FDR’s Funeral Train: A Betrayed Widow, a Soviet Spy, and a Presidency in theBalance. By Robert Klara. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 244 pp.

In FDR’s Funeral Train, magazine writer and editor Robert Klara tells the storyof the train that carried Franklin D. Roosevelt’s body from Warm Springs, Georgia,where he died on April 12, 1945, to its final resting place at the Roosevelt familyestate in Hyde Park, New York. As it made its grim voyage it carried some of the mostnoteworthy individuals in America, including the newly sworn-in President HarryTruman, the current and former first ladies, the cabinet, the Supreme Court, andleaders of both the House and the Senate. As it made its way along the eastern sea-board, it passed countless mourning Americans who lined the track to pay their finalrespects to the man who had served just over 12 years as their nation’s leader. It was,likely, the country’s largest outpouring of collective grief since the murder of AbrahamLincoln, 80 years earlier.

Klara is at his best in conveying the nation’s sadness and anxiety during those daysin April, as Americans not only mourned their fallen hero but wondered whether hischosen successor, the still-obscure Truman, was in any way capable of bearing his mantle.The author is an unabashed admirer of both Roosevelt and Truman, but it is certainly nothard to believe that the passing of the thirty-second president evoked such emotion.Klara is also a talented storyteller with an obvious love of trains; indeed, the book is atleast as much about the locomotives and passenger cars as it is about those traveling onthem. Finally, he explores some important questions, most notably, that of security—asa number of contemporaries pointed out, a single saboteur could have wiped out most ofthe nation’s leadership during a time of war.

Ultimately, however, the book fails to live up to the hype implied by its subtitle.While it is true that Eleanor Roosevelt learned just after her husband’s passing that hehad spent his final hours in the company of his longtime mistress, this adds little realdrama to the story of the funeral train—after all, Mrs. Roosevelt spent most of the tripbrooding in her car. Likewise, it is true that one of the passengers, White House economicadvisor Lauchlin Currie, later turned out to have spied for the Soviets. However, he barelyappears in the narrative; indeed, nobody who subsequently wrote about the trip recalledhis even being there, and there is certainly no evidence that he conducted any espionageat that time. Only in the “presidency in the balance” part does the book truly deliver. Thenew commander-in-chief used the voyage as an opportunity to draft, with the aid of hisclosest advisors, the State of the Union address—his first presidential speech to thenation. In the end, it is this fact that justifies Klara’s claim that the funeral train is worththe attention of historians.

—John MoserAshland University

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