by FDR
“Do you ever take his blood pressure?” she asked.
“When I think it necessary,” McIntire testily replied.15*
At Anna’s insistence, Admiral McIntire reluctantly scheduled a checkup for the president at Bethesda Naval Hospital on March 27, 1944. “I feel like hell!” Roosevelt told White House aide William Hassett as he entered his limousine.16 Anna rode with FDR up Wisconsin Avenue to Bethesda. When they reached the hospital grounds, the president pointed to the tall tower that dominated the facility. “I designed that one,” he said proudly. And it was true. While campaigning in the Midwest during the 1936 election, Roosevelt had been struck by the design of the Nebraska state capitol in Lincoln—a twenty-two-story skyscraper rising out of the prairie. Like President Grant many years earlier, FDR deplored the pedestrian style of federal architecture. “Therefore, I personally designed a new Naval Hospital with a large central tower of sufficient square footage and height to make it an integral and interesting part of the hospital itself, and at the same time present something new,” he wrote his uncle Frederic Delano.17 Roosevelt laid the cornerstone for the hospital on Armistice Day 1940 and spoke at its dedication in 1942.
FDR’s SKETCH OF BETHESDA NAVAL HOSPITAL
Waiting for FDR inside the hospital was Lieutenant Commander Howard G. Bruenn of the Naval Reserve, the staff consultant in cardiology from Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. McIntire had instructed Bruenn to examine Roosevelt, report his findings directly to him (McIntire), and say nothing to the patient.18 “I suspected something was terribly wrong as soon as I looked at the president,” Bruenn recalled. “His face was pallid and there was a bluish discoloration of his skin, lips and nail beds. When the hemoglobin is fully oxygenated it is red. When it is impaired it has a bluish tint. The bluish tint meant the tissues were not being supplied with adequate oxygen.”19
Bruenn noted Roosevelt was having difficulty breathing. With his stethoscope he listened to FDR’s heart. “It was worse than I feared,” said Bruenn. X-rays and an electrocardiogram revealed that the apex of the heart was much further to the left than it should have been, indicating a grossly enlarged heart. Blood pouring through the atrium to the left ventricle of the heart was meeting resistance. Bruenn heard a blowing sound—a systolic murmur, which indicated the mitral valve was not closing properly. When he asked the president to take a deep breath and hold it as long as he could, Roosevelt expelled it after only thirty-five seconds.20 His blood pressure was 186 over 108. Bruenn could not understand why McIntire had not reacted earlier. The conclusion seemed obvious: Roosevelt was suffering from congestive heart failure. His heart was no longer able to pump blood effectively. If it continued untreated, the president was unlikely to survive for more than a year.21
Roosevelt chatted amiably with Dr. Bruenn throughout the examination but did not inquire about his condition, nor did Bruenn (in keeping with his instructions from McIntire) volunteer any information. But the young cardiologist recognized that the situation was critical. He immediately reported the findings to Admiral McIntire, along with his recommendations: bed rest with nursing care for one to two weeks; digitalis; a light, easily digestible diet with reduced sodium intake; codeine (½ grain) for his cough; and sedation in the evening to ensure a good night’s sleep.22 McIntire was appalled. He doubted that Roosevelt had a heart condition, and he did not want to worry the president or upset his routine. “The president can’t take time off to go to bed,” he told Bruenn. “You can’t simply say to him, Do this or that. This is the president of the United States.”23
When Roosevelt’s condition failed to improve, McIntire convened a team of senior consultants to review Bruenn’s findings. They unanimously rejected his diagnosis. After all, someone said, Admiral McIntire had been treating the president for years and it was impossible to imagine that FDR had become so ill overnight.24
“I was only a lieutenant commander,” Bruenn remembered. “McIntire was an admiral. But I knew I was right, so I held my ground.”25 Finally McIntire agreed to let two outside consultants, Dr. James Paullin of Atlanta and Dr. Frank Lahey of Boston, examine the president. Afterward, both agreed that Bruenn was correct. Lahey believed Roosevelt’s condition was sufficiently serious that he should be informed of “the full facts of the case in order to insure his full cooperation.”26 McIntire rejected the suggestion. He preferred not to tell the president of the diagnosis. The conference agreed on a scaled-down version of Dr. Bruenn’s original recommendations. Low doses of digitalis would be administered, callers would be held to a minimum at lunch and dinner, and Roosevelt would be asked to cut his consumption of cigarettes, limit his cocktails in the evening, and try to obtain ten hours of sleep.27
