Campaigning for an unprecedented fourth term in the White House in 1944, Franklin Roosevelt was a very ill man. He suffered from angina, high blood pressure, gall stones and exhaustion. His weight had dropped from 190 to 165 pounds and he slept 10 to 12 hours a day, sometimes nodding off at meetings.
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.
That did not satisfy his close friend and confidant, Margaret “Daisy” Suckley, a distant cousin who stayed at the White House for days at a time. She had never seen the president so melancholy and restless. She insisted that Harry Lenny, a former boxer and self-taught massage therapist in New York, help him regain his vigor.
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 summer home at Campobello during a lunar eclipse. Daisy and Polly came down for breakfast dressed in their finest clothes with suitcases packed, certain 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.
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 defeated Thomas 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 post-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 enabled 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.
***
Carlton E. Spitzer
