FDR's Deadly Secret

That Roosevelt was a sick man, older than his years, at Yalta, is undeniable. Sir Alexander Cadogan, of the British foreign office, “got the impression that most of the time he hardly knew what it was all about.”² But whether he was so sick as to be unfit to participate in Yalta, or whether his astonishing resilience and recuperative powers allowed him to marshal the mental acuity necessary to conduct such critical negotiations is another question entirely. Charles Bohlen, FDR’s interpreter and a senior U.S. diplomat and Soviet expert, maintained in 1973 that “our leader was ill at Yalta, but he was effective. . . . I so believed at the time and still so believe.”³

Roosevelt had wanted the conference to take place along the Mediterranean. But Stalin, citing—ironically—the advice of his own doctors, who’d ordered him not to undertake a long trip, insisted on a site closer to home for him. The three leaders ultimately settled on Yalta, a resort on the Black Sea. But Churchill, who arrived there first, sent word to Roosevelt that the Soviet leader had picked the most remote and inconvenient—not to mention inhospitable—location possible. “If we had spent ten years on research, we could not have picked a worse place in the world than Yalta,” he told Harry Hopkins, who relayed the message to FDR. “It is good for typhus and deadly lice, which thrive in these parts.”⁴ Moreover, recalled Howard Bruenn, this was followed by another dire message from Churchill:

The drive from the airfield at Saki to Yalta [was] 6 hr instead of 2 hr as originally reported by Mr. [Averell] Harriman [the U.S. ambassador to Moscow]; that one of his people had reported the mountain part of the drive as frightening and at times impassable; and the health conditions as wholly unsanitary, as the Germans had left the building infested with vermin. It was, therefore, a great relief upon landing at Malta to learn from Mr. Harriman and our advance party that, although we would face a difficult drive after landing at the airport at Saki, it would not be too tiring if completed during daylight and if we had clear weather; also, that the medical officers of the USS Catoctin, anchored at Sevastopol, had accomplished a very effective job of debugging.⁵

The trip took nearly two weeks: eight days’ travel to Malta aboard the heavy cruiser USS Quincy, a 1,200-mile flight to the remote Crimean airfield of Saki—at a low altitude, Bruenn noted, between 6,000 and 8,000 feet, which Roosevelt weathered well—and then the eighty-mile trip to Yalta, which did indeed take six hours.

Even before his arrival at the summit, some of those around the president had grown concerned. At a White House movie screening a few days before his departure, Roosevelt announced to the guests that they were going to see a film about Yalta. “No, Father,” whispered Anna, “not Yalta”—the location of the upcoming conference was top secret—“but Casablanca.”⁶ Upon his arrival in Malta, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, commander in chief of the U.S. fleet and chief of naval operations, and others in FDR’s military entourage were troubled by Roosevelt’s attitude during his briefings: He listened but did not talk. In fact, King recalled, the president seemed to want to get rid of them, so they quickly left without a word.⁷

Jimmy Byrnes, who took copious notes of the conference, complained that “so far as I could see, the President had made little preparation. . . . Not until the day before we landed at Malta did I learn that we had on board a very complete file of studies and recommendations prepared by the State Department. . . . I am sure that the failure to study them while en route was due to the President’s illness.”⁸

Things did not improve once FDR reached Yalta. William Rigdon, the president’s deputy naval aide, recalled that “some of us noticed, but without concern, that his lower jaw often hung down.” Writing in 1962, seventeen years after the events, Rigdon admitted that “it is incredible that many of us who were with Roosevelt daily did not see that he was declining.” ⁹ During the first three nights, the president developed a paroxysmal cough that would rouse him from his sleep; it disappeared, Bruenn disclosed, “with the use of terpin hydrate and codeine.”¹⁰

The summit began on February 4 and followed the same daily schedule: preparation sessions in the mornings, then formal meetings convened at 4 p.m. at the Livadia Palace; these lasted three to four hours and were followed by dinner and, in the evenings, social gatherings. During the first day, Anna, who’d accompanied her father, wrote to her husband, John Boettiger:

