1944

by Jay Winik

  Roosevelt had spent considerable time that winter in Hyde Park, but being there did little to improve his health. Already by January, the president was waking later and later in the morning. Roosevelt’s trusted aide William Hassett noted in his diary on January 28, “The President again slept late.” On January 25, Roosevelt did not come downstairs until almost 11:30 a.m. By the second half of March, back at Hyde Park, Roosevelt had begun to deteriorate rapidly. As the first gray of morning light spread in through the windows, the president would wake, tired and trembling. Unable to work, barely able to concentrate, he confined himself mostly to his bedroom, even eating all of his meals in bed on a tray. On March 24, Hassett noted, “The president not looking so well in his bedroom this morning, nor later when he held a press and radio conference—voice husky and out of pitch. This latest cold has taken a lot out of him.” Every morning, in response to the inquiry as to how he felt, Roosevelt’s characteristic reply was “Rotten” or “Like hell.” By March 26, his temperature had spiked to 104 degrees. “Boss looks ill, color bad,” Hassett again noted. As the president meekly picked at his food, his daughter Anna grew so alarmed that she confronted his physician, Admiral McIntire, who brushed off her concerns, citing the lingering effects of influenza and bronchitis. She knew better, however, and insisted that her father receive a full workup at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Reluctantly, McIntire arranged it—but he gave an order: not one word of the president’s condition should be revealed to Roosevelt himself.

  On March 28, 1944, as Roosevelt was eased into his limousine for the ride to the hospital, he muttered once more to Hassett, “I feel like hell!”

  WITH A MOTORCYCLE ESCORT clearing the road, Roosevelt’s motorcade rolled up Wisconsin Avenue to Bethesda Naval Hospital. There, he was lifted from his car and placed in a waiting wheelchair. He immediately put up a happy front, playfully waving and wisecracking as he was wheeled into the hospital and down the dimly lit corridor past the swelling crowd that had assembled to see the leader of the Allied armies. Whereas Roosevelt’s personal doctor was an ear, nose, and throat specialist, specifically chosen because Roosevelt suffered from a chronic sinus condition—which he often notoriously groused about—here he was met by Dr. Howard Bruenn, a young, highly regarded cardiologist who was a lieutenant commander in the naval reserve. Austere and famously no-nonsense, Bruenn was disturbed at what he found. From the outset, he suspected that “something was terribly wrong.” Flicking on the lights in the examination room, he found Roosevelt’s face “very gray,” “pallid,” and saw that his lips and skin had a “bluish discoloration,” which meant that the body and blood were not performing the most basic circulatory function, getting oxygen to the tissues. Roosevelt coughed constantly, and could not hold his breath for more than thirty-five seconds.

  Listening to Roosevelt’s heart and lungs with a stethoscope increased Bruenn’s sense of alarm: as Roosevelt inhaled and exhaled, Bruenn heard rales, telltale rattling or bubbling sounds indicating that fluid was building up inside the president’s lungs. Roosevelt was literally starting the slow process of drowning from within. This was not simple bronchitis or the lingering effects of pneumonia, as McIntire had led him to believe. In fact, from the outset, Bruenn recognized that Roosevelt was having trouble even breathing; simply moving him from one side to the other induced a disquieting “puffing.” As the doctor later recounted, “It was worse than I feared.”

  The severity of Roosevelt’s illness became even more apparent as the examination progressed. A quick scan of Roosevelt’s records revealed that as early as February 1941, the time of the small heart attack, his blood pressure had been recorded as 188/105. What had happened after that was unknown; according to Roosevelt’s medical history, McIntire had not taken the president’s blood pressure since then. Today, in Bruenn’s exam room, it was 186/108. But other changes were obvious. The X-rays and electrocardiogram revealed that his heart was seriously enlarged and his pulmonary vessels were engorged. And there had been a significant increase in the size of Roosevelt’s cardiac shadow. If this weren’t distressing enough, Bruenn’s stethoscope also detected a systolic murmur, indicating that the president’s mitral valve was failing to close properly.

  Bruenn quickly made his diagnosis: Franklin Roosevelt, president of the United States, was suffering from congestive heart failure, hypertension, and hypertensive heart disease, compounded by acute bronchitis. Absent significant intervention, Roosevelt had no more than a year to live. Bruenn’s words would prove to be prophetic.

