The doctor thought that should satisfy anyone. It didn’t suit Roosevelt. Perhaps because of his paralysis, the President was hypersensitive to rumors about his physical capacities, and he resolved to prove the doctor right by submitting himself to a physical ordeal. The first opportunity arose in New York. He was to lead a four-hour, fifty-mile motorcade from Ebbets Field in Brooklyn through Queens to the Bronx, then to Harlem and mid-Manhattan and down Broadway to the Battery. It was raining that day—a hard, steady, drenching, cold autumn rain which saturated clothes and inflicted misery on everyone not sheltered. The cavalcade was madness. Yet FDR refused to consider ending or even shortening it. Twice he paused for rubdowns and a quick change of clothes, at a Coast Guard motor pool in Brooklyn and in his wife’s Washington Square apartment. The rest of the time he stood—smiling, waving his fedora, utterly wretched.
Eleanor, in the Secret Service follow-up car, felt desperate. She had a roof, and she thought that at the very least Franklin should order the canvas top raised over his presidential Packard. La Guardia and Wagner, occupying the jump seats in front of Roosevelt and soaked to the skin, were also worried about him. The downpour grew heavier and heavier, silvering his boat cloak. The President’s hair—thinner and whiter than in the last campaign—was plastered down. He could see little through his pince-nez. But hundreds of thousands of Americans were shivering under umbrellas and sodden newspapers for a glimpse of the country’s most famous smile, and he was determined to give it to them if he had to grit his teeth all the way. Six days later he repeated the performance in Philadelphia, riding around for hours in the open car, wrapped in sheets of freezing rain. After it the press corps, including reporters from Rooseveltphobic papers, wrote that he appeared to be the very image of vitality.
On November 7 he appeared as usual at the Hyde Park village polling place with Eleanor, told officials his occupation was “tree grower,” was solemnly identified as voter number 251, and was introduced for the first time to a polling machine. He failed to master it. After some muttering and bouncing about, his matchless voice came through the curtain: “The goddamned thing won’t work.” Advice was offered through the curtain, and with it he overcame what was to be his only difficulty of the day. Even before the ballots from absentee servicemen had been counted (they were heavily pro-Roosevelt) he had won 54 percent of the vote. In the electoral college his margin over Dewey was 432 to 99. His coattails had brought Fulbright of Arkansas and McMahon of Connecticut to the Senate; Helen Gahagan Douglas and Adam Clayton Powell would be in the new House; Ham Fish and Gerald Nye had been defeated; and despite John L. Lewis’s endorsement of Dewey in mining precincts, the Democratic ticket had swept them. Roosevelt was elated. Repeatedly during the campaign he had told voters that the election was also a referendum on United States participation in the United Nations, and now the ghost that had haunted Woodrow Wilson to his grave had been forever laid.
In triumph the President was also vindictive. Dewey’s red-baiting, he had said, deserved “unvarnished contempt.” Now, wheeling himself toward his New York bedroom after the Republican’s 3 A.M. concession, he told Hassett, “I still think he’s a son of a bitch.” He never said that in public, of course. By all outward signs, the country had survived a wartime election with no scars.
And yet…
If the Fala speech had got Dewey’s goat, the implications that Roosevelt was physically unfit had not only touched Roosevelt to the quick; the hurt lingered afterward. In public appearances he now made a point of being brisk and hearty. Returning to Washington like a victorious Caesar, he found the capital engulfed in rain. It was eerie; this was happening to him every time he moved from one city to another. Ten years ago farmers had cheered the downpours that had accompanied his visits, and his staff had called it Roosevelt luck. Now it was unlucky, and could become dangerous to a man his age. The President calmed their fears—and then ordered the Packard top down. In Union Plaza thirty thousand soggy people awaited him. Flanked by Truman and Wallace, he made a joke about the weather. Then the limousine drove slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue past three hundred thousand cheering Washingtonians. FDR (and Truman and Wallace) were deluged. Nevertheless, when they reached the White House Roosevelt was radiant, even euphoric. He had never seemed so robust.
