World War Two: 1945 & the Wheelchair President

I have just done something

that Franklin Delano Roosevelt could never do

on any day of his 12-year presidency.

1945.

As the global war reached its devastating climax,

Franklin Roosevelt was the supreme figure of the wartime alliance,

but also a man living on borrowed time.

The images of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin

meeting at Yalta are well known.

What may be less familiar, given his appearance,

is the fact that the American President

was, by some years,

the youngest of the Big Three.

Roosevelt's health was collapsing,

sapped by chronic heart disease

and by two decades as a secret paraplegic.

One wartime American general nicknamed him Rubberlegs.

But few Americans were aware that their president

could not walk unaided,

or that he had been diagnosed

as being on the brink of cardiac failure.

And in Roosevelt's complicated personal life,

other skeletons lay hidden in the cupboard.

His formidable yet fragile wife, Eleanor,

had supported him through his long battle with disability.

But their marriage was now coming under increasing strain,

for Roosevelt was living with a dark secret...

..about an affair,

exposed and ended 25 years earlier,

but now resurrected in wartime by a president

isolated in the loneliness of power.

Despite all these very human flaws, however, the public Roosevelt

stands as one of America's most remarkable presidents.

He crafted a New Deal to drag America

out of the depression of the 1930s.

And, amid the catastrophe of World War II,

he envisioned a New Deal to redeem the whole world.

We are going to win the war

and we are going to win the peace that follows.

Roosevelt would not survive the war,

yet his desperate bid to create a lasting peace

and his tangled legacy in the post-war world

is one of the great stories of the 20th century.

To understand the endgame of World War II

and the dawn of the Cold War, we must also understand

the mind and the heart of this most enigmatic of leaders -

how his complex personality influenced world affairs

at a critical moment in history.

By 1945, Franklin Roosevelt was a man inspired

by visions of a better world,

yet also gripped by deep personal anxieties.

America's wheelchair president,

racing to shape the future before his past caught up with him.

EXPLOSIONS

At the beginning of November 1944,

American forces were delivering killer blows to the enemy.

The American army dominated the war in Western Europe.

In the Pacific, the American navy

had penetrated deep into Japanese coastal waters

to hunt down enemy shipping.

At home, the Arsenal of Democracy

was producing more combat aircraft

than Britain and Russia combined.

Pundits were already talking of the superpowers,

with America in a league of its own.

Franklin Roosevelt had been elected president

for an unprecedented fourth term.

He was the most powerful man in the world,

yet ironically one powerless over much of his own body.

On election night, 7th of November 1944,

Roosevelt sat here on the front porch of Springwood,

the family mansion in Hyde Park, some 75 miles north of New York,

savouring the taste of victory.

From the porch, FDR could look along the avenue

to the Albany Post Road. It was a view he knew so well.

In the early 1920s, he'd stared at it day by day

in a mixture of hope and despair.

A mere quarter mile, this was a journey he longed to make,

but for years his legs couldn't manage it,

and now his heart was too weak as well.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's character was forged

in a unique crucible of privilege and then adversity.

He was the only son of wealthy New York gentry -

one of the "river families" whose grand estates

spread out expansively along the banks of the Hudson.

After a pampered childhood dominated by his widowed mother,

Sara Delano Roosevelt, he went to Groton,

modelled on the English Victorian public schools,

on to Harvard, and then into a Manhattan law firm -

a good springboard for politics.

Roosevelt also married well.

Eleanor was his fifth cousin once removed,

and a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt.

She brought a wealth of useful connections

for a young man with political ambitions.

Over the next 11 years, she gave birth to a girl, Anna,

and five boys, one of whom died before his first birthday.

Eleanor was an intelligent, intense, but shy young woman.

Marriage gave her new confidence and poise

but she was still prone to crippling nerves

and to what she called "Griselda moments"

when she went into a deep sulk.

The young FDR, by contrast, modelled himself on Uncle Ted,

with his brash, whirlwind style,

even though his own branch of the family

were Democrats, not Republicans.

His early political career was dazzling.

FDR rose through New York state politics to become

Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I,

while still in his thirties.

The Navy became a lifelong passion,

but even more enduring was the influence

of his wartime boss, President Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson tried to sell Americans on his vision for a lasting peace,

built around the League of Nations.

But the Senate rejected his plans,

America slipped back into isolationism,

and Wilson himself was laid low by a massive stroke,

which paralysed him and the remainder of his presidency.

For the rest of his life, FDR would be inspired

by Wilson's political ideals,

and also haunted by Wilson's personal tragedy.

In 1920, aged 38,

FDR ran as the Democratic Party's vice-presidential candidate.

Although the Democrats lost, he was clearly a rising star -

yet one already with secrets.

This was a man who flew high but lived dangerously.

FDR revelled in the attention that came with politics.

In 1918, one journalist penned this almost sensuous portrait:

"His face is long, firmly shaped and set with marks of confidence.

"Intensely blue eyes rest in light shadow.

"A firm, thin mouth breaks quickly to laugh, openly and freely."

Roosevelt knew he was attractive to women, and he enjoyed it.

Although married with a family, he was an incorrigible flirt.

But his affection for Lucy Mercer, Eleanor's secretary,

was no mere flirtation.

# We're all alone, no chaperone

# Can get our number

# The world's in slumber

# Let's misbehave... #

Lucy was tall and elegant, with a rich voice,

deep eyes and a dazzling smile.

Just how far things went between them during World War I

is not clear, but FDR seems to have talked for a time about marriage.

Their letters were certainly passionate,

as Eleanor discovered when she found them by chance in 1918.

# ..Let's misbehave. #

Shocked, in panic for a while,

she felt utterly betrayed.

There was talk of divorce.

But Franklin's mother Sara weighed in hard, warning her son

that if he renounced his wife, shaming the family name,

she would disinherit him and he would not get another cent.

FDR had to listen.

But the price extracted by Eleanor for staying together

was Franklin's promise that he would never see Lucy again.

The affair would have ended many marriages.

But Franklin still admired and respected Eleanor -

her fierce intelligence,

her passionate sense of right and wrong.

