Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (157 page)

The result of all this was that the actor never left the stage. By the twelfth year in the presidential spotlight, the performer’s constitution was breaking down. The first conclusive evidence of incipient failure appeared in March 1944. Ross McIntire, the president’s physician, was a navy doctor who specialized in ears, noses, and throats. He received the assignment as presidential physician because he knew Cary Grayson, Woodrow Wilson’s doctor, who was a friend of Roosevelt’s, and because at the time of Roosevelt’s first inauguration, sinus complaints were his only chronic medical condition—aside, of course, from the paraplegia. For decades presidents had been treated by army or navy doctors, partly on account of the cost saving to the patients, at a time when presidents weren’t paid very well, and partly because the president’s doctor had to be able to travel with the president on the president’s schedule—something few physicians in private practice would have been willing to do. This tradition meant that presidents often didn’t receive the best care possible. Military doctors typically weren’t at the leading edge of their fields, and the fact that those treating the president were dealing with their commander in chief inhibited their assertiveness. McIntire was no exception to the rule. He was perfectly adequate in treating head colds and other pedestrian maladies, and he was adept at the politics of the navy and of Washington, eventually becoming a vice admiral and the surgeon general of the navy. But he was over his head in treating a patient with chronic complicated illnesses.

To his credit he realized his limitations, albeit belatedly. Roosevelt returned from Teheran in December 1943, having traveled seventeen thousand miles in five weeks. The success of his first meeting with Stalin had boosted his spirits, as did the time he spent aboard ship, but the whole endeavor wore him down. He contracted influenza and spent most of his Hyde Park Christmas holiday coughing and aching. The cough and discomfort persisted into January and February, causing the cancellation of several engagements, including press conferences, which naturally prompted speculation about what was wrong with the president. McIntire finally ordered a full workup in March, bringing in specialists, including Howard Bruenn, a young navy cardiologist. The conditions of Bruenn’s consulting reflected navy practice; as a junior officer, he reported to his superior, McIntire, rather than to his patient, Roosevelt.

“He appeared to be very tired, and his face was very gray,” Bruenn recalled of his initial examination. “Moving caused considerable breathlessness.” The patient coughed frequently. His pulse was seventy-two beats per minute; his blood pressure was 186 over 108. Fluoroscopy and X-rays revealed that the left ventricle of the heart was enlarged and the pulmonary vessels engorged. “Accordingly, a diagnosis was made of hypertension, hypertensive heart disease, and cardiac failure (left ventricle), and acute bronchitis,” Bruenn wrote. “These findings and their interpretation were conveyed to Surgeon General McIntire. They had been completely unsuspected up to this time.”

This wasn’t quite true. McIntire had diagnosed hypertension in Roosevelt in 1937 and again in 1941, although he missed the other maladies. Bruenn proceeded to file a memorandum with McIntire prescribing the standard treatment of that day for such cases: bed rest for a week or two, regular doses of digitalis to ease blood flow through the heart, codeine for the cough, and reduction of dietary salt and gradual weight loss to bring down the blood pressure.

“This memorandum was rejected because of the exigencies and demands on the President,” Bruenn wrote. McIntire pointed out the obvious: Roosevelt wasn’t a normal patient. He could take the digitalis, he could cut back on his salt, and he could lose weight. But he couldn’t stop working, not with a war on. McIntire directed Bruenn to monitor the situation.

The younger doctor did so, examining Roosevelt three or four times a week and ordering electrocardiograms and various other tests. The bronchitis eased, in part as a result of Roosevelt’s curtailment of cigarettes, to six per day. But the hypertension worsened. On April 4 his blood pressure was 226 over 118. Roosevelt reported sleeping well and said he felt fine. Yet he was strikingly incurious about his condition. “At no time,” Bruenn remembered, “did the President ever comment on the frequency of these visits or question the reason for the electrocardiograms and the other laboratory tests that were performed from time to time; nor did he ever have any questions as to the type and variety of medications that were used.”

Roosevelt’s lack of curiosity may have reflected the medical ethos of the time, when patients typically deferred to physicians more than they would later. It may have mirrored Roosevelt’s preoccupation with his work. With his head full of the war, he would let the doctors worry about his health. It may have indicated a conscious or unconscious act of denial: to refuse to acknowledge that something was gravely amiss. Denial had been his initial strategy for dealing with polio, and in retrospect he couldn’t argue with the results. Denial might be the most productive way to deal with a failing heart.

Roosevelt couldn’t stop working, but he could take a working vacation. Bernard Baruch volunteered his South Carolina estate, and the president, McIntire, Bruenn, and several members of the White House entourage headed to the Carolina coast. The weather was fair though a bit cool for April. Roosevelt slept late each morning and remained in bed till noon, reading newspapers and answering correspondence. He ate lunch with the group, joined by Baruch and occasional visitors, including Eleanor, Anna, his cousin Daisy Suckley, and military and civilian officials who came down from Washington. After lunch he would nap and in the late afternoon go fishing or for a drive around the plantation. Every day a special plane from the capital brought documents that required signatures; Roosevelt dealt with these before dinner, which began about seven and was the high point of the day. “The conversation was animated, with the President playing the dominant role,” Bruenn wrote. “It ranged from reminiscences with Mr. Baruch over earlier contemporaries and incidents to a discussion of recent and current events.”

