An eyewitness recalls the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt

Grace Tully

President Franklin D. Roosevelt died on this date in 1945 in Warm Springs, Georgia. While signing documents and posing for an artist who was painting his portrait, Roosevelt suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. One of the people on hand that day was Grace Tully, who had been FDR’s private secretary for 17 years. In this account, which appears on eyewitnesstohistory.com, Tully recalls being told to summon a doctor. 

I could feel a chill in my heart, a sense that this was something different from another complaint about his sinus acting up or his tummy being out of whack. I decided to go at once to the President's cottage.

By the time I reached the house, both Bruenn and Fox (physicians) were with the President in his bedroom. Miss Suckley (FDR’s cousin) was in the living room, Miss Delano (another cousin) entered from the bedroom as I walked in. There were sounds of tortured breathing from the bedroom and low voices of the two men attending him. Miss Delano and Miss Suckley looked shocked and frightened; the former told me the President had finished some work with Mr. Hassett (an assistant) and was sitting for Madame Shoumatoff (the artist). At 1:00 o'clock the President remarked to the artist, “We have only fifteen minutes.” At 1:15 he put his hand to his head and slumped backward in a coma. Prettyman and a Filipino house boy had carried him from his chair to his bedroom.

Hacky already had gotten Dr. McIntire on the phone in Washington and had put Bruenn on the line with him. At McIntire's instruction, Dr. James E. Paullin, a heart special­ist in Atlanta, had been summoned. Dr. Paullin made a desperately fast automobile trip to Warm Springs and ar­rived while we were waiting anxiously in the living room.

Almost within seconds of Paullin's arrival, Bruenn was called again by Dr. McIntire. While on the phone he was summoned back to the bedroom. Bruenn left the line open as he disappeared into the Boss' room. In a minute or so he was back. With a tragically expressive gesture of his hands he picked up the phone again. I knew what his message was before he spoke. The President was dead.

My reaction of the moment was one of complete lack of emotion. It was as if my whole mind and sense of feeling had been swept away. The shock was unexpected and the actuality of the event was outside belief. Without a word or a glance toward the others present, I walked into the bedroom, leaned over and kissed the President lightly on the forehead. Then I walked out on the porch and stood word­less and tearless. In my heart were prayers and, finally, in my mind came thoughts, a flood of them drawn from seven­teen years of acquaintance, close association and reverent admiration. Through them, one recurred constantly - that the Boss had always shunned emotionalism and that I must, for the immediate present at least, behave in his pattern. I did, for a matter of hours.