Roosevelt's fourth candidacy

On Tuesday 11 July 1944, at a press conference in the White House, Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced what Washington had long expected: if the Democratic National Convention, meeting in Chicago eight days later, nominated him for president, he would accept, and if the voters elected him, he would go on governing. No one before him had sought a fourth term. Roosevelt had held office since March 1933; he had defeated Herbert Hoover in 1932, won a second time in 1936 and in November 1940 became the first president to win a third term, breaking a custom dating back to George Washington. Now, in the middle of a war entering its decisive phase in Normandy, in the Marianas and in Belorussia, he was asking for four more years.

He announced his decision in the form of a letter. This was no accident: Roosevelt wanted his candidacy to look like an answer to a summons rather than a pursuit of power. Behind this form, however, lay something of which the public knew nothing: since March 1944 the president’s doctors had known that he was seriously ill with heart disease.

The letter to Hannegan

The press conference followed a carefully prepared script. First came a letter from the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Robert E. Hannegan, a St. Louis politician who had led the party since January 1944. Hannegan informed the president that, according to official certifications from the individual states, “more than a clear majority” of the convention delegates were pledged to vote for his nomination, and asked Roosevelt to let the convention or the nation know that he would “again respond to the call of the party and the people”. The American Presidency Project dates both letters to 11 July; some accounts give the day before for Hannegan’s letter.

Roosevelt’s reply was short and framed like a military order. If the convention nominated him for the presidency, he would accept; “If the people elect me, I will serve,” he wrote. Every one of America’s sons fighting in the war had officers from whom he took his orders; the president was Commander-in-Chief, but he too had a superior – the people of the United States. He would therefore accept the office and serve, but would “not run, in the usual partisan, political sense”; if the people ordered him to remain in office in wartime, he had no more right to withdraw than a soldier had to leave his post in the front line.

There followed a passage the president described as personal – purely personal. For himself, he wrote, he did not want to run. By the spring of 1945 he would have served twelve years as president and Commander-in-Chief, elected three times by the people. Everything within him, he wrote, cried out to go back to his home on the Hudson River, at Hyde Park, away from public responsibility and from the publicity that in a democracy follows every step of the head of state. But his generation had been fated to live at a time when the nation had been attacked and its future and its chosen form of government were in danger. The first task was to win the war “wholeheartedly, unequivocally and as quickly as we can”; the second, to win it in such a way that there would be no more world wars in the foreseeable future; the third, to provide work and a decent standard of living for the servicemen when they came home and for all Americans. Reluctantly, therefore, but as a good soldier, he repeated that he would accept and serve in the office if so ordered by the Commander-in-Chief of them all – the sovereign people of the United States.

A sick president

The assurance that the president was ready to go on serving came at a time when his health was already seriously undermined. Paralysed from the waist down since 1921 by an illness then diagnosed as poliomyelitis, Roosevelt had for years successfully concealed his disability from the public. In the winter of 1943–1944, after the exhausting journey to Cairo and Tehran, he visibly declined: he was constantly tired, lost weight, had a persistent cough and headaches, and those around him noticed that he dozed off at his desk and lost the thread of conversations.

His physician, Rear Admiral Ross McIntire, an ear, nose and throat specialist who was also Surgeon General of the Navy, attributed this to influenza and bronchitis. At the urging – as is usually stated – of the president’s daughter, Anna Boettiger, Roosevelt underwent an examination at the naval hospital in Bethesda on 28 March 1944. He was examined by a young cardiologist, Lieutenant Commander Howard Bruenn. According to the notes Bruenn published only in 1970, he diagnosed very high blood pressure, hypertensive heart disease with left ventricular failure, and acute bronchitis. He prescribed digitalis, a diet, less smoking and less work, and daily rest; from then on he accompanied the president almost everywhere. McIntire drew up a daily schedule with two hours’ rest and a ban on working lunches, and from early April to early May Roosevelt rested at Hobcaw Barony in South Carolina, the estate of the financier Bernard Baruch.

In public McIntire insisted that the president’s health was good for a man of his age. Roosevelt himself did not ask his doctors for details, and his aides told no one about them. Historians such as Robert H. Ferrell in The Dying President (1998) believe that in the spring and summer of 1944 the president could work only a few hours a day, and that concealing his condition from the voters was a deliberate decision by his entourage; others point out that in 1944 it was not customary to disclose politicians’ illnesses, and that Roosevelt himself remained clear-headed on the most important matters. Whether, in standing for a fourth time, he realised that he might not live to the end of his term remains disputed. What is certain is that fear of his death made the choice of a vice-presidential candidate the most important contest of the summer of 1944.

Wallace or Truman

On the same evening of 11 July Roosevelt dined at the White House with the party leaders: Hannegan, the mayor of Chicago Edward Kelly, the New York politician Edward J. Flynn, the former Postmaster General Frank Walker, the party treasurer Edwin Pauley and several others. The subject was who should run for vice-president. The incumbent vice-president, Henry Wallace, elected in 1940, was the favourite of the party’s left wing and the trade unions, but conservative Southern Democrats and the bosses of the big-city party machines regarded him as a dreamer and an electoral liability. Since – as was said behind the scenes – the vice-presidential candidate might soon become president, they did not want it to be Wallace. According to the participants’ accounts, described among others by Robert H. Ferrell in Choosing Truman, they left the dinner convinced that the president had agreed to the senator from Missouri, Harry Truman, known for chairing the Senate committee investigating waste in the defence industry.

Roosevelt, however, said nothing of the kind outright to any of those concerned. He let Wallace believe he had his support, as well as James Byrnes, a former Supreme Court justice who was then directing the war economy and was hoping for the nomination. In a letter to the chairman of the convention, Senator Samuel D. Jackson, he wrote that if he were a delegate himself he would vote for Wallace, but that he did not wish to appear to be “dictating to the convention”. Hannegan, on the other hand, received a short letter dated 19 July in which the president stated that he would be glad to run with Truman or with the Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas. The instruction to “clear it with Sidney” – Sidney Hillman, head of the CIO union federation’s political action committee, without whose consent Wallace could not be dropped – passed into legend, although its exact wording and circumstances are disputed.

The Chicago convention

The Democratic National Convention met in the Chicago Stadium from 19 to 21 July 1944. The president was not in the hall: he was travelling by train to the West Coast, from where he was to go to Hawaii to confer with General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz on the further conduct of the war against Japan. On 20 July the convention nominated him on the first ballot; a small group of Southern delegates, hostile to the New Deal and to the administration’s racial policy, voted for Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia. In the evening Roosevelt delivered his acceptance speech by radio from a railway carriage at the naval base in San Diego. A photograph taken during that speech, in which the president looked haggard, with his jaw sagging, was later used by the opposition press as proof of his illness.

The vice-presidential question was settled on 21 July. Wallace’s supporters packed the galleries and very nearly forced a vote the previous evening, but the chairman adjourned the session. On the first ballot Wallace received 429½ votes and Truman 319½, with neither having a majority. After intense lobbying by the party bosses, and with whole delegations switching their votes, Truman won the second ballot by 1,031 to 105. The senator from Missouri, who only a few days earlier had been insisting that he was not seeking the nomination, became the candidate for an office that within nine months would take him to the White House.

The opponent: Dewey

Roosevelt had known his opponent for several weeks. The Republican National Convention, which also met in Chicago, from 26 to 28 June 1944, had nominated the Governor of New York, Thomas Dewey, on the first ballot and almost unanimously. The forty-two-year-old Dewey had won fame in the 1930s as a prosecutor fighting organised crime in New York; he belonged to the party’s moderate eastern wing and questioned neither America’s part in the war nor the plans to create an international organisation after it ended. The vice-presidential candidate was the conservative Governor of Ohio, John W. Bricker. Wendell Willkie, defeated by Roosevelt in 1940, had withdrawn from the race as early as April, after his defeat in the Wisconsin primary.

Dewey could not challenge the conduct of a war whose course in the summer of 1944 – after the Normandy landings, the capture of Saipan and the great Soviet offensive in Belorussia – was going the Allies’ way. Instead he attacked the New Deal, the growth of the bureaucracy and the alleged corruption of the administration, and above all portrayed the government as a bunch of “tired old men”, a transparent allusion to the president’s health. The Republicans also argued that twelve years of one man’s rule was enough and that a fourth term threatened the American system of government. Roosevelt replied that one does not change commanders in wartime, and in the autumn, to give the lie to the rumours, he conducted a gruelling campaign, including a ride through New York in an open car in pouring rain.

Poland in the campaign

The 1944 election had a dimension that directly concerned Poland. As early as Tehran, at the end of November 1943, Roosevelt had given Stalin to understand in a private conversation that he agreed to shifting Poland’s borders westwards, but that because of several million voters of Polish descent he could not say so publicly before the election. When the prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, came to Washington in June 1944, the president was cordial but made no binding commitments on the borders. The Polish American Congress, founded in May 1944, lobbied the White House, and both parties courted the Polish American vote; in October Roosevelt received its leaders, headed by its president Charles Rozmarek, and allowed himself to be photographed in front of a map of pre-war Poland. Many historians point out that the electoral calendar was one of the reasons why the administration in Washington put off taking an open position on the Polish–Soviet dispute.

Place in the war

The announcement of 11 July was no surprise, but it dispelled the last doubts: the United States would go through the decisive period of the war under the same leadership that had taken it from the second term and the years of neutrality through Pearl Harbor to the invasion of Europe. For the allies, especially Churchill, and for the enemies in Berlin and Tokyo who were counting on American war-weariness, it was a signal of continuity. At the same time the candidacy of a sick president shifted the weight of the political struggle to the choice of his deputy – and it was that contest that proved to have far-reaching consequences.

On 7 November 1944 Roosevelt defeated Dewey, carrying 36 states and 432 electoral votes to 99, and 53.4 per cent of the popular vote to 45.9 per cent – though it was the narrowest of his four victories. On 20 January 1945 he took the oath for the fourth time, in a modest ceremony on the South Portico of the White House, and a few days later set off for the Yalta Conference. He did not complete his fourth term: he died of a cerebral haemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, on 12 April 1945, less than three months after his inauguration. Truman, who had spent 82 days as vice-president and had been let in neither on the details of the Yalta agreements nor on the atomic bomb project, which he learned of only as president, succeeded him. It was he who would bring the war to an end, take the decision to use the bomb and open the era of the Cold War. Had the Chicago convention voted otherwise, all of this would have fallen to Wallace.

Roosevelt’s fourth candidacy also remained the only one in American history. The Republicans, who won a majority in Congress in 1946, pushed through the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution in March 1947, limiting the presidency to two elected terms. It came into force on 27 February 1951, after ratification by the required number of states, turning the custom that Roosevelt had broken in 1940 and finally overturned in 1944 into a constitutional rule.