  Considering how deathly ill he felt, Roosevelt was remarkably incurious about his condition. Following McIntire’s pointed orders, Bruenn never offered a word about his findings, and Roosevelt cheerfully went along with the charade, chatting about one topic or another—this was his standard way of avoiding distasteful subjects—but never inquiring about his health. Indeed, the charade continued that afternoon, when Roosevelt made sure to attend a scheduled press conference so as to dispel any public concerns. It was a brilliant performance. Waving off any worries about pneumonia, the seemingly bemused president flashed a smile, feigned a mock cough, and patted his chest to show how unaffected he was. As flashbulbs popped, the press fell for it, and even the New York Times reported, “The president’s color and voice . . . were better.”

  Yet this was mere bravado, and he was anything but better. Met by Eleanor and their daughter Anna in his White House study afterward, he was visibly suffering and too tired even to talk. By 7:30 p.m., he had gone to bed.

  In the meantime, determined to treat Roosevelt like any other patient, Dr. Bruenn dictated a memo outlining his recommendations. A few could be easily accomplished, such as restricting salt in his diet, undertaking a program of weight reduction, taking digitalis (though setting the dose was somewhat complicated and possible side effects included hallucinations and blurry eyesight), taking daily mild laxatives, and sleeping in a specially elevated bed to relieve his breathlessness at night. Roosevelt was also smoking as many as thirty cigarettes a day, and Bruenn’s instructions were to significantly reduce this number and to limit his cocktails in the evening. But Bruenn’s most significant recommendations were trickier, both because Roosevelt was president of the United States and because the Allied invasion of Europe was just two months away. He urged that Roosevelt have complete bed rest for several weeks, with nursing care, and that he avoid “tension.”

  McIntire, who had egregiously missed most of the president’s ailments and was still resisting the idea that his patient had any kind of heart condition, all but exploded at the suggestion of bed rest. “The president can’t take time off to go to bed,” he snapped. “This is the President of the United States!” So he assembled a team of senior specialists to review Bruenn’s diagnosis. McIntire’s handpicked specialists sided with him, but Bruenn, believing the president’s life was endangered, refused to back down. Finally, McIntire agreed to allow two outside specialists to examine Roosevelt. After seeing the president, they emphatically sided with Bruenn.

  One of the consulting specialists, Dr. Lahey, indicated that he was also worried about the president’s gastrointestinal tract. Lahey left no definitive record of what his concerns were, but on the basis of some materials he left behind, he may have found what he believed to be an inoperable and probably malignant tumor in Roosevelt’s stomach. It was perhaps a secondary cancer, originating in a malignant mole over the president’s left eye or a wen that had been removed from the back of his head. But the immediate danger for Roosevelt was his heart.

  This medical team, then, was presented with an almost insuperable challenge. The president couldn’t work—work could kill him—and he couldn’t not work: the country needed him. What to do? They agreed on a scaled-down version of Dr. Bruenn’s recommendations, including limiting callers to a minimum during his meals; this would be buttressed by a much more careful, daily program of monitoring his health. Bruenn now began to appear at the White House gates on alternate days to check on his patient.
Within the first two weeks, the regimen seemed to be working—up to a point. X-rays showed a clearing of the lungs and a lessening of the bronchitis, probably helped by fewer cigarettes. Some of Roosevelt’s color also returned, and his coughing stopped. There was even a decrease in the size of his heart. The president was also sleeping better and reported that he was feeling better. Still, he was far from well—but that did not stop McIntire from blatantly misleading the public and the press. On April 3, McIntire asserted that the president was fine, that the exam had revealed nothing of any real import, and that now the president needed only “some sunshine and more exercise.”

  The next day, however, Roosevelt’s blood pressure rose to 226/118, and in contrast to his usual demeanor, Roosevelt was unusually listless, impatient, and expressionless; moreover, his concentration remained impaired. The normally stoic Roosevelt even confessed to Eleanor that he too was worried and suspected that the doctors didn’t know what the problem was. When he suffered inexplicable pain in his rectal area, he himself feared that there was a malignant cancerous growth, though the discomfort eventually ceased. But he continued to take his pills without asking what they were for and continued to avoid any talk of his real diagnosis. Whether it was the strategy of denial that had worked so well for him with polio, or whether it was the denial that had cloaked his father’s own ultimately fatal heart condition, it was the route that Roosevelt took. He preferred to remain completely in the dark.

