The Unfinished Portrait

On the morning of April 12, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, vacationing at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, sat at a table signing papers. As lunchtime approached, he said, We have fifteen minutes more to work. In the words of Elizabeth Shoumatoff, an eyewitness to the scene, Suddenly he raised his right hand and passed it over his forehead several times in a strange jerky way, without emitting a sound, his head bending slightly forward. Moments later he was unconsious, and he died, of a cerebral hemorrhage, later that day.