In addition to keeping Roosevelt in the dark about his condition, McIntire also misled the public. Speaking to the press on April 3, he blithely reported the president was fine; FDR had come through his medical checkup with flying colors. “When we got through we decided that for a man of sixty-two we had very little to argue about, with the exception that we have had to combat the influenza plus respiratory complications that came along afterwards.” McIntire made no mention of the president’s heart condition or the treatment that had been prescribed.28*
Roosevelt responded quickly to his new regimen. X-rays taken two weeks after treatment began showed a definite decrease in the size of the heart and a notable clearing of the lungs. His blood chemistries were normal, and an EKG revealed marked improvement in the heart’s rhythm. Dr. Bruenn was reassigned from Bethesda to the White House and examined FDR almost daily. “At no time did the President ever comment on the frequency of these visits,” said Bruenn, “or question the reason for the electrocardiograms and other laboratory tests that were performed from time to time. Nor did he ever have any questions as to the type and variety of medications that were used.”29
On April 19 Roosevelt, accompanied by Bruenn, McIntire, Pa Watson, and Admiral Leahy, departed Washington for what was planned as a two-week stay at Bernard Baruch’s secluded South Carolina plantation, Hobcaw Barony, but which stretched into almost a month. “The whole period was very pleasant,” Bruenn recalled. “The president thrived on the simple routine. I had never known anyone so full of charm. At lunch and dinner alike he animated the conversation, telling wonderful stories, reminiscing with Baruch, talking of current events, pulling everyone in. He was a master raconteur.”30 According to Bruenn, Roosevelt displayed no cardiac symptoms, although his blood pressure remained elevated, ranging from 240/130 after breakfast to 194/96 in the evening.31
Returning to Washington in early May, Roosevelt wrote to Hopkins, who was recovering at White Sulphur Springs from abdominal surgery complicated by a bout of jaundice. “It is a good thing to connect up the plumbing and put your sewerage into operating condition,” he told Hopkins. “You have got to lead not the life of an invalid but the life of common sense. I, too, over one hundred years older than you are, have come to the same realization and have cut my drinks down to one and a half cocktails per evening and nothing else—not one complimentary highball or night cap. Also, I have cut my cigarettes down from twenty or thirty a day to five or six a day. Luckily they still taste rotten but it can be done.… I had really a grand time down at Bernie’s—slept twelve hours out of the twenty-four, sat in the sun, never lost my temper, and decided to let the world go hang. The interesting thing is the world didn’t hang. I have a terrific pile in my basket but most of the stuff has answered itself anyway.”32
One of the pressing issues Roosevelt returned to confront was the crisis of European Jewry. Hitler’s campaign of genocide was now in full swing. Few as yet grasped the extent to which mass extermination was being conducted in specially constructed death camps, but it was becoming increasingly clear that the problem Washington faced was not so much providing asylum for several hundred thousand refugees but rescuing an entire population caught in the Nazi death machine.33
From the beginning of his presidency Roosevelt had been sympa
thetic to the plight of the Jews.* Yet he faced insurmountable obstacles. The Immigration Act of 1924 was unyielding, and the Seventy-eighth Congress was in no mood to consider changes. Public opinion, always susceptible to nativist appeals, was at best indifferent. Church leaders for the most part remained silent, and the intellectual community, with few exceptions, took little notice. The State Department’s striped-pants set (particularly those charged with immigration matters) was permeated with genteel anti-Semitism. The War Department—from Stimson and McCloy to Marshall and Eisenhower—resisted any diversion of military resources from the central effort to defeat Germany. And at that time the American Jewish community itself was divided. Members of the old-school Jewish establishment, primarily German in origin—men close to FDR, such as Felix Frankfurter, Sam Rosenman, Herbert Lehman, and the publishers of The New York Times—were lukewarm about mounting any special effort to rescue the Jewish populations of eastern Europe, fearing its effect on efforts to assimilate.
