Everybody needs to know, Franklin.
Will you run again?
ROOSEVELT: The situation in France changes everything.
CHURCHILL: I’d rather have a declaration of war
from America.
There’s nothing I’d like better than to kick Hitler
in the teeth.
They’ve attacked Pearl Harbor.
A date which will live in infamy.
The prime minister of Great Britain
has nothing to hide from the president of the United States.
Our team cracked it.
They fooled the Japanese.
We know where they’re going to be, so we can lay a trap.
See this ship?
It’s got Marines aboard.
My son Jimmy is one of them.
He’s going to be in the thick of it, isn’t he?
Franklin Roosevelt was the president
who had to face the Great Depression and World War II.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
He was ambitious and active, incredibly privileged.
But he suffered.
You’ve contracted infantile paralysis.
And he’s had setbacks.
But through pain can come wisdom.
The country’s on the edge of a cliff,
but we’re not going to let it fall.
What do plan to do with this power?
He has a vision to change the very soul of America.
I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people.
American democracy was literally
resting on his shoulders.
This was zero hour.
[speaking german]
Get everybody in here.
He knew that he needed to project real strength.
He is the dealer in hope for the entire free world.
An invasion of France is courting disaster.
He took risks.
Again and again, you see these moments of great daring.
ROOSEVELT: Success may not come with rushing speed,
but we shall return again and again.
Roosevelt led the grand alliance to victory
over fascism.
This was a tumultuous, complicated period of time.
It’s a mistake to think that he somehow got everything right.
But there was something about that voice.
There was something about that smile.
That empathy, that humility, that resilience,
all those qualities that FDR just had triumphantly
built into his character.
[music playing]
There’s a small American base at Midway Island in the middle
of the Pacific, and in the spring of 1942,
the Japanese think they’re going to be
able to take the Americans by surprise
and knock out that outpost.
The Japanese believe that if they can threaten Midway,
it will bring those US carriers that weren’t at Pearl Harbor
out and they can destroy them in one climactic battle.
NARRATOR: Suddenly, from behind the clouds, the Japs attack.
The Japanese think they’re going
to be able to take the Americans by surprise.
What the Japanese didn’t realize is that the Americans have
broken the Japanese code, and FDR knows the Japanese fleet is
coming, and the American forces in the Pacific
lay a trap for them.
NARRATOR: The trap is sprung.
Navy planes roar from the decks of our carriers.
Army bombers, Marines.
It’s a really high risk move on the part of FDR,
but it pays off spectacularly.
The results are just catastrophic for Japan.
The Japanese lose four carriers.
The US loses one.
Japan will never, in the entire course of the war,
replace the losses at Midway.
NARRATOR: The Battle of Midway is over.
Our frontyard is safe, but a big job is still to be done.
[singing]
It’s Jimmy.
You know, every mother in America should see this film.
Won’t they be scared seeing their sons in combat?
They’ll be inspired, Harry.
They’re seeing their boys winning.
Roosevelt is blown away by the uplifting story
of American victory.
Next thing you know, this documentary
is being shown in movie theaters all across the country.
And it was the first kind of up close,
you are there, our boys in action,
achieving spectacular military victory in the Pacific.
FDR’s responsibility as commander
in chief and president the United States is
to be the global optimist for Western civilization.
Summer of ’42, the Battle of the Atlantic
still rages, the Germans are 500 miles into the Soviet Union
at this point, the Mediterranean is still a battleground.
They’re all massive problems of their own
of a complexity nobody has ever dealt with before.
The Germans have driven the British almost all
the way back into Egypt, but the United States isn’t really
in the European war, and this is FDR’s problem.
We’ve got to get in the war.
There’s still been no forward movement of the American troops
against the German army, and that’s
where so much of the attention of the American public is at.
Roosevelt knew that somehow we needed to get the soldiers
moving against the German army.
There’s great debate in 1942 about which way
the Allies should go in terms of trying to push the Nazis out
of Western Europe.
In 1942, Russia is bearing the brunt of the Nazi onslaught.
The Nazis are driving deep into Russia,
laying siege to Leningrad and to other cities.
Every day, thousands of people are being killed.
It’s really a bloodbath on the Eastern Front.
Joseph Stalin is pleading, demanding that Churchill
and FDR open a second front.
There were people that wanted to keep the focus
in the Pacific, because after all, it was Japan that
had attacked the United States.
There were people who wanted to go straight
into continental Europe.
Churchill favors starting in North Africa,
and then that then becomes a staging ground to come up
through what Churchill vividly described
as the soft underbelly of the Nazi controlled Europe.
NEWSREADER: In Washington D.C., the president of the United
States welcomed the prime minister of Great Britain.
The gravity of the moment had brought them together.
Churchill really feels he has his back to the wall.
Britain is basically standing alone
against the German and Italian threat in North Africa.
There’s great camaraderie between FDR and Churchill,
but there’s also great tension.
I see you found the good brandy.
Thank you.
Have you given any more thought to North Africa?
I’ve been doing nothing but thinking about North Africa,
and northern France.
An invasion of France is courting disaster.
We’re not ready.
From the map room.
Just came in.
Thank you, my dear.
It’s Tobruk.
Churchill was in the White House in 1942
when there were severe Allied reverses in North Africa,
and Tobruk falls.
And FDR looks at him and sees the pain in his eyes.
The commingling of the personal and the political
and the diplomatic and the human was fascinating and decisive
in many ways.
How could this happen?
It’s one defeat.
It’s not over.
A defeat is one thing.
A disgrace is another.
Beaten by a force half our size, the British army.
I thought they would hold on.
I need every tank you can spare sent directly to North Africa.
Consider it done.
And I need you to agree to the North Africa invasion.
We can’t let Hitler control the Mediterranean and our oil.
It’s where you need it most now.
My generals say otherwise.
Some of them want France.
Some of them want me to move more resources to the Pacific.
But we’re depending on you.
Roosevelt ultimately sides with Churchill,
because if a cross-channel invasion misfires,
there’ll be enormous casualties and it’ll be morale crushing
in the United States and Great Britain.
