radio out. >> in this final battle, joseph writes about the last days of franklin d roosevelt's life. he talked about the book at the fdr library in hyde park new york, this is 45 minutes. >> enough new. we've had a great day so far, welcome those of you who are new and to our 14th annual rita

festival we've had 14 authors speak today so i don't want to dispersion by say we kept the best for last but will end on a high note. i appreciate you coming. those of you who are members raise your hand. that's fantastic. i can't tell you how much i appreciate you being here in your support. we have christie goodman and jack goodman who have been supporting the library one of the most interesting parts about working at the library is even though it's been 80 years, new material comes up all the time. you researchers find new things to talk about. and expose new aspects of this story. this incredible story. our next speaker has focused in on the final era and is written

a book which i think is going to go down as one of the defining descriptions of this time. a pulitzer prize winning author of one of our great journalist, sir four years as reporter and editor, i followed his career closely when i was a journalist at the museum, great writer and great eye for detail and a persistence that all good investigative journalists have. author two other books, mahatma gandhi and his struggle within the in omaha blues, memory the which i'm can have to read. his final battle, the last month of franklin roosevelt does look at this time which is so important to understand the entire roosevelt legacy. laid the foundation for the truman administration for the entire postwar world. please welcome joseph.

[applause] >> thank you very much. i've heard very good talks here today. i don't know feel and on a high note. but it is nice to be back here. spent perhaps not as much time as a conscious a biographer should spend in the archives, but once i learned how to use franklin, the search engine of the website i took some shortcuts. i never quite came up with a satisfactory answer to the question about how i got

interested in roosevelt in the first place and why i was writing about him. i was mainly a foreign correspondent and then an overall editor. i had not been that trying to american politics. i came up with a flippant answer when people asked me that question and i said is the right exit on the throw away. i have a house on the other side of the river. i could get here in about 25 minutes from door to door. but when i tried that nobody understood what i was saying. and i gave up on it. the awkward truth is that i could not and cannot today remember exactly which image fdr in the first place. when i was actually thinking of researching and writing about him. these days, i have to confess that i forget a lot. at some point, for five years

ago after my furnace book on gandhi came up, i read something that point to me to this very different figure. it wasn't an entire book, that i can be sure, hadn't read a book on fdr in years. may have been nothing more than a paragraph or sentence, it least it was something approaching a thought. started me thinking and poking around in libraries, looking through books should have encountered earlier, eventually let me hear to the reading room adjacent to the fdr archives. what i found interesting was the faint notion that i might uncover clues to this famously elusive figure is most intimate thoughts on the ultimate question of his own mortality. a more down-to-earth terms, the

question of what it was that kept our longest-serving president going amidst the most destructive war in human history, was it a sense of dirty your self-sacrifice? was it his ego is a political enemies and some later scholars suggest? or, was he as we now say on this very sensitive topic, and denial? as is for to say most of us are, day in and day out. not to be morbid, there's one fact i cannot ignore. when i started thinking about fdr i was years older. he was just 63 the day he died, april 12, 1945. i'm old enough to remember the day the way many of us remember november 22, 1963 in all of us remember september 11, 2001. days on her private preoccupations were first time

smothered and taken over by shopping events in the public spirit. on that line go april day, one of my favorite radio serials, pressures captain midnight was interrupted. that's was how they did things in radio days before social media. a deep disembodied voice came out of a box a second we interrupt this program to bring you an important news bulletin. president roosevelt's dead. followed by slow music, the more bulletins and more sad music. captain midnight was banished from the airway for several days. could be my interest started there. i don't think so. i think i was doing what i had done through a long career as a reporter and editor. i sensing the story that had not

