On this day in 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed
away partway through his fourth term in office, leaving Vice
President Harry S. Truman in charge of a country still fighting
the Second World War and in possession of a weapon of
unprecedented and terrifying power.

In the afternoon of April 12, 1945, in Warm Springs, Georgia,
while sitting for a portrait by Elizabeth Shoumatoff, Roosevelt
said: "I have a terrific headache." He then slumped forward in
his chair, unconscious, and was carried into his bedroom.

The president’s attending cardiologist, Howard Bruenn, had
diagnosed a massive intracerebral hemorrhage.

The last photograph of U.S. President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, taken at Warm Springs, GA by Nicholas
Robbins for Elizabeth Shoumatoff.          
          

Engraving of the Four Freedoms at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, dedicated in 1997 in Washington,
D.C.

On April 6, 1841, John Tyler was sworn in as president. Tyler was
elected as William Harrison’s vice president earlier in 1841 and
was suddenly thrust into the role of president when Harrison
died one month into office.

SANDY KOZEL

Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was
fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-
story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation
workers’ strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet
struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was
pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He
was only 39 years old.

James Earl Ray (March 10, 1928 – April 23, 1998)

Ray was convicted of the Assassination of Martin Luther
King, Jr.

The Lorraine Motel, now known as the National Civil Rights Museum, where King was assassinated.

 
ROSS SIMPSON

    
    
 John Warnock Hinckley Jr. will be 69 in May.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States and
one of the most highly regarded American generals of World War
II, died in Washington, D.C., at the age of 78.