FDR's Deadly Secret by Eric Fettmann

Author:Eric Fettmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs

The medically naive Perkins’s mention of fainting recalls the way Grace Tully wrote about him repeatedly “nodding off” while going through his mail, and Anna recalling times when her father seemed “very quiet, almost introspective.” (Perkins also said the attacks went on “for several years,” meaning that they must have predated Turner Catledge’s encounter.) However, there is evidence that Roosevelt did indeed have actual fainting spells: Milton Lipson, a Secret Service agent, recalled “several occasions when [FDR] had the misfortune to fall out of his chair, and you’d have to come in and there was the president of the United States helpless on the floor. And you [had to] gently pick him up, say nothing about it, put him back on the chair and that was it. But your heart would break.”11 Grace Tully also recalled “a fainting spell” that Roosevelt suffered at Hyde Park back in 1938—and how he “recovered so quickly that he was present with the dinner gathering in the library in fifteen minutes without any sign of indisposition.”12 A well-documented incident of sudden unconsciousness occurred in February 1940 when FDR “collapsed” while dining with his secretary, Missy LeHand, and Ambassador William Bullitt. McIntire later told the guests that the president had suffered “a very slight heart attack,” although he most likely meant a general cardiac problem.13

From the sheer volume of the reports, as well as their strikingly similar accounts, the overwhelming probability is that these events were seizures—momentary neurological dysfunctions provoked by abnormal electrical activity in the brain. Contrary to popular belief, not all seizures are convulsive; the ones FDR suffered, with a temporary impairment of consciousness, are best categorized in present-day neurological parlance as “partial complex,” highly suggestive of an abnormality of the temporal lobe of the brain. It is tempting to suggest that these episodes were the first indications that Roosevelt’s melanoma had metastasized to his brain, given that brain hemorrhages from metastases are the second most common cause of death in melanoma patients. But though this most probably did occur later on, the time element involved—Catledge witnessed it a year before his death—makes it most unlikely that these incidents were caused by a metastatic brain tumor, which generally causes death within a matter of weeks or months.

The most probable cause of Roosevelt’s seizures was an otherwise asymptomatic stroke, attributable to his severe cardiovascular disease. Unlike hypertension, for which there was no effective treatment in 1944, seizures had been treated with bromine since the late nineteenth century and with phenobarbital since 1912. Roosevelt had been taking phenobarbital, between 90 and 180 milligrams per day, since April 1944, ostensibly as a sedative—though it is curious why a powerful “downer” would be given to someone who was sleeping sixteen hours a day. More likely, it was given as a treatment for his seizures.br Roosevelt may not have been aware of its side effects when he complained to Daisy that he had “a sleeping sickness of some sort.”14

Bert Edward Park, a neurosurgeon who has written on the

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