With the exception of the attached piece, there is no magazine article in existence that illustrated so clearly the soul-piercing pain that descended upon the city of New York when the word got around that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died. YANK correspondent Bill Davidson walked from one neighborhood to the next recording much of what he saw: "Nowhere was grief so open as in the poorest districts of the city. In Old St. Patrick's in the heart of the Italian district on the lower East Side, bowed, shabby figures came and went, and by the day after the President died hundreds of candles burned in front of the altar. 'Never' a priest said 'have so many candles burned in this church'."
"A woman clasped her 8-year-old son and said, 'Not in my lifetime or in yours will we again see such a man.'" Here is a series of articles from YANK magazine that reported on the funeral of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One of these four correspondents was assigned to write about the general sense of loss that New Yorkers felt upon learning of the death of their president:
"Not in my lifetime or in yours, will we again see see such a man."
CLICK HERE... to read the obituary of President Kennedy.
"At 5:45 p.m. telephones rang simultaneously in the Washington bureaus of the AP, UP and [the International News Service] on a conference call from the White House. The familiar voice of Steve Early, who had retired only recently after twelve years as White House press secretary, called the roll to make sure all were listening. Then: 'Here is a flash. The President died suddenly early this afternoon'"
"Swiftly the news went around the world... No president had meant quite so much to the press as Mr. Roosevelt. Few in history had been more consistently and bitterly opposed by a majority of publishers. Perhaps none had more admirers and fewer detractors among working newsmen. No president since his cousin Theodore, who coined the word 'muckracker', had on occasion denounced press and newsmen alike more harshly. Yet most newsmen forgave him his peevish moments. Certainly none had been more news-rich and none had ever received the voluminous coverage that President Roosevelt had. Over the years, the Roosevelt twice-a-week press conference was the Capital's biggest newsmaker." It was no secret around Washington that President Franklin Roosevelt was partial to the U.S. Navy. The admirals and other senior officers of the navy certainly knew - and loved it. The attached essay was an appreciative salute to FDR composed shortly after his death by Admiral William Pratt (1869 – 1957):
"Other men, military in training and veterans of successful land campaigns, have sat in the White House, but never before in the history of our country has any man ever sat there whose instincts at heart were essentially those of a sailor."
Click here to read about FDR as Under-Secretary of the Navy.
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