♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: "In all the years I knew him," Franklin Roosevelt's eldest son remembered, "there was only one time "when my father worried about his ability.

It was the night he was elected president."

♪ ♪ (train whistle blaring) On March 2, 1933, as a Baltimore and Ohio train sped from Hyde Park, New York, toward Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat all alone in the last car.

In two days, this man with the legs crippled by polio, whose greatest strength seemed to be his charm, would become the 32nd president of the United States.

(train whistle blares) (train clacking on tracks) Over 70 years before, Abraham Lincoln had traveled by train to his inauguration to lead a country about to be torn apart.

Now Roosevelt would have to face the nation's gravest crisis since the Civil War.

♪ ♪ 14 million Americans were out of work.

Nine million had lost their life savings.

The economy had collapsed.

MAN: People were down and out in their feelings, not only in their stomachs and in their pocketbooks.

It was a tremendously depressing period of time.

There were not a few people who really saw the possibility that the country was going to disintegrate.

McCULLOUGH: The train clattered through New Jersey, where Newark had defaulted on its payroll, and rolled on through Pennsylvania and Maryland, where the banks were closed.

Halfway across the country, Iowa farmers threatened to hang a lawyer foreclosing on their farms.

And in Detroit, men who had lost their jobs were stealing food from grocery stores.

(train whistle blares) As the president-elect's train pulled into Washington's Union Station, no one knew what to expect from this man who had promised a New Deal for Americans.

MAN: The country was in a hell of a mess and everybody was looking to this new man to do something about it.

They didn't know what.

His promises had been all over the lot, but action, action, action was what they were looking for.

McCULLOUGH: "If the New Deal is a success," a friend told Roosevelt, "you will be remembered as the greatest American president."

"If I fail," Roosevelt replied, "I will be remembered as the last one."

CHOIR: ♪ O God, our help in ages past ♪ ♪ Our hope for years to come... ♪ McCULLOUGH: Inauguration day began with a service at St.

John's Episcopal Church with hymns selected by Roosevelt himself.

(verse concludes): ♪ ...and our eternal home.

♪ McCULLOUGH: His secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, described the scene: "We were in a terrible situation," she wrote.

"Banks were closing.

"The economic life of the country "was almost at a standstill.

If ever a man wanted to pray, that was the day."

(choir continues) "He did want to pray and he wanted everyone to pray for him."

CHOIR: ♪ ...and our defense is sure.

♪ McCULLOUGH: The weather was cold and bleak.

General Douglas MacArthur had prepared his troops for a possible riot.

On his last morning in office, President Herbert Hoover said, "We are at the end of our string.

There is nothing more we can do."

(people chattering) Hoover detested Roosevelt, thought him an opportunist sure to drag the country even deeper into despair.

On the ride to the Capitol, Roosevelt tried to make conversation, but Hoover sat stony-faced.

"The two of us simply couldn't sit there on our hands, ignoring each other and everyone else," Roosevelt recalled, "so I began waving my top hat, and I kept waving it until I got to the inauguration stand."

(crowd cheering) CHOIR: ♪ Sufficient is thine arm alone... ♪ McCULLOUGH: "It was very, very solemn," Eleanor Roosevelt told reporters later, "and a little terrifying.

"The crowds were so tremendous "and you felt that they would do anything if only someone would tell them what to do."

CHOIR: ♪ ...in order stood ♪ McCULLOUGH: As he made his way to the podium, Roosevelt appeared to be walking, but it had taken years of practice to perfect that illusion.

In fact, he was pressing down on his son's arm with an iron grip, propelling himself forward with the help of a cane and his powerful upper body.

CHOIR: ♪ ...endless years the same ♪ McCULLOUGH: Americans everywhere waited.

ROOSEVELT: I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute... MAN: One has to imagine millions of people clustered around their radio sets in towns all across the country.

They don't know what to expect of this new president.

He's not shown them much yet, ROOSEVELT (on radio): ...so help me God.

and then they hear, coming through their loudspeakers, this voice.

ROOSEVELT: This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly... LEUCHTENBURG: So filled with courage, with self-confidence, with a sense of leadership.

This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

MAN: Suddenly this man came in and he made clear to the country that there was really nothing to fear except the fear that was in one's own heart.

Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror... GINZBERG: The country was so excited that one had a live leader finally, at long last, in the White House that he could have suggested that we all get ready to walk to the moon and we would have followed him.

It was just an unbelievable change in mood.

(playing "Stars and Stripes Forever") LEUCHTENBURG: It has an electrifying effect.

Nearly a half a million people write to him.

This is unheard of.

American presidents in the past generation had gotten as few as 200 letters in a week.

Now nearly a half a million write to Franklin Roosevelt, and overnight he establishes himself as the leader that the country has been looking for.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: "Dear Mr.

Roosevelt: I am writing to you for help.

"We have eight children to take care of "and nobody working but my husband.

"He's getting such little pay for his work "and we have a sick child.

"Please, Mr.

Roosevelt, "don't let them take our home away from us.

Please, sir."

"Dear Mr.

Roosevelt: I have never as yet begged, "but I would appreciate some kind of help.

"I have always put up a good fight and have worked many a day until I was almost unable to stand up, but all to no avail."

March 4, 1933, Roosevelt's first day in office.

With the banks closed, investment at a standstill, many Americans believed that the free enterprise system was failing.

One aide wrote, "We were confronted with a choice "between an orderly revolution or a violent overthrow of the whole capitalist structure."

Roosevelt could hope, like Hoover, that the economy would repair itself.

Or he could try something that had never been done before in America: intervene on a massive scale with the power of the federal government.

MAN: I had a professor that taught the course in business cycles, and I remember he reached in his pocket and took a rubber band out and he held it and then he pulled it and he said, "This is boom."

Then he let go of one end, it snapped back, he said, "Bust."

He says this happens to a capitalistic economy and you can't do anything about it.

Let nature take its course.

And Roosevelt, of course, brought around him a lot of people that didn't believe that bunk and thought you got to do something to turn it around.

McCULLOUGH: Roosevelt's advisers offered him a range of programs.

In the end, he would work from no systematic plan.

Instead, he would experiment.

LEUCHTENBURG: Try one idea; and if it doesn't work, we'll try another.

He likened himself to a quarterback.

You try a play; if that play doesn't work, you turn, turn to another play.

McCULLOUGH: "It is common sense," Roosevelt said, "to take a method and try it.

"If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.

But above all, try something."

♪ ♪ In his first 100 days in office, Roosevelt managed to put tens of thousands of people back to work.

♪ ♪ He pledged billions to save their farms and their homes from foreclosure.

He provided relief to the unemployed.

He restored confidence in the banks and guaranteed the savings of millions of Americans.

ROOSEVELT: I can assure you that it is safer for you to keep your money in a reopened bank than to keep it under the mattress.

GINSBURG: His key was somehow to prop up capitalism.

That was unquestionably in back of his mind.

But he was a pragmatist.

He was seeking to find solutions to the practical problems that beset people today.

The banks were closed.

Get the banks open.

McCULLOUGH: And to sell the centerpiece of his program-- the National Recovery Administration-- he orchestrated an extraordinary publicity campaign.

The N.R.A.

was designed to tame the unruly cycles of American capitalism by encouraging business and government to work together.

Each industry was allowed to set its own wages and prices.

Labor was promised the right to bargain collectively.

MAN: I went to the top of the Empire State Building on a day in, I think, June 1933.

There was this enormous National Recovery Act parade, you know, and they had this symbol, the blue eagle, everywhere.

It was on cigarette packages, and it was in stores, and so on.

It was an immensely moving thing.

I mean, there must have been two million people, it seemed like, up and down 5th Avenue and everywhere, all just cheering, and the country just lifted itself up.

♪ ♪ ROBERTS: This was a great thing that was happening.

The country was coming out of this incredible mood.

Roosevelt was changing national despair to hope.

MAN: ♪ There's a new day in view ♪ ♪ There's gold in the blue ♪ ♪ There is hope in the hearts of men ♪ ♪ All the world's on the way to a sunnier day ♪ ♪ For the road is open again!

♪ McCULLOUGH: When the 100 days were over, Roosevelt had signed 15 major bills into law and created an alphabet soup of new government agencies.

"We have had our revolution," one magazine reported, "and we like it."

GINZBERG: Everything was up for grabs in a country that was basically a conservative country, but now had a leader to whom anything and everything was possible.

SINGERS: ♪ 'Cause the road is open... ♪ The least ideological person that ever lived.

That's why I think he was such a great success.

A few timid people who fear progress will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing.

Sometimes they will call it fascism, and sometimes communism and sometimes regimentation, and sometimes socialism.

But in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical.

I believe in practical explanations and in practical policies.

McCULLOUGH: Roosevelt used the radio to speak directly to the American people and they listened to his "fireside chats" as if he were a close friend.

ROOSEVELT: In the present spirit of mutual confidence and the present spirit of mutual encouragement, we go forward.

McCULLOUGH: By the end of 1933, many of Roosevelt's most skeptical critics had been converted.

An aide who worked with him during the Wilson years marveled, "that fellow in there "is not the fellow we used to know.

There's been a miracle here."

If Roosevelt ever had any doubts about his ability to do the job, they evaporated quickly.

The White House, which for some presidents was a prison, was, for F.D.R., home.

WOMAN: Oh, I think there's no question that Roosevelt loved being president.

You know how he used to say, "I love it."

I suspect if somebody said to him, "How do you like being president?"

That's what he would have said, "I love it."

