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sister, secured passage on a ship bound for America in 1920. They were Jews hoping to escape persecution and build a better life. As a young girl, Frances sold fruit on the streets of Boston with her father and dreamed of becoming a nurse. In 1937 she graduated from Boston City Hospital’sSchool of Nursing.
    Frances kept a scrapbook, as did many young girls in those days. In one of hers, she copied this:
    There was a dream that men could one day speak their thoughts. There was a hope that men could stroll through the streets unafraid. There was a prayer that each could speak to his own God. That dream, that hope, that prayerbecame America.
    FORTY YEARS AFTER D-DAY, President Reagan stood at Pointe du Hoc where American Rangers had secured the cliffs. Looking out at an audience filled with veterans of the landing, he said:
    Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there. These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war. Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender’s poem. You are the men who in your “lives fought for life . . . and left the vivid air signed with your honor.”
    The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or the next. It was the deep knowledge—and pray God we have not lost it—that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were rightnot to doubt.
    In the Normandy American Cemetery, above Omaha Beach, 9,387 Americansare buried, young men who gave all. The inscription in the central colonnade at the cemetery is a tribute to them and to all the Americans killed fighting to liberate Europe and preserve our freedom:“This embattled shore, portal of freedom, is forever hallowed by the ideals, the valor and the sacrifices ofour fellow countrymen.”
    VICE PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN was presiding over the United States Senate at 4:45 P.M. on April 12, 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage in his cottage atWarm Springs, Georgia. Unaware of Roosevelt’s death, Truman recessed the Senate at five o’clock and headed through the Capitol to a meeting with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn in his hideaway office, the “Board of Education.” When Truman arrived, Rayburn told him he had a message to call the president’s press secretary. Steve Early asked the vice president to come immediately to the White House. Two hours later, Truman was in the Cabinet Room being sworn in as presidentof the United States.
    He’d been vice president for eighty-nine days, and in that time he’d met with President Roosevelt three times, once when they were being inaugurated on January 20 and twice in the Oval Office with members of thecongressional leadership. Truman had no office in the West Wing and rarely used the vice president’s ceremonial office in the Capitol building, preferring instead to continue working out of his Senate office in Room 240 of theSenate Office Building. Of his time as vice president, Truman said, “I enjoyed my new position as Vice-President, but it took me a while to get used to the fact that I no longer had the voting privileges I had enjoyed for ten yearsas a senator.” Indeed, Truman had lost virtually all his power—he could no longer vote in the Senate, and he had no role in Roosevelt’s White House.
    The nation was in the midst of the largest war in history. America had, in Truman’s words, “created military forces so enormous asto defy description.”