Just between you and me, we are having to watch OM very carefully from the physical standpoints. He gets all wound up, seems to thoroughly enjoy it all, but wants too many people around, and then won’t go to bed early enough. The result is that he doesn’t sleep well. Ross and Bruenn are both worried because of the old “ticker” trouble—which, of course, no one knows about but those two and me. I am working closely with Ross and Bruenn, and am using all the ingenuity and tact that I can muster to try and separate the wheat from the chaff—to keep unnecessary people out of OM’s room and to steer the necessary ones in at the best times. This is actually taking place at the Conf so that I will know who should and who should not see OM. I have found out through Bruenn (who won’t let me tell Ross that I know) that this “ticker” situation is far more serious than I ever knew. And, the biggest difficulty in handling the situation here is that we can, of course, tell no one of the “ticker” trouble. It’s truly worrisome—and there’s not a helluva lot anyone can do about it. (Better tear off and destroy this paragraph.)¹¹

Unbeknownst to Anna, however, she and the doctors were not the only ones at Yalta who were aware of Roosevelt’s “ticker trouble.” Charles McMoran Wilson, Lord Moran, who was Winston Churchill’s personal physician, confided to his diary that the day before he and the prime minister left England for the conference, he’d received a confidential letter from his longtime close friend, Dr. Roger I. Lee of Boston. It said:

Roosevelt had heart failure eight months ago. There are, of course, degrees of congestive failure, but Roosevelt had enlargement of his liver and was puffy. A post-mortem would have shown congestion of his organs. He was irascible, and became very irritable if he had to concentrate his mind for long. If anything was brought up that wanted thinking out, he would change the subject. He was, too, sleeping badly.¹²

The final summit of the Big Three: Winston Churchill, FDR, and Joseph Stalin, two months before FDR’s death. “I didn’t say it was good,” Roosevelt told Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle of the still hotly debated agreements on postwar Europe that were negotiated at the parley by the “sick man” of Yalta. “I said it was the best I could do.” (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)

Though off in some details—FDR’s heart failure actually had been diagnosed eleven months earlier—it was a remarkably accurate assessment of the March 1944 examination at Bethesda and the state of Roosevelt’s health at the time. His source, Roger Lee, was a prominent physician, a founder of the Harvard School of Public Health who had played a pioneering role in overcoming the clinical impediments to blood transfusion in the early part of the century.¹³ His own 1956 memoir does not mention FDR, although he does confirm that he and Lord Moran were close friends. So where did Lee obtain his obviously accurate information? We can’t be sure, but it’s significant that two of his immediate predecessors as president of the American Medical Association in the 1940s were Frank Lahey and James Paullin—the two “honorary consultants” Ross McIntire had brought in to examine Roosevelt at Bethesda the previous March and confirm Bruenn’s dire diagnosis.¹⁴

Armed with this advance knowledge, it’s hardly surprising that Lord Moran’s assessment of FDR, confided to his diary, appears so prescient. “To a doctor’s eye,” he wrote, “the President appears a sick man. He has all the symptoms of hardening of the arteries of the brain in an advanced stage, so that I give him only a few months to live. But men shut their eyes when they do not want to see, and the Americans here cannot bring themselves to believe that he is finished. His daughter thinks he is not really ill, and his doctor backs her up.”¹⁵ (Obviously, Anna’s letter to her husband reveals that she knew FDR was ill, though it’s likely that she was told of the cardiac illness in order to conceal from her the other threats to the president: seizures and cancer.)

But Lord Moran also was a skilled physician, and his eyes confirmed what Roger Lee had told him earlier—and what so many others had seen over the past several months. “The President looked old and thin and drawn,” he wrote of his first observation of FDR at Yalta. “He had a cape or shawl over his shoulders and appeared shrunken; he sat looking straight ahead with his mouth open, as if he were not taking things in. Everyone was shocked by his appearance and gabbled about it afterwards.”¹⁶

But “it was not only [Roosevelt’s] physical deterioration that had caught their attention,” he wrote several days later. “He intervened very little in the discussions, sitting with his mouth open.”¹⁷ Yet, Moran added, “if he has sometimes been short of facts about the subject under discussion, his shrewdness has covered this up. Now, they say, the shrewdness has gone, and there is nothing left. I doubt, from what I have seen, whether he is fit for his job here.”¹⁸

“The President no longer seems to take an intelligent interest in the war,” he said Churchill told him. “Often he does not seem even to read the papers the p.m. gives him. Sometimes he appears as if he has no thought-out recipe for anything beyond his troubles with Congress.”¹⁹ In his own memoir, Churchill would write only that “at Yalta, I noticed that the President was ailing. His captivating smile, his gay and charming manner, had not deserted him, but his face had a transparency, an air of purification, and often there was a faraway look in his eyes.”²⁰ Churchill was poetically suggesting that Roosevelt, a man he admired greatly and whose dignity he would never wish to impugn, looked as if he was dying.