Hitler’s “final solution” had been launched with the utmost secrecy on January 20, 1942, at what historians call the Wannsee Conference—a meeting of top government officials on the outskirts of Berlin. By the summer of ’42 reports of death camps began to filter west. How much Roosevelt knew is uncertain. The State Department initially suppressed the information because of its “fantastic nature.” Career foreign service officers, remembering the atrocity stories manufactured during World War I, characterized the reports as having “the earmarks of war rumors inspired by fear” and declined to send them forward.34 When Rabbi Stephen Wise, the head of the American Jewish Congress (and a longtime friend of FDR*) provided Sumner Welles with irrefutable documentation in September 1942, Welles asserted the State Department had authoritative confirmation that the Jews were being transported eastward to construct roads and fortifications on the Russian front.35 Throughout the autumn of 1942 the evidence mounted, including a report from Myron C. Taylor, the president’s personal representative to the Vatican.† Welles soon confirmed the reports—“There is no exaggeration,” he told Wise—and on December 2 the rabbi appealed directly to FDR:
Dear Boss,
I do not want to add an atom to the awful burden you are bearing … but you do know that the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history has befallen Jews in the form of the Hitler mass-massacres.
Wise asked Roosevelt to meet as soon as possible with him and other Jewish leaders to discuss a course of action. “As your old friend I beg you somehow to arrange this.”36
Roosevelt responded immediately. Wise was invited to the White House December 8 and brought with him the heads of four major Jewish organizations.37 FDR received the delegation cordially. Wise made a brief oral presentation and presented the president with a twenty-page summary of the extermination data. He asked Roosevelt “to warn the Nazis that they will be held to strict accountability for their crimes.”38 Roosevelt agreed without hesitation and requested Wise and his colleagues to draft a statement for him condemning the atrocities. He said he would endorse it sight unseen.
Roosevelt acknowledged that the government was now aware that Wise’s information had been correct. “We have received confirmation from many sources.” The president asked for concrete recommendations as to what might be done. The group, which was apparently taken by surprise, had none to suggest other than a public statement. FDR said he understood. “We are dealing with an insane man. Hitler and the group around him represent … a national psychopathic case. We cannot act toward them by normal means. That is why the problem is very difficult.”39 When the meeting ended, Roosevelt assured his visitors, “we shall do all in our power to be of service to your people in this tragic moment.”40
Nine days after meeting with Wise, Roosevelt induced Churchill and Stalin to join with him in a Declaration on Jewish Massacres, which denounced “in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination”; condemned the German government’s “intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe”; and announced their joint determination to try as “war criminals” all those responsible—the origin of the war crimes trials that later convened in Nuremberg.41 Given that U.S. and British troops had yet to land on the continent of Europe, the declaration nevertheless represented a powerful statement of Allied purpose.42* It received wide publicity in the American and British press and committed the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union to prosecute war crimes against European Jewry.43
But the fact is that little tangible could be done. An Anglo-American conference on refugees convened in Bermuda in April 1943 but foundered on Britain’s refusal to discuss Palestine as a possible destination for whatever Jews might be liberated from Hitler’s grasp.44 In June Roosevelt met with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, who pressed the Jewish case for a Palestinian homeland. “The attitude of Mr. Roosevelt was completely affirmative,” wrote Weizmann.45 The president said the Arabs had not been helpful in the war and had not developed their vast territories. He thought they could be bought off and suggested that Weizmann meet with Saudi Arabia’s Ibn Saud.46 Later FDR authorized Rabbi Wise and Rabbi Abba H. Silver to announce on his behalf that “full justice will be done to those who seek a Jewish National Home.” The United States, Roosevelt was quoted as saying, had never approved Britain’s 1939 white paper restricting immigration. As Wise and Silver put it, “The President was happy that the doors of Palestine are today open to Jewish refugees.”47*