It just seemed to fit his temperament, I have a feeling he loved getting up in the morning, loved going to his office, enjoyed the people that came in.

I can't imagine another president being more suited for the presidency and enjoying it as much as Roosevelt did.

♪ ♪ LEUCHTENBURG: Roosevelt believed that he belonged in the White House.

His idea of who a president should be was himself as president.

He thought it was the grandest job in the world.

♪ ♪ GINSBURG: This was a man of great ebullience.

He was a man of constant cheer.

He was a man of cigarettes.

It would be a constant flow of laughter and jokes.

There was never a moment that one had a feeling that he suddenly felt helpless or suddenly uncertain of what to do.

He knew what to do, and he would do it.

COOKE: He was immensely cunning, and what people had not realized was his extraordinary guile.

I mean, I think he was quite capable of telling what Winston Churchill called "a terminological inexactitude" and never blush.

And he had this marvelous face of, you know, total placid sincerity and earnestness, and he had a great gift of seeming to think that you were about the wisest man that he'd ever consulted on anything, until you found he had no use for you the moment you left.

McCULLOUGH: Franklin Roosevelt had always imagined himself as president.

But the White House was the last place Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to be.

"I never wanted to be a president's wife," she said, "and I don't want it now."

By 1933, Eleanor and her husband were leading all but separate lives.

15 years earlier, Roosevelt's affair with Eleanor's social secretary, Lucy Mercer, had ended the intimacies of their married life.

But they had developed a political partnership and Eleanor had built a life of her own.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: My grandmother had real reservations about moving into the White House.

She knew the social role.

She knew how all-consuming it could be.

She had become a figure in her own right and within the Democratic Party, even somewhat of a power, and the thought of going to Washington, she was appalled.

GOODWIN: All she saw was social ceremonial jobs, which she hated.

She always said she was never good at small talk.

I'm sure she imagined that in the first ladyship she'd be talking small talk for all the years they were in there.

(people chattering) McCULLOUGH: "At the first few receptions," Eleanor wrote, "my arms ached, my shoulders ached, my back ached.

I was lucky in having a supple hand, which never ached."

"I realized," she said, "that if I remained in the White House all the time, I would lose touch with the rest of the world."

WOMAN: She wanted her freedom.

She didn't want to be curtailed by protocol by being the head... the wife of the head of a government.

She wanted to pack up a bag, get into her little car and go out into the country.

(crowd cheering) ♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: During her husband's first year as president, Eleanor traveled more than 40,000 miles, reporting back to the White House on the New Deal.

(cheering) GOODWIN: Never before had a first lady taken to the road and traveled hundreds of thousands of miles on her own supporting her husband.

What she was looking for was the human detail that she could bring back to her husband to let him understand what the people of his land were thinking, feeling and hoping.

♪ ♪ ROBERTS: She became his legs.

She became his emissary.

She could go places that he couldn't go and she went everywhere.

McCULLOUGH: Eleanor wrote a daily column called "My Day," held weekly press conferences, received hundreds of thousands of letters.

Her popularity ratings were sometimes even higher than her husband's.

MAN: He could make a great speech, but Mrs.

Roosevelt went out and intermingled with the people.

Well, she would sometimes pick up someone off the street and bring them in for lunch and she would invite people to the White House to dinner, for a state dinner.

And they had never had a tuxedo on in their lives, and they'd come there and unpack and no tuxedo and they're supposed to be at the dinner.

Then what would we do?

We would take them to the locker where we had supplies-- uniforms for the butlers-- and fit them out in that.

McCULLOUGH: The woman who never wanted to be first lady revolutionized the role.

More and more, Eleanor became the White House advocate for women, factory workers, tenant farmers, Blacks, often pressing her husband to move faster than he was prepared to move.

GOODWIN: Eleanor sent so many memos into his bedroom at night that after a while, he had to create an Eleanor basket just to hold all these memos.

And then, after a while, he had to make a deal with her, saying, "Eleanor, three memos a night-- "not 12, not 20, not 30.

I will initial them and deal with them by morning."

Sometimes she kept her bargain, but my sense is that more than three went in there many nights.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: What they had together, my grandmother and grandfather, was what I call a creative tension.

They both basically believed in the same things, but they had different roles to play.

He had to work with the Congress.

He was president of the United States, which meant not the liberals in the United States.

It meant everybody in the United States.

She was able to influence issues and he was delighted.

But he could also disown her and did with the press.

He would say, "Well, you know my missus.

I don't dictate what she says," or, "I don't control her."

He was very charming about it, but in a way it was just saying, "Oh, she can say what she likes.

That doesn't represent my position."

Which was very, very convenient, very convenient for him to, through her, sense how far he could go.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: By 1934, Roosevelt had been president for a year, yet in spite of all his New Deal programs, hard times persisted.

GINSBURG: The depression was too deep.

The origins, the roots of the problem were too deep.

McCULLOUGH: The government had spent over $2 billion for relief, but thousands of new people were forced on the welfare rolls each day.

LEUCHTENBURG: The numbers of people who are on welfare rise to a quarter of an American city.

One reporter in 1934 comes upon a couple living in a cave in Central Park in New York.

And there was a sense that the New Deal-- although it had improved things greatly from the worst days of the Great Depression-- was not really getting the country back to prosperous days again.

(glass breaking, crowd jeering) McCULLOUGH: Despair turned to anger.

Violent protests and strikes swept across the country.

(crowd shouting) Bewildered and frightened, many Americans were drawn to agitators calling for reforms more radical than Roosevelt's.

I dared you and challenged you to organize so that the people, if not the president... McCULLOUGH: Father Charles Coughlin, a maverick Catholic priest from Detroit, turned radio into a pulpit from which he blasted the New Deal, demanding a living annual wage and nationalization of the banks.

Who, then, is the inflationist?

Roosevelt or the National Union?

(crowd cheering) McCULLOUGH: Francis Townsend, a retired California doctor, galvanized millions of supporters by advocating a plan for old-age pensions.

And Senator Huey Long from Louisiana, with his "Share Our Wealth" program, had his eye on the presidency.

"I can take him," Long said of Roosevelt.

"He's scared of me.

"I can outpromise him, and he knows it.

"His mother's watching him and she won't let him go too far.

"He's living on an inherited income.

People will believe me and they won't believe him."

Roosevelt's consensus was beginning to unravel.

During the euphoria of his first 100 days in office, even Republicans had supported him.

Now they turned against him.

MAN: The New Deal is government from above.

It is based on the proposition that the people cannot manage their own affairs and that a government bureaucracy must manage for them.

McCULLOUGH: Republicans charged that government was becoming too big and too intrusive.

We do not want to see these alphabetical bureaucratic agencies become permanent fixtures in our national political life.

McCULLOUGH: Roosevelt grew increasingly frustrated as business began to accuse him of meddling with free enterprise.

When he regulated the stock exchange and the banks, the captains of American industry were outraged.

They thought he had come in, he had done a very good job-- those first 100 days were all right-- but now he should give us a chance to take back and run the country as we always had been accustomed to running it.

He had a different idea about that.

McCULLOUGH: With the election just two years away, the attacks on Roosevelt became more intense than ever.

Angry businessmen founded the Liberty League, dedicated to stopping further New Deal legislation.

COOKE: The discovery of what a political wizard he was was what fired a lot of hatred of Roosevelt, because they'd thought of him as somebody they could manipulate, a splendid, well-meaning, rather genteel type.

That's what they thought.

Then they discovered they have an absolute master politician, mischief maker, cunning man, and they hated him all the more because they'd been fooled.

McCULLOUGH: Then, on May 27, 1935, a day New Dealers would remember as Black Monday, the Supreme Court struck at the very heart of Roosevelt's hope to stimulate the economy.

They declared the N.R.A., the National Recovery Act, unconstitutional, and it was just the first blow.

The court was moving against Roosevelt's efforts to abolish child labor, establish a minimum wage, boost farm prices.

Law by law, the court would attempt to dismantle the work of the first 100 days.

But with millions still unemployed, Roosevelt continued to use the power of the federal government to relieve the suffering caused by the Great Depression.

LEUCHTENBURG: Congress, at Roosevelt's request, enacts the Emergency Work Relief Appropriations Act, which is the largest single peacetime appropriation in the history of this country or any country in the history of the world.

(newsreel music playing) ANNOUNCER: New York City: federal jobs for thousands at the rate of 100 a minute, while all over the nation, Work Progress administrators are hurrying to transfer millions of idle from relief rolls to work payrolls.

138 Greene street, New York, tomorrow morning, 9:00.

Municipal building borough hall, Brooklyn, tomorrow morning, 9:00.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: $5 billion went to the Works Progress Administration, the W.P.A.

♪ ♪ Men and women hired by the government worked on more than 5,000 schools, 2,500 hospitals, 1,000 landing fields, 13,000 playgrounds.

(children playing) Even artists went to work for the W.P.A.

♪ ♪ But for Roosevelt, this was just the beginning.

He would bring power to rural America, where nine out of every ten families still lived without electricity.

Ma, just look at that.

McCULLOUGH: For millions of Americans, impoverished children, the unemployed, the elderly with no savings, the disabled, he offered the Social Security Act.

He sold it as an insurance policy for everyone.

But the poor, Roosevelt was saying, had rights too.

GINSBURG: The great tradition in the United States had been private charity, community charity.

Families take care of their own.

And so the notion that somehow the government would take care of the poor or the unemployed or the old-- this was something that was just not part of our tradition.

We didn't know of it.

This Social Security measure gives at least some protection to 30 millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions, and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.

(applause) McCULLOUGH: By the end of his first term, Roosevelt had begun to shift the balance of power in America.