At the end of the day, they plan
an invasion of North Africa called Operation Torch,
and FDR will do this against the military advice,
a presidential prerogative as commander
in chief, to say we need to get in the war
and North Africa is where we do this.
Now FDR has got to focus on getting our military squared
away and all of the tools that they need
to go out and be victorious.
FDR understood that part of being a war leader
is not simply to be commander in chief of the armed forces
but to be able to mobilize the home front.
It’s not just making strategic determinations
about where to fight and what battles,
you have to get the people and the soldiers wanting to fight,
willing to fight, willing to be producing on the home front
24 hours a day.
To win the war, we have to ramp up production,
and to ramp up production, the president has to be deeply
involved in making the federal government a force to make
capitalism start to create a war machine,
to create what FDR calls arsenal democracy.
FDR knew that he had to change his relationship
with the business community, which had been marked
by hostility at the end of the New Deal,
that he had to pivot and make himself a partner of business,
and he really makes a peace.
Factories are transforming from cars into planes and tanks.
Doctor New Deal becomes eventually Doctor Win The War.
Rarely do you find a leader who
is good at proposing controversial programs as FDR
did during the New Deal, and then in the 1940s
uniting the country to win the war.
Name me anyone else who might have been president
of the United States during those years who could have done
that.
It was only FDR.
He felt it was so important to go to the manufacturing plants,
to go to the factories, because he knew the enormous pressure
that they were working under to produce.
They know that these weapons and planes and tanks are
critical for the war effort.
There’s a lot of sense of needing to make
sure their morale is up.
In every factory that he visited,
the productivity went up shortly thereafter.
And he also has to pressure the manufacturers to get them
moving as fast as they could.
One of the leading manufacturers in the United
States was the Ford Motor Company.
Ford had this enormous Willow Run Plant that they’ve created,
the biggest one of all.
They’ve only produced one bomber that’s all that’s
come off the assembly line.
Henry Ford was largely an opponent of the New Deal.
He was a vicious antisemite.
He said nice things about Hitler.
So Henry Ford would not have been at the top of FDR’s hit
parade.
But in 1942, he is a wartime president
and is trying to mobilize absolutely everyone.
Henry, quite an impressive place you have here.
You got a lot of nice press for it.
We’ve got a mile long assembly line.
You should bring Hitler and Tojo in here to see it.
They’d surrender in two seconds.
Only if it lives up to its billing.
Your factory is behind the others
and I’m here to find out why.
Mr. Roosevelt, everything is new.
New machinery, new parts.
You can’t expect it to run like clockwork right off the bat.
We’re going to get rid of the Nazis.
And when we do, I hope I’ll have you and your factory
to thank for it.
Weeks after that visit, productivity
goes up at the Ford plant, and they actually
do outstrip the industry average eventually.
The relationship between business and government
during World War II was the most productive in all of history.
It was an incredible accomplishment.
We see this incredible increase in factory production.
The country is in better economic footing
than it has been.
The workplace is becoming more diverse.
We are seeing more and more African-Americans,
Mexican-Americans, Latinos contributing to the war effort.
We are seeing more women in the workforce, in factories.
Rosie the Riveter.
Eleanor was instrumental right from the start.
By 1942 and ’43, she was arguing with the factory owners,
bring women aboard.
You need them.
She made a statement, if I were a young girl at 17,
I would want to work in a factory.
That’s where I would want to be.
And Eleanor focused on the women who had
come to work in the factories.
During the war, Eleanor was instrumental in encouraging
women to work the 24/7 shifts.
Eleanor met with them, became pen pals with them,
secured better working conditions for them,
got them raises, and made sure there was daycare available
at federal employment facilities.
Before her, there had been ceremonial first ladies,
but she was the first first lady to speak
at a national convention, the first to speak
at a congressional investigation,
the first to hold weekly press conferences, the first half
radio shows of her own.
The price FDR paid for Eleanor’s independence,
however, was that she was gone almost 200 days a year.
But as Eleanor emerged into the first lady she became,
FDR’s admiration for her only increased.
She becomes absolutely central to his leadership.
At the fall of 1942, there’s a lot of pressure on Roosevelt.
It had been almost a year, and the United States
had done nothing meaningful it seemed in the European theater.
Winston Churchill would argue, you haven’t been to war
unless you’ve fought the Germans.
So this will lead us to November of 1942.
Operation Torch will be the largest amphibious invasion
in the United States history, where
they will land on three different landing sites
on the coast of North Africa.
The idea is if you can pinch the Germans in North Africa
between the one force coming from the east
and the other force coming from the west,
you can clear all of North Africa.
The weekend before the invasion of North Africa, FDR
was uncharacteristically tense, and I think the reason was
because he was the one responsible for making
the decision to invade North Africa against the wishes
of Marshall and Eisenhower, so you can imagine what he felt
as he was waiting for the news.
Were the troops ready?
Were they sufficiently trained enough to make this work?
On the eve of the invasion of North Africa, Operation Torch,
Roosevelt is at one of his vaunted cocktail parties,
and most of those people there would not have even
known this was even happening.
Boss.
Thank you, Grace.
Is there anything from Marshall?
Nothing yet.
Get down.
We’re taking a hell of a chance with this, Harry.
I feel good about our chances.
Is there anything I can do?
It’s out of our hands now.
I can’t stop wondering if we’re ready.
[phone rings]
Hello?
It’s the war department.
Yes?
Thank god.
Well, that sounds grand.
Congratulations.
We have landed in North Africa.
We are striking back.
[applause]
British and American forces have landed in Operation Torch
in November of 1942.
NEWSREADER: A gigantic American invasion force is landing.
A second front is at hand.
65,000 American troops plus British troops
will hit the beaches in French North Africa,
and they’re going to start pushing eastward
along the North African coast.
Operation Torch allows for Americans
to see their ground troops in action.
That has a morale building effect stateside.
FDR made every American feel like they
were a part of this challenge to beat back fascism.
Every radio address ended with a call to action.
There is one front where everyone in the United States,
every man, woman, and child is in action,
and that front is right here at home.
The story of the war cannot be told without the story
of the home front, and the story of the home front cannot be
told really without the incandescent leadership
of Franklin Roosevelt. FDR understood that the only way
that we could get the soldiers the equipment they needed when
there were scarcity of supplies was rationing.
