His Final Battle by Joseph Lelyveld

Author:Joseph Lelyveld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

AUGUST 12, 1944. Speaking from the deck of the USS Cummings in Bremerton Navy Yard, with Anna, right, looking on anxiously.

“This was the first time under my observation that he had something like this,” Bruenn said in an interview many years later. “This was proof positive that he had coronary disease, no question about it.” In yet another interview, the cardiologist would acknowledge, “It scared the hell out of us.”

The thought that it might be a heart attack is likely to have crossed the president’s mind too. Somehow he labored through to the end of his speech without collapsing. “I had severe pain,” he exclaimed to Dr. Bruenn once he was carried belowdecks. A count of white blood cells was then taken and an electrocardiogram administered, a cardiograph being at hand by this time wherever he traveled. “No unusual abnormalities were detected,” Bruenn would say, writing carefully; in other words, just the usual ones. It had not been a heart attack, Roosevelt must have been assured, though perhaps not in so many words. (In later years, Bruenn would call it a “transient episode.”) His blood pressure was high but no higher than it had been. That same evening, he was wheeled onto his train in Seattle. Regular EKG tracings were taken over the next four and a half days as he traveled across the country to Washington with the security ban on disclosing his whereabouts back in force.

—

On his return to the White House, after an absence of five weeks, insiders generally held the president to be, as his aide Bill Hassett noted in his diary, “in fine spirits, looking fine, too, brown, a little thin.” Secretary Stimson, seeing him for the first time since June, found him “in better physical form than I had imagined.” His expectation would have been shaped by the photograph on the train of a slack-jawed president, the subpar Bremerton performance, and the whispers these stirred within the administration, as Rosenman would later put it, about whether “the old master had lost his touch.” That his visitors were studying him so closely shows that doubts about his ability to carry on were no longer confined to his enemies.

Roosevelt’s suntan gives him a sturdy appearance in a professionally styled campaign portrait taken at Hyde Park several days after his return: the light shines off his broad brow; his chin is thrust forward, leaving his neck in the shadows; his shirt and suit fit perfectly. He looks every inch the determined, commanding wartime leader. Five days later, Henry Morgenthau calls on him in his bedroom, where the president, sitting up in his pajamas and Navy cape, was accustomed to holding court before, with his valet’s help, getting dressed for the office. The Treasury secretary, a faithful friend, had taken no note of Roosevelt’s appearance at an office meeting the previous week. This time he writes in his diary, “I really was shocked for the first time because he is a very sick man, and seems to have wasted away.

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