The rich felt the sting of higher taxes and workers acquired the right to bargain collectively.

Soon great American industries-- steel, rubber, automobiles-- would be unionized for the first time.

And the men F.D.R.

grew up with, who went to Groton and Harvard, had begun to say, "That man in the White House has gone too far."

BRONSON CHANLER: People from Franklin Roosevelt's class, when he first was elected, had no idea that he was going to do anything as radical as he did do.

(applause) They really believed that because he was one of them, more or less, propertied and coming from old New York society, that the last thing that he would do would be anything that would cause anguish to his peers.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: People who held a position in society that was basically inherited and family oriented instinctively felt that this was being lost and that "That man in the White House," Franklin D. Roosevelt, was responsible and, hence, he was a traitor to his class.

They hated him, and I know this from my personal experience with people who would come up to me-- not just when my grandfather was alive, but for... ever since, but particularly say in the ten and 15 years after he died-- and express their vitriolic hate towards Franklin D. Roosevelt in a way that is totally irrational.

A great yachtsman in Marblehead, Mass., Mr.

Crowningshield, when he... when on his entering in his log book of his yacht a, a description of something really terrible, he referred to it as "a Roosevelt."

It was blowing "an absolute Roosevelt" that day and the fog was thicker than a "Roosevelt."

Because he used the word "Roosevelt."

I mean, it seems ridiculous, but that was the extent to which these people took their hostility to the New Deal.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: The rich and the privileged might hate him, but as his first term was drawing to a close, Roosevelt remained immensely popular with ordinary Americans.

In spite of persistent hard times, the president had given them hope.

COOKE: The most astounding thing was the pictures of Roosevelt you saw: framed photographs, framed bad watercolors, good photographs, bad photographs, but everywhere-- bus stations, libraries, barbershops, homes-- there were pictures of Roosevelt.

I went into this lodge and as we were checking in, I looked and saw this photograph, you know, where the clerk was checking us in, and it was rather bad.

It had been very bad color with sort of rouge cheeks, and I made a joke about this-- you know, the way they'd done him up-- and we were thrown out.

Now that was the striking thing.

It had nothing to do with, with partisanship.

You know, for the time being, the entire country decided he was the savior.

♪ ♪ I don't believe five Americans in 100 knew he was paralyzed.

I think if it had been absolutely common knowledge, it would have been very difficult to elect him.

MAN: The country just simply didn't perceive Roosevelt as being handicapped.

(applause) And they would look, and they just would not see what they were seeing.

The people wanted him to be president and he wanted to be president.

There was this little matter of being crippled in the way.

I did my talk yesterday.

(laughs) (people chattering) GALLAGHER: The president was always performing.

MAN: Is there a Mr.

Foster in there?

There he is.

GALLAGHER: He was performing before crowds, before visitors of state, the Congress and so forth, but also for his family and everyone else.

That's fine.

That's fine.

GALLAGHER: When he met Orson Welles, he said, "Orson, you and I are the two best actors in America."

And he was right, you know, he was right.

MAN: Ready?

GALLAGHER: He's appearing in public.

It's politically important that he not look helpless.

He's got to plan, how will he enter a room?

How will he move across to the chair?

How... who will help him sit down?

How will he do it?

Who will take the cane?

How... do they know?

Is the chair stable?

(indistinct chatter continues) We became experts at designing ramps, and there would be ramps that would be erected either on a permanent or temporary basis to allow for the wheelchair.

(indistinct chattering) Of course, there were times when he would be helped by a couple of agents in a fireman's carry, and all he would do is drape his arms around us, and we'd form a fireman's carry and carry him.

(people chattering, horn honks) GALLAGHER: For large crowds, they would build a ramp for the car, so the car would come into the stadiums, drive up on the ramp and then the president, still seated, would address the public.

They had the braces painted black, even though they were shiny steel.

He wore black shoes, black socks, black trousers, black trousers cut long, so that the braces all but disappeared if you weren't looking closely.

ROBERTS: Most of the pictures you see of him, he's either standing up and if you look carefully, he's holding onto somebody's arm or he's sitting in a chair.

Very few pictures of him in a wheelchair.

This was not exactly a conspiracy, but it was a conspiracy of consent between photographers and the White House, something that could never exist today.

GALLAGHER: At Hyde Park, they have something like more than 40,000 still photos of Franklin Roosevelt, and of those 40,000, there are only two of him in a wheelchair and they were family photos.

And there was never a cartoon of him being handicapped or being in a wheelchair or otherwise.

He was always running and jumping or in a boxing ring hitting, knocking a Republican out of the ring or something like that.

People were more polite back then.

And the press loved Franklin Roosevelt because he took care of them.

I can't be truthful and say that I'm glad to get back.

I'm awfully sorry to get back.

(laughter) But while I've been having a wonderful time, I gather also that both houses of Congress have been having a wonderful time in my absence.

ROBERTS: He was awful good at charming you.

You had to be awful careful you didn't get badly seduced.

And a lot of people did.

He had the press with him heart and soul.

If he made a crack, the place would bust into an uproar as though they were doing it to applaud a TV comedian.

And I've come back with all sorts of new lessons which I learned from barracuda and sharks.

I'm a tough guy.

(laughter) TROHAN: I've heard him tell women how hard it was for him to go through the press conference because these men were so alert and so sharp that he had to keep on his toes, so to speak, every minute.

Well, it wasn't so.

They were all with him.

REPORTER: President, how soon you coming back?

Just as soon as Congress will let me.

(laughter) TROHAN: And he liked jokes and he liked trading jokes.

I used to make dirty cracks at something under the New Deal and he'd come back and make dirty cracks at my publisher or me.

Or we'd play poker with him, which was a rather good index to his character.

He was a great bluffer.

And a lot of reporters would lose to him and enjoy putting down on the expense account "Lost to President Roosevelt at poker."

I never claimed a loss.

(crowd cheering) McCULLOUGH: By 1936, government intervention seemed to be working.

Unemployment was still high, but six million people had been put back to work.

Corporate profits were rising.

Detroit was now rolling out almost as many cars and trucks as were being produced before the Depression began.

(crowd cheering) At the Democratic Convention, there was little doubt that Roosevelt would be renominated by acclamation.

ROOSEVELT: We are fighting-- fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world, and so I accept the commission you have tendered me.

I join with you.

I am enlisted for the duration of the war.

(crowd cheering, music playing) McCULLOUGH: The New Deal was at high tide and F.D.R.

was in top form.

(Happy Days Are Here Again" playing) "There's one issue in this campaign," he told an advisor.

"It's myself, and people must be either for me or against me."

(crowd cheering) ROBERTS: The mood of the country was that something is happening.

There was motion.

I never had any doubt that Roosevelt was going to be reelected in '36.

You could smell it.

LEUCHTENBURG: Mile after mile, Roosevelt's entourage could barely get through the streets of well-wishers.

And people could hear individuals call out, "He gave me a job."

"He saved my home."

In the freight yards in Denver, someone had scrawled in chalk, "Roosevelt is my friend."

McCULLOUGH: Roosevelt was so supremely confident that he never even mentioned his Republican opponent.

He saved his fire for the leaders of big business.

ROOSEVELT: Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mobs.

(crowd cheering) Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today.

They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred!

(loud cheering) McCULLOUGH: The Republican opposition accused Roosevelt of turning class against class.

Eleanor Roosevelt also came under attack for her tireless advocacy of New Deal reforms and especially for her sympathies with the struggle of Black Americans.

For the things that we as African Americans loved her, there were too many Americans who hated her.

Here was a woman coming from the top class in our country and here she was, moving into poor neighborhoods.

Here she was, sitting in groups of people of all races and all backgrounds.

She didn't have a program, but a lot that she did helped to lay the groundwork that we could build upon later years in civil rights.

And, of course, many hated her for it.

WOMAN: The whole thing was a paradox.

She was loved and despised both, dependent on where you sat, you might say-- what your needs were, was she filling your needs or was she stepping on your toes?

("Happy Days Are Here Again" playing) LEUCHTENBURG: On election night, Franklin Roosevelt was at Hyde Park and when the first returns came in, he let out a puff of cigarette smoke and said, "Wow!"

It was the first indication of a landslide victory.

Roosevelt would carry every state in the country except Maine and Vermont.

McCULLOUGH: It was the biggest popular margin in history.

MAN: ♪ No more bread lines, we're glad to say ♪ ♪ The donkey won election day ♪ ♪ No more standin' in the blowin' snow and rain ♪ ♪ He's got things in full sway ♪ ♪ We're all a-workin' and a-gettin' our pay ♪ ♪ We've got Franklin D. Roosevelt back again ♪ ♪ Back again, back again ♪ ♪ Back again, back again... ♪ McCULLOUGH: F.D.R.

had changed the American political landscape.

Wherever African Americans were allowed to vote, they abandoned the party of Abraham Lincoln to vote Democratic.

Inner-city immigrants, working men and women, white Southerners-- Roosevelt had created a new Democratic Party coalition.

(crowd chanting and whistling) GINZBERG: Roosevelt became overconfident from that overwhelming victory.

He thought he had the country in the palm of his hands.

I think his guard was down.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: The president still faced powerful political enemies determined to undermine his programs.

January 20, 1937-- the day of his second inauguration.

He had already developed a plan to take them on.

CHIEF JUSTICE: You, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear that you will faithfully execute... McCULLOUGH: Roosevelt was about to challenge the Supreme Court of the United States.

And will, to the best of your ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States?

McCULLOUGH: When the chief justice came to the words "defend the constitution," Roosevelt later said, "I felt like saying, 'not the kind of constitution your court has raised up as a barrier to progress and democracy.'"

The Supreme Court had been leading the opposition to the New Deal, rejecting one Roosevelt law after another.

Now Roosevelt feared that the court was preparing to strike down the Social Security Act and the law that gave unions the right to collective bargaining.

Immediately after his inauguration, Roosevelt vented his anger at a Democratic Party dinner.

The Democratic administration and the Congress made a gallant, sincere effort to raise wages, to reduce hours, to abolish child labor and to eliminate unfair trade practices.

(smattering of applause) LEUCHTENBURG: Roosevelt not only wanted a court that would rule favorably on New Deal legislation, he wanted a measure of revenge because he took personally a number of the opinions, a number of the actions of the court.

And I defy anyone to read the opinions concerning the triple A, the Railroad Retirement Act, the National Recovery Act, the Guffey Coal Act, and the New York minimum wage law and tell us exactly what, if anything, we can do for the industrial worker in this session of the Congress with any reasonable certainty that what we do will not be nullified as unconstitutional.

GINZBERG: He was upset-- had good reasons to be upset-- but one of the few times in his life, I think, that he miscalculated.

McCULLOUGH: To save the New Deal, Roosevelt proposed a radical piece of legislation: a bill to give him the power to appoint additional justices to the Supreme Court and outnumber his opponents.

On Capitol Hill, critics argued that Roosevelt's bill challenged the constitution itself.

I shall not be a party to breaking down the checks and balances of the constitution.

A packed jury, a packed court, and a stuffed ballot box are all on the same moral plane.

This is more power than a good man should want or a bad man should have.

This is a nonpartisan battle to preserve an independent Supreme Court.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: Determined to win votes for his court plan, Roosevelt was now in the congressional fight of his life.

He dangled promises of federal projects, hinted at judicial appointments, threatened to withdraw patronage.

At a picnic for Democratic congressmen, he turned on all his charm.

♪ ♪ This time, it didn't work.

♪ ♪ On July 20, he asked his vice-president, Jack Garner, what his chances were with Congress.

"Do you want it with the bark on or off, cap'n?"

Garner replied.

"The rough way."

"All right.

You're beat.

You haven't got the votes."

GINSBURG: And the price that he paid was very high.

It was a loss of confidence on the part of the country, it was a recognition by his opponents in politics that they could beat him, it was a recognition on his part that he had lost some measure of power.

McCULLOUGH: And then the economy snapped.

The stock market crashed again, businesses failed, and by December, two million more people had lost their jobs.

His opponents called it "the Roosevelt recession."

An aide observed that Roosevelt seemed depressed.

"His face is heavily lined," a member of his cabinet wrote.

"He is distinctly more nervous, "punch-drunk from the punishment he has suffered-- a beaten man."

The momentum behind the New Deal was slowing down.

Congress was reasserting its authority, the press was turning more critical, and he now faced an even more terrible crisis.

♪ ♪ Far away, fascist armies were marching.

Adolf Hitler's Germany had seized the Rhineland... Benito Mussolini's Italy crushed Ethiopia.

♪ ♪ Emperor Hirohito's Japan ravaged China.

(explosion booms, people shouting) Roosevelt privately called them "the three bandit nations."

♪ ♪ In 1936, he had written his ambassador in Berlin: "Everything seems to have broken loose again "in your part of the world.

"All the experts say there will be no war, "but as president, I have to be ready, just like a fire department."

But Roosevelt knew that America was not ready.

We had an army the size of the army of Sweden.

You know, people think of us today as being a tremendous military power.

The United States never wanted to be a military power.

The habit had been, after a war-- you mobilize two million guys-- and they immediately demobilized.

There's no thought in the minds in the great bulk of Americans that they will ever send another land army to Europe to fight in a war again.

This is the abiding feeling in the United States: avoid involvement in any war.

ROBERTS: Memories of the first world war were not all that far behind and Americans were very disillusioned about it, so they became isolationists.

McCULLOUGH: Roosevelt had to move cautiously.

Congress had passed a series of neutrality laws forbidding the president to take sides.

Whenever Roosevelt suggested that the United States play any part on the world stage, he met with violent isolationist opposition.

Two congressmen even threatened him with impeachment.

ROBERTS: For a long time, the principal battle in American politics and in Washington was between the internationalists and the isolationists, and the people who hated Roosevelt said, "He's trying to get us into war."

ROOSEVELT: You may have heard that I was about to plunge the nation into war, that you and your little brothers would be sent to the bloody fields of battle in Europe, that I was driving the nation into bankruptcy and that I breakfasted every morning on a dish of grilled millionaire.

(laughter) DALLEK: Roosevelt, from the start of his presidency, is troubled by Hitler.

And privately, he's deeply concerned, but he's not going to say anything in public.

He knows the country is so opposed to anything that would involve it in European power politics.

Actually, I am an exceedingly mild-mannered person-- a practitioner of peace both domestic and foreign... (laughter) a believer in the capitalistic system, and for my breakfast, a devotee of scrambled eggs.

(laughter and applause) DALLEK: And so he caters to the isolationist and pacifist sentiment in the country, but if he had his druthers, he would avoid war not by retreating from international politics but by participation in international politics, and so it's a matter of method.

He wants to avoid war, but the way to do it, he feels, is not to be isolationist, is not to pass these neutrality bills, but for the United States to be assertive and play a significant role in international power politics.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: In March 1938, German troops occupied Austria without firing a shot.

"The dictator nations find their bluffs are not being called," Roosevelt wrote a friend in frustration.

Czechoslovakia fell next.

On September 30, 1938, at Munich, the British signed a treaty which recognized Hitler's new conquest.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: Franklin's reaction to the Munich conference was one of great discontent.

He was very unhappy.

Of course, being in an official position, my husband said little publicly.

McCULLOUGH: The president grew more and more frustrated and angry.

WOMAN: Both the president and Mrs.

Roosevelt would talk a lot about what went on.

He would say, "Every time one gives in to Hitler, his ambitions become greater and he wants more."

And I think the president felt that in the end, a war was unavoidable.

McCULLOUGH: But Roosevelt's hands had been tied by Congress and a cautious public.

Desperate to do something, Roosevelt broadcast a personal appeal to Hitler, asking him to halt further aggression.

In reply, Hitler ridiculed the powerless president with withering sarcasm: HITLER (speaking German): (loud laughter) DALLEK: In essence, he was being told by Hitler, "You're not a player in this world political game.

"We don't count you for very much, "and we know that you've got a big political headache-- "your isolationists are not going to let you do anything.

"You have all these neutrality laws.

"If we go to war against Britain and France, you're not going to have a significant say in things."

And it, I think, deepened his frustration.

He knew it.

He knew Hitler was right in that sense, at least for the moment.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: Roosevelt was tired.

He was already thinking of retiring to his Hyde Park home.

His second term was coming to an end, and no president had ever served more than eight years.

"I think there was a great seesaw," Eleanor wrote.

"On the one end, the weariness and the desire to be at home; "on the other, the overwhelming desire to have a hand in the affairs of the world."

Eleanor was urging her husband to retire, yet she was keenly aware that the goals of the New Deal had not been fulfilled.

There was much unfinished business.

(piano playing intro to "My Country 'Tis of Thee") ♪ My country 'tis of thee ♪ ♪ Sweet land of liberty ♪ ♪ Of thee we sing... ♪ McCULLOUGH: On Easter Sunday that April, Marian Anderson sang from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

With America still deeply segregated, hundreds of thousands of Blacks and whites gathered together to honor the great contralto.

♪ ...from every mountainside ♪ ♪ Let freedom ring.

♪ (applause) McCULLOUGH: Without Eleanor Roosevelt, the concert would never have happened.

When Anderson was denied permission to sing in a segregated hall, Eleanor worked behind the scenes to bring her to the Lincoln Memorial.

HEIGHT: Mrs.

Roosevelt inspired it.

She wanted Marian Anderson, the artist, to have her moment in history but it was a moment in history for all of us.

You had a feeling that official Washington was saying, "We may be deeply segregated, and we have all of this still, but here is what we stand for."

And I think that was a great moment.

♪ Ave Maria... ♪ ♪ Ave Maria... ♪ ♪ Gratia... ♪ McCULLOUGH: If this had been the end of the Roosevelt presidency, he would have left a mixed record.

In his first term, he had restored hope to a people who had lost hope, used the power of the presidency to ensure that the Great Depression could never happen again and forced government to accept the responsibility for the well-being of America's poorest citizens.

But in his second term, he seemed to overreach and then lose his way.

Congress no longer did his bidding.

Millions were still without work and he remained helpless in the face of aggression overseas.

Germany and England were on the brink of war.

(fanfare playing) In June 1939, Roosevelt did something no president had ever done before.

He invited the king and queen of England to America.

The president hoped their visit might inspire Americans with greater sympathy for Britain, now faced with the Nazi threat.

♪ ♪ COOKE: The idea of the king and queen of England coming to America-- there'd never been such a thing happen before.

If it had been George III, it couldn't have been more of a surprise; it was fairyland.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: The president, born to wealth and privilege, was in his element.

♪ ♪ "The visit was prepared very carefully," Eleanor later wrote, "but Franklin always behaved "as though we were simply going to have two very nice young people to stay with us."

COOKE: And Roosevelt took them off to Hyde Park and drove his own hand-run automobile into the grounds and gave them a hot dog lunch.

Well, this was a shocker to the British, but it's the thing he would do.

You see, he was a natural aristocrat, Roosevelt was.