And yet, and yet…
Among those close to him Franklin Roosevelt’s well-being had been a matter of concern for some time. That October Time had reported that sinus trouble was “Franklin Roosevelt’s most nagging health problem.” The situation was graver than that. His entire cardiovascular system—a branch of medicine in which Dr. McIntire had no special training—was afflicted. As early as 1937 systolic hypertension had been diagnosed in the President, and four years later diastolic hypertension, much more serious, had joined it. McIntire remained cheerful; although his patient was exercising less and worrying more, he remained jovial. But Roosevelt was not as healthy as his physician led the public to believe. Early in 1943 he had been afflicted by two serious illnesses, influenza and an unexplained fever which he blamed on his North African trip, and after returning from Teheran he caught flu again. He complained of evening headaches. By mid-morning, after a good night’s rest, he would be exhausted. Sometimes he fell asleep in the middle of a conversation, and once he dropped off while signing his name; the pen just dribbled off the paper. Frightened, his daughter Anna and his secretary Grace Tully confided in Dr. McIntire. He said he shared their anxiety and wanted a hospital checkup, but he seemed intimidated at the very thought of confronting his imperious patient with anything so drastic. Finally Anna spoke to her mother. Eleanor simply told the President that he was going to be bundled off to Bethesda Naval Hospital for an examination, and on March 27, 1944, he meekly went. This time he would be observed not by a single physician, but by a whole battery of specialists.
Among them was a Lieutenant Commander Howard G. Bruenn, a consultant in cardiology and chief of Bethesda’s electrocardiograph department. Bruenn was shocked at Roosevelt’s condition. The President was worn out, feverish, and suffering from bronchitis. Worse: his heart was enlarged, the vessels around it were swollen, and his blood pressure was alarming. Dr. Bruenn reported hypertension, hypertensive heart disease, and cardiac failure. His colleagues agreed. They recommended rest, and the President, a good patient, went off to lie in the sun at Hobcaw, Bernard Baruch’s South Carolina plantation. He cut his predinner drinking to one and a half cocktails (with no nightcap later) and his smoking from twenty or thirty Camels a day to five or six. He wrote Hopkins that he was having a splendid vacation sleeping twelve hours a night, basking in the sun, controlling his temper, and letting “the rest of the world go hang.” Lucy Rutherfurd was a frequent visitor.
He was an incurious patient and never asked about the small green pills he was taking. They were digitalis. Commander Bruenn or any of the other Bethesda physicians could have explained his condition to him, but no one in medical school had told them how to inform a President of the United States that he is gravely ill. Besides, they lacked rank, which in wartime was important. All the charts and diagrams were turned over to Admiral McIntire. The Bethesda staff assumed McIntire would tell Roosevelt. There is no evidence that he ever did, and the President’s working hours after leaving South Carolina certainly weren’t those of an invalid. He traveled fifty thousand miles that year, leading two wars and campaigning for reelection. At the same time he had to supervise the home front and dispose of all the trivia Americans dump on their President’s desk. In 1944 his domestic agenda included the seizure of Montgomery Ward in Chicago, drafting the GI Bill of Rights, persuading Alben Barkley to withdraw his resignation as Senate floor leader, approving plans for a Missouri authority patterned after TVA, talking Secretary Stimson out of retiring, submitting the biggest budget in the history of the world, stumping New York in a mayoralty election, studying a proposed moratorium for insurance companies, endorsing a program of postwar scientific research, carrying out secret negotiations with both
labor and management in the secret atomic fission plants, and reviewing the court-martial sentence for a young marine who had shot a wounded calf. It was up to him to decide whether Marshall or Eisenhower would lead the invasion of Europe, which was fair enough; what was grossly unfair was that only the President could convince the Navy that it should share the Pentagon with the Army—the admirals wanted their own Pentagon—and he alone could decide whether or not to call off the Army-Navy game. “One man simply could not do it all,” Stimson said afterward, “and Franklin Roosevelt killed himself trying.”
Visitors to the White House were remarking to one another how “wasted” the President’s face looked. In July James Roosevelt had his first augury of what lay ahead. They were in the “Ferdinand Magellan” just before the Marine Corps maneuvers off the California coast. Suddenly Roosevelt’s face was drained of color. Writhing, with his eyes closed, he gasped, “Jimmy, I don’t know if I can make it—I have horrible pains.” His son wanted to cancel the appearance, but Roosevelt, recovering after several minutes, overruled him. There is no way of knowing what the attack was since it wasn’t reported to Dr. Bruenn. The next incident, however, occurred in public. Leaving his son in California, he met a speaking engagement in Bremerton, Washington. The Secret Service had suggested that he address the civilian audience from the deck of a moored destroyer, with its guns as a background. The President liked the idea. Everything was in place, and he was in the first paragraph of his address, when he was stricken. Although no one knew it, he was in the grip of an agonizing angina pectoris attack. For fifteen minutes shooting waves of pain crossed and recrossed his chest, lacing his rib cage and both shoulders with excruciating pangs. The wonder is that he could keep his feet at all—his braces were insecure on the slanting deck—let alone deliver a speech.
