SMRs and AMRs

Sunday, April 13, 2014

The huge secret about FDR’s death

Americans were told their president died of a sudden stroke. Not true, says a new book.

by Brian Bethune, McLean's

Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack, LBJ’s gallbladder, Kennedy’s many ailments, even George Bush Sr.’s bout of nausea in Japan: ever since the occupant of the White House became the Most Powerful Man in the World, the health of U.S. presidents has been of consuming interest. Much of that concern is pure finger-on-the-nuclear-button angst, but a significant portion derives from the fate of president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When the first leader of superpower America died in office in 1945, it was a shock to most of his countrymen, who were largely unaware of just how sick FDR was. In fact, according to neurologist Steven Lomazow and journalist Eric Fettmann, authors of FDR’s Deadly Secret, they are the first to crack wide open the secrecy that has shrouded Roosevelt’s health until now. FDR, they write, died of cancer, a disease that had deleterious effects on his mental as well as physical health. In concealing the cancer from the American people, the authors argue, Roosevelt was “rolling the dice with history”: he won (mostly), but it was a very close run.

By the time his health began seriously declining in the 1940s, Roosevelt was long accustomed to disguising his disability. At 39, 11 years before he was first elected president in 1932, polio left the ambitious politician paralyzed for life from the waist down. FDR took care never to let it show in public. He used a wheelchair in private, but before crowds walked with the help of five-kilogram iron braces fitted to his hips and legs, and he had hand controls in his cars so he could be seen driving. Voters never noticed—or, pinning their hopes on Roosevelt through catastrophic depression and the greatest war in history, never wanted to see—the stage management. During the 1944 campaign, caught in a New York parade during a persistent rainstorm, the president’s open car was several times whisked out of the cavalcade and into a heated garage. Secret Service agents would stretch Roosevelt out on blankets laid on the garage floor, remove all his clothes, towel him dry and rub him down; re-dressed in dry clothes and fortified with a shot of brandy, FDR was soon back in the downpour.

(More here.)

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