He didn't have to put on airs.

(drum beating) MAN: American Indians were asked to dance as the entertainment.

His mother thought this was a dreadful way to entertain such distinguished people, but actually, they had a marvelous time.

He sat up with the king quite late at night, whom he called George.

And finally, he put his hand on his knee and said, "Young man, it's time for you to go to bed."

And the king later said to one of this aides, "Why don't my ministers talk to me that way?"

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: The royal couple had won American hearts.

When it was time for the king and queen to leave, Eleanor wrote that she "thought of the clouds "that hung over them and the worries that they were going to face."

The president called after them, "Good luck to you!

All the luck in the world!"

Three months later, Great Britain and Germany were at war and F.D.R.

would decide to run for a third term as president of the United States.

(explosion booms) McCULLOUGH: Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, France had fallen.

September 1940, German bombs were destroying London.

England stood alone.

♪ ♪ (air raid sirens wailing) WINSTON CHURCHILL: Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.

If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward.

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age.

McCULLOUGH: Prime Minister Winston Churchill inspired the British people, but he also beamed his message at a target in America.

He desperately needed help from Franklin Roosevelt.

The war would be Roosevelt's final test.

♪ ♪ (cheering) On November 5, 1940, with Nazi armies in control of Europe, Franklin Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term as president of the United States.

The next day, he received a telegram from Winston Churchill.

"I did not think it right for me as a foreigner "to express any opinion upon American policies "while the election was on, but I prayed for your success and I am truly thankful for it."

♪ ♪ Month after month, for over a year, Churchill had been sending secret messages to Roosevelt.

"We must ask as a matter of life or death to be reinforced.

"It has now become most urgent for you "to let us have the destroyers for which we have asked.

"Mr.

President, with great respect, I must tell you "that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now."

Roosevelt wanted to help.

But most Americans were against involvement in any war.

It would take all of F.D.R.

's political genius to get Churchill what England needed to survive.

We cannot and we will not... tell them that they must surrender merely because of present inability to pay for the weapons which we know they must have.

McCULLOUGH: Congress had prohibited Roosevelt from sending weapons unless England paid in cash, and England was bankrupt.

The president would have to outmaneuver the lawmakers.

ROOSEVELT: I do not recommend that we make them a loan of dollars with which to pay for these weapons.

McCULLOUGH: Roosevelt proposed a daring plan with an innocuous name-- Lend-Lease.

Lend-Lease was a way to give the British planes, tanks, guns, artillery, ammunition without them really paying for it.

And reporters at a press conference ask him, "What does this mean?

What does Lend-Lease mean?"

McCULLOUGH: Roosevelt explained that we would lend England the weapons and when the war was over, England would return them.

It was like lending a neighbor a garden hose to put out a fire, he said.

After the fire was out, the neighbor would simply return the hose.

DALLEK: Of course it was patent nonsense.

What were the British going to do, give us the tanks back that were blown up?

The planes that were shot down?

But Roosevelt's invocation of this homily about the neighbor and the garden hose is a wonderful way for him to sell it to the public and that was his political genius.

That was something that he, he had a kind of sixth sense for.

You can't understand it, you can't define it, you can't put it under any scientific rubric, it simply was something that the man had.

McCULLOUGH: On March 11, 1941, Congress passed and Roosevelt signed into law Lend-Lease.

COOKE: There was an emergency press conference called.

This morning he had signed the Lend-Lease bill.

A reporter said, "Mr.

President, "have you got ships and materiel and tanks and things?

"Are they already, you know, left the ports and crossing the Atlantic?"

Well, my British supply man had told me that there were cargoes just about to arrive in Liverpool and Southampton.

And Roosevelt looked up like an innocent child and he said, "Oh!"

He said, "We work fast, but not that fast."

And of course it was-- I mean, if they'd known the truth, you know, the whole Atlantic was thick with all the things already on their way.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: The Lend-Lease lifeline stretched across the Atlantic.

♪ ♪ Roosevelt had bent the law, outflanked Congress and provided England with billions of dollars' worth of weapons and supplies.

But as the great armada reached Britain's shores, opposition remained strong back in America.

CHARLES LINDBERGH: They dare not tell us that these steps mean war.

They dare not tell us what war means.

McCULLOUGH: Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and leftists alike campaigned to keep America out of another European war.

Charles Lindbergh expressed the concerns of many Americans across the country.

I say it is they who are undermining the principles of democracy when they demand that we take a course to which more than 80% of our citizens are opposed.

McCULLOUGH: In fact, Lindbergh exaggerated.

Yet the American people were deeply divided and Roosevelt, sensing their indecision, was stymied.

♪ ♪ "It's a terrible thing," he later told an aide, "to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead and to find no one there."

GOODWIN: The spring of '41 seems like one of the lowest points for Roosevelt.

Public opinion itself was so incredibly confused, and when public opinion was confused Roosevelt himself lost his moorings.

His genius was that he somehow could divine where the country was and help push it along maybe a little ahead of itself, but he saw where the country was heading.

In this period of time, the country seemed to be in such a maze of contradictions that he looked out almost as if he were staring into a fog himself.

McCULLOUGH: Eleanor Roosevelt was also at a crossroads.

No one had fought harder for her husband's New Deal, but now his priorities had changed.

GOODWIN: She had had this wonderful decade of a partnership with her husband, where they were both moving toward social reform and the New Deal was the center of their hearts.

Now she sees him totally preoccupied by war.

When she comes back from her travels around the country, he doesn't really have time to talk to her anymore.

My grandmother felt herself a little bit off to the side, less useful... with less reason to go and be with him as she always was early in the morning or at the end of the day.

So this relationship from which she drew strength-- and a position-- no longer existed.

McCULLOUGH: All through 1941, the pressures on Roosevelt mounted.

On one side of the globe Japan threatened to spread its empire throughout the Pacific.

"They hate us," Roosevelt said.

"Sooner or later they'll come after us."

And across the Atlantic, Roosevelt increasingly feared for Great Britain's survival.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: Some people think that this great master politician was always on top of things, but he had to move in relation to public opinion and it was a major thing.

It really got to him.

He went to bed for ten days out of exasperation of the... from the pressures on both sides to intervene or not to intervene, and Britain was going down the tube.

(air raid siren wailing) (explosion booms) McCULLOUGH: "If Great Britain goes down," Roosevelt said, "all of us in all the Americas would be living at the point of a gun."

♪ ♪ Then, in early August, determined to do more for the British, Roosevelt headed out to sea for a secret rendezvous in U-boat-infested waters.

Under cover of darkness, he slipped away from reporters, boarded an American warship and headed north to meet the British battleship the Prince of Wales.

On board was Winston Churchill.

The course of the war would be determined by the convergence of these two extraordinary personalities.

WOMAN: I was told as a deathly secret that this meeting was going to happen.

It was perfectly clear to my father-- and perhaps also to the president-- that, of course, it did matter very much whether they would see eye to eye.

McCULLOUGH: "Churchill," his bodyguard later reported, "was as excited as a schoolboy."

At stake, the prime minister believed, was the fate of western civilization.

The president was also on edge.

He was not used to sharing the stage with any man, and Churchill was already a legend.

A Roosevelt aide who knew both men worried about a clash of prima donnas.

("Stars and Stripes Forever" playing) McCULLOUGH: With the Navy band playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever," Churchill came aboard the American ship.

"At last," Roosevelt said, "we've gotten together."

("The Stars and Stripes Forever" continues) They talked for four days.

Two titanic egos, each taking the other's measure.

Churchill was determined to bind the Americans ever more firmly to the British cause.

Roosevelt was wary.

He was unwilling to ask Congress for a declaration of war without the rock-solid support of the American people.

But he was searching for some way to help Great Britain before it was too late.

DALLEK: What Churchill needed to do was to convince Roosevelt that Britain was not going to give up.

And what Roosevelt was saying to Churchill was, "I understand what your needs are.

"I understand the importance of the danger to us, both of us, "from Adolf Hitler, and we're going to stand together against this monster."

PASTOR: Hymn 540.

McCULLOUGH: On Sunday, Roosevelt was carried on board the British battleship for a morning service.

(singing hymn) "If nothing else had happened while we were here," Roosevelt told an aide, "that joint service would have cemented us."

SOAMES: All the ships' companies all mixed up and sharing the hymn sheets and everything, and it really did seem rather wonderful and very moving.

My father sat with the president.

I mean, normally he would have stood during such a service, but he and the president sat and everybody else stood on the quarterdeck.

My father chose the hymns very carefully-- his favorites.

♪ Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war... ♪ McCULLOUGH: "The same language, the same hymns," Churchill said later.

"It was a great hour to live."

SOAMES: It was sort of like a beam of brilliant sunshine, like a genuine ray of hope.

And, of course, now it's... I find, anguishing looking at those photographs, because three months later, the Prince of Wales was under the waves with its entire ship's company.

McCULLOUGH: As the two men parted, a message flashed from the British battleship to the American cruiser.

"God bless the president and the people of the United States."

When Churchill returned to England, he told his cabinet that Roosevelt had made a secret promise that he would wage war against Nazi Germany but not declare it.

Everything was to be done to force an incident.

(explosion) McCULLOUGH: Roosevelt would find his incident in the cold waters of the North Atlantic.

By the middle of 1941, Nazi U-boats had sunk over 1,500 British ships, all but cutting England's lifeline to America.

(alarm blaring) Without telling the American people, Roosevelt issued secret orders to the Navy to escort British convoys and, if necessary, sink Nazi submarines.

The president was willing to risk war with Germany.