been fully told. the time spinach on this book is limited, just 17 months as i finally conceived it from the day the president left the white house in november 1943 to sail to the meta- train you to meet the soviet dictator and tyrant, joseph stalin until that fateful day. obviously, 17 months cannot begin to tell the story of the man. it is necessary to unfold the chronology of it, ending it forward .. to see the bigger picture. for instance, you cannot fully understand roosevelt's determination to engage stalin face-to-face is he did for the first time without referring back to his experience as a second-tier official in the wilson administration during world war i which left him to a determination to shape the postwar order as he believed

wilson failed to do in his day. even before pearl harbor before a formal a trench of the war, roosevelt was preoccupied with the question of how this might be accomplished. he had no answer. this was a president who didn't deal but the question of how he could succeed where wilsonville was seldom far from his mind. we think of wilson and roosevelt as being in separate historical eras. each has his own world war and yet when you think about it, the wilson administration and to just 12 years before the roosevelt administration began. they're about as far apart as tricia b busch and donald trump on the timescale. in the presence and experience

of world war i and our efforts to stay out of it work on many minds but principally on the president. i think i can handle stalin better roosevelt wrote to churchill early on before we are formally or. properly handle the dictator may be the key to victory in the postwar world. it wasn't a sure thing. as a proposition to be tested. iran was to be the first test. similarly, the current chronology has to bend. for to find meaning in the place he made in this life for his new love lucy. the drum inherited in the fact that it was lucy who is with him when he had a hemorrhage on the

brain and as eleanor discovered, only that me to her better and lasting chagrin. beyond that, my 17 months are packed with history involving this president. the d-day landings in normandy, the largest amphibious assault likely to remain so, the diskette decision to proceed with building the atomic bomb. the long postponed decision to stand again for a fourth term in the election of 1944. the stealthy maneuvers to drop his vice president henry wallace after whom the centrist name. it would be a very roosevelt thing. name the center and drop them from the ticket and in favor of a little-known missouri senator,

a hard-fought campaign in a time when no other democrat was given a chance of winning which is a point that people often forget when they talk about how roosevelt made up his mind. he is really decided whether thomas story could be president. >> soon followed by the battle of the bulge in belgium which proved to be his last desperate throw the dice. roosevelt's perilous trip for the second meeting was in church alluding to an agreement on the united nations and soviet intervention on our side in the pacific war and crucially a compromise on paula that had little or no chance of holding. roosevelt recognized the army had already occupied the entire country. to mention a few highlights.

by picking harry truman as his understudy dwight eisenhower to be supreme commander both surprise traces fdr chose not only his successor but his successor successor. all these matters have been written about over and over. if you have given rise to controversies. but he came to feel as i burrowed into my reading used to reasonably presumed long after the fact but a dying man losing his grip in the midst of all these events. after all, he did die. yet, somehow it seems he managed to remain a convincing president to the end, or very nearly so. his medical condition was never exposed in his medical record

disappeared and were destroyed afterward. possibly on his instructions. he took care as he has had to cover his tracks. some have fallen for the interpretation the doctors haven't told him it should until ten. he had been very sensitive to his medical conditions when he was struck by polio and reached out to the best medical advice in that time. he was accompanying every day in the last year for his life cardiologists who gave him ekg tests once or twice a day.

he can add all of that up and there's plenty of evidence that he did. so i think the answer to that line of interpretation was, how could he not know. this was the most private public men. jeremy, extremely guarded. making donald trump and hillary clinton by contrast -- of self wrote revelation. he kept no diary. here tape red square regularly but almost always on and off the record basis. very few contemporaries who are later thought to have been his confidant got only peeks into his thinking for the simple reason it was in a constant state of flux and revision.

never static. dedicated to keeping political and diplomatic and personal option open as long as he could he could stand on all sides of an issue. highly principled, he was routinely duplicity in his tactic. a juggler roosevelt once acknowledged ally could help when the war. a british military historian called him by far the most -- figure world war ii. i said i started out by wondering how he thought about his basic situation in life with mortality and what he was facing and how he made his choices, that in the end seemed an impossible task because he confided in so little.

