Roosevelt, serving an unprecedented fourth term and visibly exhausted from twelve years steering the nation through the Depression and World War II, collapsed while sitting for a portrait and died hours later at age 63. Vice President Harry Truman, largely uninformed about the atomic bomb project and postwar planning, was sworn in that evening to finish the war and shape the peace.
Roosevelt had traveled to his "Little White House" in Warm Springs, Georgia, to rest, worn down by heart disease his doctors had long concealed from the public. On the afternoon of April 12, while artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff painted his portrait, he suddenly said, "I have a terrific pain in the back of my head," and lost consciousness. He never woke.
His death, just 26 days before Nazi Germany's surrender, stunned a country that had known no other president for over a decade; many young Americans could not remember any other man in the White House. Harry Truman, kept largely outside Roosevelt's inner circle on matters like the Manhattan Project, learned of the atomic bomb's existence only after becoming president.
Roosevelt's funeral train traveled from Georgia to Washington and then to Hyde Park, New York, with hundreds of thousands of mourners lining the tracks, many weeping openly for the only president many Black Americans, union workers, and Depression survivors felt had ever fought for them.
Key people: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman