The lonesome death of FDR!

FRIDAY, JULY 5, 2024

The things we the people aren't told: In his new column for the Washington Post, David Ignatius reviews some of the history of presidential health evets in the 20th century.

He starts with Woodrow Wilson:

IGNATIUS (7/5/24): Past presidents have struggled with problems of old age, but public discussion has usually been suppressed. President Woodrow Wilson suffered a pre-stroke breakdown in late September 1919 (“I don’t seem to realize it, but I seem to have gone to pieces,” he said). Then came a debilitating stroke on Oct. 2. But Wilson officially served out the last year of his term, largely invisible. His wife, Edith, took control, writing in her memoirs that she decided “what was important and what was not,” according to biographer August Heckscher.

For well over a year, so it went.

The lonesome death of Franklin Roosevelt is a sadder and richer story. In the middle of the war against the Third Reich, he successfully struggled to election for a fourth term. 

After serving only five weeks of that term, he died at 63 years of age:

IGNATIUS (continuing directly): President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s frailty was obvious a year before his death on April 12, 1945. But, again, it was shielded from public view. Biographer Jean Smith writes that by the early spring of 1944, “the president was slowing down: the dark circles under his eyes grew darker; his shoulders slumped; his hands shook more than ever when he lit his cigarette.”

A doctor examined FDR that spring. His heart was enlarged; his blood pressure was 186 over 108. He was slowly dying, but his wife, Eleanor, and his inner circle pulled the veil of privacy tight. As FDR grew weaker, he made one decisive move: He replaced Vice President Henry Wallace with Harry S. Truman. It was one of the wisest and most consequential decisions of his presidency, for Truman turned out to be a president who could safeguard the future.

This (relatively young) wartime president struggled forward in the face of vast health challenges, and in the face of impending death. The leading authority on this history offers this brief account:

When Roosevelt returned to the United States [in February 1945] from the Yalta Conference, many were shocked to see how old, thin and frail he looked. He spoke while seated in the well of the House, an unprecedented concession to his physical incapacity. During March 1945, he sent strongly worded messages to Stalin accusing him of breaking his Yalta commitments over Poland, Germany, prisoners of war and other issues...

On March 29, 1945, Roosevelt went to the Little White House at Warm Springs, Georgia, to rest before his anticipated appearance at the founding conference of the United Nations.

In the afternoon of April 12, 1945, in Warm Springs, Georgia, while sitting for a portrait by Elizabeth Shoumatoff, Roosevelt said: "I have a terrific headache." He then slumped forward in his chair, unconscious, and was carried into his bedroom.

Continuing: 

"The president's attending cardiologist, Howard Bruenn, diagnosed a massive intracerebral hemorrhage. At 3:35 p.m., Roosevelt died at the age of 63."

What might this history suggest with respect to the matter at hand? Needless to say, you can teach it flat or you can teach it round. Our general impression would be this:

Here in Blue America, the people we're trained to trust have perhaps behaved rather poorly over the past year or so, and they continue to do so today. We know of no obvious way out of the current dilemma.

At any rate, we the people weren't aware of the medical situations involving Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt. Beyond that, a fair amount of secrecy was maintained about some of President Kennedy's health challenges—and, needless to say, about aspects of his personal conduct during his years in the White House.

(More on that below.)

Also, there's the case of former Senator Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.), a major presidential candidate in the 1992 Democratic primaries and by all accounts a good, decent person. He died in January 1997, at age 55, two days before his first term as president would have ended. 

Due to a previous episode with cancer, he had worked quite hard, during Campaign 1992, to tell us the people that he had no serious health concerns. Needless to say, the press corps anointed him as the fearless truth-teller in the campaign, as opposed to the Big Liar Bill Clinton.

(As politicians so favored may tend to do, Candidate Tsongas sometimes seemed to agree with this standard bit of casting.)

It's our impression that the Biden team has perhaps behaved rather poorly in recent years. It's also our impression that it's too late to do anything about the situation which exists, and that Donald J. Trump is quite likely to end up back in the White House.

Many different groups have contributed to this situation down through the many long years. If it's the simple truth you want, we self-impressed denizens of Blue America have been one part of the problem, though the chances are slim that you'll ever convince us of any such fact.

That said, also this: We denizens of Blue America! (Most especially, we refer to the people who have scripted us, down through the years, from their roles within the upper-end mainstream press.)

We Blues! We still love Dear Jack and his glamorous wife! For that reason, we disappear the 19-year-old actual intern he crudely procured and assaulted during his term in the White House.

In fairness, it was a different time, and according to at least one major biographer, he and his brothers had been very poorly raised, with respect to such matters, by their lecherous father. That said, the appalling story was finally told in 2012, in an extremely well written memoir, and we're fairly sure that no one actually doubts the truth of what was described in that thoughtful, well-composed book.

That said, so what? We simply continue on preferred paths, as if Mimi Alford's story had never been told:

For example, we continue to be shocked at the thought of the fictitious "21-year-old intern" who was neither 21 nor an intern during the period in question. 

Most pathetically, we insist that we somehow needed to know if Donald J. Trump had consensual sex, on one occasion, ten years before he ran for president, with a fully grown adult woman who shockingly wasn't his wife.

We continue to love and revere Dear Jack. On the vastly other hand, we very, very strongly feel that we needed to know about that!

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Our main impressions at present are these:

Cummings got his reporting right about the way "humanity" tends to behave. Also, it's possible that our flawed human race wasn't built for this line of work!