In the summer of 1943 the Treasury Department pressed plans to ransom 70,000 Jews from Romania at a cost of $170,000. The money would be deposited in Switzerland for Romanian officials to collect after the war. Roosevelt approved the arrangement, but because of State Department foot-dragging nothing came of it.48 Similarly, when Rabbi Wise came to FDR in July with a Swiss proposal to rescue Jewish children hiding in France, Roosevelt immediately agreed. “Stephen, why don’t you go ahead and do it,” the president said. When Wise suggested that Morgenthau and the Treasury Department might not cooperate, Roosevelt picked up the phone. “Henry, this is a very fair proposal which Stephen makes about ransoming Jews.” Treasury thereupon approved the plan, but again diplomats at State scuttled it.49
By the end of 1943 it had become evident that the European Affairs Division of the Department of State was determined to block any rescue effort. Officials at Treasury (most of whom were not Jewish) were incensed. Led by General Counsel Randolph Paul, Foreign Funds Control Chief John Pehle, and Assistant Counsel Josiah DuBois, the Treasury staff prepared a confidential report for Morgenthau documenting State Department obstructionism entitled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.” It charged that the State Department was “guilty not only of gross procrastination and willful failure to act, but even of willful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler.”50
Morgenthau retitled the memorandum “A Personal Report to the President” and met with FDR on January 16, 1944. Accompanying the secretary were Paul and Pehle. Morgenthau summarized the findings of the report and urged the president to establish a cabinet-level rescue commission that would strip the State Department of its refugee responsibility. Roosevelt needed little convincing. On January 22, 1944, he signed Executive Order 9417, establishing a War Refugee Board (WRB) consisting of Morgenthau, Hull, and Stimson, with Treasury’s John Pehle as director. “It is the policy of this government to take all measures within its power to rescue victims of enemy oppression in imminent danger of death” and to provide “relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war,” the order stated.51 Three days after the WRB was established, New York congressman Emanuel Celler wrote Roosevelt, “Your glorious action has cleared the atmosphere. It is like a bolt of lightning dispelling the storm.”52
Under John Pehle’s aggressive leadership, the WRB moved swiftly to provide whatever relief was possible. “The board,” Morgenthau wrote later, “was made up of crusaders, passionately
persuaded of the need for speed and action.”53 When Hitler occupied Hungary in March 1944 and ordered the deportation of 700,000 Jews—the largest intact Jewish community in Europe—the WRB dispatched the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg to Budapest under diplomatic cover. With a combination of bluff and bribery, using funds funneled through the WRB, Wallenberg saved thousands of Jews. The board also arranged for air-leaflet drops warning of war crimes prosecutions and induced New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman, the ranking Catholic prelate in the United States, to record a radio broadcast reminding Hungarian Catholics that persecution of the Jews was in direct contradiction of Church doctrine.54
Roosevelt addressed the issue again on March 24, 1944. Stung by Morgenthau’s report of State Department malfeasance, FDR took pains to clarify the government’s intention to provide succor. “In one of the blackest crimes of all history,” said the president, “the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour.” The Jews of Hungary were now threatened. “That these innocent people, who have already survived a decade of Hitler’s fury, should perish on the very eve of triumph over the barbarism which their persecution symbolized, would be a major tragedy.” FDR promised swift retribution. “This applies not only to the leaders but also to their functionaries and subordinates in Germany and in the satellite countries. All who knowingly take part in the deportation of Jews to their death … are equally guilty with the executioner. All who share the guilt shall share the punishment.”
Roosevelt pledged to persevere in the effort to rescue the victims of Nazi brutality. “Insofar as the necessity of military operations permit, this Government will use all the means at its command to aid the escape of all intended victims of the Nazi and Jap executioner.… We shall find havens of refuge for them, and we shall find the means for their maintenance and support until the tyrant is driven from their homelands and they may return.”55