  By this stage, however, the president’s medical team realized there was little choice. War or no war, president or not president, if Roosevelt were going to survive, something more needed to be done. The president was told he needed a significant period of rest. Away from the White House.

  FOR ROOSEVELT, IT MUST have been a torturous moment. A significant rest, away from the White House? Against all the odds, he had overcome polio and been elected president, had confronted the Great Depression, and was now presiding over the coming D-Day invasion and keeping the Allied coalition together. But suddenly, the ravages of his own ill health were threatening to do him in. “I see no way out and I am furious,” Roosevelt hotly told Churchill. Could the Allied effort survive his death? Roosevelt, like Churchill, knew well enough that wars could turn on such unexpected events: the death of a commanding general from friendly fire, an “error in strategy” or failed intelligence, or even a president’s sudden loss of nerve. But Roosevelt also knew that the task of great commanders was to find ways to overcome obstacles, not to be thwarted by them. They needed to lead—even when impaired. And always, they had to move on. So it was for Roosevelt.

  Though his doctors may have felt desperate, he felt challenged. Throughout his presidency, the mere act of standing up with his heavy metal leg braces locked in place—they weighed fourteen pounds—was an ordeal. Sweat pouring down his face, his jaw rigid, he often struggled to stand or to walk, swinging his hips forward in a halting, bowlegged gait. For years, he attempted to manage stairs on his own, muttering under his breath, “I must get down the stairs, I must.” He never did. But if his body was broken, his spirit never was. As president, he often awed observers with his stamina. The nation, indeed the world, knew him not for his handicap, but for his vitality: his resonant tenor, his lilting cadences and singing phrases, his flowing cape, and his famous smile. And most of all, for the fact that he spoke and thought in the idiom of the times.

  Thus he treated this obstacle like everything else he confronted in life: with unbridled confidence. He had faced down despair before, and was determined to do so again.

  IN EARLY APRIL WINSTON Churchill’s good friend, the financier and elder statesman of the Roosevelt administration, Bernard Baruch, offered Roosevelt his spacious mansion, Hobcaw Barony—a famous South Carolina plantation “between the waters”—as a secluded retreat for the president. Here, there were fish of all kinds and plentiful wildlife, from quail to fox, and alligators to turkey. Here, there were rustling streams, miles of beautiful fields and salt marshes, and dense forests filled with pine trees and century-old oaks festooned with Spanish moss. Here, away from the tug of war, the president could convalesce. Indeed, so peaceful was Hobcaw that Baruch didn’t even allow telephone lines to be strung there. Roosevelt’s bags were packed and his slow private train was prepared. “I want to sleep and sleep,” Roosevelt said when he first arrived, on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1944, “twelve hours a day.” It was supposed to be a two-week getaway.

  Roosevelt stayed for a month.

  AT THE VERY TIME that Roosevelt was wending his way down to South Carolina and the Allied forces were gearing up for D-Day, one particular sector of the Nazi empire was working at a frenetic pace: the gas chambers of Auschwitz. These represented the final, desperate push to eliminate the last remaining large population of Jews in Europe—every child and every mother, every father and every grandparent, anyone deemed unfit for heavy labor, or for medical experiments, or simply to live. This time, the intended victims were Hungarian Jews; their gassing would constitute the single largest mass murder in the history of the world. For Hitler, it was the realization of a long-held dream.

  AUSCHWITZ. ON ANY MAP, there was nothing like it. It was, from its medieval beginnings, a border town, dividing peoples and cultures, Slavic and German. Its name, Oswiecim, ironically, was derived from the old Polish word for saint. The Slavic residents brought their culture; the German settlers who followed brought their legal system. Straddling two rivers, the Vistula and the Sola, Oswiecim evolved into a small trading center. Over the centuries, it would pass from Polish rulers to the Holy Roman Empire and then to the Bohemian kings of Prague, with Czech as the official language. It returned to Poland in 1457, having been sold for 50,000 silver marks. During the first partition of Poland in 1772, Oswiecim was claimed by Austria. Under the Hapsburgs, its name was changed to Auschwitz, and German became the official language. In fact, until the collapse of his empire in 1918, the Hapsburg ruler was, among his many other titles, the duke of Auschwitz.

