Medicine Man

WHITE HOUSE PHYSICIAN (244 pp.)--Vice-Admiral Ross T. Mclntire--Putnam ($3).

"A White House physician," Admiral Mclntire explains, "may not wait until the President picks up a germ, runs a temperature. . . . The job is to keep him well . . . and that entails daily observation. . . . [The] medicine man of the Great White Father must have the run of the place . . . in parlor, bedroom, and bath."

As the White House physician, Mclntire observed F.D.R. almost daily throughout his presidency. No one close to Roosevelt, says Mclntire, ever thought of him as a cripple. His stupendous vitality and cheerfulness drowned out the clicking of his duralumin braces, overshadowed the wheelchair itself. (No one was more delighted than the President when Mme. Chiang Kai-shek so far forgot his condition as to beg him not to get up and see her to the door.) Mclntire believes that, but for the strain of the war years, which made it impossible for the President to follow his schedule of exercises, he might eventually have recovered full use of his legs.

Worn but Sound. Dr. Mclntire's memoirs of these years is fiercely protective of his patient, generally devoid of spectacular revelations and gossip. "In writing of Teheran and Yalta," says Mclntire, "it has become the fixed habit of many editors and columnists to state without qualification that Franklin Roosevelt was a sick man, even a dying man." In fact, says Mclntire, he was "tired and worn" and underweight from overwork, but "organically sound" save for a chronic sinus condition. But once the rumors of his decrepitude had been noised around, Mclntire remarks bitterly, supporting evidence was fabricated too:

"In earlier years photographers had been uniformly kind and thoughtful, never snapping him in an awkward position. . . . Toward the last, however, they shot him from every angle and seemed to prefer the pictures that caught him with his mouth open or stooped forward. . . ."

There is no doubt, Mclntire insists, that the President undertook his last two terms because he was convinced that his country needed him, and that he scorned to conserve his own vitality by cutting down on his killing pace.

Winnie the Enemy. Mclntire's principal clues to his master's condition were simply "[his] color, the tone of his voice, the tilt of his chin, and the way he tackled his orange juice, cereal, and eggs." He got F.D.R.'s valets to pass on to him any pertinent details. He learned to peek unobtrusively at the height of the presidential workbasket and "the wash" (F.D.R.'s name for the countless documents that required his signature), to estimate the hours of work the President had before him, and to lay plans accordingly. He came to recognize the types of people who encroached on the presidential reserves. One thing in "Uncle Joe" Stalin's favor was that he hopped off to bed early, whereas "Winnie"--who took an afternoon snooze, rain or shine, and consequently loved to keep the President up into the small hours--was America's "Public Enemy Number One."

Other observations of F.D.R.: EURJ "He never resented any blow that landed above the belt. [But] his irritation was invariably stirred by the mean and little. Being 'nibbled to death by ducks' was the way he phrased it." CJ He signed the bill authorizing the Chemical Warfare Service with horror and disgust. CWS's results, says Mclntire, "were and are, in my opinion, more . . . devastating than the atomic bomb. . . ." CJ He was contemptuous of his own safety, saying "If anyone wants to kill me, there is no possible way to prevent him." When

Uruguay's President Gabriel Terra, recovering from an assassin's bullet, urged him not to ride through the streets of Montevideo, F.D.R. burst out laughing. "I can't see where I run any risks," he exclaimed, poking his fellow-president in the ribs. "You are the president they're out to get!"

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