For her part, Eleanor still believed in Franklin,

maybe even loved him,

though theirs was almost certainly no longer a sexual relationship.

And the tension eased in 1920 when she learned

that Lucy had married a wealthy New York businessman.

But then, in August 1921, came a different

and even more devastating setback for the Roosevelts.

FDR was struck down by poliomyelitis.

The disease was generally known as infantile paralysis,

because it particularly afflicted children, causing them

to scream in agony and lose control of their bodily functions.

Gradually, painfully, Roosevelt began to recover.

But his thighs and legs remained unusable

and he was confined to a wheelchair.

Hating the hospital variety,

FDR had wheels put on ordinary wooden chairs,

which were less obtrusive. He had a special car made,

which he could drive without using any foot pedals.

At Springwood, ramps were installed

and he was moved from floor to floor via a pulley lift

in the servants' quarters,

originally used for cases and trunks.

Let me be blunt about what polio had done to this handsome,

ambitious, virile politician.

He was now a man who could not dress or undress himself,

who had to be heaved into bed

or placed on a toilet. In the language of the time,

he was now a cripple at the age of 39.

How would he face such a life?

Franklin's mother was once again quite sure what the future must be.

Her beloved son should retreat to the Hudson

and retire from public view.

But FDR refused to heed his mother's wishes,

intent on making a political comeback.

He called his polio a childish disease,

something that a strong adult should simply outgrow.

Against all the odds, this mama's boy -

whom she dressed, for much of his childhood, in girl's clothes

and Little Lord Fauntleroy outfits -

dug deep, finding an iron determination

and radiating hope.

FDR had a simple, straightforward faith in God.

Like his father, he was a vestryman at the local Episcopal church,

and was sustained by an underlying belief

that Providence was watching over him.

In the worst sleepless nights of his illness,

he would tell himself that this was trial by fire,

testing his moral fibre for challenges to come.

That faith and resilience would become an essential part

of his charisma as a political leader.

As he would say in later life,

"Once you have spent two years trying to wiggle one toe,

"everything is in proportion."

Roosevelt's battle with himself

accentuated the secretiveness

ingrained in him as an only child.

Being mysterious, holding his cards close to his chest,

would become central to FDR's political identity,

allowing him to be all things to all men.

In 1939, the Washington press corps caricatured him as the Sphinx.

Even those closest to Roosevelt

only understood a fraction of his mind

and very little of his heart.

He often said he never let his left hand

know what his right was doing.

"Which hand am I, Mr President?" asked Treasury Secretary

Henry Morgenthau anxiously on one occasion.

Morgenthau was an old friend and Hudson Valley neighbour.

Roosevelt smiled sweetly.

"You are my right hand."

Then he added, "But I keep my left under the table."

Divide and rule - that would be Roosevelt's motto,

in politics as in private life.

No-one stereotyped as a man in a wheelchair

could hope to succeed politically in that day and age.

Somehow, Roosevelt had to walk again -

or at least appear to.

He was fitted with a heavy steel corset and braces,

running from hips to heel.

The weight was exhausting and the metal cut into his body,

but the braces, when locked, enabled him to stand.

He then worked to build up his torso

so he could manoeuvre his locked pelvis and legs forward.

Finally, he tried to walk.

Every morning, imprisoned in what looked like

something out of a medieval torture chamber,

Roosevelt would stand near the house and vow,

"I must get down the driveway today."

Then he would set out towards the gates,

using crutches to heave each side of his body forward.

After a few steps he'd pause to rest, covered in sweat.

Sometimes he'd crash to the ground

and have to be put back, fuming, into his wheelchair.

FDR never abandoned hope that he'd make it

right down to the Albany Post Road.

But after a couple of years of lumbering failure,

it became clear that he could not walk freely.

He would have to con the public that he could.

His chance came in the election campaign of 1924.

Roosevelt was booked to give the nominating address

at the Democratic Party Convention in New York

on behalf of the candidate Al Smith.

This would be his first appearance in public

since polio struck in 1921.

He practised for hours with his teenage son James,

so as to be ready to take those few vital steps.

Behind the scenes, Roosevelt was helped to his feet

and his leg braces locked in place.

Then James gave him his crutches.

FDR slowly heaved himself

across the stage,

eyes down,

face fixed in concentration.

The audience watched in riveted silence.

In the gallery, Eleanor knitted like a maniac.

When he reached the rostrum, Roosevelt handed back his crutches.

He held on to the podium for dear life,

grinning broadly as the crowd cheered.

DISTANT CHEERING

Roosevelt spoke for a full half-hour with energy and animation,

seeming almost to glow in the spotlights.

At the end, he praised Al Smith

as "the happy warrior of the political battlefield" -

a reference to Wordsworth's poem honouring Admiral Lord Nelson.

But it was clear from press reaction

that the "happy warrior" who stood out

on that hot June day in New York

was not Al Smith, but Franklin Roosevelt.

Smith failed to win the presidency in 1924,

but tried again in 1928, with Roosevelt once more

making the speech of nomination, this time in Houston, Texas.

By now, FDR was an accomplished public speaker.

More important still, he had become a public walker.

Fitted with steel braces and gripping the arm of his son Elliott,

this time FDR walked to the podium using only a cane.

The speech was a complete success.

Americans concluded that Roosevelt had clearly recovered -

he was no longer crippled, merely a bit lame.

In a way, his ordeal now seemed a positive asset.

One New York paper lauded him as:

"A figure tall and proud, even in suffering,

"a man softened and cleansed and illumined with pain."

Thousands of Americans are here

to cheer the birth of a new era in national affairs,

a New Deal era which is supposed to pull the country out of its chaos.

Four years later, in 1932,

with America hit by the worst depression of its history,

Roosevelt himself ran for the presidency,

gaining a landslide victory and becoming the first Democrat

to occupy the White House since his political mentor, Woodrow Wilson.

-CROWD CHEERS

-Never was there such a joyful, jubilant,

yelling, applauding inauguration crowd.

Roosevelt is the nation's idol here today.

First of all, let me assert my firm belief

that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Amazingly, even after he took office,

most Americans never discovered Roosevelt's secret.

