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.