He has rubber drives in the village squares,
and everybody brings on a Saturday their old rubber toys
and rubber hoses, rubber bands, and he does that same thing
with aluminum.
One very important feature of World War II
is that the sense of shared sacrifice.
It’s the same spirit of during the Great Depression
and the New Deal, that same idea that we’re all in this
together.
Trust is the most important part
of his leadership in many ways.
The American people trusted him.
So when he told them that this is necessary for you
to only have five gallons of gasoline a week,
it’s necessary for you to only drink one cup of coffee a day,
even though they grumbled and got angry with it,
eventually they knew they had to do their part, because we were
all working together in a common goal.
That’s one of the huge parts of FDR’s leadership,
that he was able to mobilize that collective will
of the country.
It’s January 1943, and the war has really
reached a crossroads.
Stalin is in the process of losing a million men
at Stalingrad and he is desperate for his Western
partners to open a Western Front to take some of that pressure
off of the Red Army.
In fact, Stalin says bluntly to FDR
and to Churchill, we Russians are killing more Germans
every day than the two of your people put together.
The fear is that if Russia gets worn down by the Nazis,
that they’ll sue for a separate peace.
They’ll just give up.
And so FDR is eager to do something
to help the ally Joseph Stalin and to relieve some
of that pressure.
I cannot tell you when or where the United Nations are
going to strike next in Europe, but we are going to strike
and strike hard.
We believe that the Nazis and the fascists have asked for it,
and they’re going to get it.
After Operation Torch, for the first time
the Allies have the initiative.
FDR and Churchill, they’re going to meet in Casablanca
in Morocco.
FDR is going to be the first president to leave the United
States in a time of war, and he’ll be the second president
since Abraham Lincoln to go to a war zone,
and this conference is really about what are the next steps.
And they ask Stalin to come, but Stalin is afraid to fly,
and Stalingrad is in the midst of it
so he’s not going to be there.
What meant so much to FDR about Casablanca
is that two of his sons in the military were there,
Harry Hopkins’ son was there, Churchill’s son was there,
and there’s that next generation who are carrying out
the goals of that older generation of Churchill
and Roosevelt.
They seem to be hitting it off.
Yes.
Did you know Stalin’s son has been captured?
It’s awful.
I’m told he refuses to negotiate for him.
I hear his motto is, not one step back.
I guess that goes for his son too.
Well, he’s certainly making the Nazis bleed.
He just might hold Stalingrad.
It’s good to have our boys close by.
Yes.
They’re out of harm’s way, for the moment.
At the Casablanca conference, Churchill
is advocating for a continuation of this attempt
to strike Germany through the soft underbelly of Europe
by invading through Italy in hopes of getting
a quick series of victories.
But within the United States, the military advisors
are not necessarily of the same mind.
Some of them feel that most of the attention
should be on the Pacific, while others feel that the Europe
first strategy is still the way to go.
We’re already in position for an invasion of Sicily.
I believe I’ve made that abundantly clear.
This is just a delay of the inevitable.
We need to strike in France now.
I’m not certain your Yanks are ready for that.
When the time comes, we’ll be ready.
You can bet on that.
Gentlemen, the point is Italy is a much more achievable
target than France right now.
But we all know it won’t do anything to help the Russians.
What’s your view, General Eisenhower?
The invasion of France is going to be the biggest
operation maybe ever.
The way I see it, we’re short on time.
Time to supply our bases in England for launch, time
to train enough troops.
How much time?
We can’t do it before ’44.
It’s true.
We’ll need an overwhelming force for the invasion of France.
So, in the meantime, we strike a blow in Italy.
All right.
Italy seems the most feasible option right now.
FDR was not risk averse, but he was patient
and he knew when to strike.
He had an uncanny sense of when to strike
and when to not strike.
FDR shows his tremendous leadership.
He realized that you have to have a powerful coalition.
You can’t go it alone, and you can’t lose the British
and you can’t fight without the British.
And so to keep this alliance together,
he said, OK, we’ll do that because they’re our ally
and then they’ll end up serving our interests.
At the end of the Casablanca conference,
Churchill goes to Roosevelt and suggests that they take a trip
out to Marrakesh.
Churchill wants Roosevelt to see the sun set over the Atlas
mountains before he goes home.
Uncle Joe is going to be furious when he finds out
there won’t be a second front in France this year.
He’ll get a second front when the time is right.
And we both know Stalin is not to be trusted.
He made a pact with Hitler once before.
Who’s to say he won’t do it again?
God help us if he does.
But at least we’ll get there in 1944.
We have to stand by our promises, and after the war,
we’ll lead by example.
What do you mean?
I’m talking about your colonies.
People have the right to self-determination.
I did not become prime minister in order to liquidate
the entire British Empire.
If we want freedom in Europe, that means freedom everywhere.
I’m telling you as a friend, if you
stick with the old way, Winston, there
will be a third world war.
And nobody would survive that.
In February of 1943, during the invasion of North Africa,
the Allies have the initiative.
They’ll drive across North Africa.
But America’s troops are young and not terribly well trained
yet, still trying to learn the lessons of armored warfare,
of combined operations using aviation.
The Germans will counter an attack at a place called
Kasserine Pass, and they’re going
to wreck part of the United States Army’s advance.
They’re going to roll it back upon itself.
The Americans were routed by the Germans.
There were some examples of cowardice.
There was not good leadership.
It was a flop, and it was kind of a demoralizing
one and a bad start.
At the same time, there’s an operation
halfway around the world in the Southwest Pacific
in Guadalcanal and Solomon Islands
whose casualties are much higher than they are at Torch.
In the Pacific theater, we’re going
to hop from island to island as we close in the defensive ring
on Japan.
At Guadalcanal, both sides are feeding in reinforcements.
And, of course, the casualties grow.
NARRATOR: Now it began, the toil and the terror that
makes Guadalcanal not a name but an emotion.
The casualties mount from the fighting,
from malaria, from dengue, from the rot and corruption
of the jungle, which knows not mercy.
It’s costly in men.
It’s costly in munitions.
It’s a very, very costly campaign.