Press and photographers maintained

a discreet silence about his disability.

The only surviving shots of FDR in a wheelchair

come from family photos or home movies.

But appearance didn't alter reality.

Roosevelt was the wheelchair president,

and he was trying to lead his country through

one of the most testing decades in its history.

Yet ironically, I think, Roosevelt's infirmity

was his greatest source of power.

When he told Americans, traumatised by the Depression,

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,"

Roosevelt, more than almost all his countrymen,

knew what he was talking about.

In his first two terms, Roosevelt was preoccupied

with his New Deal for America -

to pull the country out of the Depression through massive spending

on infrastructure and social programmes.

But Roosevelt became more and more engaged in foreign policy

as Nazism took hold in Europe.

Having spent several summers in the Rhineland during his youth,

he had long been convinced that the German elite

were militaristic expansionists. And he saw through Hitler,

describing him as a "wild man" and a "nut".

When he read the abridged English edition of Mein Kampf in 1933,

FDR wrote caustically in the flyleaf:

"This translation is so expurgated as to give a wholly false view

"of what Hitler really is or says.

"The German original would make a different story."

During the 1930s, Roosevelt could do little

to shift isolationist attitudes in America.

But then came the amazing German conquest of Western Europe in 1940,

creating a global crisis.

Roosevelt drew America closer to embattled Britain.

America was then pitchforked into the global war

by the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

Powerful and resourceful gangsters have banded together

to make war upon the whole human race.

Their challenge has now been flung

at the United States of America.

We are now in this war.

We're all in it. All the way.

Every single man, woman and child

is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking

of our American history.

In 1942 and 1943,

America, allied with Britain,

engaged in a brutal struggle against Japan in the Pacific...

EXPLOSION

..and also threw its troops against the Germans in North Africa...

..and then Italy,

probing what Churchill called the "soft underbelly of the Axis"

before trying to attack Hitler's "hard snout" in France.

The sources of international brutality, wherever they exist,

must be absolutely and finally broken.

EXPLOSION

We must begin the great task that is before us

by abandoning once and for all the illusion that we can ever again

isolate ourselves from the rest of humanity.

EXPLOSION

But the war posed new challenges for an already weary president.

Roosevelt didn't simply want victory.

He wanted to shape an enduring worldwide peace

and avoid a repeat of the tragedy of Woodrow Wilson.

For him, I think that meant drawing communist Russia

into peacetime cooperation,

moving beyond the era of European imperialism,

and above all, persuading Americans

to take up the burdens of international leadership

in an improved version of Wilson's League of Nations.

It was in search of those goals that Roosevelt travelled

halfway around the world in November 1943

for summit meetings in Tehran and Cairo.

Here the man they nicknamed the Sphinx

could take the measure of foreign leaders

and test his political skills.

Would his secretive, enigmatic nature,

seeming to be all things to all men, work on the world stage?

For Roosevelt, the highlight of the trip

was his first meeting with America's other ally, Joseph Stalin.

Russia's revolutionary tsar had now gained the upper hand

in his titanic struggle with Hitler.

GUNFIRE

The Red Army was driving the Germans out of the Ukraine.

Roosevelt hoped to establish

a close personal relationship with the Soviet leader.

Terse, soft-spoken with a dry humour,

Stalin seemed like a man with whom he could do business.

But Roosevelt had to persuade Winston Churchill,

the British Prime Minister.

Churchill also felt he could work with Stalin personally,

but as an inveterate anti-communist, he harboured dark fears

about what might happen if Soviet ideology caught fire across Europe.

Roosevelt's mind, by contrast, was more open.

To him, Stalinism seemed very different from Leninism.

The Soviets had dropped the official ideology of world revolution

and had allied with the West.

Roosevelt genuinely believed, I think,

that it was possible to bring the Reds in from the cold,

into the family of nations,

and that he was the man to do it.

At Tehran, Roosevelt was willing

to manipulate his old ally, Winston, to achieve his goal.

Keen to show the Soviets that America and Britain

weren't operating as a bloc, Roosevelt went out of his way

to side with Stalin against Churchill.

Together, they baited the British leader

about the number of Germans that should be shot after the war.

Roosevelt envisaged Russia, with Britain,

as one of the "policemen" who would ensure

peace and order in the post-war world,

as bulwarks of the new United Nations Organisation.

Roosevelt's other pitch for Stalin's goodwill at Tehran

was tied up with his great aim for the post-war world -

the end of empire.

Imperialism was one of Roosevelt's obsessions,

but he viewed it as essentially a vice of the Europeans

with their far-flung colonial empires.

He didn't seem to recognise the expansion of Russia across Asia

as imperialist, and certainly not the expansion

of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

When meeting on their own at Tehran,

Roosevelt treated Stalin almost as a fellow anti-imperialist

when discussing how to handle this issue

with the reactionary Europeans.

He told Stalin that after 100 years of French rule in Indochina,

the inhabitants were worse off than they'd been before.

As for the British Raj in India, Roosevelt advocated what he called

"reform from the bottom, somewhat on the Soviet line."

To which Stalin responded drily,

"Reform from the bottom would mean revolution."

Roosevelt was delighted by the results of his journey.

For him, the meeting with Stalin had been a huge step

towards achieving his goal of a new world order,

no longer centred on the historic great powers of Europe.

But the 12,000 mile round trip

had taken a massive toll on the president's health -

massive and, in fact, fateful.

THUNDERCLAPS

Back in Washington, in December 1943,

Roosevelt was struck down with flu

and seemed unable to regain his strength.

At Christmas, he said he felt like "a boiled owl".

He would nod off in meetings and complained of persistent headaches.

Several long breaks in the New Year at his beloved Hyde Park

did not make a real difference.

What's amazing today, I think, is the almost casual amateurishness

of the medical care given to the most powerful man in the world.

For months, the president's personal physician,

Admiral Ross McIntire, insisted that FDR's problem

was simply persistent bronchitis and the after-effects of flu.

But then, McIntire was a rather strange sort of presidential doctor.

McIntire's day job was Surgeon General of the US Navy,

the navy's top medical post - responsible for 52 hospitals

and 175,000 doctors and nurses.

Looking after the president was done on the side.

He got that job through contacts in the right places

and because Roosevelt had a chronic sinus condition

and he was an ear, nose and throat specialist.

# Dry bones, I hear

# The word of the Lord. #

McIntire did his presidential duties on the run.

He'd call in at the White House about 8:30 in the morning

and go upstairs to the president's bedroom for what he called a "look-see".

This consisted of sitting around while Roosevelt, still in bed,

ate breakfast and chatted about what was in the morning newspapers.

That, said McIntire, "Told me all I wanted to know."

No thermometer, no stethoscope, no taking the pulse -

just listening to his master's voice.

This was hardly a model of advanced medical science.

It was not until March 1944,

when the President was running a temperature of 104 degrees,

that McIntire grudgingly arranged for him to have a checkup

at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the outskirts of Washington.

In secret he was put onto the presidential train at Hyde Park

and taken for what was probably the first

serious medical examination of his whole presidency.

Bethesda was the navy's premier hospital,

and the president was being seen by one of its young

up-and-coming cardiologists, Dr Howard Bruenn.

FDR was wheeled in, jocular and chatty.

He kept that up the whole time -

a cover, Bruenn guessed, for inner anxiety.

The checkup itself was deeply alarming.

These are Dr Bruenn's original examination notes.

The president's lungs were congested,

his heart "enormous,"

and blood pressure readings dangerously high -

170 over 110, way above the norm.

Bruenn wrote that he was "appalled" at what he'd found.

The diagnosis here is stark:

hypertension,

hypertensive heart disease,

cardiac failure.

FDR's visit to Bethesda could not be kept a secret.

But at a press conference, Admiral McIntire insisted brazenly

that the president's health was satisfactory

apart from the lingering effects of flu and bronchitis.

What FDR needed, claimed his doctor,

was just a bit more exercise and sunshine.

Behind the scenes, however,

McIntire fought a desperate rearguard action

against Bruenn's devastating diagnosis.

The young cardiologist was insisting

that Roosevelt needed injections of the drug digitalis

to strengthen his heart,

a regular daily pattern of rests in bed,

and a strict diet to wean him off rich food,

his infamous evening cocktails,

and 20 or 30 cigarettes a day.

McIntire was absolutely furious.

"You can't do that," he shouted.

"This is the President of the United States!"

But Bruenn was sure that "is" would become "was"

if they didn't act quickly, and he calmly stuck to his guns

before three boards of senior Washington medics.

Eventually given leave to go ahead, Bruenn achieved significant results.

After a week of digitalis,

the president's lungs were clear and his heart smaller.

He was sleeping much better

and had cut down his cigarettes to half a dozen a day.

But his blood pressure remained very high,

and with it the risk of a stroke.

Yet in those days, there were no medications available

for high blood pressure and the standard remedies -

rest and no stress - were hard to arrange

for the most powerful man in the world.

But Bruenn did what he could.

He persuaded FDR to take a break

on the estate of an old friend, Bernard Baruch, in South Carolina.

Early nights and a lot of fishing were real tonics.

Roosevelt liked it so much that he stayed four weeks.

But none of this dealt with the basic problem.

How could the ailing president survive all the pressures?

He had been out of the White House

for nine of the first 20 weeks of 1944.

He was now back, but was trying to operate on a four-hour day.

This was hardly satisfactory for the President of the United States,

especially a president who was planning to run for a fourth term.

The Washington rumour mill speculated feverishly

about how FDR's health would cope

with another four years as president.

The choice of his new vice presidential running mate

would be critical.

Roosevelt dithered about the alternatives,

only late in the day plumping for the obscure and inexperienced

Senator Harry Truman of Missouri,

and getting very stressed about the whole business.

It was another alarming sign of FDR's infirmity.

Dr Howard Bruenn was never consulted, but looking back,

he had no doubt that a fourth term was a medical impossibility.

And deep down, FDR surely knew this too.

I think it's telling that,

at the end of his check-up at Bethesda,

the president thanked Dr Bruenn and the staff

but then left without asking a single question.

He carried on avoiding any discussion of his real condition

with Bruenn or any other qualified doctor.

I think Roosevelt didn't want to know.

Perhaps he couldn't afford to know,

for this was a man with a vision who, like most statesmen,

had come to see himself as irreplaceable.

With vision comes hubris,

the cardinal sin of all political veterans.

In the summer of 1944, as the war boiled up to its climax,

the wheelchair president was sure that he had to stay around

to shape the political future.

But given the desperate state of his health,

this was a reckless gamble.

The 6th of June, 1944.

EXPLOSION

D-Day - the long-awaited Anglo-American landings in France.

News of Operation Overlord was greeted with relief

and elation across America.

That evening, the president spoke by radio to the American people,

not in tones of exaltation, but in the form of a simple prayer.

Our sons, pride of our nation,

this day have set upon a mighty endeavour,

a struggle to preserve our republic,

our religion and our civilisation

and to set free a suffering humanity.

Help us, almighty God,

to rededicate ourselves

in renewed faith in Thee

in this hour of great sacrifice.

But for the moment, the GIs didn't get much farther

than the hedgerows of Normandy,

pinned down by fierce German resistance.

Meanwhile, another D-Day dawned on the Eastern Front.

Little known even today in the West,

this shaped the fate of Europe as much as Operation Overlord.

On the 21st of June, the Red Army

unleashed its summer offensive into Byelorussia.

EXPLOSION

The impact was devastating.

In five weeks, while Eisenhower and Montgomery

were bogged down in Normandy,

the Red Army destroyed 20 German divisions...

..and drove forward 450 miles to the gates of Warsaw.

EXPLOSION

But when the Polish Home Army rose up against the Nazis,

the Soviets provided little help.

Admittedly the Red Army was now exhausted

and in no condition to assault a well-defended city.

But Stalin, with reason, viewed the Warsaw Rising

as a deliberate attempt by the Poles

to liberate their country before it fell under Soviet control.

Churchill, angered by the Soviet attitude,

pressed Stalin to offer aid.

