Truman Lesson: VPs Often Aren't Presidential Material

Seventy years ago this week, on April 12, 1945, while he was sitting for a portrait in Warm Springs, Georgia, President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke what were probably his last words—“I have a terrific headache”—and fainted. He died two hours later, of a cerebral hemorrhage. After F.D.R.'s Vice-President, Harry S. Truman, a former senator from Missouri, got the news at the Capitol, the Secret Service rushed him to the White House, where he was sworn in by Chief Justice Harlan Stone. “I felt as though the moon and the stars and all the planets fell on me last night when I got the news,” Truman told reporters the next day. “I have the most terribly responsible job any man ever had.”