But only he knew of the pain; Bruenn, standing directly behind him, didn’t suspect anything wrong and couldn’t find evidence of it until much later. The President’s dismayed audience was aware only of the worst speech they had ever heard. His delivery was slurred, uninspired, and at times inaudible. The content rambled wildly, making little sense. He didn’t even sound like Roosevelt. Sam Rosenman, listening to a radio, wrung his hands. Rumors that the President was dying were everywhere now, supported by a cruel news photograph showing him with a slack, gaping mouth, a skeletal face, and poached eyes. Mike Reilly of the Secret Service told FDR that some reporters insisted the President had been in a hospital, not South Carolina. Roosevelt said tightly, “Mike, those newspapermen are a bunch of goddamned ghouls.”
His response was both understandable and unreasonable. Sometimes it becomes the duty of the press to keep a deathwatch, and this was one of them. Out of their long affection for him they had been writing little about his appearance; the photographer who had taken the ghastly picture of him was ostracized by his colleagues. Members of the President’s official family and old acquaintances were far more outspoken. Years of accumulated strain seemed to be taking their toll all at once; within a single week, an observer wrote, the President appeared to have passed “from the prime of life to old age.” Frances Perkins was immune to gossip about him (and herself), and she had dismissed all the stories about his decline. But at a cabinet meeting the day before his fourth inaugural, she was stunned. His eyes were glazed and looked as though they had been blackened, his complexion was gray, his face gaunt, and his clothes a size too large for him. His hands trembled. His lips were blue. He had to prop up his head with a hand. “We were all shocked by the President’s appearance,” Dean Acheson wrote in his memoirs. “Thin, gaunt, with sunken and darkly circled eyes, only the jaunty cigarette holder and his lighthearted brushing aside of difficulties recalled the FDR of former days.” John Gunther, seeing him the next day, wrote, “I was terrified when I saw his face. I felt certain that he was going to die. All the light had gone out underneath the skin. It was like a parchment shade on a bulb that had been dimmed. I could not get over the ravaged expression on his face. It was gray, gaunt, and sagging, and the muscles controlling the lips seemed to have lost part of their function.” At times, Gunther wrote, his exhaustion was so great that “he could not answer simple questions and talked what was close to nonsense.”
Two weeks later, at the Yalta Conference in the Crimea, Anthony Eden thought the President hazy and confused on their first evening together; Lord Moran, Churchill’s physician, took one look at the President and decided that he was a dying man. Their impressions, coupled with those formed in Washington, later contributed to the theory that FDR, “the sick man of Yalta,” was outfoxed by the Russians at Yalta, and that in letting him run for a fourth term his family and friends had betrayed not only him but also his country. Yalta, in a Republican phrase of the 1950s, had been “a sellout.”
There are certain difficulties here. The first is the assumption that anyone could have talked Roosevelt out of running. Eleanor had tried very hard in 1940; he had been unmoved. The second problem was that his ailment was maddeningly inconsistent. One day Dr. Bruenn’s indices would warn that the President’s condition was about to enter a critical phase; the next day his vitality would be superb. Bruenn found little correlation between his findings and the condition of his patient. Clearly his campaigning in the rain fatigued him; after it he lost color and appetite. Yet his blood pressure had dropped (to 210/112), his lungs were clear, and his heart showed every sign of being in excellent shape. Leaving the destroyer deck in Seattle, he had told Bruenn of his pain. Blood counts and electrocardiograph tracings were made within an hour; both were normal.
