New memo: Doctor wrote in 1944 that FDR was not healthy enough to serve another term

[alp227]

"A grim warning to an ailing president"
By Peter Schworm, Boston Globe

In the summer of 1944, with World War II raging on two fronts, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set aside mounting health concerns to seek a fourth term in office.

Publicly, Roosevelt’s doctors maintained his health was good. But privately, one eminent Boston doctor who examined the ailing leader told his primary doctor he would not survive another four years and recorded his diagnosis in a confidential memo to protect his reputation in the eyes of history.

In a remarkable document just released by the Lahey Clinic, Frank Lahey, the clinic’s founder, wrote on July 10, 1944, that he "did not believe that, if Mr. Roosevelt were elected President again, he had the physical capacity to complete a term."

Full story: http://articles.boston.com/2011-04-12/lifestyle/29410495_1_lahey-clinic-poor-health-doctors

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. I'm not surprised at this.

I AM surprised it was kept quiet for so long.

[DCKit]

2. OK, but he kicked ass, anyway.

I'll take a sick FDR over anything we've had since.

[napoleon_in_rags]

3. It was Churchill's fault.

FDR lived a fairly conservative life, early to bed early to rise. Then Churchill came in, and FDR would stay up to 2am drinking with him every night, this man from Britain who would knock down a double with breakfast. FDR was ever the gracious host, but it cost him here.

FDR had something about him as well that was really unique in history. He had the big picture, and he knew it, and he also knew almost none of the other people around him did, so he took things on because he felt he had a moral obligation to do so. I feel like that was the case with the third term.

Also a little voice inside me questions the circumstances of his death. A private meeting with Lucy Mercer arranged by his daughter and hidden by all, and that Russian painter... Stalin and FDR never really were totally on the same side.

[Bucky]

6. His pack-a-day smoking should get a lot of the blame, too.

[Spider Jerusalem]

7. Four packs a day. And he drank a pitcher of martinis every evening himself.

His arteriosclerosis was so bad that the undertaker couldn't get a needle for embalming fluid into his veins after he died and he had congestive heart failure. Between that and the stress of the presidency in wartime it's a wonder he lived long enough to run for a fourth term, really.

[Bucky]

8. Someone explained to me once that God didn't want his socialist vice president to take office

I think it was my Nana who said that. Anyway, I found it to be profound.

[Ken Burch]

4. This isn't news, really

It was common knowledge among the senior leaders of the party at the time.

This is why the crucial moment at the 1944 Democratic Convention was the roll-call vote for the vice-presidential nomination. A lot of the people in that room knew that the person chosen for the vice-presidential slot would almost certainly become president himself.

I'd say it was a great tragedy that Henry Wallace, the sitting vice president who had a lot of familiarity with the foreign policy situation and knew how to keep a civil relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, lost to Harry Truman, who, despite his "common man" appeal, knew almost nothing about foreign policy and who probably made the post-1945 "Cold War" situation much worse.

FDR would have won with Wallace staying on the ticket.

[rasputin1952]

5. It was well known, although not spoken of, that FDR was in dire straits...

before 1944. Pics of him from mid 43 on show a very frail president.

Putting Truman on the ticket was a calculated move; Garner was gone, and Wallace was little more than pissed off clown who spent his days looking into the bottom of a bottle. While FDR found Truman "brusque", his resume was impeccable. I think FDR knew what was coming, hoping to last out the closing months of the war, maybe take the postwar era in a slightly different direction, he, like Churchill had no trust in Stalin.

Listening to the few speeches still available from those last few months, one can tell things were not going well at all. In fact, the R's played that angle, but the nation was convinced that after what FDR had done before and during the war, the presidency was his for the asking. The sunken eyes, the look of extreme fatigue...people looked beyond that, they wanted to give him the "win" of WWII, the last hurrah. To most people, he had earned that. The nation wanted this man to outlive Hitler and Tojo, it was not to be.

Sort of the same thing happened w/Reagan to a degree. I find it preposterous that his docs did not see the early signs of Alzheimer's...most of the rest of us did, we knew "something" was wrong. I am no fan or Reagan by any means, but I would not wish Alzheimer's on anyone...I do think it is the duty though, of the medical profession, to be open when discussing the capabilities of the Chief Executive. These people are mere mortals, and things happen. The incredible stress of the job, the 24/7 aspect of a possible nuclear exchange or attack from an enemy take it's toll as it is, adding medical liabilities to the equation can have, or prevent, severe consequences.

I wonder if Lincoln would have served out his 2nd term, he was looking pretty frail in 1865. One thing about Lincoln though, Booth destroyed any chance the South had of a decent reconciliation and doomed that area of the nation to abject poverty till just before WWII, at that point, in 1939, livestock levels and agricultural production of the former Confederacy reached antebellum levels that year. If Lincoln had survived that night in Ford's Theater, the outcome would most likely have been far different and while there would have been animosity, it would have been nothing like the level that was reached when the Radical Republicans ensured the destruction of the South.

[Bucky]

9. No, you're thinking of Mark Knopfler. FDR was in the Kingston Trio