ROOSEVELT: On the morning of September 4, the United States destroyer Greer was attacked by a submarine-- a German submarine.

I tell you the blunt fact that the German submarine fired first upon this American destroyer Greer without warning and with deliberate design to sink her.

DALLEK: What he hides from the American public is the fact that the Greer had been tracking the German submarine to help a British seaplane, which was going to try and sink it with depth charges.

McCULLOUGH: Roosevelt knew that the Greer had deliberately stalked the Nazi U-boat and that the British plane had fired first.

(explosion) "You know I'm a juggler," he would later tell a friend, "and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does.

"I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war."

Roosevelt did not ask Congress for a declaration of war, but he used the Greer incident to justify an undeclared war in the Atlantic, where he was sure the real war would soon begin.

(explosion rumbles) (insects chirping) ♪ ♪ That same autumn, with her son at her side, the president's mother, Sara, died.

Minutes after her death, the largest oak tree at Hyde Park toppled to the ground.

It was a clear, windless day.

"You are constantly in my thoughts," Sara had told her son toward the end, "and always in my heart.

I think of you night and day."

WARD: He managed to get through the funeral without breaking down.

A few days later, though, a secretary brought him a box with his mother's handwriting on it.

He had no idea what was in it, and he found locks of his own hair and little childhood toys and his christening dress, each of them carefully labeled in her loving hand.

And tears filled his eyes and he asked his secretaries to leave the room.

No one on his staff had ever seen him cry before.

(song playing on radio) ANNOUNCER: We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin.

The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air, President Roosevelt has just announced.

McCULLOUGH: On December 7, 1941, Roosevelt's long campaign to rally the American people against fascism came to a shocking and unexpected end.

At 1:50 P.M., the president was told that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

At 2:28, the attack was confirmed.

FIELDS: When I went upstairs, they had set up in the bedroom and they were taking communication from what was going on.

And Pa Watson came out and he had this message and he says, "Mr.

President, the whole damn navy is gone.

What in the hell are we going to do?"

And president and Mr.

Hopkins-- he said to Mr.

Hopkins, he says, "My God, my God, how did it happen?"

Had his head in his hands at his desk like this.

He says, "how did it happen?"

He says, "Now I'll go down in history disgraced."

McCULLOUGH: At a cabinet meeting that night, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins found Roosevelt deeply shaken.

He was having actual physical difficulty in getting out the words that put him on record as knowing the Navy was caught unawares.

FIELDS: He looked drawn.

His face was kind of palish-like and tired-like.

And there seemed to be a maze around him, just a, just a blind sort of a fog around him.

When I looked at him, I got that impression from him that he was in a fog.

And he was so despondent over the fact, he says, "I don't know what's... we don't know what's out there."

(alarms blaring) ROOSEVELT: Yesterday, December 7, 1941-- a date which will live in infamy-- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.

COOKE: The Monday after Pearl Harbor was very, very solemn.

Roosevelt had a press conference and looking back on it, I'm astounded that he was able to cover up the appalling extent of the damage.

We knew that there had been a few ships bombed.

We had no conception that the whole Pacific fleet had been bombed to hell.

You know, Roosevelt said, "We've suffered great losses," and so on, but he didn't specify.

You wonder that he could even sort of face anybody.

So he handled that with great confidence.

McCULLOUGH: Four days later, Germany, too, declared war on America.

Now Roosevelt would have to wage war on both sides of the globe, across two oceans and three continents.

GALLAGHER: No man in history ever had a greater burden than Franklin Roosevelt did during World War II.

He was leading the free world against Adolf Hitler, and it wasn't at all clear that we were going to win.

(people shouting) ♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: The early news was all bad.

Disaster followed on disaster.

The Japanese swept through southeast Asia, pushing the Allies out of most of the Pacific.

The Germans had advanced deep into Russia, threatening Moscow and Leningrad.

(loud boom) Just two weeks after Pearl Harbor, on December 22, Roosevelt received a secret visitor at the White House.

COOKE: We were at a regular press conference-- always in the Oval Office-- and so we all stormed in and were staggered to see sitting at the... next to him in a chair was this rotund, pink, pink Winston Churchill.

And there was one of those sort of indescribable strange noises between a rustle and a gasp and a... and eventually a cheer and Roosevelt said, "Mr.

Prime Minister, get up there and let them see you."

So Churchill got up, stood on the desk and gave the great victory sign.

McCULLOUGH: This time the prime minister and the president met to plot military strategy.

Their most important decision: who to fight first-- the Germans in Europe or the Japanese in the pacific.

For nearly a month, they talked and planned.

Churchill moved into the White House just down the hall from Roosevelt.

The daily rub of living side-by-side would test their friendship and the future of the alliance.

♪ ♪ (applause) GOODWIN: When Churchill came, it was like a cyclone had hit the White House.

His whole schedule was totally out of whack with Roosevelt's.

He, of course, loved to stay up late at night drinking, smoking cigars, and Roosevelt would sit there with him until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, drinking, smoking cigars.

FIELDS: Before breakfast, you would pour him a tumbler of sherry and he'd have that as his eye-opener.

For lunch he'd start drinking scotch and soda, and he'd drink scotch and soda until he'd take a nap.

And at dinner he had to have his champagne and 90-year-old brandy.

Then he would go to work.

(crowd cheering) ♪ ♪ GOODWIN: Roosevelt relished with all people the chance to break through decorum and have a one-on-one friendly relationship.

He was always calling people by their first name even before he knew them.

So I think that once he established with Churchill this kind of crazy, informal relationship, he knew that it was a good omen for their friendship.

SOAMES: One will never know whether they would have been friends if there hadn't been war, but maybe it needed a great cause to bring them together and maybe it was a marriage of convenience, but then a lot of marriages of convenience are very successful, aren't they?

McCULLOUGH: By the end of the month, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to fight the Germans first.

But in January 1942, the Nazis dominated most of Europe, and the Allies were still far too weak to invade the continent.

♪ ♪ Just two years earlier, American soldiers had been forced to train with cardboard weapons, firing flour instead of shells.

Roosevelt had done all he could to build up the country's defenses, but he still had a long way to go.

GOODWIN: There aren't even private companies that are making very many weapons, so he's got to take companies that are making girdles, that are making cars, that are making all sorts of other things and change over their production to making weapons for war.

In this year, 1942, we shall produce 60,000 planes... 10,000... (applause) McCULLOUGH: Roosevelt began by setting war production goals which to many people seemed astronomical.

ROOSEVELT: Next year, 1943, we shall produce 125,000 airplanes, including 100,000 combat planes.

NATHAN: Roosevelt says, "We are going to be the arsenal for democracy."

All these numbers poured out and most people thought they were crazy.

How do you persuade Detroit to convert-- suddenly to stop making these profitable automobiles and begin making tanks which somehow they've never made, don't know how to make, and will have to learn how to make?

It isn't easy and it wasn't easy.

Even though it will mean the dislocation of the lives and occupations of millions of our own people, we must raise our sights all along the production line.

Let no man say it cannot be done.

It must be done and we have undertaken to do it.

(applause) ♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: As America prepared for war, Roosevelt was determined to strike at the Nazis by invading across the English Channel as soon as possible.

Churchill wanted to wait.

MAN: American military planners were all for a cross-channel assault on Germany at the earliest possible moment.

The British in effect said, "We can't do it.

"We"-- being the Allies-- "can't do it.

"We don't have the landing craft, "we don't have command of the air, we don't have control of the sea, and '42 is just too soon."

And Roosevelt's counter-argument was, "I have to show the American people "that we're moving against Hitler.

I've got to do something."

And the something turned out to be Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: On November 8, 1942, ignoring the advice of some of his top commanders, F.D.R.

sent American soldiers into combat for the first time against the German army.

More than 80,000 Americans poured out of hundreds of warships onto the North African beaches.

When Roosevelt picked up the phone to receive news that the assault had begun, an aide noticed that his hand was trembling.

He listened, then announced: "We have landed in North Africa.

"Casualties are below expectations.

We are fighting back."

♪ ♪ Two months later, Roosevelt again made a dangerous journey.

This time he flew to the North African battlefront.

No American president since Lincoln had visited troops in a combat zone.

(indistinct chatter) ♪ ♪ At Casablanca, he met with Winston Churchill to discuss Allied war plans.

And again, Churchill argued to postpone the cross-channel invasion and Roosevelt agreed.

Ships were still in short supply.

Then Roosevelt and Churchill set off together for a brief holiday across the Moroccan desert to Marrakech.

♪ ♪ SOAMES: My father said to the president, "You cannot come all this way and not see the sun set over the Atlas Mountains from Marrakech."

At the golden hour, the president had to be carried up to the tower.

He was determined to see it from where my father said it should be seen.

They sat at the top of the tower and they watched the sun set over the Atlas Mountains.

♪ ♪ My father had brought his paints and he played truant from the war for two days, and he painted the only picture from his brush in the whole of the war.

And he later gave it to the president to remind him of their, their journey to see the sunset.

(bird cawing, wind whistling) McCULLOUGH: All during the war, Roosevelt in secret retreated to his home at Hyde Park, New York.

When sleep eluded him, he imagined himself a boy again, he said, coasting down the hills in the snow.

Each day the war presented the president with terrible choices, forcing him to make decisions that would haunt his reputation.

When he was advised to send to internment camps Americans whose only crime was their Japanese ancestry, he sent them.

When news of the slaughter of Jews in the German death camps reached him, he felt he could take no special military steps to rescue them.

When scientists recommended a weapon more terrible than any known to man, he secretly set them to work on the atomic bomb.