General Marshall’s on his way.
Is Eleanor coming to dinner?
No.
She’s left for New York, giving a speech.
She wrote you a note.
I see.
I must have forgotten.
Thank you, grace.
Sir.
Have a seat, General.
Thank you, sir.
I came to let you know Eisenhower has the situation
in hand at the Kasserine Pass.
The Germans are withdrawing.
We can’t afford these command problems.
It’s my responsibility, sir.
Do we know the casualties yet?
7,000 of ours, but mostly wounded, or missing.
300 killed.
Where are we when 300 dead boys seems like a small number?
How many was it at Guadalcanal?
7,000.
Dead?
But they were both victories, sir.
Yes, I know.
7,000 killed or wounded.
At some point, it’s numbers on a ledger,
but each one of those ledgers has a mother or a father,
and it’s FDR who carries that weight
and considers how would you write that letter
to every mother and father.
It is the burden of command.
It is the burden of being the commander in chief.
He knew that this was not a battle.
It was a war.
He knew this was not the work of six months.
He knew it would be many years.
He had learned that you have to keep going.
And I think that as he led us into war,
there was a fortitude and a resilience that grew out
of his own personal fortitude and resilience.
Somebody said to FDR, how can you
go to sleep at night with all these hard decisions
that you’ve had to make and the pressures that are on you?
He said, if you spend two years just trying
to wiggle your big toe, you’re going to learn patience.
As the war unfolds, there is increasing pressure because
of the losses that Stalin and the Soviet Union
are sustaining to open a second front in the West.
So Stalin Churchill and Roosevelt
go to Tehran in November 1943, and the central question
from Stalin is, when are you going to attack in the West?
Tehran is the first opportunity for Roosevelt,
Churchill, and Stalin to all sit down, the three of them.
Roosevelt really relied on his own personal powers
of persuasion and really dependent
on personal connections.
FDR loved politics, and politics at the very highest
was keeping together a coalition of thoroughly disagreeable
potential enemies.
And although their three countries were in an alliance,
their interests were not parallel.
Stalin believed that Churchill and Roosevelt,
those capitalists, were ganging up on Stalin, as indeed they
were.
So Roosevelt’s got to figure out how to mollify Stalin when they
got together.
And during the war, FDR sent his advisor Harry Hopkins
to meet with Stalin.
Hopkins was the entire State Department
all by himself in this sort of unofficial capacity as advisor
to the president.
Harry, you’ve met the man.
What can I expect?
Well, he does not care much about clever strategies.
But he does care about killing as many Nazis as possible.
That’s clear.
But what’s he really like?
Besides being a butcher in his own right?
When I first met him, I was astonished how polite he was.
Perfect uniform, polished boots, cool as a cucumber.
When I was in Moscow, we could hear German guns.
No sign of fear from him.
No hesitation.
Go on.
I need something I can use.
He does have a sense of humor in his own peculiar way.
He laughs, but when you least expect it.
And he does not trust Churchill.
What matters is that he trusts me.
When the time comes, I’ll have to distance myself
from Winston.
He will not like that.
I can’t worry about that now.
We need Stalin to stick with us.
It shouldn’t be long now.
I’m glad to see you.
I’ve tried for a long time to make this happen,
and here we are.
[speaking russian]
That’s quite all right.
I believe men should meet face to face.
I was so terribly sorry to hear about your son.
[speaking russian]
I suppose we all must be prepared to sacrifice
everything to win this war.
Tehran Conference is the first conference where we now
have all of the big three.
NEWSREADER: Tehran, capital of Iran.
Here, 6,000 miles from Washington, the president
and prime minister meet their great ally
in the war against Nazi Germany, Marshal Joseph Stalin, premier
of Soviet Russia.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt has the relationship with Winston
Churchill, and Winston Churchill has met with Stalin before,
but Franklin Delano Roosevelt has not,
so he wants to develop a rapport,
and fundamentally he thinks, he is the only one on Earth that
should be able to go ahead and break this crusty exterior.
Stalin is ruthless, I would go so far as to say heartless,
but that Soviet Union was a necessary ally.
Roosevelt looked at Stalin not as his partner
or as his great friend, but as a leader who
was in charge of millions of soldiers that might wind up
saving American democracy.
One of Roosevelt’s enormous strengths
was that he could manipulate people and he could oppose them
or he could have them working with each other.
I always think one of the best metaphors for FDR
as a leader is, you know, he had spinning plates on his fingers
and on top of the plates were spinning forks,
and this whole apparatus was operating well because FDR was
there providing the leadership.
Roosevelt was careful to make sure that Stalin saw that there
was no solid Anglo-US front.
So at Tehran, that the dynamic of that US-British relationship
begins to change just a little bit,
but it must have come as quite a shock to Churchill
to see this gap begin to open up.
Imagine the human side for Churchill.
He’s been at war with Hitler since September 1st, 1939.
Stalin was allied with him at the time
and America was living in a fantasyland,
and now Churchill is becoming less important as these two
forces come up, and it was incredibly painful
for Churchill, and FDR didn’t do much to help.
[speaking russian]
Your aspirations are justified, Marshal Stalin,
but your numbers are off.
The Atlantic wall is not to be taken lightly,
and Hitler’s got to have more than eight Panzer divisions
there.
[speaking russian]
The prime minister is not haggling.
He just woke up on the wrong side of the bed,
and he was forced to wake up before noon
for the first time in 20 years.
[laughter]
And without his precious brandy to boot.
Now, I agree with the prime minister
that the risks for this invasion are high,
but it’s a greater risk to not take action now.
So I agree with you, Marshal Stalin,
that we must commit to an invasion of France immediately.
My doubts haven’t changed, but you stood by me after Tobruk.
I’ll stand by your decision now.
Then we have a lot of work ahead of us.
Churchill’s giving Ike a hard time over using those bombers
over France.
He still thinks if we keep bombing Germany we can avoid
the whole invasion.
Well, he’s wrong.
I’ll handle Winston.
The most important decision reached at Tehran is that
the United States and Britain will conduct Operation
Overlord, which becomes D-Day in Normandy.
Operation Overlord, or the Allied advance
from England into mainland Europe,
is the fastest way to Berlin.
