PREFACE

This story begins in 1979, with the publication of Dr. Harry Goldsmith’s landmark paper, “Unanswered Mysteries in the Death of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” by the medical journal Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics, the first peer-reviewed examination that challenged the traditional account of FDR’s final illness. This paper by a well-respected surgeon, which garnered national attention, raised the possibility that a pigmented lesion over the thirty-second president’s left eye—quite visible, but rarely commented on during his lifetime—may have been malignant.

If true, this would suggest the need for a whole new evaluation of Roosevelt’s final years and the precise nature of the ill health that progressively overtook him. And it raises questions, long debated by historians, as to whether FDR was fully capable of functioning as chief executive and commander in chief during the global conflict of World War II.

In reaction to Goldsmith’s article, Roosevelt’s lone surviving primary physician, Howard Bruenn, emphatically denied that FDR ever had cancer, effectively quashing further speculation and investigation. But the 1991 death of Margaret “Daisy” Suckley, Roosevelt’s cousin and frequent companion, led to a surprising discovery: Daisy had kept a secret diary that documented her relationship with FDR, along with many of his previously unknown letters to her. And, to the surprise of Roosevelt biographers, who had dismissed her as a historical footnote, it turns out that FDR had confided things to Daisy he didn’t dare divulge to anyone else (save, perhaps, his onetime mistress, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd), knowing she would protect his secrets.

Like Goldsmith’s paper, the startling revelations in Daisy’s diary, published in 1995, often directly contradicted many of the claims made years earlier by FDR’s physicians, including what historians long had accepted as the definitive account of Franklin Roosevelt’s medical history.

Working with these disclosures, and expanding on them with intensive research, we have produced what essentially is a medical biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It presents a strong circumstantial case, backed by surviving medical records and analysis, that Roosevelt did indeed have cancer—melanoma, to be exact, originating in the pigmented lesion above his eye—that eventually spread to his brain and his abdomen. In other words, the cerebral hemorrhage that struck him down less than a month before V-E Day was not a “bolt out of the blue,” as his doctors contended, but the inevitable result of a deadly illness, compounded by catastrophic heart problems.

We did not intend this to be a political book, although it is impossible to avoid politics entirely when considering the effect that cancer had on Roosevelt’s performance as president. Others can read into this information what they will: Some will see confirmation that FDR was indeed the “sick man of Yalta,” incapable of negotiating skillfully with the determined Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin. Others will see a determined champion, tirelessly guiding America through the global conflagration while contending with the ravages of the diseases that threatened his own life.

In fact, even as soldiers were fighting the enemy on the battlefields of Europe, Africa, and Asia, a parallel struggle was under way in the White House to preserve the president himself against the considerable medical challenges—polio, heart disease, and cancer—that surrounded him. Roosevelt himself was at the center of this battle—not as a disengaged and uninterested spectator, as historians have long believed, but as a chief executive who ultimately determined the course of his own medical struggle, just as he did in the fight against the Axis powers.

With the help of his doctors, Roosevelt was determined not only to stay alive for the time needed to accomplish his goals, but also to convince the nation—and the world at large—that he was always functioning at full capacity. Yet he knew that his was a desperate race against time. In this respect, Franklin Roosevelt took one of the greatest gambles in world history—and won.