Roosevelt's life, death still mystify

By Verne W. Newton
For the Poughkeepsie Journal

Soon, three shifts were working simultaneously trying to stanch the greatest surge in the company's history.

Chaos also reigned in the streets. On the fourth day of drenching humidity, enervated rush-hour commuters abruptly bolted up the staircases back into the street, confronting policemen with the same demanding question that clogged the phone lines: Is it true? Is FDR really dead?

Indeed he was. The only president many Americans ever knew died suddenly that April 12 afternoon in Warm Springs, Ga., only months into his fourth term. Like so many other episodes in the Roosevelt presidency, his death spawned controversy that has only increased over the years.

Had his political handlers known he was a dying man when they engineered his fourth election? Was he in fact an enfeebled negotiator at Yalta? And why was his old flame Lucy Mercer with him when he was stricken?

They join hundreds of other scholars who every year drive, bus, fly or train to Hyde Park from all over the world to tackle the enduring mysteries and rich legacy of the Roosevelt presidency.

Historians, like detectives, seek to resolve conflicting evidence. They are still digging for clues that will reconcile the countervailing elements in a global order that lasted 45 years, a social order which no one has dared tamper with for nearly 60 years, and a president who had perhaps the most impenetrable temperament of any in the Oval Office.

Roosevelt loved giving the Secret Service and Washington journalists the slip. So too he very artfully crafted his presidency to give historians the slip. For instance, he forbid note-taking at cabinet meetings, and rarely recorded his own thoughts or impressions, thus cloaking the reasons he chose one course over another.

It may be difficult to grasp in an era when Americans eagerly go on TV to spill their guts about the most intimate, not to mention embarrassing, things about themselves, but FDR believed a president's deliberations should remain private.

This means each historian or layman is on almost equally sound footing to attribute any motive they choose to his critical and far-reaching decisions, from the most egregious miscalculation to the highest ideal.

The Soviet Union has collapsed. The new Congress is out to dismantle what is erroneously labeled "the New Deal welfare state.'' But such actions will not end the search that takes place daily at the Roosevelt Library to discover the secrets of the man who dominated the great crises of the first half of the 20th century and whose policies shaped the events of the second half.

Do you, citizens have more of a stake than other Americans in this debate without end? You bet. The 500 or so scholars who come here every year probably spend $300,000 or more at motels, restaurants, cinemas, etc. But the works they produce in no small part fuels the curiosity that stimulates tourists to make the trek to Hyde Park. Collectively, these tourists pump millions more into the local economy.

For instance, we have seen dramatic increases in visitation at the library and its museum in the six months since Doris Goodwin's bestseller "No Ordinary Time'' and David Grubin's four-hour PBS special, "FDR.'' Both Goodwin and Grubin and their associates spent months researching at the library.

So the mysteries of Roosevelt linger on. And hundreds of "detectives'' are as determined to find the "truth'' about FDR's life and death as were those people in 1945.

Verne W. Newton is director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park.