i was much more struck and drawn by this quality. he is not a simple man to understand. but that is what pulled me along in this enterprise. his duplicity applied on the political front as well. the same few months and days in july 1944 he simultaneously let a pair of would be candidates for vice president to believe that each had his support for nomination while working to block them on behalf of a third man to whom he never directly spoke. in his diary henry wallace called him a water man. capable of looking in one direction while rolling in another.

among the best description there is of roosevelt's methods. and these were timelines at the end of his life his instinct for secretiveness could be justified on the grounds of national security, under a voluntary censorship agreement with reporters covering the white house the actual whereabouts of the president retreated as a state secret, not just when he traveled abroad, but also when he was abroad in the united states. he was actually away from the white house more than any. congress, the public at large often did not know where he was let alone where he was going. he made 21 trips to hyde park in the 17 months. on a presidential tray that would depart late at night from the basement of engraving and printing across the mall from

the white house, riding in his own railway car called the ferdinand magellan. which now if you have any thoughts of heading to the sunshine state can be visited outside the miami zoo and what is called the -- railway museum. you can learn a lot about franklin roosevelt by spending time in that car, he thought nothing of spending a whole week in it. in april 1945 trend 1944, he spent months in rehab and a plantation in the low country of coastal south carolina. all that time the closest the new york times came to disclosing his whereabouts when condition was to say in a clause tucked away in the middle of a short and conspicuous dispatch

on an inside page that the president of the united states was quote somewhere in the south. in the biography of lincoln inspired me to give this subject a shot. he said it had been his ambition to produce a biography lincoln britain from lincoln's point of view using information and ideas available to him seeking to us explain rather than to judge. after months of exploration i concluded with the reporters opportunism that there is ample room for another book on roosevelt. it seems to be ample room every other week for another book on roosevelt. >> the opening was there part because some of his most industrious and ambitious students never got the end of

his life. there were still in the 1930s when it broke off. -- died after the first three values. they did research for fifth but left it on finish. new information and insight surface. there is clinical notes from basalts cardiologists. a specialist named howard bruen. he published 25 years after's patient type. there is a letter, notice surgeon was a consultant, letter dictated day before you finally declared for a fourth term. and said he would not be able to survive it. much later, after a long court battle the full au letter

finally came into the public domain in 2007. i think it was hardly mentioned in previous biographies because scholars doubted its authenticity. but, i went into that hoping to make some kind of stunning discovery. i convince myself that it is authentic. i actually lay he went down to washington the way before he dictated that letter. for one night just overnight, saw ross mcintyre and roosevelt's position and he hoped to see roosevelt. but roosevelt was off with lucy and didn't have time for him. mcintyre told him there would be

an announcement the following monday or tuesday and he went back and dictated his letter saying this was a mistake. i'm convinced that letter is significant gives you an insight when you think about it as to who is really managing the disclosure of information about the president's medical condition. i think it was the patient. more helpful were the days he was a hudson valley neighbor and distant cousin who spent more private time during the war years along with the president than anyone else, including his wife. she survived him by just under half a century, always insisting that she said no notes, no correspondence. after she died in 1991, a

battered leather suitcase was hauled from under her bed in her family's dilapidated mansion on the banks of the hudson. now restored and open to the public as the mansion just north of here in south of rhinebeck. inside was her diary which jeffrey word her self authored three outstanding books masterfully edited into a volume appropriately tired closest companion. in conjunction with the day by day white house blogs now online at the website they provide the music for the presidents last month. in the up-and-down reciprocity and riches hopes, worries and calculations find highly variable expression. these and other discoveries it impossible to adapt the standard

and attempt to book about this time of his life and presidency. rumsfeld's home point to be to explain his thinking rather to judge him in simplest terms to tell a story and viewing his choices through his eyes it became clear they did not often appear as choices. at the end of 1943 i returned from tehran he appeared to be in good health. at that time, the person everybody was worried about was winston churchill who is with pneumonia. churchill was so sick that the british was wife to his bedside thinking he might not recover. roosevelt in a speech on christmas eve to the nation about talking about tara said we

