FDR's Death and Truman's Succession
How the sudden death of America's longest-serving president thrust an unprepared Harry Truman into command of the atomic age, the end of World War II, and the dawn of the Cold War.
The Death at Warm Springs
On the afternoon of April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt was sitting for a portrait at his cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, when he said, 'I have a terrific headache,' and collapsed. He had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He was pronounced dead at 3:35 PM. He was 63 years old and had been president for twelve years and 39 days.
The news hit the American public with a force that is difficult to comprehend today. Roosevelt was the only president millions of Americans had ever known. An entire generation had grown up with his voice on the radio, his face in the newsreels, his name synonymous with the government itself. Soldiers wept openly on battlefields in Europe and the Pacific. Strangers embraced on street corners. A White House usher said it was as if 'the roof had fallen in.'
Roosevelt had been visibly declining for months. Photographs from the Yalta Conference in February 1945 show a gaunt, exhausted man who looked far older than his years. His personal physician had diagnosed severe hypertension and congestive heart failure a year earlier but concealed the severity from the public and, to some extent, from Roosevelt himself. The question of whether a dying man should have run for a fourth term in 1944 remains one of the great what-ifs of American history.