Lord Moran’s description of his British colleagues’ astonishment at Roosevelt’s appearance and demeanor is confirmed by the contemporary recollections of Sir Alexander Cadogan, Churchill’s permanent undersecretary for foreign affairs, who noted: “Whenever he was called on to preside over any meeting, he failed to make any attempt to grip it or guide it, and sat generally speechless, or, if he made any intervention, it was generally completely irrelevant.”²¹

On the night of February 8, after a grueling debate over the issue of Poland—Roosevelt and Churchill insisted on free elections; Stalin demanded more control, citing the fact that “throughout history, Poland has been the corridor through which [Germany] has passed into Russia”—Roosevelt suffered an attack of pulsus alternans, in which strong and weak heartbeats alternate. “That’s a very bad sign,” Bruenn explained years later. “It indicated he didn’t have much reserve.” Once the president’s activity was cut back, the alternating pulse “disappeared, thank goodness, after three or four days.”²² In the end, Stalin promised free elections, though it soon became clear that he had no intention of following through.

Other issues were equally difficult: Stalin agreed to join the United Nations but demanded a formula in which a set of permanent members, including the USSR, would enjoy veto powers; he also wanted three extra votes for the Soviet Union. And his agreement on entering the war against Japan following the defeat of Nazi Germany was made contingent on U.S. recognition of Manchurian independence from China.

All these, along with other agreements that ensured Soviet control over the rest of Eastern Europe, have been cited over the years by FDR’s critics as proof that the decisions taken at Yalta were seriously flawed and heavily tilted in Stalin’s favor, making the Cold War inevitable. There is a fascinating exchange of letters to the editor in the New York Times, published in 1954, in which a young Robert F. Kennedy, who had been an aide to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, pilloried the Yalta agreements, saying they had “caused some of the heartbreak and problems of postwar Europe.” FDR, he charged, “made the agreement with Russia with inadequate knowledge and without consulting any of the personages, military or political, who would ordinarily have had the most complete knowledge of the problems involved.”²³ He was answered by the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whose reply blasted Kennedy’s “astonishing mixture of distortion and error.”²⁴

Certainly Roosevelt has been faulted for being too trusting of Stalin, and not just by his political enemies. Charles Bohlen wrote that FDR “felt that Stalin viewed the world in somewhat the same light as he did. . . . What he did not understand was that Stalin’s enmity was based on profound ideological convictions. The existence of a gap between the Soviet Union and the United States, a gap that could not be bridged, was never fully perceived by Franklin Roosevelt.”²⁵ Harry Hopkins confirmed this, saying that “in our hearts, we really believed a new day had dawned. . . . The Russians had proved that they could be reasonable and far-sighted and neither the President nor any one of us had the slightest doubt that we could live with them and get on peaceably with them far into the future.”²⁶ But the point at Yalta was that Roosevelt was in possession of the information—he just lacked the mental focus to use it, except minimally. He had little stamina, and only sporadic attention to detail. He was, in short, not a forceful negotiator, and if he believed that the shortfalls of Yalta could be sorted out later on, he was deluding himself equally about the character of his opponent and how much time was available to him.

But could Roosevelt and Churchill really have done any better at Yalta? Britain’s military commander, Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, would claim that Stalin “had no difficulty fooling Roosevelt,” charging that he and Churchill “behaved to the communist dictators at Yalta much as their despised predecessors had to the Nazi dictator at Munich.”²⁸

Yet Jimmy Byrnes would write that “it was not a question of what we would let the Russians do, but what we could get the Russians to do.” Poland, after all, already was occupied by Stalin—along with most of the rest of what eventually would become the Soviet bloc. “Theoretically, Churchill and Roosevelt could have refused to cut any deal with Stalin at Yalta,” Jacob Heilbrunn has written. “But that could have started the Cold War on the spot. . . . FDR’s approach was not particularly different from that of Churchill, who had declared that he would ‘sup with the devil’ to win the war, which is what he and Roosevelt, in effect, did.”²⁹

For his part, FDR probably gave the most honest assessment of his week at Yalta. “I didn’t say it was good,” he told Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, “I said it was the best I could do.”³⁰ Before long, Roosevelt realized that the agreements he’d reached at Yalta essentially were worthless. “Averell [Harriman] is right,” he confided to Anna Rosenberg of the War Manpower Commission. “We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.”³¹