O
NE VISITOR TO
Baruch’s plantation wasn’t recorded in the official log. Roosevelt had continued to see Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, more frequently following the death of her husband in early 1944. By then Anna was back living at the White House, where she assumed some of the responsibilities of the peripatetic Eleanor and some of the tasks of Missy LeHand. She had to be careful not to confuse the portfolios, especially when Roosevelt one day asked, “What would you think about our inviting an old friend of mine to a few dinners at the White House? This would have to be arranged when your mother is away, and I would have to depend on you to make the arrangements.” Anna had learned the story of Lucy years before from Eleanor, and at first she hesitated, out of loyalty to her mother. “It was a terrible decision to have to make,” she recalled.

But her love for her father won out. Having come to see him through the eyes of an adult—one who, like him, had been unlucky in love—Anna realized how hungry he was for the kind of companionship that Lucy could provide and that Eleanor couldn’t or wouldn’t. The First Lady always had an agenda. She rarely met with her husband without bringing up her current causes. These were generally worthy and often underrepresented in the policy circles of the administration, and before the war Roosevelt had been willing for her to push him on such matters. But the war was wearing him down, and he didn’t have the energy or time for Eleanor’s projects.

For years Missy LeHand had played the second wife, the devoted helpmeet who asked nothing besides the chance to serve the man she loved. But Missy was dying. That he had lost Sara about the time Missy fell ill doubled the blow. From birth Roosevelt had been doted on by at least one woman; now there was none. Anna helped fill the gap, but as a daughter there was only so much she could do.

One thing she did was smuggle Lucy into the White House. A first private dinner was arranged, then several more. Finding evenings when Eleanor was away was easy, given her endless travel schedule. The White House staff and Secret Service agents were discreet. As far as Anna could tell, the meetings consisted of nothing more than dinner and pleasant talk, which eased her conscience. “They were occasions which I welcomed for my father,” she said, “because they were light-hearted and gay, affording a few hours of much needed relaxation.”

Roosevelt met Lucy outside the White House as well. On fair afternoons he would have himself driven to the home of a mutual friend near Leesburg, Virginia. He and Lucy would visit there, or she would join him in the back seat of the car for a tour of the countryside. In one instance he stopped the presidential train en route from Washington to Hyde Park to visit her at a home she kept in New Jersey. At least once she spent the weekend with him at Shangri-La. And in the spring of 1944, during his month at Baruch’s South Carolina estate, Lucy drove over from her winter home at Aiken. Baruch provided the ration coupons to purchase gasoline for the journey.

“I
HAD REALLY
a grand time down at Bernie’s,” Roosevelt wrote Harry Hopkins after returning to Washington. “Slept twelve hours out of the twenty-four, sat in the sun, never lost my temper, and decided to let the world go hang. The interesting thing is the world didn’t hang. I have a terrific pile in my basket, but most of the stuff has answered itself.”

Howard Bruenn concurred, to a point. “He slept soundly and ate well,” Bruenn recorded. The president’s spirits and demeanor were much improved. But his blood pressure remained high and in fact got worse, rising to as much as 240 over 130. “He complained of soreness in the back of his neck and a throbbing sensation all through the body.” Bruenn and McIntire sent him to bed for two days, and the symptoms subsided.

A new symptom—intermittent abdominal pains—caused McIntire to order X-rays of the gall bladder. When the images revealed gallstones, the president was placed on a low-fat diet of 1,800 calories per day. During the next few months he showed no new symptoms, weathering his journey to California, Hawaii, and Alaska quite well.

But on the return, while giving a speech at a naval facility in Bremerton, Washington, he felt a pressure in his chest that radiated out to both shoulders. The incident lasted perhaps fifteen minutes, and the pressure had disappeared by the time he finished talking. Bruenn checked him for signs of a heart attack but found nothing.

The train journey home was slow and uneventful. Roosevelt stuck to his diet, so well that he shed fifteen pounds. “As usually happens with weight loss of this degree, the President had lost some flesh from his face,” Bruenn noted. “His features had become sharpened and he looked somewhat haggard in place of his normal, robust appearance.” Bruenn and McIntire told him he had lost all the weight he needed to lose, and they eased the caloric restrictions on his diet. But he didn’t have much appetite, partly because of the blandness of his food, and the weight loss continued.

It was at this point that Robert Sherwood saw him and was shocked at his appearance. Others, too, wondered what was wrong with the president. Rumors circulated, with the election approaching, that the president was gravely ill. “You hear them everywhere you go,” journalist Marquis Childs wrote. Childs, a Roosevelt loyalist, refused to believe them. “This is wicked business,” he said. “It is the vilest kind of fear campaign.” But he knew what drove the campaign. “Some people hate the President so much that the wish is father to the thought that his health is seriously undermined. There is a type of frustrated individual who actually seems to get a malicious pleasure from hinting that he or she has inside information that Roosevelt is suffering from some serious ailment.”