24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Consider the health of the president, January 14, 2010
This review is from: FDR's Deadly Secret (Hardcover)
In today's world if the president has a hangnail, I'm sure that a reporter will note it and within seconds the information will be all over the world and a topic of discussion on CNN, Fox News, Twitter, Facebook and every other medium of communication on the face of the earth. When Pres Obama and the French President glanced at a woman's butt as she walked by, it made national news!
Such was clearly not the case in the age of FDR. Here was a president who could go and spend a day with his former mistress Lucy Mercer Rutherford in her Aiken, S.C. home and make trips to doctors and hospitals without the item being news worthy. Contemporary Americans find it hard to believe that the vast majority of Americans and the world did not know that FDR was bound to his wheelchair, a secret that was maintained through the cooperation of the media who never photographed him in his wheelchair or getting in and out of a vehicle. Even in the 1960's it's hard to imagine that the relationships that JFK had - which I believe were somewhat exagerated now - but none the less existed to some extent went without media coverage. Today the guest list at the White House is always known. Every move the president makes seems like news. In the "good old days" politicians, candidates and other public figures got by with a lot until Gary Harte got caught on his boat. In our age of paparazzi news coverage, the age of FDR seems much like the stone age.
FDR was only 62 at the time of his death, but from the accounts in this book, he had the body of a man 30 years his senior with numerous health issues. It is surprising to find out his real age at time of death, because most people having only known him from his pictures assume that he was much older. The authors make a good case for the fact that FDR had cancer that caused his death. They also raise serious questions about the physicians who surrounded FDR - what were their motives? Did they act at the direction of FDR or on their own? The truth will never be known.
This is an extremely readable and interesting book for the first time student of FDR and the person with prior knowledge of the President and his life. There are references to the health of other presidents and the concluding chapter has an interesting recap of the issues regarding changes in presidential succession.
Although there is a good deal of speculation because of the lack of verified records as to many of the facts, the book is well footnoted. However, I found some of the astericks distracting. For the most part, the infomation included could have been included in the text of the work.
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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A hash of new information and speculation..., January 28, 2010
This review is from: FDR's Deadly Secret (Hardcover)
I'm surprised a publisher like Public Affairs would put out a book with such poor scholarship and sloppy editing as this one. It's the kind of thing I expect from Regnery Publishing. I immediately spotted an error to the effect that Franklin Roosevelt's 1944 acceptance speech (which was delivered via radio while he was aboard a train) was the first time he had not appeared at the Democratic National Convention to accept the nomination personally. Not true. He accepted the 1940 nomination via an address from the White House. (By the way, it was FDR who began the tradition of the nominee accepting his nomination at the convention.)
The thesis of the book is that Roosevelt was in much worse shape for longer in his presidency than has ever been revealed publicly. This has been raised in the media before. In 1979, a doctor named Harry Goldsmith postulated that FDR may have had malignant melanoma. This is based on photographs of FDR showing a dark spot over his left eye that appeared in the late-1920s, slowly grew, then mysteriously disappeared in 1942. The authors pick up on this, further theorizing that, by the time of his death, FDR's (unproven) melanoma had metastasized into stomach and brain cancer. The authors state that it was stomach cancer which caused FDR's weight loss in 1944, and that several incidents when the President seemed "out of it" were seizures caused by brain cancer.
The book's preface is illustrative of the flaws in the authors' work. It recounts FDR's address to the Congress after his return from the Yalta conference in 1945. There were a large number of verbal stumbles in that speech. The authors state that, based on the location of the text in his reading copy of the speech, FDR was having trouble with visual acuity in his left eye. Further, they state that FDR was using his hand to mark his place on the page while reading, and that he had never done so before. This latter statement is demonstrably NOT TRUE. There are newsreels of FDR as early as 1938 showing him using this method, and it increases as the years pass. Could it simply be that FDR's eyesight, as was common in older men, was beginning to fail, and he may have developed an astigmatism? There is no record of FDR's glasses prescription ever being changed during his presidency - and this would easily account for such troubles.
The authors speculate on several instances in the last year of his life when FDR seemed to briefly lose his mental grasp, only to recover a few minutes later. They claim that the President was suffering from seizures. But anyone who has seen someone having a brain seizure knows this is not the usual way it presents itself. It has been speculated elsewhere that FDR was suffering from Transient Ischemic Attacks, sometimes called "mini-strokes" and this seems the more likely cause.
As to FDR's weight loss, it has been documented as having been deliberate. FDR preferred to keep his weight at 175#, which would be an acceptable weight for a 6'2" paralytic. Due to the doubly sedentary nature of being paralyzed and working behind a desk, his weight fluctuated throughout his presidency, and by the end of 1943, he was nearly obese. It was on the recommendation of his doctors that FDR lose weight to reduce the strain on his heart. The authors trot out several figures for how much FDR weighed at various points, with no documentation to support them. One can only surmise that they are "guestimating" based on photographs.
Perhaps most troubling is the attitude the authors take toward Howard Bruenn, the cardiologist who examined FDR in early 1944 and diagnosed his cardiac failure. This book is a reckless slap at his memory, accusing Bruenn, who
arguably kept the President alive several additional months, of falsifying his accounts of his time with the President. If any physician made such a remark in public about another doctor, he would likely get booted out of the AMA. But Bruenn died in 1995, so he must be a safe target.
The book also relies on some highly suspect accounts, such as those by Walter Trohan, a scandalmonger for the fiercely anti-FDR Chicago Tribune (the newspaper which published the infamous Dewey Defeats Truman headline).
Finally, the authors fail to clearly delineate between the reporting of fact and their own speculations - several times repeating the cancer thesis as if it were a fact.
There is some new information in the book, such as the results of several blood tests in 1941 when the president was severely anemic. (I showed one of the tests to my partner, who performs just these kinds of tests, and looking at FDR's red blood cell count, he said "He was almost dead.") This has been attributed to hemorrhoids, but the amount of blood loss FDR experienced (he needed nine transfusions) would be highly unusual. The authors again speculate cancer, but it could just have easily been diverticulitis. They also print, in full, a previously unpublished account of FDR's embalming, which was depressing to read. The book also further confirms that FDR intended to resign the Presidency as soon as the war was over. So, history would have been little different if he hadn't died on April 12, 1945.
Speculation about FDR's health has surrounded him ever since he ran for Governor of New York in 1928. There were rumors that his paralysis was caused by syphilis. In 2003, a peer-reviewed study concluded that his paralysis was most likely caused by Guillain-Barré syndrome, not Polio (and certainly not syphilis).
No doubt, the controversy surrounding FDR's health and his fitness for office in the last 16 months of his presidency remains some 65 years after his death. Many worthy books have been written which address his physical health and state of mind during that period. This isn't one of them.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A waste of time and money, February 5, 2010
This review is from: FDR's Deadly Secret (Hardcover)
As a physician, I bought this because one author is a neurologist, and I thus expected a sound medical orientation. Alas, the neurologist knows little about medicine in the 1940s, and less about oncology. The book is a hash of idle speculation and medical ignorance, with a tedious fixation on 'coverups' by FDRs docs, as if doctor-patient confidentiality should have been ignored. Much effort was expended to bulk up the book with tiresome repetitive retelling of a few relevant facts.
Two thumbs down.
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