Fdr Simply A Giant Among Men

You never forget the mournful whistle or the darkened train or the casket in the brightly lighted car.

It was 50 years ago and Franklin D. Roosevelt was dead. In my Southern boyhood town, time stopped.

Nothing cuts deeper tracks in American memory than a president’s sudden death. The Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations scarred their generations. Just ask anyone where he or she was when JFK was shot.

But on April 12, 1945, when radios told us of Roosevelt’s death, there was hollow shock. Who could believe it?

When you’re young, your father’s immortal. Roosevelt had been in the White House so long (more than 12 years), he’d been our reassuring voice through the Great Depression and World War II, and newspapers never had revealed his war-beaten frailty.

So you were sure FDR would live and be president forever.

Now, on the 50th anniversary of his death, much is being said about Roosevelt’s legacy - ironically, when 1990s’ politicians are hellbent on ripping it apart.

But I’ll stick with how it felt as Roosevelt’s funeral train - grinding along its 800-mile journey from Warm Springs, Ga., to Washington, D.C. - passed through my hometown.

Cool April evening, with dogwoods budding in Charlotte, N.C. I was sitting on the porch of a Harding High School friend, Martha Hibbard, with my buddy, Tommy Coursey. We were gabbing lazily of the future. I was an apprentice sportswriter, headed for the Navy.

Then there was a melancholy whistle, floating across the pines. Tommy and I looked at each other wide-eyed. Somebody said, “The Roosevelt train!”

Wordlessly, the two of us began running nonstop the mile and a half up the Trade Street hill. Chests heaving, we stopped at the Southern depot tracks.

The train had pulled into the station, with lights of every car but one dimmed. The last car was illuminated like the stage in a darkened theater.

You could see the raised bronze casket holding Roosevelt’s body. At each corner, a serviceman - the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines all were represented - stood in dress uniform, somberly erect.

I’ve read that along the train’s route, people prayed or wept or sang “Rock of Ages” and “Abide With Me.” But my memory is of the stillness. You heard the engine chugging. Every eye was riveted on that floodlighted casket. People huddled in the dark, a silent choir. Every hair on my body was standing up, like an awestruck animal’s. No use for words.

In Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, “No Ordinary Time,” Eleanor Roosevelt said of the funeral journey, “I lay awake in my berth all night with the window shade up, looking out at the countryside he loved and watching the faces of the people in the stations …”

I wondered if Eleanor Roosevelt had looked out at us, two young men under small-town street lights, dumbstruck by death.

This week, I wandered to the Potomac River where bulldozers are digging the site of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, scheduled to open in 1997.

I knew there had been controversy - FDR, who never walked again after his polio attack, won’t be shown with braces or a wheelchair. “Of 125,000 photos in the FDR Library, only one shows him in a wheelchair,” Dorann Gunderson, FDR Memorial director, told me. “We think we’re honoring his wishes.”

Probably only five of 100 Americans knew Roosevelt was paralyzed. There was much else we didn’t know: FDR’s unhappy marriage to Eleanor, the liaison with Lucy Mercer Rutherford. His indifference to the Nazis’ gassing of Jews.

But we heard the aristocratic “Fireside Chats” drawl on our Philcos and saw the jaunty, cigaretteholder grin on Pathe newsreels.

That he led us through America’s darkest modern crises was greatness.

Standing beneath fading cherry trees at the FDR Memorial site, looking at the sunlit Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, I tried to sort out how we’ve changed.

“All we have to fear is fear itself,” FDR said. Now, 50 years later, cynical, safe and grouchy, all we fear is government itself. What would FDR think of House Speaker Newt Gingrich? Maybe he’d laugh at Newt copping his phrases. But I can imagine Roosevelt’s scorn (and Eleanor’s fury) at Gingrich & Co. smashing the safety nets FDR had erected for the downtrodden and the elderly.

Something’s been lost. In FDR’s 1930s, we were poor, wearing secondhand clothes and living on beans, then were thrust into an enormous war. Yet, there was confidence, trust, a feeling we were in this together. The country is bigger, richer, faster now, but the politicians seem small and scared.

You want to believe, despite a computer-TVmicrowave society, that Americans still are gutsy in hard times. That crisis produces great men. That in a world-class jam - not petty, juggle-the-budget 1990s’ tantrums - a new FDR would show up.

I stood by FDR’s memorial site, with jets flying overhead, and tried to remember the Roosevelt funeral train that night 50 years ago. All I could picture were the dark cars with the floodlighted casket slowly moving away, past Elmwood cemetery, past the textile mills.

The last red lights flickered into history.

xxxx