FDR - Jean Edward Smith [378]
Roosevelt met the press for the 929th time on December 28, 1943. He was asked about the New Deal: Was the term still appropriate to describe his administration? FDR thought not. “How did the New Deal come into existence?” he asked. “It was because there was an awfully sick patient called the United States of America, and it was suffering from grave internal disorder. And they sent for the doctor.”
“Old Doctor New Deal” prescribed a number of remedies, said Roosevelt. “He saved the banks of the United States and set up a sound banking system. One of the old doctor’s remedies was Federal Deposit Insurance to guarantee bank deposits. Another remedy was saving homes from foreclosure, through the H.O.L.C. [Home Owners’ Loan Corporation]; saving farms from foreclosure by the Farm Credit Administration; rescuing agriculture from disaster through the Triple A [Agricultural Adjustment Administration] and Soil Conservation; protecting stock investors through the S.E.C. [Securities and Exchange Commission].” The president ticked off a list of prescriptions Doctor New Deal had written: Social Security; unemployment insurance; aid to the handicapped and infirm; minimum-wage and maximum-hours legislation; abolition of child labor; rural electrification; flood control; the public works program; the TVA; the Civilian Conservation Corps; the WPA; and the National Youth Administration. “And I probably left out half of them,” he added.
“But two years ago after the patient had recovered, he had a very bad accident. Two years ago on the seventh of December he was in a pretty bad smashup—broke his hip, broke his leg in two or three places, broke a wrist and an arm, and some ribs, and they didn’t think he would live for a while. Old Doctor New Deal didn’t know ‘nothing’ about legs and arms. He knew a great deal about internal medicine but nothing about surgery. So he got his partner, who was an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Win-the-War, to take care of the fellow who was in this bad accident. And the result is that the patient is back on his feet. He has given up his crutches. He isn’t wholly well yet, and he won’t be until he wins the war.”
Q: Does all that add up to a fourth term declaration? (Laughter.)
FDR: Oh now—we are not talking about things like that now.8
The deterioration of Roosevelt’s health became evident in the late winter and early spring of 1944. For years his blood pressure had been rising, and he had given up his daily dips in the White House pool sometime in 1940.9 Grace Tully noticed that the president was slowing down: the dark circles under his eyes grew darker, his shoulders slumped, his hands shook more than ever as he lit his cigarette. The year before he had ordered a coffee cup twice as large so he could hold it to his lips without spilling it. These were normal signs of aging, Tully thought, intensified by the relentless pressure under which Roosevelt worked.10
But in February and March 1944 the signs grew worse. FDR seemed unusually tired even in the morning hours; he occasionally nodded off while reading his mail and several times fell asleep while dictating. “He would grin in slight embarrassment as he caught himself,” Tully recalled. Once he blanked out halfway through signing his name to a letter, leaving a long, illegible scrawl.11
Anna was stunned at her father’s failing health. She mentioned it to Eleanor, but her mother dismissed it. “I don’t think she saw it,” Anna told the writer Bernard Asbell. “She simply wasn’t interested in physiology.”12 In the last week of March Roosevelt’s temperature reached 104 degrees. He canceled all appointments and confined himself to his