FDR Dies in Office: Truman Assumes the Presidency

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sitting for a portrait when he pressed his hand to his temple and said, "I have a terrific headache." Minutes later, at 3:35 PM on April 12, 1945, the thirty-second president of the United States was dead of a massive cerebral hemorrhage at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. He was 63 years old and had served as president for twelve years and 39 days, longer than any person before or since. Roosevelt's health had been deteriorating visibly for months. At the Yalta Conference in February, Churchill and Stalin both noticed his gaunt appearance and wandering attention. His blood pressure readings, which his physician Howard Bruenn kept largely secret, had reached dangerously high levels. Yet Roosevelt ran for and won an unprecedented fourth term in November 1944, concealing the severity of his condition from the American public and even from his vice president, Harry Truman. Truman was summoned to the White House and told by Eleanor Roosevelt, "Harry, the President is dead." When Truman asked if there was anything he could do for her, she replied, "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now." Truman, who had been vice president for just 82 days and had been excluded from nearly all wartime decision-making, did not even know about the Manhattan Project or the atomic bomb until after being sworn in. Roosevelt's death came less than a month before Germany's surrender and four months before Japan's. He had led the country through the Great Depression and most of World War II but did not live to see either the victory in Europe he had engineered or the postwar order he had helped design at Yalta. Twenty-five thousand people lined the railroad tracks as his funeral train traveled from Warm Springs to Washington. He was buried at his family estate in Hyde Park, New York.