Because the war is not over until a soldier
stands in Berlin with their heel on Adolf Hitler’s neck.
Roosevelt gets credit for choosing Dwight Eisenhower
to head the invasion of France and the war in Europe.
Roosevelt recognized in Eisenhower something
of a capacity that he himself had,
and that was this personal political skill, this ability
to keep divergent interests in other people
from destroying the central purpose toward which they’re
working.
Roosevelt was willing to delegate responsibility,
so he listened to Eisenhower.
Winston?
Yes, I figured you’d still be up.
Listen, Ike assures me it’s essential to divert
those bombers to targets in France.
Yes, I know France is our ally and there
will be civilian casualties, but I’ve got to leave the choice up
to the commander.
It’s his responsibility and his decision.
Well, that’s really all there is to it.
You too, Winston.
Get some rest.
Good night.
Your daughter sent me.
She wants to know if you plan on sleeping tonight,
or ever again.
Maybe she’s right.
We’ve got two months to pull off the biggest invasion
the world has ever seen.
And if it fails, we won’t get a second chance.
I’ll sleep when it’s over.
You could see, really, in the end of ’43 and early ’44 that
hollows were coming under Roosevelt’s eyes,
that his color wasn’t very good, that he was having some trouble
breathing, that he was having headaches at night.
I imagine the anxiety he must have felt about knowing
that something was wrong but not being able to talk to anybody
about it.
Who could he talk to about the fact that his body was failing?
Who could he talk to about his anxieties about the war?
Because for everybody else, he had
to keep up as much of a cover as he could
and not let people know what he was really feeling inside,
so it must have been, I imagine, a really lonely time for him.
And Anna, his daughter, saw this, finally persuaded
her father to go and have a checkup done at Bethesda Naval
Hospital.
He meets with a young cardiologist,
and he was stunned when he saw Roosevelt’s visage.
He could see that he was in the midst of congestive heart
disease.
Things are so bad that Roosevelt’s doctor recommends
that he stay in bed to arrest the deterioration.
He’s being told that he can’t work more than 10 to 15 hours
a week.
This is during among the most critical times
in world history.
To say that there’s a lot riding on D-Day,
Operation Overlord, is a massive understatement.
Operation Overlord is the culmination
of years of effort by Franklin Roosevelt
to convince Americans that they needed to be prepared
for the war, and then once we entered the war, taking
an army of just a couple 100,000 and building it
up putting people into uniform by the millions.
Just the logistics of that alone is pretty staggering,
and training all those folks and outfitting all those folks.
It is the largest military operation ever undertaken
in history.
It involves so many people, so many layers
of military apparatus, from transports and tanks,
ammunition, soldiers and sailors, communication devices,
aircraft, tremendous amount of coordination.
It’s an extraordinarily difficult operation.
The Atlantic wall is a system of defense
that the Germans start to create from the moment they take
Europe.
This is what the Allies have to break in order
to get into Europe.
It’s basically a 1,700 mile wall that starts in Norway,
goes all the way to the Spanish coast.
If you think about the Atlantic wall as these 15,000 bunkers
as being the skeleton, the trenches that connect them
would be the sinew that connects those bones.
The cannons would be the muscles that make it all work.
In front of that would be 6,000 mines, the obstacles
on the beaches, the obstacles in the field to keep
gliders from landing.
That would be the armor or the skin.
And then ultimately the soldiers that defend it
would be the blood that pump through it.
In the buildup to what becomes Operation Overlord,
the D-Day invasion, the Allies create all kinds of diversions,
all kinds of fake radio traffic, even using fake tanks
and things like that to create the illusion that this may be
a three-pronged or a two-pronged operation,
all to get the Germans to not massed their forces at what
ultimately becomes the main point of contact at Normandy.
We need waves that are less than five feet.
We’re going to land at dawn.
We’d like to have a half a moon.
We’d like to have 2,500 feet of cloud ceiling.
We’d like to have at least 50% visibility.
How do we get those conditions to happen?
On the eve of D-Day, this is the culmination of years
of preparation, years of building the supplies,
years of coalition building.
Now there’s nothing more that FDR can do.
He had to believe that he had supplied the soldiers the best
they could, that they were trained
and they were ready for this, and there was nothing he could
do but depend upon those soldiers.
Across June 6th, we’re going to put 155,000 soldiers
on the beach on one day.
You’ve got 7,000 ships, 13,000 aircraft all in support
of this.
It’s the greatest joint Army, Air Force,
Navy coalition multi-service military operation
in the history of Earth.
If you were in the first wave of D-Day,
you would’ve left your port early in the morning of June
6th.
You would have made your way across rough seas.
You were probably seasick.
They tried to give you some breakfast.
You took it and now you’ve thrown that up.
All the toilets are full.
All the rails are full.
You’ve now gotten on a landing craft.
Climb down a slippery rope to get in that landing craft.
You would have been splashed by sea waves,
soaking wet carrying 60 pounds of gear.
You can hear the aircraft go overhead.
You hope they’re doing their part.
And in front of you you would see German defenses, mines,
and barbed wire, artillery and mortars and machine guns.
Then all of a sudden the boat would hit the beach,
and then they would drop the ramp.
FDR had made the decisions he could make and was now
at the mercy of events, of time and tide quite literally.
Come in.
From General Eisenhower, Mr. President.
10 seconds, Mr. President.
And 5, 4.
My fellow Americans, in this poignant hour
I ask you to join me in prayer.
Almighty God, our sons, pride of our nation,
this day have set upon a mighty endeavor.
They struggle to preserve our republic, our religion,
and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.
They will need life lessons.
Their role will be long and hard, for the enemy is strong.
Success may not come with rushing speed,
but we shall return again and again.
By the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.
We shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy.
Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances.
Lead us to the saving of our country,
and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell
a shore of peace, and a peace that will let all of men
live in freedom.
Thy will be done, Almighty God.
Amen.
That speech was arguably the largest mass prayer
in human history.
100 million Americans listened.
Church bells rang, and everybody went
to churches and synagogues.
The impulse to pray was overwhelming.
