Remembering FDR - 14 April 1995

It was the end of a barmy April afternoon in New York just 50 years ago, when the BBC's Washington correspondent, a tall leggy man with thick glasses and a genial almost oriental smile, was packing his typewriter and getting ready to go home to Washington for the weekend.

I too was packing up and had phoned home to say, "Here I come," when the news ticker at the end of the corridor let off four bells, a sound rare enough to send Wiggin darting from the room. One bell was the signal for any news item, two for something rather special, three for a bulletin and four for what was known as a flash. The only other time I remember hearing a four bell flash, when I was sitting in my office waiting for it in the middle of the night, was in the first week of June the year before, 1944, waiting for the word of the invasion of Europe.

This time none of us could have possibly guessed what rated a flash. Tony Wiggin practically in shock appeared at my door and waved at me a strip of the United Press wire ticker tape he'd ripped off – I have it still – it had evidently been typed by a man shaken with emotion, for the first line stumbled and said simply: "Flash, warm Georgia FDR Dad following by till this." It then chattered down to the next open line and tried again: "Warm Springs Georgia FDR dead." By then the man had composed himself and there followed the first of many almost processional despatches: "This afternoon in warm springs Georgia, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States, died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage, his last words were, 'I have a terrific headache'".

First thing was to get in a call to London – you did not for many more years to come raise a finger and dial, you filed your call for a line and you waited – and when London came on they told us to set up a special circuit from a relay station at the end of Long Island – they were all radio circuits in those days – and it was a matter of luck whether you came over intelligibly, though waveringly at best, or like this: (distorted sound).

We got a circuit for an hour later, it must have been say, for 6 p.m. our time. Tony Wiggin unpacked his machine and started clacking away, a brief fast biography of Roosevelt. I took off for the streets. The BBC offices and studio then, and for 50 more years, were bang in the middle of the handsomest pile of modern architecture still in New York City, the towering Rockefeller Centre project with its lofty skyscrapers and their breaking setbacks surrounding the bronze fountain and the sunken ice rink, so there couldn't be a spot in New York more likely to have a surer mixture of home folks and tourists.

I was down, I was 31 storeys in a flash without benefit of notebook paper – I simply forgot – and unceremoniously stopped people and said, "Have you heard?" I suppose in a Hollywood movie of this incident we should see beautiful women streaming with tears and strong men blowing their noses. In life it's never what you expect. Of the dozen or more people I stopped, half of them looked at me dumbly in the certainty that I was crazed. One or two pushed their companions on as you would do with an embarrassing beggar, but at least four others resented me, one man saying spontaneously, "Better watch your language son," and a young angry woman blurting out "Are you ashamed or what?" till I convinced her, then she apologised and quite simply broke into tears.

By the time I was back to our office, of course the word had spread everywhere and I had the eerie sensation of looking down on the channel that leads to the skating rink and the adjoining sidewalks and seeing the people way down there – a scatter of ants running and stopping and forming small groups and breaking away and stopping other ants. The last piece I wrote and broadcast that evening was not for BBC, but in response to a request from the Columbia Broadcasting System and they, like the other two radio networks had abandoned their usual programmes and spent the evening on the life and times of Franklin Roosevelt.

What I remember most about that short talk as I was walking over to the C.B.S. studios, was to wonder how the Republicans must feel, especially those old Republican stalwarts, whose disillusion with Franklin Roosevelt had set in after his first year in the White House and who had loathed him steadily for 11 long years as a traitor to his class, a fellow traveller, an opportunist hell bent for the destruction of free and unregulated enterprise. They had ached for the end of his first term and expected to put a fine old American type a rural Midwestern governor in his place, but in 1936, Roosevelt buried Governor Landon of Kansas. I remember learning that year, a useful maxim about American presidential elections. For many years it seemed the rock-bound Yankee state of Maine, way up there on the far northeast coast had uncannily set the political fate of the country by always voting for the man who would win in November. Since Maine was a small lightly populated state, its returns came in early and conventional wisdom came to say: "As Maine goes so goes the nation".

Well in 1936, the Republican candidate Governor Landon took two states only, Roosevelt 46. Landon took Maine and its country neighbour Vermont and Roosevelt's campaign manager – I should think one of the few in history to coin a famous witticism – amended the famous maxim: "As Maine goes he said so goes Vermont." Four years later, Roosevelt further enraged the Republicans by doing something no president had ever done before and George Washington had declared no president ought to do, run for a third term. The Republicans confidently predicted if Roosevelt was re-elected, it would mark the end of American democracy and the birth of a dictatorial dynasty. I myself knew several Republicans, fathers of friends I'd made, a INAUD who announced that if Roosevelt went back into the White House in 1937, they would immediately emigrate to New Zealand.

Well, Roosevelt explained with moving sincerity over the radio, that he yearned to retire to his country home up the Hudson River, how he yearned to lay down the burdens of his exhausting office, but he felt he had a duty he could not shirk etc. etc. chimed the Republicans, so he won again.

Four years later, 1944, in the high summer, he again appalled the Republicans – none of whom by the way had yet emigrated to New Zealand – and amazed many of his own party by consenting, as he put it, to run for a fourth term. He did this in a typically artful Rooseveltian way. He got the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, the party chairman, to write to him to give him the news that a majority of the delegates to the Democratic convention – which was about to meet in Chicago – were intending to renominate Franklin Roosevelt. Surprise, surprise.

The President wrote back to the chairman and the letter was published in a masterpiece of political rationale. He wrote: "I feel I owe to you in candour a simple statement of my position. Everyone of our sons serving in this war has officers who have superior officers. The president is the commander in chief and he too has his superior officer, the people of the United States. I would accept your nomination and serve but I will not run in the usual partisan political sense. However, if the people command me to continue in this office and in this war, I have as little right to withdraw as the soldier has to leave his post in the line." In other words, not to run for a fourth term would be a form of desertion in wartime. The splendid cunning of the man, the hypocrite of the century one Republican newspaper called him and he won yet again.

The Republicans revenge was limp and too late. When Roosevelt had been dead and gone only two years, the Congress, a heavily Republican Congress passed an amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified four years later. It says: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice".

To turn the knife in the wound of the Republicans misery, was the fact that in the late fall of 1944, Roosevelt was pretty certain to win again. The allied armies were beginning to close the Rhine and push back the Nazi forces west of the river; the invasion of Germany was not far off. In the Pacific, the United States had recaptured naval superiority in a naval battlefield that covered a third of the globe. American soldiers and marines had kept MacArthur's two year promise and returned to the Philippines. The smell of victory was everywhere and Roosevelt's stress on running, not, goodness, as a politician but as the commander in chief of all the armed forces, sworn to stay at his post, gave him a handsome electoral majority over the lacklustre Republican of 432 to 99.

As I went up to that CBS microphone on the evening of Thursday the 12th of April 1945, there was very little to say to Americans that they didn't already know. The simple tremendous truth they all knew was that he had led them with frightening courage out of a depression that could have turned in a night and a day into a revolution and he'd led them willingly to the verge of victory in the Second World War. But I kept thinking about those poor Republicans indignant and uncomforted for 13 interminable years, so I ended the talk by saying simply: "Until today, the Republicans feared he was immortal, now they know he is".

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