In 1944, contemplating a fourth term in the White House, Franklin Roosevelt was a very ill man, suffering from angina, high blood pressure, gall stones and exhaustion. He carried digitalis and stopped chain-smoking only when his doctors demanded he cut back on tobacco and alcohol. Ten smokes a day, and one drink. He made it a tall one.
His weight had dropped from 190 to 165 pounds and he slept 10 to 12 hours a day and sometimes nodded off at meetings. His family and staff were distressed by the dark circles under his eyes and his chronic fatigue. The man who had restored the nation’s health with a bold jobs program could not restore his own health.
FDR’s doctors examined him often, marked their charts and offered little information. He asked for none. When the press raised questions about his health, they were assured the president was simply tired from overwork but physically sound and looking forward to his fourth campaign against Thomas Dewey of New York. It was true that FDR’s mind was as sharp as ever, when he was alert.
But his close friend and confidant, Margaret “Daisy” Suckley, a distant cousin who often stayed at the White House for days at a time, was deeply worried. She had never seen the president so melancholy, restless and disinterested in reading briefing papers. She insisted that he meet Harry Lenny, a former boxer and self-taught massage therapist in New York. She had never met Harry, but had heard great things about him from a friend and believed he could help the president regain his vigor.
If the suggestion had come from anyone else, FDR might have brushed it off with a laugh. But Daisy was the one person with whom he was totally at ease, without pretense or reservation. And she didn’t hesitate to criticize. She had listened patiently when he offered a noble explanation for wanting to “change the composition” of the Supreme Court, and then told him bluntly that trying to pack the Court was foolish and would bring down the wrath of members of his own party as well as his entrenched enemies. Which it surely did. So he paid attention when Daisy recommended that Harry Lenny treat him.
Staff members tried to dissuade Daisy from bringing Mr. Lenny into the White House, and gently reminded the president that while they all loved Daisy and agreed she was a comforting presence, she sometimes did ditzy things. Like the day she and her friend Polly with the bright purple hair were guests at the Roosevelt family’s summer home at Campobello during a lunar eclipse. Daisy and Polly came down for breakfast dressed in their finest clothes with suitcases packed, certain that the eclipse was about to end the world.
But FDR waved off objections and agreed with Daisy that, like chicken soup, Mr. Lenny’s treatments couldn’t hurt and might help.
So it was that pugilist Harry Lenny became a guest at the White House, to the keen displeasure of FDR’s medical advisers, who stopped speaking to Daisy and tried their best to ignore Harry. He was difficult to ignore as he massaged FDR’s polio-withered legs for two hours each day. Lenny concluded that the president’s problem came from his spleen, and claimed his treatments would rid the president of his gall stones.
For whatever reasons, perhaps psychological, FDR’s blood pressure dropped, his fatigue lessened, and he was able to campaign in an open car through Manhattan in the pouring rain as millions of New Yorkers lined the streets and waved from office windows.
Lenny returned to New York, and FDR, having handily defeated Dewey, traveled 14,000 miles by plane and ship to meet at Yalta with Joseph Stalin of Russia and Winston Churchill of Great Britain to discuss war strategies. Stalin and Churchill were stunned by FDR’s appearance, and Churchill confided to an aide that he knew he was seeing his friend for the last time.
When FDR returned, he sat while addressing a joint session of Congress, explaining that the long journey had tired him and he did not want to wear the ten pound braces on each leg that would enable him to stand while holding on to a podium.
He left Washington immediately to rest at his little home on Pine Mountain, Georgia near the Warm Springs polio rehabilitation center he had founded. While working on a speech mid-day, as an artist painted his portrait, a cerebral hemorrhage ended his life. Daisy remembered with a sad smile that the healthiest weeks FDR had known during the previous year were the ones when Harry Lenny the boxer was his private therapist.
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Carlton E. Spitzer
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