By noon on June 6th, 1944, even defenses
around Omaha Beach, bloody Omaha Beach, will start to break,
and now what we have is the invasion is a success.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s prayer speaks volumes.
He’s responsible for speaking for all freedom loving people.
What Operation Overlord stands for, its hope.
Liberty is not just this ethereal idea.
Liberty is coming.
The summer of 1944, the Allies now have a foothold
in northwestern Europe and are able to push across France
and directly into Germany.
The war is still unfolding.
The war in Japan has no end in sight.
So for FDR, it was--
the job was unfinished.
The war was not won.
After D-Day, he feels a sense that it’s close to the end,
but he has to get there.
So the question was, will Roosevelt
run for a fourth term?
You have to remember the enormous emotional toll
being the commander in chief had taken on FDR.
He was giving orders that were sending boys into battle
every day, who were dying.
And he could not imagine walking away from that responsibility
for himself.
Sacrifice was everything to him.
He believed that he had a duty to serve his office,
to serve his country until he could no longer do it.
FDR’s decision process seems to largely lie on a sense
that, my work is not done yet.
The country still needs an optimistic leader,
an aspirational leader.
I think one of his biggest strengths was his imagination.
How can we open the doors for the future?
He has a lot more to do.
NEWSREADER: President Roosevelt signs GI Joe’s Bill of Rights
that guarantees a returning soldier
a year of unemployment insurance and helps pay
for the completion of his schooling.
The GI Bill was created to assist veterans returning
from war so that they had a substantial leg up economically
as they were trying to look for housing, look for homes,
or go back to school.
When the GI Bill of Rights passed, he was so happy.
I think he wanted to be the man who would shape the peace,
and he thought he was probably in a better position
to do that than anyone else.
The real concern is, his health is failing,
and there are media outlets who are making
that point in subtle ways that, hey, you know, you’re not
looking well.
By 1944, FDR is dying of congestive heart failure.
You can see that FDR is sick.
He doesn’t look as well.
He’s lost his rosy good cheer.
And he’s not going out much.
He’s not giving speeches.
And there’s some question, is he up to the demands
of being president?
And so when he was in Pearl Harbor
for some strategic sessions with MacArthur and Nimitz,
he went to visit the troops in a particular ward
where they had lost limbs.
And he deliberately told the people,
I want to be wheeled in.
I want them to see me in my wheelchair.
And he very, very rarely was ever seen in his wheelchair
beyond the inner circle, but he thought
it was important for them to see that he was disabled, that he
had lost use of certain limbs, but he could lead a full life
again.
It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.
You a sailor?
I was.
I’m a bit of a sea man myself.
Nothing soothes me more than being out in the open water.
Yeah, me too.
That’s over now.
Well, if you want to sail again, then you’ll sail.
That’s a joke.
Are you telling me that I don’t sail?
No, I--
Well, if I can do it, you can.
Tell you what, if you find the strength to get back out
to sea, I’ll be sure to get out there with you.
NEWSREADER: At the International Teamsters Union dinner,
President Roosevelt makes his first campaign speech of 1944.
Here we are again after four years,
and what years they have been.
The 1944 election is not an easy one for Franklin
Roosevelt. He’s in some trouble.
For his political opponents, Dewey, the Republican running
against him, they’re starting to draw attention to Franklin
Roosevelt not being out there.
Where is he?
And is he up to the demands of being president?
And at the same time, there is a conspiracy theory
that’s been floated by the Republicans,
that FDR has sent a destroyer, a warship, to get his dog Fala.
There’s this rumor about how FDR had left his dog Fala
at a base in Alaska, at great cost to the taxpayer sent
a destroyer to go and fetch his dog.
Completely false.
And so FDR is making a campaign speech at a Teamsters dinner,
and he said, enough of this.
He knew that he needed to project real strength.
These Republican leaders have not
been content with attacks on me, or on my wife, or on my sons.
No, not content with that, they now include my little dog Fala.
[laughter]
Of course, I don’t resent attacks,
and my family don’t resent attacks,
but Fala does resent them.
[laughter]
Roosevelt shows he’s back.
He’s taunting his enemies.
He’s having fun with them.
He’s not a sick old man.
He’s the great politician Franklin Roosevelt.
You know, Fala’s scotch, and being a Scotty,
as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers
in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had
left him behind on an Aleutian island
and sent a destroyer back to find him,
at a cost to the taxpayer of two or three or eight
or $20 million, his Scotch soul was furious.
He has not been the same dog since.
When he gave the great Fala speech, the old master still
has it, newspapers said.
So time and again he could rally himself.
The next day, it’s played and replayed.
It’s printed and reprinted.
I mean, if anything could go viral in 1944, this does.
NEWREADER: Crowds at Ebbets Baseball Field, Brooklyn greet
President Roosevelt starting his tour of New York City.
Mr. Roosevelt has a special word for Brooklyn Dodger fans.
You know, I come from the state of New York,
and I’ve got to make a terrible confession to you.
I have never been in Ebbets Field before.
They planned a long, hard, arduous day for him
to prove that he was still up to the job,
and he was going to go in an open touring car
through the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens
and Bronx and Brooklyn.
They didn’t plan on the fact that there would be a drenching
rain and that it would be freezing cold that day.
And people look at his ability to do this.
I think it went for 50 miles, and they say, all those rumors
that FDR is in bad health, those must be wrong,
otherwise he could not have done that this day.
That day in New York City was a masquerade.
He was pretending to be much more healthy than he was,
and he always knew that politics was drama.
FDR once said to the actor Orson Welles,
you and I are the two greatest actors in America.
And almost like the actor being taken off stage,
he was taken to Eleanor Roosevelt’s apartment
in New York City, her separate apartment, which he has never
seen.
Eleanor was traveling so much, and she had become that person
that she could no longer go back from.
And in some ways it turned out to be fine for both of them.
He had enormous respect for her, more than he had had before.
Quite the life you’ve had.
Yes.
Not exactly what I expected.
You always try to do what’s right.
And people see that.
You must be hungry.
I can scramble you some eggs.
Don’t trouble yourself.
I should get cleaned up and get out of your way.
Why not stay here?
I’ve already put your room together.
Thank you, Babs.
But I’m speaking at the Waldorf in a few hours.
People are expecting me.
You’re running yourself ragged.
You’re sure you won’t stay?
I should go.
Please don’t worry about me.
But I do.
I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly
swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president
of the United States, so help me God.
Winter, 1944, I think a lot of Americans
expected the war to have been over
after the success of Overlord.
The forces are still not actually in Germany yet.
In December 1944, Hitler’s unwilling to accept defeat,
so he comes up with a daring scheme involving 10 Panzer
divisions to smash through the Allied lines
where they’re at their weakest.
NEWSREADER: In the Christmas season of 1944,
the German army unleashed a desperate offensive.
The Germans conduct this counteroffensive that today we
call the Battle of the Bulge.
It’s a surprise offensive that takes place in December 1944.
The Battle of the Bulge is called the bulge
because there was a bulge in the Allied line,
the drive in ostensibly to get to Antwerp all
the way on the Belgian coast.
When the Germans begin their assault,
they have bad weather on their side,
so American airpower is negated.
The German tanks and artillery can just
slice through the Americans of the British and slaughter.
The Americans lost 19,000 men.
10,000 men surrendered.
NEWSREADER: The Nazi party is willing to sacrifice every soul
in Germany to stave off defeat.
The Germans could not afford any mistakes, because they
couldn’t replace their resources and the people that
had been lost.
There was a close moment during the Battle of the Bulge
when things could have gone very badly,
but eventually the United States wears down the other side.
NEWSREADER: The attack was blunted,
the spearhead stopped, the Nazi columns thrown back
by men who had flung themselves into the breach.
The Battle of the Bulge is probably
the last German attempt to try to change
the strategic momentum of the war.
Once that fails, they really are fighting
on the defensive in the West.
In January 1945, the Soviets uncover the concentration
camps, and they were completely unprepared for what they saw.
The Allies had learned that the Nazis wanted
to commit mass murder of European Jews very early on,
and at this point the Allies could no longer
deny what was happening in the concentration camps.
My sister was in Auschwitz.
When she came home post-war, she said the one thing
that we never understood while in Auschwitz, we
saw large groups of American and Allied planes flying high
up in the air, and we stood there praying that they should
come down and bomb the gas chambers
and bomb the crematoria and bomb the whole damn camp,
not caring about what would happen to our own lives.
And they just flew on and never came to help us.
We could not understand why they would never attack this death
factory.
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill
should have destroyed those camps, even though there would
have been many lives destroyed along with them.
It’s a complicated problem, and we should not understate
just how deep the antisemitism was in major parts
of the American government.
Roosevelt asked his military advisors, what could we do?
Could we bomb the rail lines that lead into the camps?
And the answer was, we’ve been trying to bomb rail lines
for the last three years, and it’s really hard
and they can rebuild overnight.
But I suspect that Roosevelt thought,
what if we bomb somewhere near the camps and the bombs
go astray and hit the camps?
Then the Germans might very well say it was the American bombs
that killed the Jews.
There was an argument on the part of the military
that it’s better off to bomb factories and prevent
the production of war so the war will end earlier,
and that will help the situation as a whole.
Roosevelt said the German leaders are going to be held
strictly accountable.
They will be brought to the bar of justice.
It’s January 1945, and it looks
like finally after a half decade of war, the war in Europe
will finally come to a close sometime in the late spring
or early summer.
And with this brings pressing questions
that Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin have to address,
and they’re questions that they feel
they can only address in person.
So they decide that they’re going to have a conference
together at the LaGuardia Palace on the Black Sea, the farthest
west that Stalin will go.
NEWSREADER: Yalta on the Black Sea
was the scene of a big three meeting.
Here starts a series of talks that will profoundly influence
the diplomatic and political future of the world.
February of 1945, they’re starting to plan the post-war
world.
And you have three people that see the world very differently.
The big three arrive at Yalta with distinct goals.
Roosevelt wants to bring the Soviet Union into the war
against the Japanese, but Roosevelt also
has a personal goal that’s looking even farther
into the future.
After the war’s over, he wants to create a new organization
for international peace, the United Nations.
FDR believes the United Nations will help the world
resolve its problems, will help de-escalate militarism and make
the world a safer place into the future.
For Churchill and Stalin, their objectives for Yalta
are really centered around Poland.
Britain went to war in defense of Polish sovereignty in 1939,
and the Polish government has been in exile in London
ever since.
Churchill wants to make sure that when all of this is over,
that Poland is free, that they are independent
and have self determination.
Stalin wants to make sure that they
are going to have a government in Poland that’s controlled
by Stalin.
FDR never thought that Soviets and Americans ultimately
had the same political ideals.
But as a tough political leader, Roosevelt knew at the beginning
of 1945, the only way to finish off this war
is to keep the Soviets fighting, and that
may mean allowing Stalin to do a lot of things
that Roosevelt would have preferred that he not do.
[speaking russian]
Of course we want Poland’s government to be friendly,
but most importantly, it must be decided by the Polish people.
Which means, Marshal Stalin, the members
of the Polish administration who’ve been taking refuge
in my country should be included in the government,
but you have shut them out and put your own people in.
[speaking russian]
I’m assuming that you will honor our previous agreement
that Poland will enjoy free elections
under American and British supervision.
[speaking russian]
Then swear to me that you will guarantee free elections
in Poland.
[speaking russian]
I will need your word on something else too.
I want you to join the war against Japan.
The legacy of Yalta was complicated.
When they depart, they have reached agreements
that are going to lead to peace, to a better world.
And yet Churchill is deeply concerned
that Stalin has no intention of honoring his agreements,
especially when it comes to guaranteeing free elections
in Poland.
Roosevelt does succeed in drawing the Soviet Union
into his plan for the United Nations.
He also walks away with a commitment from Stalin
to join the fight in the Pacific.
We now look back on the Yalta Conference in 1945,
and many people would say why did Roosevelt give up Eastern
Europe?
Was it because he was old and sick?
No, it was because the Soviet army owned an awful lot
of Europe, and no matter how charming or how angry Roosevelt
got at this conference, his personal skill was not
enough to overcome that.
Roosevelt believed that he was going
to keep going back to Stalin to negotiate issue
by issue as things unfolded.
He didn’t see Yalta as this climactic act.
It was not supposed to be the final word.
Sir.
What do you think of the changes?
The speech is fine, Sam.
They won’t like some of the things I did out there,
but I did my best.
I think we should forget the braces for tonight, Sis.
I don’t think that’s a good idea.
Pa, don’t give them any more reason to criticize you.
This is who I am.
I have nothing left to prove.
FDR returns to the United States on March 1st, 1945,
comes before a joint session of Congress.
[applause]
You can imagine the moment with a filled chamber,
the doors open, and FDR is wheeled down
the aisle in his wheelchair.
Congressmen and senators who’ve been dealing with him for years
had never seen him in a wheelchair before.
I hope that you will pardon me for an unusual posture
of sitting down, but I know that you will realize that it makes
it a lot easier for me in not having to carry about 10 pounds
of steel around on the bottom of my legs,
and also because of the fact that I have just completed
a 14,000 mile trip.
It has been a long journey.
[applause]
The Congress just felt a sense of love for him
because he had acknowledged his infirmity.
And it’s the first time he has ever admitted in public
to his disability.
Both Eleanor and Frances Perkins later
commented that it wasn’t so much that FDR was admitting
to the American people that he had a disability.
He was admitting it to himself.
In the month after his address to Congress,
FDR has a frantic set of legislation and things
he has to deal with.
He’s exhausted.
He’s in poor shape.
I think he just felt, I’ve got to give it everything I can
just to make sure the war comes to the right end,
the peace treaty is right, and that I’ve
got people established on a different road toward peace.
Roosevelt had a sense of his own immortality
that was borderline irrational.
He actually thought he was going to serve out until 1948, ’49,
and then he was going to go to Hyde Park
and world leaders were going to come and fly in and bring
their problems to him as a former president
and he would solve them.
Finally, towards the end of March,
he goes down to Warm Springs to recover.
And despite the fact that his health was failing,
FDR was still focused now on the first meeting of the United
Nations, which is to take place in San Francisco in late April.
But he gets the Warm Springs, he’s in such bad shape
that he has to be carried off the train and put into his car.
The population of Warm Springs, who had always come out
to meet him, when they see what condition he’s in,
literally gasp and ask each other, what happened to him?
What’s the matter?
Warm Springs had always been the place that gave him
that resuscitation of his energy because of the original time
of what Warm Springs meant to him.
He went back there again and again almost
like he was finding the strength in that ground
there that he had once had.
And it appears to people around him
that FDR is actually starting on that path towards recovery
and that maybe he’ll be strong enough
to go to San Francisco for the opening of the United Nations.
This was what he was working towards,
and he was very hopeful that this would mean something
for the future.
Sir.
Yes, let’s go.
We have a lot to do.
It’s Thursday, April 12th, 1945.
Warm Springs, Georgia.
FDR had just been working on a speech
he was to deliver the next day.
In the speech he was going to talk about how
the only limitation to our dreams for tomorrow
would be our doubts of today.
Let us move forward with strong and active faith.
That was the last speech he was supposed to give.
A Russian portrait painter had been there painting him
in his Navy cape.
A cousin, Polly Delano is there, and Lucy Mercer Rutherford
is there, the woman he was never supposed to see again
after 1918, but who had been back in his life.
He has an aneurysm.
Among his last words were, I have a terrific headache,
as he faded.
Mrs. Roosevelt.
Yes?
I’m sorry, but you’re needed at the White House right away.
Right away?
It gives me great pleasure to introduce
my friend and the first lady of the White House, Mrs. Eleanor
Roosevelt.
[applause]
Eleanor gave her talk, and she said she knew that something
dreadful had happened.
As his cousin Daisy Suckley said,
Franklin Roosevelt, the hope of the world, has died.
Eleanor summons vice president of Truman to the White House,
and she put her hand on his shoulder,
and she says, Harry, the president is dead.
And Truman says, oh, Mrs. Roosevelt, I’m so sorry.
You know, what can I do for you?
And she says, that’s the wrong question,
because you’re the one that’s in trouble now.
From his beloved second home at Warm Springs,
Georgia, the body of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
moves on to the first stages of its journey
to his final resting place.
There’s immense public grieving.
There’s this sense that the glue that had held the country
together had cracked, that someone
who had seemed perennial was actually temporal.
And "The York Times" that day wrote, "Men
will thank God on their knees 1,000 years from now
that Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House when he was."
There was a daily government list
of casualties that went out, and the top casualty that day was,
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, commander in chief.
There was a sense of his being the only president for lots
of people that they’d ever known.
12 years is a long time.
Having carried them through the Depression,
carried them through the war.
Feeling a sense of connection to him.
The kids who went to the Civilian Conservation Camps
become the soldiers in World War II.
There’s a story of somebody who’s
crying during the funeral, and they say to him, an old man,
he’s crying, did you know President Roosevelt?
He said, no, but he knew me.
Franklin Roosevelt rescued democracy and capitalism
in their hours of maximum danger,
and the fact that we have a market economy and a republic
if we can keep it is in no small measure because
of his fundamental belief in the constitutional order.
Ambition is the most mysterious part of leadership.
FDR had this ambition that’s large,
but it’s for something larger than himself.
FDR had this great gift for understanding what
the American people needed.
FDR made us better than we are.
He could call on our better angels.
I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people.
There was something about that voice.
There was something about that smile that
suggested it’s going to be OK.
Roosevelt opened the eyes of Americans to positive effects
that government could have on individual lives.
Everybody talks at the end about how he’ll be remembered
for having gotten us through the Depression,
carrying us through World War II, and there’s Social Security
and all these things you can see in the history books.
He would say, it’s the bond with the people
that I’ve established and that I care for.
Underneath all those laws are people,
and they’re people whose lives he’s affected
and people who he helped to get them
back on their feet in the ’30s to be ready to be the Greatest
Generation in the ’40s, and I think that’s what he’d
want to be remembered for.
Americans have always been lucky.
We got Lincoln when we needed him,
we had Washington when we needed him,
and we had FDR when we needed him.
Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have
to fear is fear itself.