Keep in mind what we are seeing in Hillary Clinton's obviously FAILING health as you read this. The parallels, including the coverup, are eerily familiar. ////////////////////////////////////////////
Roosevelt is entering his sixties when Lelyveld’s story begins, and he is still fighting his own body’s attempts to betray him. Sixty was older then than it is today, and after twelve years in the presidency his appearance sometimes left visitors alarmed. In his memoir of interviewing him that year, Turner Catledge, a respected reporter for The New York Times, recalled that at first glimpse of the president he was so “shocked and horrified” that he had an impulse to turn and walk out. He felt he was “seeing something I shouldn’t see,” he wrote, describing the president with a “vague, glassy-eyed expression” and mouth “hanging open,” a man who “would lose his train of thought, stop and stare blankly at me.”
When the vice-presidency problem finally became acute, FDR was facing a calendar that made 1944 heavy going even by presidential standards. As commander in chief, he had the D-Day attack at Normandy and invasion of Europe high on his summer agenda. Having made himself the one-and-only master of American diplomacy, he had vital meetings ahead with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. That meant exhausting long-distance travel. Because 1944 was an election year, the vice-presidential business had to be settled by summer but—far more important—Roosevelt himself had to decide whether to run for another term.
There was every reason not to. His health was poor, and he must have realized that another campaign would be a physical ordeal too precarious for a sensible person to contemplate. It would be his fourth term; jeering Republicans noted that two had been enough for George Washington.
With the wisdom of hindsight, though, it is hard to see how he could have escaped it, if only because being president had become a way of life. Though all his medical advice indicated the job might kill him, he had grown into it. It was what he did and who he was. His love for it was so obvious that millions would have cried out in disbelief if told that he was quitting. That Roosevelt would still be president after eternity ended had become a national joke. He couldn’t resist just one more campaign, could he? Especially when he had persuaded himself that he was the party’s only plausible candidate.
Yet old friends and family were now disturbed by visible signs of frailty. His hand shook when he lifted his coffee cup. His shirt collars seemed to be much too big. Ed Flynn, Democratic boss of the Bronx and one of FDR’s oldest political friends, had been keeping a professional eye on him lately and exercised friendship’s privilege by telling him that he no longer had the stamina for the job and ought to quit. There was also a somber opinion from Dr. Frank Lahey, founder of the Lahey Clinic, who had examined him. Lahey had left a memorandum that was kept from public disclosure until Roosevelt had been dead for sixty-two years. Maybe that was because it revealed doctors playing fast and loose with the presidential medical news back in the 1940s. Lahey wrote that Roosevelt was unlikely to survive another term, and that the president had been so informed. The note was dated July 10, 1944. The next day Roosevelt announced that he would run for a fourth term.
Everybody seemed aware that the president had a medical problem of some sort, but nobody knew precisely what it was. Political medicine differs from medical science because news of a physical sickness may quickly produce a terminal political ailment. The usual treatment in FDR’s day was to lie about it, and if that was impractical, to pretend it was merely a trifling seasonal ailment, a touch of bronchial discomfort perhaps, left over from last winter’s touch of flu. “Good as new in a day or two” was a common prognosis from doctors too scared to speak truth to ailing politicians.
Roosevelt had been receiving such reports for years from his regular physician, Admiral Ross McIntire. An otolaryngologist specializing in ear, nose, and throat diseases, the admiral was Voltaire’s Doctor Pangloss in Navy blue, dispenser of always cheery medical analysis that puzzled the president’s family because it did not seem relevant to the decline they were witnessing in the president’s health. Anna Boettiger, Roosevelt’s daughter, finally told McIntire that she wanted to know what was wrong with her father. McIntire apparently groused a bit but assembled an impressive team that included Dr. Howard Bruenn, a cardiologist trained at Johns Hopkins and Columbia Presbyterian hospitals.
Until then, Lelyveld says, FDR had never been examined by a heart specialist, though cardiology was already an advanced branch of medicine. So much for presidential health care in 1944. After Bruenn’s first day on the job he became a daily presence in FDR’s life, and in his death, too—he was at Warm Springs with the president when he died.
Interviewed years later, Bruenn said Roosevelt was in “God awful” condition at their first meeting. His examination notes described “a diseased heart” that had “become enlarged and shifted away from its normal location in the chest.” The president’s face was “very grey,” indicating a possible oxygen deficiency in the blood. His blood pressure was “a worrisome 186/108.” All the evidence pointed to “an alarming enlargement of the heart, induced by chronic high blood pressure.” Bruenn’s notes said, “heart was enormous.”
His diagnosis was “acute congestive heart failure,” specifically “left ventricular heart failure.” Lelyveld observes that this would have been explosive political news in 1944 and may explain why it was kept from the public for twenty-six years. Heart disease nowadays seems so common that the public no longer tends to think it a death warrant. Heart attack now seems to be viewed as one of life’s daily risks, like being run down in the street by a motorist making a phone call. Technology was not so advanced in the 1940s. It had not yet provided doctors with the modern arsenal of defensive weaponry now available to cardiologists. As Lelyveld notes:
There were no tiny catheters with balloons on the ends with which to perform plaque-clearing invasive surgeries; there were no statins, beta blockers, ACE inhibitors, effective blood thinners, echocardiograms, stents… In 1944, the best that up-to-date doctors like Bruenn were able to manage was, basically, to limit the strain on the heart by limiting the patient’s activities and diet.
In short, Lelyveld concludes, “A wartime president was to be told that he needed to sleep half his time and reduce his workload to that of a bank teller.”
What Bruenn’s report told the few permitted to see it was quite different from the report Roosevelt gave his news conference shortly after the examination. His problem, the president said, was “a lingering bronchitis.” His White House doctor, the “unfailingly loyal” Admiral McIntire, replied to press questions without once using the word “cardiologist” or mentioning cardiac problems. There were some slightly debilitating “residuals” of the flu, he said, and an “ensuing bronchitis” that exercise and sunshine could readily dispose of. The message seemed to be “Good as new in a day or two.”
Medical advice must have figured heavily in the thinking of the small group of professional politicians who decided to make Truman the next vice-president. They were certainly aware that it was not just a vice-president they were choosing but quite possibly the next president too. FDR himself obviously had final right of approval, but the short list of candidates was based on consultation with a small group of party leaders he respected and whose advice he occasionally took seriously.
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