The Champ Comes Home

At daybreak, rain drummed on the windowpanes of Washington, D.C. But the city awakened with a stir of excitement, like a college town on the morning the football team comes home with the championship. Franklin Roosevelt, elected to Term IV, was coming back to the White House from Hyde Park. At 7:30 a.m. crowds were standing in the grey morning outside the Union Station. By 8:28, when the President's special train pulled in, there were 30,000 people on the wet plaza before the station, and a third of a million more along the two miles to the White House.

Inside police lines at the train platform, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson led Cabinet members aboard Franklin Roosevelt's car. The rain came down harder. The big, black automobile with bulletproof windows moved up beside the train, with the President's grandson, five-year-old Johnnie Boettiger, wriggling excitedly beside the driver.

Franklin Roosevelt appeared on the rear platform at 9 o'clock, and the Metropolitan Police Band launched brassily into ruffles, flourishes and the resounding Hail to the Chief. By now the sky had blackened. But Franklin Roosevelt, bundled in a grey raincoat, ordered the automobile's top put down before he settled in beside Harry Truman and Henry Wallace.

The Winner. The President had slept late at Hyde Park the day before, had dictated letters, and then lazed through the afternoon, relaxed after the tense final weeks of the campaign. Messages of congratulation had poured in all day from all over the world. But now, as his car rolled into the plaza, he heard and saw something more satisfying than telegrams --the sudden sound of cheering, the sight of thousands of umbrellas shining in the rain.

Radio men placed microphones on a board across the President's lap. He chuckled as he talked: "... I hope some of the scribes in the papers won't intimate that I expect to make Washington my permanent residence. . . ." He talked extemporaneously for three minutes, with the rain beginning to drip from the brim of his grey campaign hat. "This is a very wonderful welcome home ... a welcome I shall always remember. ..."

Then the parade of shiny automobiles swung off behind a noisy V of police motorcyles down Delaware Avenue, down Pennsylvania Avenue. A steady spatter of wet handclaps kept pace as jampacked thousands craned for a glimpse of the President, waving and smiling, with a lap robe pulled almost to his shoulders. Bands along the way thumped and blared, and at the sight of one in particular--the Marine Corps's only bagpipe band, home from service in Londonderry--the President turned and waved in evident appreciation.

Homecoming. The line of motorcycles and automobiles swept in through the White House gates at 9:30 in a steady downpour. The crowds, sodden and silent after their moment of excitement, jostled slowly toward trolley-loading platforms, the masses of Government workers going back to their offices. Inside the Executive Mansion the President shed his dripping coat and hat and immediately went to his office for a press conference. The President's good humor had a steady, coal-grate glow this morning. The conference began with a burst of laughter. Franklin Roosevelt had just informed the men in the front row that he had no news--and they had replied, "Thank God."

Then the President, leaning back in his baggy tweeds, agreed to disclose his private pre-election guess on the division of electoral votes. He searched in a drawer for an envelope he had sealed before election day. He looked up, laughing--perhaps it would be necessary to search everyone in the room. Finally, paper in hand, he guessed that he had been a little too conservative. He had given himself 335 votes, Governor Dewey 196. (Final vote: 432 to 99.) The short conference ended with another roar of laughter after the Baltimore Sun's Paul Ward threw a quick curve:

"Mr. President, may I be the first to ask you if you will run in 1948?"

Franklin Roosevelt, guffawing, said that the question was already hoary--he had been asked it in 1936 and 1940.

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