Machiavellian as ever in his approach to ends and means,

Roosevelt kept out of this argument.

For him, the real goal continued to be

forging a long-term partnership with the Soviet leader.

At Tehran, he had even pretended to snooze

when Stalin and Churchill haggled over the details of Eastern Europe,

joking, "I don't care two hoots about Poland."

"Wake me up when we talk about Germany."

But the Warsaw Rising did have a significant effect

on Roosevelt's Ambassador to Russia, Averell Harriman.

The Soviet response to the Warsaw Rising

left Harriman feeling FDR was too confident

about the Soviet regime gradually adopting Western, democratic ways.

The question became even more pressing when, in September 1944,

the Red Army broke through into Romania and Bulgaria.

The Soviets were clearly going to be a presence in Eastern Europe

after the war was over. How should the West deal with them?

Again Roosevelt and Churchill were not of one mind.

In October 1944, Churchill flew to Moscow

to cut a deal on spheres of influence in the Balkans.

By conceding the fait accompli of Soviet dominance

in countries like Romania and Bulgaria,

he hoped to preserve Britain's interests in Greece and Yugoslavia.

This was the now notorious "percentages agreement".

Roosevelt acquiesced for the moment,

but for him, as for American public opinion,

this sort of spheres of influence deal-making

was yet another sign of the Old World imperialism

that had brought about two world wars.

Biding his time, the president pressed Stalin

for another summit at which they could confirm

the shape of the new world order that he envisaged.

At the same time, the Roosevelt administration

mounted a massive PR campaign

to sell the new United Nations to the American people,

billing it as the country's second chance

to realise Woodrow Wilson's goal.

A new blockbuster movie about the Great War president

hit the cinemas that autumn, portraying Wilson as a tragic hero

driven by a vision ahead of his time

who destroyed himself trying to achieve it.

FDR saw a private viewing in the White House.

When the film reached the point of Wilson's stroke,

Roosevelt was visibly moved.

Dr Bruenn heard him mutter,

"By God, that's not going to happen to me."

Afterwards, the President's blood pressure was 240 over 130 -

nearly double the healthy norm.

EXPLOSIONS

Roosevelt wanted to achieve the new world order

that Wilson had failed to create,

and he was determined to stay around to run it.

But he feared it might be a long time before victory was won,

because this was truly a world war, not just a struggle in Europe.

American troops were encountering

ferocious Japanese resistance across the Pacific.

Roosevelt had approved the development

of a potentially devastating new weapon,

but despite the investment of two billion dollars,

no-one knew if the atomic bomb would work.

So the US Army had to prepare

for a massive invasion of the Japanese Home Islands

in 1945, 1946 or even later.

Judging by the cost of reconquering Saipan, Leyte

and other Pacific islands in 1944,

this would be a brutal fight, with heavy American losses.

The horrors of war touched Roosevelt personally,

prompting him to be more open about his own disability

when he toured Hawaii in July 1944.

Usually Roosevelt was seen in public in one of two positions -

either seated in an open car,

or standing with his leg braces locked to hold him upright.

But when visiting the seriously wounded from Saipan -

young men in their prime who had lost limbs

and would be disabled for the rest of their lives -

Roosevelt deliberately stayed in his wheelchair.

He told a Secret Serviceman

to push him slowly through the wards,

rubberlegs and all, as he chatted solicitously to the patients.

The message was clear - you didn't need legs to get to the top.

Rarely did FDR display his infirmity in public,

but now he was performing the power of vulnerability.

I've told that story many times, but I still find it deeply moving.

Here was a man who had to endure every day

the countless petty humiliations

of being a paraplegic,

yet who could nevertheless, in public,

radiate the confidence and good humour that inspired millions.

But the courage and self-discipline he'd displayed relentlessly

for more than 20 years had taken its toll,

and now his medical regime was sucking the remaining fun

from his life - food, drink, good company.

The "happy warrior" of the world's political battlefield

wielded about as much power as anyone could crave,

but as a human being he was deeply unhappy.

By 1944, I think,

Franklin Roosevelt was almost hollowed out by loneliness.

If one thinks of the other war leaders,

their private lives were relatively simple.

Churchill had a long-suffering wife

who kept him going at the cost of her own emotional exhaustion.

As for the dictators,

the abstemious Hitler had a devoted mistress,

while Stalin mourned his first wife,

drove his second to suicide,

and thereafter seems to have got his kicks from killing.

Roosevelt's love life was more complex,

and typically devious.

Yet the tangled story, I think, defies any simple moral judgment.

Roosevelt's women were essential to his survival as a politician,

and in 1945 love and politics were entangled as never before.

To understand this, we need to dig way back into his emotional past.

Despite FDR's affair with Lucy Mercer in 1918,

Eleanor continued to care deeply for him,

nursing him through the peak of his illness in 1921

and even learning to apply catheters and manage bedpans.

But Eleanor's crusading mission

made her more driven and harder to relax with.

Franklin continued to enjoy light-hearted female company,

especially attractive young women who thought he was wonderful.

Women like Marguerite LeHand, known as Missy,

his principal secretary for 20 years,

who idolised the man whom she called FD

and who made him laugh.

And Daisy Suckley, FDR's Hyde Park spinster cousin,

ten years younger, whom he treated

as a special confidante and quiet companion.

In their own ways, these women gave him

the love that was lacking in his own marriage.

Eleanor, too, found love in other ways.

Through the feminist movement in Manhattan,

she flirted with lesbian relationships

and established a furniture-making business

with two of her special women friends,

Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, at Val-Kill,

a property a few miles from Springwood.

Privately, FDR called Nancy and Marion the "she-males",

but he liked them, while they said

that Uncle Franklin was "utterly charming".

He encouraged the venture here at Val-kill,

which finally gave Eleanor a place of her own.

And FDR, always fancying himself as an architect,

even designed the cottage for them.

FDR also needed his own hideaway, and designed this simple house

on the highest hill of the Roosevelt estate,

whose porch looked out westward across the Hudson River.

At Top Cottage, FDR could keep some distance from Eleanor.