all pray for the health of prime minister churchill. but three months later, his navy cardiologist diagnosed him with congestive heart failure, a diagnosis that wasn't revealed for 25 years. at that point there were only two months remaining to dj in six weeks to the democratic convention. if one thinks about the timeline the big question is race, what possibly could the president have done what options were open to roosevelt at that time? he may have wondered whether and into war in europe might give him an opportunity to bow out, but that consummation didn't come soon enough. given these timetables for the invasion and convention, the commander-in-chief seems obvious to me was in no position to look

for an exit or successor. he cannot conceivably say after spending young americans into battle by the hundreds of thousands, i'm getting out of here. with ten months remaining he was then serving under our inflexible constitution, carrying on was a more obvious choice than getting now. he was not going to make henry wallace president on the eve of d-day. he told himself and a few others that he could always resign if it got to be too much. a couple of vignettes taken my mind when i consider his valor. one is a visit he paid in the hills above honolulu to the words of a new baby hospital where patients including amputees survivors of the assault on the island in the

pacific were included, survivors of the assault on taipan. roosevelt never allowed himself to be photographed in public and the narrow wheelchair he had designed for himself. he would have this secret service will him through those words stopping at every bed so the wounded airmen and marines could draw a measure of encouragement and solace from the example of a president who hadn't been able to take a step on assisted for nearly one quarter of assisted century. the other image involved his wheelchair. he left two days after his fourth inauguration was gone for a month. two days after he returned he went to the capital to address congress will prove to be the final time. with the chamber full, he wheeled down the and transferred

to an armchair from which she spoke in a seated position at the foot of the podium where he previously stood uncomfortably in his braces say without a trace of self-pity. it makes it a lot easier not to carry 10 pounds of steel around on the bottom of my leg. this was the first and only public acknowledgment in those 12 years. francis, the first woman to occupy cabinet office call that one were spiritual inner victory for his long adjustment. john o'donnell, the fear santa rosa columnist the new york daily news wrote that even his grimace pros were served by the crippled brisk allusion to what i previously been unmentionable. the honest appreciation of the undoubted personal courage and

fighting heart of the man who was about to tell them what he had done in the name of the republic. it blew away some of the themes of personal bitterness. a wave of applause rolled. whether for the presidents candor the arduous trip on which she was about to report it's hard to say. for his soreness, the applause was repeated when fdr was wheeled out back up the aisle. later, the future tv anchor and commentator david brinkley would write, he was home. the victorious leader of a victorious nation. in a matter of weeks, it became an issue of bitter dispute for rewriting history. by then, franklin roosevelt himself had vanished from the scene. cheers for his last speech to congress was the last year see her. my book takes the view that they

were well and truly earned. thank you. [applause] >> which we know about fdr's thoughts about the postwar world and his concerns that churchill wanted to go back to the imperium that he wasn't really willing to give up on his vision of world order. >> that had a lot to do with the tensions that began to unravel the friendship and partnership of churchill and roosevelt.

because churchill was very concerned as a matter of military proposition with the balkans and eastern mediterranean and ultimately with the suez canal. he continually pressed for an invasion of the greek island of rome which sounded ridiculous for american strategists who wanted to get to berlin by the straightest possible line from britain to northern europe. did not want to send american troops into the mediterranean any more than they had to. this became a theme of a relationship that was turned on this. because the americans suspected, perhaps not correctly in every

case that churchill was being driven by his passion for holding on to india and roosevelt was really anticolonial. roosevelt wanted to create it system of -- talked about putting china and korea under international trusteeship at the end of the war. and talked about taking hong kong from the british and putting it under international trusteeship. and never went anywhere, but in a way, he would talk on those subjects was stolen as if he had a better chance of finding common ground with a soviet dictator was churchill. so, i think he was quite hostile

