Did Roosevelt Have Cancer?

Surgeon points to clues about F.D.R.'s last years

Little strokes, a heart attack, cancer. Rumors of these illnesses--and worries about how they would affect his fitness for office--hovered around Franklin Delano Roosevelt as early as 1936. By 1944, when he was 62 and running for an unprecedented fourth term as President, the rumors had become persistent. Vice Admiral Ross McIntire, Roosevelt's personal physician, insisted during the campaign that the President was in "excellent condition for a man of his age." But on April 12, 1945, less than three months after his fourth Inauguration, F.D.R. died.

Though no autopsy was performed (at Eleanor Roosevelt's request), there is little doubt that his death was caused by a massive cerebral hemorrhage. But speculation has continued about Roosevelt's health in the last years of his life; any serious illness could have affected his performance in office and led to what many believe were unwise concessions to Stalin at the momentous Yalta Conference. Now a doctor has raised anew the suggestion that Roosevelt had terminal cancer, knew it, but chose to run for re-election in 1944 anyway so that the country, engaged in the war effort, would not be disrupted by a change in leadership.

In a report published in the journal Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics, Dr. Harry Goldsmith, a surgeon at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Hanover, N.H., admits his theory is based on hearsay and circumstantial evidence. In 1963, while a resident at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, he attended a lecture by George Pack, a renowned cancer specialist. Pack told the audience that Dr. Frank Lahey, founder of Boston's famed Lahey Clinic, had confided to him that he had seen Roosevelt in early 1944 as a consultant and discovered that the President had a spreading tumor. Lahey had so informed Roosevelt, advising him not to run for re-election because he would not live out his term.

Though both Lahey and Pack have since died, Goldsmith believes that there is some corroborating visual evidence in photographs of F.D.R. taken over the years. By about 1932, he says, a small pigmented lesion had appeared above Roosevelt's left eye. In following years it seems to have enlarged and grown downward into the eyebrow. But after 1943 the lesion was gone. That leads Goldsmith to believe that the lesion was a sign of malignant melanoma--a form of skin cancer that can spread to other organs--and that it was surgically removed in 1943. He also suspects that when Lahey was called to the White House in March 1944, the physician found that the cancer had metastasized--perhaps to the gastrointestinal tract; several sources confirm that Roosevelt experienced abdominal pains. Cancer could also account for F.D.R.'s accompanying loss of appetite and weight. Further, it would explain why Roosevelt gave his son James funeral instructions shortly after his last Inaugural.

But Dr. Howard G. Bruenn, the Navy cardiologist who served as F.D.R.'s physician in the year before his death and signed the death certificate, vehemently denies that the President had cancer. Bruenn, now 74 and retired from Manhattan's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, conceded in a 1970 article that the nation had not been told the truth about F.D.R.'s health. The President suffered from severe high blood pressure, congestive heart failure and arteriosclerosis. But, he says, "Mr. Roosevelt did not have a cancer--of that there is no question." Bruenn believes that the abdominal pain was most probably caused by inflammation of the gall bladder--and possibly some gallstones--and the weight loss by the low-calorie, low-salt, low-fat diet ordered for F.D.R. to control his blood pressure and treat his gastrointestinal problems. He insists that Lahey never mentioned a diagnosis of cancer during consultations with him and that the President's medical charts carried no mention of any operation to remove a facial lesion.

Unfortunately, F.D.R.'s charts and other medical records are nowhere to be found. Bruenn recalls that upon returning from Warm Springs, Ga., after the President's death, he made final notations on the charts, which were kept in a safe at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md. He never saw them again, and all efforts by Goldsmith to locate them have failed. Indeed, says Goldsmith, when he phoned the Naval Hospital for information, he received the reply: "We have no record of a Franklin D. Roosevelt."

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