This is the front page of the Lincoln Nebraska State Journal telling of the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945. My memory is confirmed in my Diary that ”I had come home with the tractor from another place we were farming and Vivian ran out to tell me that the President had died”. The President died suddenly of a massive cerebral hemorrhage after complaining of a sever headache. He was 63 years old and vacationing at the little White House in Warm Springs, GA. Roosevelt had been sworn in to an unprecedented 4^th term only months before. To many of us, he was the only President we had “known”. Vice-President Harry S. Truman was sworn in as President by Chief Justice Harlan Stone. The Allies were closing in on Germany which surrendered on May 7, 1945. Truman had not been involved in the development of the Atomic Bomb but concurred in its being dropped on Hiroshima, Japan on August 7 and Nagasaki on the 9^th. The Japanese surrendered on the 20^th. While it has long been assumed that the their surrender resulted from the bombs, recent theories have been advanced that Russia's declaration of war against the Japanese was the final determinant. The rational being that the Japanese preferred negotiating a peace settlement with the U. S. rather than Russia.