USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, a 45,000-ton Midway class large aircraft carrier, was built at the New York Navy Yard. Commissioned on Navy Day, 27 October 1945, she made a shakedown cruise to Brazil in February 1946. During April and May of that year, she took part in Eighth Fleet maneuvers off the east coast, the Navy's first major post-World War II training exercise. The first of Franklin D. Roosevelt's nearly two dozen deployments to the Mediterranean Sea followed in August-October. Her second Med cruise began in July 1948 and lasted into early 1949. As the Cold War became increasingly tense in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the carrier regularly crossed the Atlantic for operations with the Sixth Fleet off Southern Europe, carrying both conventionally and nuclear-armed aircraft to deter the Soviet Union and its client states. She was reclassified as an attack aircraft carrier in October 1952, changing her hull number from CVB-42 to CVA-42.

In early 1954, Franklin D. Roosevelt steamed around Cape Horn to begin a two-year-long modernization on the west coast. When this work was completed, she was newly equipped with an angled flight deck, "hurricane" bow, steam catapults and many other features that facilitated the operation of high-performance aircraft. In November 1956, following her return to the east coast, Franklin D. Roosevelt made another cruise to European waters. Over the next decade, she deployed to the Mediterranean another seven times, doing her part to provide a powerful and continuous U.S. Navy presence in that often-troubled region. She recorded her 100,000th aircraft landing in March 1961.

From August 1966 to January 1967, Franklin D. Roosevelt made her only Western Pacific cruise, during which she conducted combat operations against enemy targets in Southeast Asia. Her seventeenth Sixth Fleet tour followed in 1967-68, after which she entered the shipyard for additional modernization work that gave her an additional deck-edge aircraft elevator, located forward of the island on the starboard side.

Franklin D. Roosevelt returned to the Mediterranean six more times during 1970-77. Her twenty-first Sixth Fleet deployment was marked by indirect participation in the October 1973 Middle East war, as she served as a transit landing "field" for aircraft en route for delivery to Israel. She received another change in hull number, to CV-42, in June 1975. Franklin D. Roosevelt completed her twenty-third, and final, Mediterranean tour in April 1977. Decommissioned in October of that year, she was sold for scrapping in April 1978.