The New York Public Library Celebrates Franklin Delano Roosevelt: FDR’s Funeral Train: A Betrayed Widow, a Soviet Spy, and a Presidency in the Balance

Historian and author Robert Klara, former writer in residence at The New York Public Library's Allen Room, presents a lecture and PowerPoint presentation on his new book, FDR’s Funeral Train: A Betrayed Widow, a Soviet Spy, and a Presidency in the Balance (Palgrave Macmillan, March 2010.) This critically acclaimed work is a groundbreaking, behind-the-scenes look at the top-secret train that carried President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s body a thousand miles from Warm Springs, Georgia to Hyde Park, New York, in the spring of 1945.

For this event, Klara will focus on the most fascinating and dangerous leg of the train’s journey: its 28-mile route through the City of New York. Because the train carried not only FDR’s body, but 140 of the most important members of the federal government (including President Truman and all nine justices of the Supreme Court), its serpentine path through Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx constituted a nightmare for the Secret Service, the FBI and the NYPD. Drawing from declassified White House documents and rarely seen archival photographs, Klara will recreate the tension and intrigue aboard the Pullman cars—one of which counted a KGB spy as one of its occupants.

Please join us for our remaining lecture from The New York Public Library celebrates Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  On Tuesday, November 9th, authors Hazel Rowley and Ellen Feldman, will engage in a wide-ranging conversation about FDR’s women: Eleanor Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd.
 

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