  While Oswiecim’s residents were primarily Catholics, there were also Jews, with only a scattering of Germans. The city had no laws forbidding Jews to live or trade within its walls. Jews were not banished to ghettos, and over time the city developed a flourishing Jewish community. Jews owned banks and factories, worked as shopkeepers and tradesmen, and even owned a popular distillery. As time passed, Auschwitz became a center of Orthodox Jewish intellectual life and Zionist organizations, to the point that some Jews spoke of “Oswiecim Jerusalem.” Actually, in its population, Jews equaled or even slightly outnumbered Catholics, and the city’s political life reflected this balance: the post of deputy mayor invariably went to a Jew, but the mayor was always a Catholic.

  The town’s first workers’ camp was built around the turn of the twentieth century to house the legions of migrant laborers. After World War I, it held refugees, primarily Poles fleeing from the newly formed Czechoslovakia. Then things began to change dramatically as the years before World War II saw the first genuine strains of anti-Semitism crop up among the residents. Jews were now forbidden to use a popular bathing spot along the Sola River, as well as the town park. Meanwhile, Polish residents quietly boycotted Jewish craftsmen, forcing some to close their shops. But no one could predict what would happen when, in 1939, Germany vanquished the Polish forces and annexed a vast area including Auschwitz, making it formally part of the German Reich.

  It was then, at the beginning of 1940, that the town of Auschwitz, in the words of one German historian, “caught Himmler’s eye.”

  Heinrich Himmler, the notorious SS Reichsführer (leader of the SS), was looking for places to build concentration camps for political opponents. The old workers’ camp at Auschwitz was one of three suggested sites, but it was not the first choice. The buildings and barracks were dilapidated, the site was swampy and malarial, and the water supply was poor. But the site also had at least two redeeming features. It was already on a transportation route—it sat at a railway junction—and it could b
e segregated from the prying eyes of the outside world. So in late April 1940, Auschwitz became the Reich’s seventh concentration camp. Everything flowed from this beginning.

  By the end of 1940, Auschwitz had already grown so large that it colonized villages and absorbed forests, ponds, and farmland, until the camp’s official “zone of interest” stretched over a sprawling fifteen square miles. And that was by no means enough. In the fall of 1941, construction began at a second camp area, in Birkenau, about one and a quarter miles away. Originally, Auschwitz had held mainly Polish political prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war. But in January 1942, Himmler announced the arrival of 150,000 Jews, one third of them women.

  They came, always, by train.

  IT HAPPENED LIKE THIS: As the packed trains pulled into Auschwitz, for several moments there was a gloomy silence, punctuated by tender whispers and sudden sobs and saddened glances. Gathering close, families huddled and started speaking in low voices. Mothers clutched sons, daughters held on to fathers, children gripped both parents’ hands, kissing them repeatedly. Some prisoners were uncommonly composed, simply listening intently. Others were on the verge of panic, counting the moments in terror and anticipation. Still others felt as though this were an eerie dream; and a hush—“every human sound now silenced”—would descend on the cattle cars packed with human cargo.

  The train lurched to a halt and the doors were flung open. Outside was a scene of chaos, confusion, and horror. For the Jews, after days of being trapped in their darkened cattle cars, squinting into the rush of bright floodlights lining the tracks was almost unbearable. So was the stench, like nothing they had ever smelled before. They couldn’t know it at the time, but it was the odor of broiling human flesh and burning human hair. Outside they heard all kinds of noises, dogs barking loudly, and commands they couldn’t understand. They were being ordered about in German; SS men with machine guns paced up and down the platform, and in staccato bursts, sentries yelled, “Mach Schnell!” When the Hungarians stumbled out of the cattle cars, disoriented and anxious, and timidly began asking questions, the Germans shouted back, “ ’Raus, ’raus, ’raus!” (“Out, out, out!”)