His ability to rally when needed was astonishing. Allen Drury, then a UP reporter, watched the President being wheeled in for the annual White House correspondents’ dinner and thought how scrawny-necked, elderly, and senescent he seemed; yet before the President left he acknowledged the reporters’ cheers “with the old, familiar gesture, so that the last we saw of Franklin Roosevelt was the head going up with a toss, the smile breaking out, the hand uplifted and waving in the old, familiar way.” On September 25, 1944, he spoke to union leaders and party professionals in Washington’s new Hotel Statler. Rosenman and the President’s daughter arrived early, both tense; FDR’s condition earlier in the day had been shocking. Anna whispered to Rosenman, “Do you think Pa will put it over?… If the delivery isn’t just right, it’ll be an awful flop.” The audience was also nervous. They had all heard the rumors, seen the news photograph from California, and heard the dreadful destroyer speech. Roosevelt spoke sitting down, and his first words sounded odd, “as though,” Burns wrote, “the President were mouthing them.” He then recovered and delivered a fine fighting speech, as crisp and resonant as his first inaugural.
At Yalta his American staff—Harriman, Byrnes, Admiral William D. Leahy, Edward R. Stettinius—believed he was representing the United States effectively and with skill. In the early sessions he had a nocturnal cough, but Bruenn found his lungs clear and his heart and blood pressure unchanged. On February 8 (after a row with Stalin over Poland) Roosevelt’s blood pressure bothered the doctor, who altered his regimen and his schedule for two days. By then the trouble had disappeared. At the same time Eden had changed his mind. His first impression had to be wrong, he felt. In spite of his poor color and loss of weight FDR was, in Eden’s opinion, negotiating with rare good judgment. Not only was he keeping abreast of Churchill’s agenda; he was finding time to carry on a conference-within-a-conference with Stalin over Soviet-American roles in Asia.
Unquestionably the Crimean conference hastened the President’s death. The same was true of his 1944 campaign against a hard-hitting Republican challenger and his role as an energetic, participating commander in chief. Yalta will be recalled because the President sacrificed much of himself there. He sacrificed little else.*
ELEVEN
Lilacs in the Dooryard
The GI invaders of Italy, when last glimpsed in this account, had been wallowing in the cold brown porridge below Monte Cassino hoping for warm
er weather and a breakthrough. That had been in 1943. The new year brought no change. The Germans still held two-thirds of Italy, including Rome. On January 22, 1944, the Allies tried to outflank the enemy’s line with an amphibious landing in his rear at Anzio, but the American general commanding the end run was incompetent. Instead of exploiting his surprise he waited cautiously on the beach while Field Marshal Kesselring hemmed him in. Anzio turned into a bloody trap. The Allies couldn’t break off contact and they couldn’t advance. For over four months they huddled on the beachhead, taking casualties and improving nothing except perhaps German marksmanship. “They lived like men in prehistoric times,” one reporter wrote, “and a club would have become them more than a machine gun. How they survived the dreadful winter was beyond us.”
Spring arrived, washing out the Bailey bridges and turning iron-hard road ruts into mire again; and still the senseless siege went on. Both Allied armies, the Fifth (American) and Eighth (British), were bleeding to death in head-on assaults up the leg of Italy, on the west and east of its shinbone, the Apennines. At most they could hope to tie down Wehrmacht divisions that might be manning Hitler’s Atlantic Wall—soon to be tested by the cross-Channel lunge—and wear down German strength by attrition. But attrition grinds both ways. Worse, it is more costly for attackers than defenders. Allied casualties rose and morale dropped. Friction between Allies, always a danger sign, was growing. Next to Mussolini, now under house arrest by non-Fascist Italians, Lieutenant General Mark Clark was the most unpopular man in the Italian peninsula. His attempt to blame the bombing of Monte Cassino on General Bernard Freyberg, the New Zealand hero, was, to put the best face on it, an ungracious attempt to evade responsibility for what seemed at the time to be a necessary act of war.
Anzio had to be relieved. The Allied high command saw but one solution: a big push toward Rome. On June 4, 1944, at 7:30 P.M., elements of the U.S. Fifth Army, with Clark in the vanguard, marched up the Piazza Venezia, the heart of the Eternal City. The conqueror was greeted by flowers, cheers, kisses, and more chianti than he could carry. It was a moment any soldier might savor, but Clark didn’t know when to stop. Next morning he called for a meeting of his corps commanders, and when they arrived they discovered they were to be used as foils in a press conference. Clark was striking martial poses at the request of photographers. His subordinate generals, American and Allied, reddened with embarrassment. Even some war correspondents colored. Clark didn’t notice their uneasiness. In fact, he decided to say a few words. “This,” he began, “is a great day for the Fifth Army.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 49