Clearly the Roosevelts were now very far from being a traditional couple.

Each had an independent life

involving intimate friendships with others.

That suited Franklin, never keen to be dependent on any one person.

Yet their marriage had also put down deep roots,

toughened by the Lucy Mercer affair and also by his battle with polio.

And they shared a commitment to progressive politics,

to making America a better place.

Everything Eleanor Roosevelt says and does becomes news.

True to her prediction, her personal life is no longer her own.

Instead, she's becoming an American institution.

When Franklin moved into the White House,

Eleanor became the eyes and ears of the wheelchair president,

travelling the country learning of human misery

and reporting back to him and to the nation.

In addition to being the first wife of a president

ever to hold her own weekly press conference,

she writes a daily syndicated newspaper column called My Day.

My Day, which she started writing in 1935, quickly became

one of the most popular columns in the American press.

She saw her role, in part, as launching trial balloons

for her husband, which he could then disown

if they got shot down by critics.

"I was the agitator," Eleanor said, "he was the politician."

Theirs was a remarkable political partnership,

utterly novel in American history.

But when the New Deal president became the war president,

things began to change.

Eleanor hated the war,

and she was deeply depressed at the deaths,

the maiming and the mourning.

As the fighting dragged on, the two of them began to drift apart,

no longer of one mind on the cause that mattered.

As Eleanor tightened up, Franklin relied more and more

on vivacious younger ladies to keep him company.

Mrs Roosevelt and Crown Princess Martha of Norway are among

the notables appearing at the New York Madison Square Garden...

He was very taken with Princess Martha,

exiled wife of Prince Olav of Norway,

who moved her three children to America to escape the war.

Eleanor was irked, but shrugged her shoulders,

telling a friend,

"There's always a Martha for relaxation

"and for the non-ending pleasure

"of having an admiring audience for every breath."

It was the Roosevelts' daughter, Anna,

a spirited, strong-minded woman in her late thirties,

who came to fill the gap between her parents.

She moved into the White House in 1944,

and did whatever was asked, big or small,

to make FDR's existence more comfortable.

When Roosevelt became ill after the exertions of Tehran,

Eleanor seemed oblivious to his physical state,

and it was Anna who prodded him into a proper medical checkup.

This was a battle to help keep the President alive

so he could achieve his vision for the world after the war.

But the result was an odd and rather prickly menage a trois.

Eleanor, a teetotaller,

hated FDR's cocktail hours before dinner

when there was a tacit agreement

that no official business would be discussed.

Anna indulged them at a modest level

as one of his few pleasures.

At the end of one cocktail hour, Eleanor marched in,

armed with a sheaf of papers.

"Now, Franklin," she said in her usual brisk manner,

"I need to talk to you about these."

FDR simply lost it.

He chucked the sheet of papers across the room

and said to a mortified Anna,

"You deal with those in the morning."

Eleanor stood silent, lips pursed.

Then she said,

"I'm sorry," and walked away.

But fortunately for Eleanor,

she didn't know just how far Anna was going

in order to keep her father happy.

On the 28th of April 1944, in deepest secrecy,

she arranged for Mrs Winthrop Rutherfurd to have lunch

with the President while he was recuperating in South Carolina.

Anna set up the lunch at her father's behest.

It was the prelude to more than a dozen intimate dinners

that would follow over the next year,

usually in the White House when Eleanor was away.

Her absence was an essential condition,

because this tete-a-tete was not with another Martha.

Franklin was seeing his former lover Lucy again.

She was now a free woman, recently widowed at the age of 52.

Anna acted as go-between.

Her father asked her to arrange the timings

and special access to the White House.

This put Anna in what she later admitted was a terrible position.

As a girl, Anna had taken her mother's side about the affair.

But now, as a divorcee who'd remarried,

she realised that her father needed

sympathetic and appreciative company,

rather than Eleanor's latest must-do hit list.

And she could also see that Lucy remained special,

allowing him to enjoy what Anna called

"a few hours of much needed relaxation."

Even so,

it was a truly bizarre situation -

daughter abetting her father's liaison

behind the back of her mother,

in what she felt were the interests of the nation.

All these women mattered in different ways

to Roosevelt as 1945 opened.

The war was reaching its climax,

yet when and how it would end remained in doubt.

EXPLOSIONS

As the new year began,

the Allies were recovering from heavy casualties

after a desperate German counterattack

in the Battle of the Bulge.

And the American navy weathered Japanese kamikaze attacks

off the coast of Thailand.

Roosevelt was briefed on the state of the Manhattan project,

America's race to build the atomic bomb.

A test was likely within a matter of months,

but whether it would work was still unclear.

Yet Roosevelt did not inform his new vice president,

Harry Truman, about progress on the bomb.

Plucked from the Senate to be FDR's running mate,

Truman was not part of Roosevelt's inner circle.

Yet he was now, to use the cliche,

a heartbeat away from the presidency.

And looking into Roosevelt's grey, gaunt face,

Truman could sense that the president's heart was failing.

Truman, in his own words, felt "troubled and worried."

But Roosevelt simply kept his new vice president out of the loop

on the bomb and on policy in general.

Given the state of his health, such secrecy was almost criminal.

But Roosevelt was like a man in denial about his own mortality.

Perhaps only in those fleeting moments with Lucy,

conjuring up anew the vitality and love of his lost past,

did Roosevelt voice his dark fears about the future.

On the 22nd of January 1945,

Roosevelt set out for a second meeting with Stalin.

The Soviet leader was scared of flying

and would not move far beyond his security net,

so Roosevelt - and Churchill - had to go to him.

Stalin's chosen venue was the old Tsarist summer palace

at Yalta in the Crimea.

Getting there and back by boat and plane -

a 14,000 mile round trip -

was another long and arduous journey for an ailing president.

And when Roosevelt finally got there, this was no holiday resort.

The Crimea had only recently been recaptured from the Germans,

and mod cons were in short supply,

though bedbugs were abundant.

Senior generals had to queue up to use the few bathrooms.

The week-long conference would draw

on all of FDR's reserves of strength.

A huge amount was at stake for Roosevelt at Yalta.

