For All Time Pt. 1

FOR ALL TIME

Written by Chester A. Arthur

For All Time Pt. 1
December 20, 1941, White House, 7:00 PM

"It's a good speech, just a little too long," commented Franklin Delano Roosevelt, trademark cigarette holder clenched in his teeth, as he read Judge Samuel Rosenman's draft for his Christmas Address to the Nation. He looked up and grinned at his speechwriter, the former judge. "It's damned good, in fact. Are you sure you don't celebrate Christmas on the sly, Sam?"

Rosenman shrugged, smiling. "Hell, Franklin, if Christmas is about Christ in this town, or half the country these days, I'll eat that speech. Have you seen that new Coca-Cola Santa Claus? That's the man the Christian kids in this country pray to," he joked.

The two men chatted for another few minutes; they'd been friends and colleagues for a very long time, since before Roosevelt's first campaign for President in '32, but even with working in the same building and with Sam working for Franklin, they rarely got a chance to just sit down and shoot the breeze for a while.

Especially with what had happened earlier in the month. The face of Washington had changed radically in the last six months; anti-aircraft guns poked up from nearly everywhere these days, and soldiers walked the streets. Still, Rosenman trusted his old friend to get the country through it.

Finally, Judge Rosenman glanced at his watch. "Ah, damn, I promised the wife I'd be home for dinner tonight, I'm already an hour late." He stood up and offered FDR his hand, and the President shook it firmly. Roosevelt was frighteningly strong for a polio victim, thought Rosenman, he wouldn't want to arm-wrestle with him. "I'll edit the speech tonight, put it on your desk in the morning."

"No, I just want to drop a page here and there." said Roosevelt with a jaunty grin. "I won't drop dead from working on my own speeches, you know, Sam." The speechwriter laughed, louder when Roosevelt feigned slumping in his seat. "No, I won't suppose you will, Frank?"

"Franklin?" Roosevelt's cigarette had dropped from his teeth, and was rapidly burning a hole through his suit. His glasses half-hung, on one ear and off the other, and his eyes stared blankly at his feet.

"Oh my God?"

December 21, 1941, Vice-President's residence, 5:00 PM

"My fellow Americans," said President Henry Wallace as he faced the microphone squarely, imagining the millions and millions of people listening to his speech by radio. He'd written this speech himself. Sure, speech-writers were great, but he needed a real connection with the American people. "This is your President, Henry Wallace." He paused for a moment, and then continued.

"By now, all of you will have heard of the tragedy that befell America yesterday. Our President, the great Franklin Delano Roosevelt, died peacefully at his desk, working, as he always did, for all Americans."

"I will never be the President he was," he said with more truth than he knew, "but I will be the best President a man can hope to be. Together, we will carry forward the struggle against the Japanese and German foes, on land, sea, and air, until at last the forces of democracy, represented by ourselves, General Secretary Stalin, and Prime Minister Churchill, together with our allies in China and the Free French, triumph. As Abraham Lincoln might have said, let us not remember this day as a tragedy, but as a new birth of freedom in the Earth."

All across the nation, a mourning people breathed a sigh of relief. The man who had brought them through the New Deal, had comforted them when the great new war began, was dead. But his chosen successor, a good, young farm boy, had manfully taken up his mantle.

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