WWII 70 years later: FDR truly was leader of the free world

When Eleanor Roosevelt heard Harry Truman declare 70 years ago that the Second World War was over, she said she found herself “filled with very curious sensations.”

She was pleased at last to be living “in a world where peace has come,” she said, but she couldn’t bring herself to celebrate. “The weight of suffering which has engulfed the world” was too great for that. Besides, she wrote to her daughter, Anna, “I miss Pa’s voice and the words he would have spoken.”

Much of the country, much of the world, felt the same way.

Franklin Roosevelt had died in early April of 1945, less than a month before Nazi Germany surrendered. He had been president for a dozen years, four years longer than any other man.

Older Americans remembered how his confident voice and willingness to act on behalf of those who could not help themselves had helped restore confidence during the Depression years. Younger people didn’t know an America without him, and the radio had made him a familiar visitor even in those living rooms where he was not always welcome.

Overseas, the journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick recalled, “People ... spoke of him simply as ‘The President,’ as if he were President of the World.”

It seemed especially sad that he had not lived to see the Allied triumph for which he could be said to have worked himself to death at just 63 years of age.

When Roosevelt came into office, America counted for little overseas; Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then the Army’s chief of staff, had ranked our Army as 16th-best in the world, behind those of Romania and Spain. At Roosevelt’s death, the United States was the most powerful nation in the history of the world.

Many factors contributed to that transformation, but none were more important than FDR’s refusal to be intimidated by tyrants, his absolute conviction that traditional American isolationism would not work in the modern world, and his unshakable belief that he and his countrymen would prevail, whatever the odds.

“The President’s great tragedy,” McCormick wrote, “was not that he died on the eve of victory but that he did not live to make the peace.”

No one knows how much he could have achieved in the postwar world. But his impact has lasted, nonetheless.

“The world we now live in,” the late British historian and Labor politician Roy Jenkins wrote, “is not Churchill’s, with its vanished British empire, and not Stalin’s, with his Soviet Union but a memory. ... (Our world) is still Franklin Roosevelt’s world, more fragmented yet with population doubled, weapons and communications revolutionized, dangerous in new ways but essentially recognizable. For good or ill, the United States is at its center, as it came to be in his time, and the presidency is at the center of its government, a position he restored and fostered. His story and he remain vital to the darkened future.”

Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns co-wrote the PBS documentary series “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.” The seven-disc set is available on Blu-ray and DVD at ShopPBS.org/Roosevelts or by calling 800-752-9727. A companion book and CD soundtrack are also available at ShopPBS.org