He wanted to get agreement on the new United Nations

and on a strategy for defeating Japan.

And on both these issues, Soviet cooperation was vital.

But as at Tehran,

he and Churchill didn't always see eye-to-eye

on how to deal with Stalin.

And the Soviet leader kept unsettling them

by his tactical ploys, playing hard to get.

At dinner on the very first evening, he put them on the back foot

by pretending to take offence at their nickname for him, "Uncle Joe".

Despite this, Roosevelt was convinced

he could secure Soviet participation in the United Nations

to anchor them in the international community.

To get Soviet agreement on the big architecture

of a new world order, FDR deliberately stayed above

what he saw as small details, particularly in Eastern Europe.

So while Churchill and Stalin haggled once again over Poland,

Roosevelt pushed the Soviets to sign up

to the Declaration on Liberated Europe -

a general commitment on the independence

of all the countries freed from Nazi rule.

FDR hoped that signing this

would commit the Soviets to follow Wilsonian values,

or at least to hold them to account if they didn't.

He told sceptics,

"It's the best I can do for Poland at this time."

Conscious that the Red Army already controlled Poland,

Roosevelt did not push as hard as Churchill.

In his view,

you couldn't make omelettes without breaking eggs,

and it was just bad luck

that so many of the eggshells would be Polish.

His top priority, as always,

was not to jeopardize relations with Stalin.

And over Asia, Roosevelt's softly-softly approach

appeared to pay off.

He conceded Stalin's demands for territory in Japan and China.

In return, Stalin confirmed that the Soviets

would enter the Asian war within three months of victory in Europe.

With the atomic bomb still untested, General George Marshall,

the US Army Chief of Staff, was relieved to share

the brutal endgame of the Japanese war with the Red Army.

Asked when leaving Yalta

whether he looked forward to civilised amenities again,

Marshall said gravely, "For what we have gained here,

"I would gladly have stayed a whole month."

By the time he got back to Washington, Roosevelt was exhausted.

He delivered his report of the summit to Congress sitting down,

making a rare reference to his disability.

I hope that you will pardon me

for an unusual posture of sitting down.

But I know that you will realise that it makes it a lot easier for me

in not having to carry about ten pounds of steel

round on the bottom of my legs,

and also because of the fact that I have just completed

a 14,000 mile trip.

APPLAUSE

The speech was full of optimism about Stalin as a man of good faith

and about a new era in international politics.

And I am confident that the Congress

and the American people will accept the results of this conference

as the beginnings of a permanent structure of peace,

upon which we can begin to build under God

that better world in which our children

and grandchildren must live and can live.

Roosevelt needed to sell Yalta to his own people,

ahead of the founding conference of the new United Nations,

which would be held in San Francisco in April.

He didn't want any repeat of the tragedy of Wilson and the League.

It wasn't just the Russians he needed to bring in from the cold,

but the Americans.

TAPPING OF TYPEWRITER

PHONE RINGS

All through March 1945, Stalin tightened his grip on Poland.

Churchill sent anguished messages to the White House,

demanding a joint protest to the Kremlin

about what he was already calling an Iron Curtain

coming down across Eastern Europe.

But FDR, more coldly realist,

felt that the Poles were a lost cause

and did not wish friction over Eastern Europe

to imperil the UN project.

Yet by early April, Stalin was dragging his feet on this,

threatening to send only a junior diplomat to San Francisco.

That would leave Americans wondering

whether the Soviets had really turned over a new leaf.

Despite odd moments, FDR stuck to the end

with his policy of enticing the Russians into the family of nations.

He wrote to Churchill to play down the aggro with Moscow.

"I would minimise the general Soviet problem as much as possible,

"because these problems, in one form or another,

"seem to arise every day, and most of them straighten out.

"We must be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct."

Was Roosevelt right that the West

needed to soothe Russian insecurities?

Would sticking with his strategy

of drawing the Soviets in from the cold

have averted, or at least eased, the Cold War?

Or was Churchill right

that the only message they understood was firmness?

That has to remain a fascinating "what if" of history,

because Roosevelt died before the Cold War really began.

But the Roosevelt-Churchill debate

about conciliation versus toughness

still perplexes statesmen today

when dealing with Vladimir Putin's Russia.

In early April, Roosevelt went down to Warm Springs, Georgia,

for another break. Dr Bruenn was in attendance.

So too were Daisy and Lucy -

in their own ways also part of his medical team.

Eleanor remained in Washington,

but she bombarded him with messages about wartime issues.

On one occasion, they argued over the phone

about aid to Yugoslavia for a full 45 minutes.

After Roosevelt hung up, the veins on his forehead were bulging

and his blood pressure had risen 50 points.

Eleanor was still pushing him hard, mind and heart,

just as she'd done ever since the dark days of polio.

At Warm Springs, the president worked on

his Jefferson Day radio speech,

intended to sell the new United Nations to America

as an essential part of "an abiding peace".

The draft recalled the words of his inaugural address

in the depths of the Depression

about the only thing to fear being fear itself.

Roosevelt planned to close with these ringing words,

"The only limit to our realisation of tomorrow

"will be our doubts of today.

"Let us move forward with strong and active faith."

Though weary, the president seemed in good spirits.

There was nothing to suggest what would happen the next day.

CLOCK TICKS

On Thursday morning, the 12th of April,

the president complained of a stiff neck and a slight headache,

but he sat patiently for a portrait painter,

fiddling away at his papers.

Suddenly, just before lunch, he looked up.

"I have a terrific pain at the back of my head,"

he murmured, and then slumped forward and lost consciousness.

As aides lifted him on to his bed

and Dr Bruenn worked desperately,

a shocked Lucy was ushered into a car and driven away.

For a couple of hours, the president fought for life,

his tortured, rasping breaths

reminiscent of the dying Abraham Lincoln 80 years before

at the end of another great war.

But at 3:35pm, Roosevelt's heart finally stopped.

In Washington that afternoon, the vice president was on Capitol Hill

while Eleanor was attending a charity concert.

Summoned by phone to the White House,

she took in the news, trying to stay calm.