Those closest to him would later say that Roosevelt had one overriding goal-- winning the war.

(indistinct chatter) Meanwhile, Eleanor Roosevelt hurled herself into the war effort with all the energy that she had brought to the New Deal.

During the course of the war, she traveled the world, visiting American soldiers everywhere.

The Secret Service gave her the code name "Rover."

On one trip to the South Pacific, she traveled 23,000 miles and visited 400,000 soldiers in Australia, New Zealand, and the tiny islands on the edge of the war zone in the Pacific.

♪ ♪ But she never gave up her social ideals.

She continued to insist to her husband that he fight the war, but not surrender the reforming spirit of the New Deal.

GOODWIN: She wanted to use the war as a way of changing the country.

Behind the scenes, day after day, she is sending Franklin memos about Blacks getting into the armed forces, Blacks getting into jobs, daycare for women in the factories, unions versus business-- she's always on union's side.

She is often at cross purposes with him, always arguing that the war had to be a vehicle for social reform.

GUREWITSCH: There were many times that he would be irritated.

And Mrs.

Roosevelt was... was a conscience.

It's not so pleasant to have someone say, "You shouldn't be doing this.

You should be doing something better."

It's like your mother.

LASH: She certainly sometimes was his hair shirt.

She needed to remind F.D.R.

of things which sometimes he didn't forget, but he wanted to push over there while he had other things to do.

GOODWIN: What he would say to her was, "Eleanor, I've got to be careful.

"If I look like I'm making the war a vehicle "for even further New Deal reforms, I'm going to lose my support in Congress."

He kept telling Eleanor that if you trust in the momentum of democracy, the country will be changed.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: By the end of the war, the government had pumped $380 billion into the economy-- more than six times the amount spent during all the New Deal years.

Every American who wanted a job now found one.

The Great Depression was finally over.

♪ ♪ And with American factories pouring out weapons and supplies, the tide of war was slowly turning... (explosions boom) But at a terrible cost.

For two years, American soldiers had been dying all over the world: at Bataan, Corregidor, Oran, Guadalcanal.

♪ ♪ In November 1943, Roosevelt flew to Tehran, Iran.

With Churchill at his side, he would meet for the first time his other ally-- the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin.

The Russians had been fighting the Nazis for more than two years, suffering more dead and wounded than any other country at war.

Stalin pressured his Western allies to launch the cross-channel invasion into Europe as soon as possible.

ELSEY: Stalin was screaming for relief.

The Russians were in desperate shape.

And Stalin hoped that an opening on the second front would relieve some of the pressure on his front.

McCULLOUGH: Roosevelt distrusted Stalin, but behind his back, he mischievously called him "Uncle Joe."

ELSEY: Roosevelt felt he could charm the pants off anyone.

He thought it included Uncle Joe, which it most certainly did not.

GOODWIN: When he first starts talking to Stalin, he knows somehow that his charm hasn't penetrated, so he decides to use Churchill as the way of reaching Stalin.

As soon as he sat down, he started whispering to Stalin in a very intimate way-- in a way that Churchill would have to see what was going on.

And then he started openly teasing Churchill relentlessly about his John Bull manner, about his cigars, about his habits, about his clothes.

Stalin loved the idea that he had a friend now.

Now it was Stalin and Roosevelt against Churchill.

SOAMES: I think my father was very upset.

The president did rather shoulder my father out.

I mean it was-- I can't describe it better than two's company, three's none.

McCULLOUGH: F.D.R.

believed that by winning Stalin's confidence he could influence the shape of the post-war world, a world in which one day Russia would replace Britain as a major power.

SOAMES: If you look at it in purely cold, political terms, of the big three, my father represented the nation who contributed least in terms of soldiers and guns and power.

And politics is about power.

McCULLOUGH: They talked for four days.

When Roosevelt told Stalin that the Allies would cross the English Channel and invade northern France in six months, Stalin was satisfied.

So was Roosevelt.

He had convinced Stalin to enter the war against Japan once Germany was defeated.

By January 1944, F.D.R.

had been president for 11 years.

He wanted to see the country through to victory, but he also had an extraordinary vision for postwar America.

He spoke of guaranteeing everyone a job, a decent home, and effective health care.

He insisted veterans get a free education and access to low-interest loans.

He designed an international organization dedicated to peace, the United Nations.

But the long, hard years in office were beginning to show.

Although he was just 62 years old, his health had begun to fail.

ELSEY: By '44, F.D.R.

was a noticeably different man than he had been at the beginning of the war.

He'd lost a great deal of weight.

His face was thin and gaunt.

He no longer came to the map room.

His hours, he was spending more and more time in the bedroom or away from the White House, convalescing.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: I could see the physical deterioration.

I mean, the legs were thinner and you could see his face.

You could sense that, that the vitality was ebbing.

You could see him just fade away.

He would come to the table sometimes and he would be bright and cheerful.

But if any agitation happened in the conversation, he would begin to sag and he'd sort of droop, drop his head or he would drop his jaw.

LIPSON: And I recall on several occasions when he had the misfortune to fall out of his chair and you'd have to come in and there was the president of the United States helpless on the floor, and you'd gently pick him up, say nothing about it, put him back on the chair and that was it.

But your heart would break.

McCULLOUGH: Alarmed by the president's failing health, in March 1944, Roosevelt's doctor brought in heart specialist Howard Bruenn.

BRUENN: And I asked him about it, questions, and there were a few things he mentioned very casually which suggested that he may be having some trouble.

Then I went over his neck and chest, and I was literally appalled at what I was finding-- congestive heart failure, hypertension, high blood pressure, and if there's a weak spot there, it blows just like a pipe.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: June 6, 1944, D-Day.

After more than two years of waiting, the cross-channel invasion of Europe had finally begun.

F.D.R.

had sent into action 400,000 men and more than 5,000 ships of every kind.

It was the largest armada in history.

♪ ♪ That evening, the president led the nation in prayer.

ROOSEVELT: Almighty God, our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion, and our civilization and to set free a suffering humanity.

They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest until the victory is won.

The darkness will be rent by noise and flame.

Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again, and we know that by Thy grace and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

(bombs whistling) ♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: Within a year, the Germans would be driven back to berlin.

Roosevelt had taken a weak, ill-prepared nation into battle against the mightiest war machine the world had ever known, but now it was no longer clear that he would live to see the final victory.

WOMAN: He got thinner.

His doctor was more often in attendance.

He never said, "I'm sick."

He'd, he'd say... he might say he was tired, or he might say he didn't want to come to lunch that day, but he never said he was sick.

That... he wouldn't say that.

BRUENN: He never inquired about what I had found, what was the medication I was giving him, and literally he passed it over very quietly.

PHOTOGRAPHER: Mr.

President, would you just give me one full profile, will you just look full profile to your left, sir?

A little bit more.

WARD: I think he didn't think there was any need to brood over things over which he had no control.

ROOSEVELT: I can keep on looking at him.

PHOTOGRAPHER: No, no, we want you out here.

I think polio had taught him a certain fatalism about health.

I think his father's heart attack long before had given him some fatalism.

I think it was just, "Better not to look into these things.

Carry on, do your duty, remain cheerful."

"The cost of production, the stock argument of the stars.

"But control of prices by that means is illogical, "and, with the scientific money "and the prevention of combines and monopoly, practically impossible."

Another great thought.

(laughter) MAN: What book is that?

I don't know.

"And the possessor of money is entitled to a certain amount of worth as divided by money."

Now don't forget, it's divided by money.

GALLAGHER: At the end, during the war years, when he began to lose his muscle power, when he got so he could no longer stand without great pain and spasms and things, he never once mentioned how he felt about that.

He was told to eat in his bed alone and not to socialize and to cut down on his smoking.

Well, what he loved most of all in life was the dinner parties, making the martinis, the cigarettes, the badinage, the conversation, and he was reduced to having milk toast in bed and talking to Grace Tully, his secretary.

And she was a very nice woman, but she was no conversationalist.

I think he was a very lonely man.

All his support system in the White House had dissipated.

His mother had died, and the children who had been in and out of the house with their family and kids, they were all off at war, and Eleanor by that time had evolved a separate orbit of her own, and she was traveling all the time on the war effort.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: I think F.D.R.

was very disappointed in his relationship with my grandmother-- just as disappointed as she must have been in him.

There was a lot of duty exchanged and an enormous amount of respect for each other, but the love, the kind of intimacy, the touching, didn't really exist.

He really had nobody to love.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: A quarter of a century earlier, Roosevelt had fallen in love with his wife's social secretary, Lucy Mercer.

When Eleanor discovered the romance, Roosevelt promised never to see her again.

Not long after, Lucy married a wealthy Southerner, Winthrop Rutherford.

GOODWIN: In April of 1944, after Roosevelt had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure, he was sent to Bernard Baruch's plantation to recover, and it happened that the month before Lucy's husband, Winthrop Rutherford, had died.

So Lucy came to have lunch with Roosevelt.

It was a reminder to him of what it was like when he was young before his polio, what it was like before his body was giving way, as it now was because of his heart condition, and he just felt some need somehow to see her more often.

And the only person he could trust with that terrible task of arranging Lucy's visits when Eleanor was away was his daughter Anna.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: My mother realized that she was getting in perhaps over her head with a divided loyalty, because she certainly realized if she'd called up my grandmother and said, "Pa wants to invite Lucy Mercer for supper.

Okay?"

She knew very well what the re...

"What?"

So it was done in secret.

GOODWIN: Lucy would come to Washington-- she came six different times in 1944 and 1945-- and according to the ushers' diaries, Roosevelt would go and pick her up in Georgetown.

