Recommended by Anthony G. Pazzanita
The sudden death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945 immediately transferred power to Vice-President Harry S. Truman, but that was perhaps the least complicated outcome of that fateful day. As soon as Roosevelt died, a wide array of personalities and political calculations suddenly assumed great importance, yet in many cases remained unknown to the public for years to come. The government found it imperative on short notice to carry the body of the late president from Warm Springs, Georgia to Washington, D.C. (and soon after to FDR’s final resting place at Hyde Park, N.Y.) in a manner which would satisfy a grieving and deeply anxious citizenry who lined the funeral train’s right of way for much of its route up the Eastern Seaboard. Moreover, FDR’s widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, found her own grief immeasurably heightened by the fact that her husband had died in the presence of his longtime mistress, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, who hastily departed Warm Springs well before Eleanor could arrive in Georgia. North of Washington, the funeral train conveyed virtually the entire upper echelon of the U.S. Government in unarmored Pullman cars through major urban areas, something enormously risky then for a nation still at war and all but unthinkable today.
The author of FDR’s Funeral Train, Robert Klara, describes President Roosevelt’s final journey home with keen attention to all the details, personal, political and logistical. We learn, for example, of President Truman’s nearly frantic attempts to learn of various critical matters – including the secret of the atomic bomb – of which he had not been informed as Vice-President, the rivalries verging on ill-feeling between the members of the former Roosevelt Administration and the incoming, and often considerably less qualified and even unsavory, Truman loyalists, and that one passenger on the train, Lauchlin Currie, was a Soviet agent inside FDR’s economic policy team, something that would soon be suspected, yet would never be proven until the 1990s after Currie’s death. Klara’s singular accomplishment gives the reader a sense of all these factors and more, while at the same time exhibiting a thorough understanding of the logistics, security, and at times unusual character and routing of the funeral train, procedures which were duplicated nearly every time FDR made one of his numerous trips by rail during his 12 years in office. The author’s fast-paced and nearly seamless narrative compresses a great deal of American history into less than 200 pages. Matters of state, affairs of the heart, stories of treachery, and the details of rail travel, in other words, are found here in one volume. Highly recommended.