When Truman arrived at the White House,

it was Eleanor who broke the news:

"Harry, the president is dead."

Stunned, he asked if there was anything he could do for her.

She looked at him gently.

"Is there anything we can do for you?

"For you are the one in trouble now."

Eleanor kept her composure all through that afternoon.

She retained it when she got to Warm Springs late that night -

even when she learned the guilty secret that Lucy had been there

for the last three days, that she'd visited Franklin

on many occasions over the previous few months,

and that Anna had arranged it all.

It was only later, when she confronted Anna,

that Eleanor lost her cool,

consumed with a burning anger.

Betrayed long ago but, she had hoped, once and for all,

she now found herself betrayed again,

this time with her own daughter as accomplice.

It was a bitter, anguished encounter,

leaving the two women estranged for many months.

Next day, bottling up her emotions,

she accompanied his body on the special train

that chugged its way 800 miles north to the nation's capital.

Eleanor, still bruised and angry,

watched in growing awe at the thousands who lined the route,

openly grieving for their lost president.

After a service at the White House, the coffin was taken to Hyde Park

to be buried next to Springwood, the house where he had been born.

Eleanor was deeply moved, beginning to realise

just how much her flawed husband had meant to his people.

She had known him too well,

yet in other fundamental ways had failed to appreciate him.

GUNFIRE

As America mourned, so did the free world -

and even Stalin.

When Ambassador Harriman called on the Soviet leader

the day after Roosevelt's death, Stalin's reaction

seemed to vindicate FDR's policy of building trust.

Harriman wrote,

"I noticed that he was obviously deeply distressed at the news.

"He greeted me in silence and stood holding my hand

"for about 30 seconds before asking me to sit down."

Stalin asked Harriman lots of questions about Roosevelt's health

and about the circumstances of his death.

For a paranoid dictator,

obsessed about assassins and poisoners,

it was hard to believe that the President of the United States

had died merely from natural causes after botched medical care.

With real emotion, Stalin declared,

"President Roosevelt is dead but his cause must live on.

"We shall support President Truman

"with all our forces and all our will."

Seizing his chance,

Harriman suggested that the best way to help Truman

and to reassure the American people about Soviet-American relations

would be for Foreign Minister Molotov

to go to see the new president and then attend

the opening session of the UN in San Francisco.

After a brief discussion with Molotov, Stalin agreed.

In death, it seemed, Roosevelt had secured

what was slipping through his fingers

in the last weeks of his life.

And so the Soviet Union joined the United Nations.

It became a permanent member of the Security Council,

just as Roosevelt had intended.

APPLAUSE

But his hopes for an eventual alignment of Russia

to social democratic values were utopian.

Or at least not something realised so far,

despite the formal ending of the Cold War.

The spirit of Yalta evaporated,

in part because Stalin was determined

to control his conquests in Eastern Europe,

and regarded any kind of open politics as a threat to security.

But ironically, it was another of Roosevelt's legacies

that poisoned the peace.

Even if the Big Three had managed to sort out their differences

in Germany and Eastern Europe - and that's a big "if" -

the way that World War II ended in Asia

made the Cold War almost inevitable.

Roosevelt had thrown all America's industrial might

into the race to build an atomic bomb.

Nazi Germany capitulated before the first American atomic test.

But Truman, fearful like Roosevelt of bloody battles

to end the war in Asia, dropped two atomic bombs on Japan.

As soon as he heard the news,

Stalin made a Soviet bomb the regime's top priority.

The Cold War arms race was born -

that endless vying for superiority

in ever more complex killer weapons.

And so, ironically, one of Roosevelt's projects,

however necessary it might now seem for ending the war,

helped undermine his vision for peace.

The United Nations was poisoned by suspicion

amongst the "policemen" who he hoped would keep peace and security.

Yet the Cold War never hotted up into World War III.

The bomb may have acted as a deterrent,

but I think that the UN,

founded in those vital transition weeks between war and peace,

also played a part.

It created the structure, however fragile,

of an international community.

In that basic sense, Roosevelt's hopes were realised.

And Eleanor remained true to FDR's global vision.

Overcoming, as in 1918, her grief and bitterness,

she drew comfort from verses sent to her by a friend.

"They are not dead who live in lives they leave behind.

"In those whom they have blessed they live a life again."

In a strangely poignant way,

it was as if America's outpouring of grief after Franklin's death

made her belatedly aware of the greatness

that lay behind his pettiness, secrecy and deceits.

Daisy Suckley - in some ways FDR's closest companion,

but never his lover or his wife -

captured the Franklin-Eleanor relationship perfectly

on the night of his death. She wrote in her diary,

"Poor ER - I believe she loved him

"more deeply than she knows herself,

"and his feeling for her was deep and lasting.

"The fact that they could not relax together, or play together,

"is the tragedy of their joint lives, for I believe,

"from everything that I have seen of them,

"that they had everything else in common.

"It was probably a matter of personalities,

"of a certain lack of humour on her part -

"I cannot blame either of them.

"They are both remarkable people - sky-high above the average."

For seven years after his death,

Eleanor was a member of the American delegation to the UN -

the only woman.

It is my ruling as chairman of the commission

that the point raised by the Soviet member is out of order.

APPLAUSE

Her Machiavellian combination of charm and persistence,

reminiscent of FDR himself,

helped push through the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

She also kept her My Day column going

until a few weeks before her death in 1962,

championing liberal causes such as civil rights...

..equal pay for women,

and a national health service through the McCarthy era.

Even after FDR's death, and despite his double betrayal,

Eleanor's partnership with Franklin remained in some ways indissoluble.

Today Franklin and Eleanor lie here in the Rose Garden at Hyde Park,

under a simple gravestone.

Their complex, often contrary marriage,

scarred by FDR's betrayals,

masked a deeper unity of purpose and values

between two remarkable, if flawed, personalities

who shared a vision of a better future.

And from the grave one can look down the avenue

to the Albany Post Road - the view that tantalized Roosevelt

for the last quarter-century of his life.

The wheelchair president never made it to the main road.

But the journey he did complete,

with its successes and failures,

helped define our world into the twenty-first century.