It would say in the diary, "President motors to Georgetown to pick up Mrs.

Rutherford," which seems to me almost, again, a memory of a courtship.

No one has to pick up a person to come to the White House.

They will come on their own accord.

But I think he wanted to go and be in the car alone with her, bring her back to the White House, and then I imagine it just as an easy dinner.

They talked about the past.

He told her what was going on during the day.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: It was just a kind of casual, funny conversation that F.D.R.

found relaxing-- that nobody was asking him to do something.

Nobody was trying to influence him of one opinion or another.

NIECE: To feel the warmth and love of someone-- it's what human beings live for.

I think that's what made him carry on.

It helped.

CROWD (chanting): We want Roosevelt!

We want Roosevelt!

We want Roosevelt!

We want Roosevelt!

McCULLOUGH: In the fall of 1944, Roosevelt campaigned for president for the fourth time.

The mood in America was changing.

The Allies had already liberated Paris and had begun to recapture the islands they had lost in the Pacific.

In a cold, drenching rain, he campaigned through the streets of New York City.

Hurricane winds blew just off the coastline.

He rode in an open car, baring himself to the elements.

He was determined to persuade American voters and whispering journalists that he was not a sick man.

(wild cheering) In Brooklyn, at Ebbets Field, home of the Dodgers, he turned on the old Roosevelt charm.

(crowd cheering) You know I come from the state of New York.

I've got to make a terrible confession to you.

(cheering) I come from the state of New York and I practiced law in New York City but I have never been in Ebbets Field before.

(crowd cheers) I've rooted for the Dodgers... (laughter) and I hope to come back here someday and see them play.

(cheering) COOKE: He still looked a boisterous, buoyant character, but, of course, he was in terrible shape because he was already very sick.

See, we didn't know that.

It was the beginning, and then, of course, the decline through the winter was very bad indeed.

McCULLOUGH: In January 1945, Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office for a fourth time.

I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States... McCULLOUGH: 12 years before, he had told a desperate people that they had nothing to fear but fear itself.

McCULLOUGH: Now, weak and frail, he still spoke with the same confident optimism.

ROOSEVELT: Things in life will not always run smoothly.

Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights, then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward.

The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward-- that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.

(explosion booms) McCULLOUGH: The war was drawing to a close.

Berlin lay in ruins, devastated by Allied bombs.

Tokyo, too, was burning from bombs dropped by American B-29s.

(excited shouting) (alarm blaring) ♪ ♪ Just two days after the inauguration, Roosevelt traveled to Yalta, a Soviet city on the Black Sea.

There he met with Churchill and Stalin for the last time.

DALLEK: It's crystal clear to all of them that the war in Europe is coming to an end.

It may not end in a month, or even three months, but it's clear that Nazi Germany is now going to be defeated and that they are going to have to sort out what the postwar world and postwar Europe is going to look like.

McCULLOUGH: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had been united in their struggle against Hitler, but now, with Nazi Germany crumbling, the alliance was threatening to come apart.

Stalin demanded control of Poland after the war.

Roosevelt convinced him to agree to free elections there, but had few illusions the Russian leader would keep his word.

DALLEK: What Roosevelt believed was that Stalin and the Soviets had the power and the influence to control Eastern Europe at the end of the war.

They were there with millions of men.

They were there with a huge, a vast army, and the notion that we were going to go into Eastern Europe to drive them out, I think, is, is utter nonsense.

McCULLOUGH: "I didn't say the agreement was good," Roosevelt told an aide.

"I said it was the best I could do."

(applause) Two days after his return from Yalta, Roosevelt went before Congress to report to the American people.

Yes, I return from the trip refreshed and inspired.

The Roosevelts are not, as you may suspect, averse to travel.

We seem to, uh, thrive on it.

(laughter) (applause breaks out) ELSEY: When he returned from Yalta, he wasn't even able to stand up in the Congress, but gave his speech sitting down, which was extraordinary for him.

He would never... had never before been willing to admit a weakness.

I hope that you will pardon me for an unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say.

I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me in not having to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs and also because of the fact that I have just completed a 14,000-mile trip.

(applause) McCULLOUGH: This was the only time in his long career that F.D.R.

publicly acknowledged that he was crippled.

♪ ♪ (birds twittering) The president needed to rest.

On Good Friday, March 30, 1945, he retreated to Warm Springs, Georgia.

GOODWIN: And there was something about the simplicity of the place and the pleasures that seemed to bring him back a little bit and allow him to feel, perhaps, that he had gathered up enough strength to go back to Washington for the final push.

But of course it was not to be that way.

MAN: On Easter, the last Easter, you might say, he came to church, and as he went in, we turned and looked at each other and shook our heads.

He looked horrible.

He had lost weight.

He had lost that smile.

He had lost his interest in life, and it was very obvious to anybody that he was a sick, sick man.

McCULLOUGH: It was spring in Georgia.

American soldiers had crossed the Rhine.

The Marines had invaded Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Almost every day the president exchanged messages with Winston Churchill about the Soviets.

"We must be firm," Roosevelt wrote in his last letter to him.

For relaxation, he enjoyed the company of two admiring cousins.

On April 8, Eleanor wrote him: "I am so glad you are gaining.

"You sounded cheerful for the first time last night, "and I hope you'll weigh 170 pounds when you return.

Devotedly, E.R."

(insects chirping) The next day, Lucy Mercer Rutherford joined him.

WARD: On the 11th of April, F.D.R.

drove Lucy to Dowdle's Knob, which was a favorite spot of his overlooking a lovely valley.

And they sat in the late evening, and he talked about the future of the world and what he was going to do after the war had ended.

The next morning was the 12th.

They were sitting in his little cottage, which was called the Little White House.

Lucy brought with her a Russian painter, a Madame Shoumatoff, who was going to do a portrait of F.D.R.

for her.

Madame Shoumatoff began to paint.

F.D.R.

signed a good many letters, had a little lunch, and then suddenly dropped some papers on the floor and reached up to his forehead and said, "I have a terrific headache," and fell unconscious.

BRUENN: And when I got there, he was slumped over the table, unconscious, and I and his valet carried him into his bedroom, which was on the same-- just next to the living room-- where it happened.

And I was on the bed, giving him artificial respiration.

He had stopped breathing.

It was ineffective.

As they say, from that time on he never regained consciousness.

McCULLOUGH: At 3:35 P.M., Dr.

Bruenn pronounced the president dead.

Eleanor was in Washington when she received a phone call asking her to return to the White House.

"I knew in my heart that something dreadful had happened," she said.

"I got into my car and sat with clenched hands."

(insects chirping) She arrived in Warm Springs near midnight.

There she learned that Lucy Mercer Rutherford had been with her husband when he died, that her daughter Anna had arranged their meetings.

♪ ♪ GOODWIN: Eleanor went into the room where he was laying on his bed, and she was in there for ten minutes alone, and one has to imagine her looking at his face and absorbing what she must feel as this terrible act of betrayal, not only by her husband, who had promised her he would never see Lucy again, but also by her daughter.

Somehow she was able to pull herself together in that ten-minute span so that all those conflicting emotions were pulled inside of her so that when she emerged from the room, she still stood tall, simply Mrs.

Roosevelt going forward with her public duties.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ BRUENN: We took him back to Washington on a train.

It was the most moving thing I can recall.

People lined the railroad tracks for miles-- 100 miles-- sobbing, crying.

♪ ♪ (train whistle blares) GOODWIN: As Eleanor looked out on the faces of her countrymen, slowly she begins to feel how much all these people-- Blacks, poor people, migrant workers, labor people, women-- loved her husband.

They tell her, "We loved him; he made our lives different," and I think what happened is that inside her heart the faces of all these people touched her somehow, and somehow that began to soften her.

♪ ♪ (train whistle blares) ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: I lay in my berth all night with the window shade up, looking out at the countryside Franklin had loved.

I was truly surprised by the people along the way.

I had never realized the full scope of their devotion to him until he died.

CHOIR: ♪ O God, our help in ages past ♪ ♪ Our hope for years to come ♪ ♪ Our shelter from the stormy blast ♪ ♪ And our eternal home!

♪ ♪ Beneath the shadow of thy throne ♪ ♪ Still may we dwell secure ♪ ♪ Sufficient is thine arm alone ♪ ♪ And our defense is sure.

♪ McCULLOUGH: On April 15, 1945, at Hyde Park, New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was laid to rest in the center of his mother's garden, where he had played as a boy.

(guns firing salute) ♪ ♪ Nothing much had changed at Hyde Park during F.D.R.

's 63 years, but the world outside had changed beyond imagining.

As he led the country through the Great Depression and a world war, F.D.R.

transformed the presidency and the role of government.

Now America was prepared to take the center of the world stage, the most powerful and prosperous nation on Earth.

But above all, F.D.R.

's optimism inspired the American people to believe they could accomplish anything they set out to accomplish.

♪ ♪ In 1946, Winston Churchill made a visit to his friend's grave.

"Meeting Roosevelt," Churchill said, "was like uncorking your first bottle of champagne."

♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: Next time, in the midst of the Vietnam War, Lower Manhattan becomes a battlefield.

MAN: When I was a student, I just felt, "We have to fight this, we have to!"

♪ ♪ MAN: To us, we grew up that you supported the United States of America.

MAN: The Hard Hat Riot is a microcosm of the polarization that would come to define American life.

ANNOUNCER: "Hard Hat Riot," next time on "American Experience."

Made possible in part by Liberty Mutual Insurance.

♪ ♪ "American Experience: FDR" is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