FDR's Shame

One of Franklin D. Roosevelt's worst moments came in 1939 when he refused entry to the St. Louis, a German ship filled with 937 Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Nazi persecution. The ship was first denied entry into Cuba. Then, despite desperate and repeated pleas to President Roosevelt, the ship was turned away from American soil. Canada was the next country to turn a cold shoulder to the St. Louis, forcing the ship to return to Europe where passengers finally disembarked in the United Kingdom, Belgium and the Netherlands. While the majority of the passengers survived World War II, research by Scott Miller and Sarah Ogilvie, as documented in their book Refuge Denied, estimates that 254 were eventually killed in the Holocaust. The story of the St. Louis has been told in the movie Voyage of the Damned.

Shhh...Don't Tell the Vice President

Running for an unprecedented fourth term (now forbidden by the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) Franklin D Roosevelt was growing increasingly ill. As a result, he ditched Vice President Henry Wallace in favor of Senator Harry Truman. Just 82 days after his inauguration, Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia, leaving the presidency to Truman. It was only then, as he inherited the Oval Office, that Truman first learned about an awesome secret that had been purposely kept from him throughout the campaign and during his brief stint as vice president: the Manhattan Project. With the world at war and his health failing, you might have expected FDR to have kept his vice president adequately briefed. But that was not the case. Was it a mistake to have kept Truman in the dark about the the development of atomic weapons? Maybe so. Ironically, Truman was the first (and so far only) president to use atomic weapons in wartime. (Photo courtesy of Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum)