. It was opinion held famously by most observers who had very few nice things to say about the youngest man to run for elected office to that point (Dewey was only 42).

Much of this may have been due to fact that while onstage and in person Dewey was stiff and seemed uncomfortable giving speeches, heard on the radio they were very effective. No one ever said Dewey didn't have a great voice, and his carefully drafted speeches gave a relentless amount of energy to an administration that Dewey said was full of 'tired, old men." In FDR's case this was more accurate than he could imagine at the time and in a sense the President's revival in this campaign may have been a sense to prove to the world – and possibly to himself – that his mortality was not encroaching.

Because the President spent the most of July and August dealing with the issues of being 'commander-in-chief', Dewey dominated the early stages. The Governor was no fool: he knew his chances of beating an incumbent President in a time of world war were remote at best and that the only chance he had was to lean into the idea the administration was superannuated.

Roosevelt's speech given to the Teamsters Union that fall – one in which he famously referred to how 'Fala resented the attacks on his administration' – gave much indication to the world that the old Franklin Roosevelt was back. In truth there had been signs the previous month that things were far more dire. While giving a tour of the Pacific, meant to shore up his role as Commander-in-chief, he had delivered a speech on radio that was so feebly delivered and in such pain, that his audience could tell things were bad. In fact he was suffering an episode of angina pectoris, and immediately afterwards he was wheeled away with a 'security ban on disclosing his whereabouts'.

Bans like this, as Lelyveld points out, were done in the name of national security but also as a cover to show how badly Roosevelt had declined from the nation. Over and over these bans are mentions but the author again declines to state whether this should have been a sign for Roosevelt to step down. Dewey did want to discuss it because he had been made aware by quite a few people that he had a moral duty to do so. Herbert Brownell, Dewey's campaign manager, makes it clear they 'sweated blood' and that there wasn't a single night we didn't hammer it out.

Apparently for all Dewey's willingness to be a mean campaigner, he refused to make political capital out of the president's health. He needed something definitive and in the 1940s with the lockdown on it limited to the White House, the decision was that if he did so it would likely backfire.

Amazingly  the most conservative newspapers – who hated Roosevelt with the fervor Fox News would hate all Democrats half a century later – were remarkably delicate on the subject. The closest came from the Chicago Tribune (then a conservative newspaper) who argued in the closing days: "In view of Mr. Roosevelt's age and brittle health, a vote for Roosevelt is very likely to be a vote for a Truman.' (This turned out to be prophecy.)

So on October 21^st FDR decided to meet these allegations head on by traveling to New York for a four-hour, 51 mile tour in an open car when a cold downpour was expected. It made him look to the voters of America that he'd met the challenges of the campaign and was therefore fit for office.

The Herald Tribune gave a fair-minded assessment or tried to. (It backed Dewey.) "He has demonstrated again his courage and his stamina, and the alertness of his mind has been unaffected. But," it added "he had aged greatly and suddenly in the last few months, raising a legitimate question as to his 'basic physical condition' which remained shrouded in mystery.

Three weeks later, the voters made their voices heard and FDR won what his closest election of his career as President – though by the standards of today, still a landslide. He received 432 electoral votes to Dewey's 99 in large part because for the last time in history a Democrat carried 'the solid South'. (The white electorate of Mississippi gave 93.6 percent of its vote for FDR; four years later they would be carried by Strom Thurmond. He held a grudge against Dewey, who refused to concede until 3 AM even though it was clear before midnight who had won. If Dewey learned anything from the experience it was that being a vicious campaigner could hurt public opinion of you. Four years later he would take a different approach to Harry Truman – only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

 

"Although he has now been dead longer than he was alive, the conflict between those who blessed him and his actions in peace and war and those who loathed him has yet to end. And probably never will."

That is the last paragraph of Lelyveld's book. The problem is, as one might have guessed, this book has been written by one of the former and he never chooses to hide it at any point, even when it comes to the question of whether Roosevelt should have stepped down.

I question who the intended audience of His Last Battle is. If you know very little about FDR, this book might fill in some of the details though at this juncture I don't know of anyone who doesn't even the broadest strokes filled in. If you are a historian or have already read a lot of books on FDR (I am definitely the latter) then outside from bits and pieces about FDR's medical condition there is nothing in this book I haven't read in a dozen other sources, some of them not even fully related to the 32^nd President and many of which take a far more objective portrayal than the author does.

Even the clearest and most obvious failure on Roosevelt's part in his final months – his failure to never tell Truman anything about the war, foreign affairs or the bomb, Lelyveld does everything in his power to excuse, saying it "was in thoroughly in accord with Roosevelt's character and the customs of the office. Taking the vice-president into his confidence on the most sensitive matters would have demanded a greater willingness to face his own mortality than he'd…shown." In other words we're supposed to excuse FDR for leaving his successor unprepared because that would mean having to personally face what everyone else around him knew was going to happen.

Then he doubles down by trying to excuse his lack of meetings with Truman  by saying "that while Roosevelt knew he was mortal and getting weaker, he wasn't planning to die just then." As if somehow any man can know exactly when death is coming for him. There might have been dereliction of duty on the party of both his doctors and the men around him but the man was the Commander-in-Chief. The man he euphemistically calls 'a creative procrastinator'  wrote almost nothing down, gave different impressions to everyone in his state department  and inner circle what those plans were, never caring about the consequences.

Lelyveld is so in love with the image of FDR as a great man but his argument that he still hadn't come up with a plan 'to deal with Stalin or the bomb' is just as flimsy. The fact remains that he owed to the nation and the world to come up with something beyond the vague ideas he had in his mind, to listen to what his advisors were telling him about men like Stalin instead of assuming his sheer personality could persuade the Soviet premier to do what he wanted. That later events show that on the contrary Stalin was completely manipulating Roosevelt and that some of his inner circle allowed themselves to be maneuvered in his basically omitted entirely from this book.

This leads to the bizarre final pages of His Last Battle: the passage of the 22^nd Amendment. Lelyveld tries his hardest to argue that FDR's decision to violate the principle that all his predecessors had abided by until 1940 – that in this same book he argues Wilson's decision to try to run in 1920 was a delusion – was an action of bitter, spiteful Republicans.

His argument is that once the new Republican Congress was elected and met in 1947, the first thing they did was swift passage limited all future Presidents to two terms. He tries to argue that  because this was done with no public hearings and only two hours of debate on the House floor and because it was voted on by every single Republican 'and enough anti-Roosevelt Democrats. He buries the lead that freshman Democrat John F. Kennedy also voted with 'the Republicans' but leaves out that he'd been influenced by a decision with Dr Frank Lahey, one of Roosevelt's physicians, that his doctors should have warned the President not to run again. Apparently Kennedy has more sense then Lelyveld is willing to show.

He also argues that there was little discussion and commentary on the subject which should have told him something else: the public had only been willing to let FDR bend the Constitution this much because of such extenuating circumstances. Perhaps, after two years had passed, the public had realized the obvious and felt betrayed. And considering that point we had just defeated the evils of fascist dictatorship and were about to deal with communist ones, the possibility of another one in America held little virtue among the electorate.

John Robison from Kentucky said during the House debate: "Who can say that some other great American, Democrat or Republican, could not have handled the affairs of the nation from 1940 to 1945 as equally well as President Roosevelt? To take any other view it to assume that we have and do produce in this country indispensable men…My sincere prayer is that we shall never live to see the day when this great republic becomes so bankrupt of leadership and patriotism that we accept the principle of the indispensable men."

Lelyveld then uses Claude Pepper's argument saying that no one but Roosevelt could have had the courage or genius to help win the second World War. He leaves out that Pepper was considered too progressive for most Democrats (he'd nominated Henry Wallace for Vice President in 1944 and led the effort to dump Truman all the way to the 1948 convention.) More importantly he yet again misses the forest for the trees of Robison's argument.

Who's to say that a Wendell Willkie or Arthur Vandenburg on the Republican side or a Jimmy Byrnes or Alben Barkley on the Democratic side could not have done as good a job as Roosevelt did had he been in office in 1940 or 1944? Roosevelt himself felt highly off all of these men at various points in his later years and they were all more than skilled political figures. The reason they didn't get the chance because Roosevelt did believe this country produced indispensable men and he was one of them.

Perhaps this is a trait that was common to the Roosevelt family: one can't forget that his cousin and predecessor spent the rest of his post-Presidency life trying to return to the White House and had little use for either his successors or those who vied for the office he'd once held. Critically it was not a trait that FDR's successor ever held.\

On announcing his campaign for reelection to the Senate in 1940 Harry Truman made it clear that he was opposed to FDR's seeking a third term. He privately wrote: "There is no indispensable man in a democracy. When a republic comes to a point where a man is indispensable, then we have a Caesar. I do not believe that the fate of the nation should depend on the life or health or welfare of any one man." That he supported FDR when he became the nominee for President did nothing to change that fact then or at any point.

When the 22^nd Amendment was finally passed in 1951, the writing of it was framed in such a way to make it clear it didn't apply to the incumbent. Truman was at the nadir of his popularity across the country but nevertheless it was still legally possible. He did toy with the idea but on March 22^nd, far earlier than was considered the norm, he announced at the Jefferson-Jackson day dinner he would not be a candidate for reelection and that he would not seek renomination. "I do not feel that it is my duty to spend another four years in the White House."

It's not a statement that one can frankly ever see his predecessor ever making even had world affairs not intervened.

And it is worth noting in an era where term limits are debated for representatives and Senators but nothing is likely to ever be done about it, the only position that is expressly given term limits in the Constitution is the Presidency. That is the last element of FDR's legacy. And frankly we should all be uniformly grateful for that much, even if we still can't agree on any part of it.