Roosevelt, Franklin D., Declining health and death

Roosevelt had been suffering from advanced arteriosclerosis for more than a year before the Yalta Conference. His political opponents had tried to make much of his obviously declining health during the campaign of 1944, when he ran for a fourth term against Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York. But Roosevelt campaigned actively and won the election by a popular vote of 25 million to 22 million and an electoral college vote of 432 to 99. (See primary source document: Fourth Inaugural Address.) By the time of his return from Yalta, however, he was so weak that for the first time in his presidency he spoke to Congress while sitting down. Early in April 1945 he traveled to his cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia—the “Little White House”—to rest. On the afternoon of April 12, while sitting for a portrait, he suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and he died a few hours later. With him at his death were two cousins, Laura Delano and Margaret Suckley, and Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd (by then a widow), with whom he had renewed his relationship a few years before.