Roosevelt & Hopkins: FDR's Last Words and Postscript

This is the last of a series on Roosevelt & Hopkins, a book by playwright and presidential aide Robert Sherwood about President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his close aide Harry Hopkins during World War II, published in 1948. 

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the first and so far only times that atomic bombs were used on human populations, in August 1945, when American planes bombed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  FDR died in office several months earlier (April 12,1945) but he had approved the Manhattan Project and knew that scientists at Los Alamos were close to constructing an atomic bomb. (The first test bomb was successfully exploded on July 16, 1945.)  The Project was highly secret, and Robert Sherwood, among others who worked in the White House, did not know about it.

Robert Sherwood was among other things a speechwriter for FDR, although Roosevelt did the final drafts.  The last speech Sherwood worked on was the last speech FDR wrote, for Jefferson Day (April 13.)  He would not live to deliver his prepared remarks.

Sherwood writes (pp. 879-80):

“For the Jefferson Day speech, he asked me to look up some Jefferson quotations on the subject of science. He said, ‘There aren’t many people who realize it, but Jefferson was a scientist as well as a democrat and there were some things he said that need to be repeated now, because science is going to be more important than ever in the working out of the future world.’

The Jefferson quotation that I found, and that Roosevelt used in his undelivered speech, referred to ‘the brotherly spirit of science, which unites into one family all it votaries of whatever grade, and however widely dispersed throughout the different quarters of the globe.’

I did not know it at the time but I realized later that when Roosevelt spoke of the importance of science in the future he was undoubtedly thinking of the imminence of the atomic age.  He said in his last speech, “Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together in the same world, at peace.”

The immense responsibilities of World War II and a 13 year presidency during the Depression and the war very likely shortened FDR's life.  Harry Hopkins life was almost over even before the war began.  He was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1939 and given weeks to live.  FDR got the best medical experts available and transfusions with blood plasma were credited with halting Hopkins deterioration.

Then the war came and Hopkins' life was dedicated to winning it.  He made numerous trips aboard and was FDR's most trusted diplomat with allies.  Both Churchill and Stalin thought highly and even affectionately of Hopkins, and his diplomacy and counsel were instrumental in the successful management of this immense undertaking.  The world had never seen anything like it before, or since.

After FDR's death, Hopkins tried to retire but the new President Truman needed him to continue diplomacy particularly with the Soviets until the end of the war.  He died about five months after the war officially ended, on January 29, 1946.  He was 55.

FDR's political enemies could be verbally vicious as well as obstructive (some Republicans were still talking that way ten or fifteen years after his death, when I was a child.)  But FDR's popularity, and his position as the leader of the free world in wartime, muted much of that expression.

Instead, Republicans (and their newspaper loyalists) turned their hatred on Hopkins, FDR's closest aide who for most of the war actually lived in the White House.  What they didn't dare say about Roosevelt, they said about Hopkins, with impunity.  Hopkins had three sons serving in the armed forces.  One of them was killed in combat in 1943, and combined with Hopkins periodic illness from overwork, caused Harry to be hospitalized.  Sherwood writes (p. 807):

“When Hopkins moved early in May [1943] from Rochester, Minnesota to the Army’s Ashford General Hospital in White Sulphur Springs, there were the usual protests from some of the press. ‘Who entitles this representative of Rooseveltian squandermania to treatment and nursing in an Army hospital?’ was one of the questions. The War Department issued a statement that Hopkins was entitled to this hospitalization as Chairman of the Munitions Assignment Board and that the Secretary of War had authorized his admission.”

In 1948, Sherwood concluded this long book with passages (on p. 932) that ought to be pretty sobering right now in 2015:

“The remarkable luck that we have had in meeting major emergencies in the past should not prevent us now from giving most serious consideration to the question: where is the guarantee that this luck will hold? 

 Presumably it lies in the genius of the American people, but one does not need to have access to any secret documents to know how difficult it is for this genius to express itself or even to realize itself. In the fateful years of 1933 and 1940 the people needed and demanded leadership which could be given to them only by the President, the one officer of government who is elected by all the people and whose duty is to represent the interests of the nation as a whole rather than the purely local or special interests which are too often the predominant concerns of the Congress.

 There is no factor in our national life more dangerous than the people’s lack of confidence in the Congress to rise above the level of picayune parochialism; the threats of Communism or Fascism are trivial as compared with this.”

Referring to the new Atomic Age, Sherwood concludes (p.933): “Our need for great men in the Presidency will continue, and our need for great men in the Congress will increase.”  Today he would add "and women" in both cases, but the point remains the same.