FDR UNMASKED

A New Jersey–based neurologist questions the official record of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s health in this nonfiction work.

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first health crisis occurred on the day he was born,” Lomazow writes, when the doctor had to blow air into the infant’s lungs to start him breathing. Perhaps more than any other president, Roosevelt’s medical history is an essential element of his biography—from the paralytic consequences of his battle with polio and frequent rehabilitation trips to Warm Springs, Georgia, to the revelations of post-mortem coverups and anomalies in medical reports. Lomazow approaches Roosevelt’s life from a physician’s perspective, documenting the history of an American icon who led the nation through the Great Depression and World War II. Central to the author’s purpose is to discredit what he calls “well-entrenched, utterly false narratives” that have dominated discussions surrounding Roosevelt’s medical history; some have been disseminated by respectable historians who relied on the questionable reports of Roosevelt’s doctors. The book convincingly lays out its case that the president was far more ill than his carefully crafted public image revealed and that he suffered myriad ailments, including gastrointestinal bleeding, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and epilepsy. For political reasons, particularly during wartime, Roosevelt’s physicians “assiduously disguised the state of his health,” Lomazow asserts, in order to promote a “fantasy of a robust leader.” This medical “hoax” continued after his death, according to the author, in falsified autopsy reports and a publicity campaign led by Roosevelt’s daughter, Anna Roosevelt Halsted, and her physician husband, James A. Halsted.

Rather than denigrating Roosevelt’s presidency, the author concludes that his revelations of the president’s serious physical challenges only solidify FDR’s standing as “the greatest American president of the twentieth century.” Still, at the same time, the author emphasizes that Roosevelt possessed an “ever-deceptive personality” and was complicit in the medical coverup. Much of this book’s evidence comes from new archival material uncovered over the last three decades, including diary accounts of Roosevelt’s health from his close friend Margaret “Daisy” Suckley, and a treasure trove of documents found in 2016 in Roosevelt’s presidential library. As a board-certified neurologist and former president of the Neurological Association of New Jersey, Lomazow backs up many of his assertions with expert medical analysis, including credible links between melanoma and prostate cancer (two illnesses that afflicted Roosevelt, he argues). This book is a follow-up volume to FDR’s Deadly Secret(2010), the author’s previous work that he wrote with Eric Fettmann; this volume contains some new archival and medical analysis, but readers of the previous volume will find a great deal of repetition here. That said, this book is backed up by more than 1,000 endnotes, displaying the author’s firm grasp over relevant historical literature, primary source material, and medical research. Its accessible writing style is likely to appeal to a broad readership even in its nuanced analysis of complex medical issues. There are also ample visual elements, including photographs, magazine covers, and reproductions of archival documents.

An extensively researched and persuasive medical biography.