to churchill's point of view. but on the other hand he knew there is no point in arguing with churchill about it because if you did churchill would just blow up. >> thank you for writing an excellent book. it was a great read. my question is, if you could ask franklin delano roosevelt. >> i ask all the off there's of the same question. it's interesting the responses. so if you could ask him one question, what would you ask him what to think his answer would be. >> i would not answer question if i had a good guess of what his answer would be unless i need a quote for a newspaper story. how to think, i think mike question would be about stolen. did he really think he had a chance of reaching some kind of

postwar accommodation was stol stolen? or did he think it was worth the effort because the consequences of not rich in it were so scary that i might've asked about there's a lot of talk about whether it be a good idea to tell the russians about the bomb. and why he never did it. i have no idea what his answer would've been. >> one of the most interesting points in the book was have the war ended prior to the 1944 election, the people thought roosevelt might actually lose. could you talk more about that i would you care to comment about governor dewey is a candidate?

>> well, as well as in a situation not unlike the one churchill found himself in where polling had reached a level of sophistication in those days. you can see in the archives, polls that were made available to the white house from 43 and 44. it clearly show that there was no other democrat on the scene who stood in the chance, partly because roosevelt overshadowed everybody for so long in the country was really tired of the roosevelt administration. roosevelt him set said this on various occasions. but they believed in his ability to leave the country through the word. and that's what they wanted, is

a question of domestic if there asked about domestic reconstruction the percentage is almost reversed entirely. and now dewey started off with a very smart campaign. he more or less endorsed the roosevelt form policy and promise to continue it. then roosevelt gave a speech to the teamsters in which he said the republicans these republicans have attacked me, my wife, my sons, they now take my little dog. it was the performance, quite brilliant if you listen to it on youtube. but it produced very on the

republican side into a came back quite savagely later. who knows what dewey would've done. we would've had the eisenhower administration of eight years earlier. but john foster and allen dulles would've become important in 45 rather than a 53. i think roosevelt died such a hero that it takes it an effort of will to understand how controversy oh he truly was in his lifetime and how many people come although he won by a landslide, what a large portion of the country was unreconciled for him. and the idea that he could a

lost with the were ending seems entirely plausible. [applause] >> could you tell us how much eleanor about franklin's physical condition prior to his reelection and 44? >> her books are clear on that. and her daughter, anna talked about it. eleanor and her tough-minded ways to first swallows her husband's decision to make and nobody should it was a difficult decision and if he felt he was needed and should continue nobody should second-guess them in the family. they should just support him.

she also wasn't very interested in medical information. she thought people should be strong and do their best. and anna says at one point that eleanor would not have understand not have understood the details of his high blood pressure if somebody had tried to explain it. she did not know the meaning of the word hypertension. and i think she meant that literally. so i think there is no indication that they never directly discussed it. here and there, and eleanor's letters their comments. she says when he -- he had lost a lot of weight over the previous year, some had to do with the diet that was imposed

on him by his doctors in order to relieve pressure in his heart. but he looked pretty bad at the inauguration. when he reached malta, people who saw him there, staff people who had not seen for a couple of weeks like chip on, the diplomat were shocked by how much worse he looked. so, i think there is a case that can be made that the trip was something he put a lot of stock in and thought he had to do it, but he knew by then he knew clearly that he was taking a big risk just from the strenuous of the trip and watson, one of his

key aides died on the trip, harry hopkins nearly died on the trip. it was a dark time. >> i forget what the question was, i'm just rambling. >> sue in your book that you mentioned that doing somehow found out that he had broken the japanese code and there was pressure both ways to release that information during the campaign. tribune's printers ro

lit first and coverage continues with sydney blumenthal, former senior advisor to president bill clinton. his book is a look at the political life of abraham lincoln. ..