The 1944 Presidential Campaign-- Why FDR Lied About His Health, And Why Wall Street's GOP Wanted Him Dead
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(photo- President Franklin D. Roosevelt acceptance speech for 1936 Democratic Presidential nomination, Philadelphia's Franklin Field)
Introduction--
The 2022 election result was in many respects a mixed bag, though many positive spinmeisters of the mainstream media have tried to declare it "a victory for democracy." While we are relieved for the moment that it didn't signal the end of democracy, we are still confronted with an unfolding monstrosity which has incubated within today's Republican Party, and emerged publicly in it's full white nationalist "cristo-fascist" hoods and robes, flanked by a large contingent of modern day brown shirts. Our democracy is on a ventilator and barely hanging on to life. Nonetheless, thanks to the recent increased participation of younger voters, we still have a recourse through politics to make meaningful changes for the good, and this is hopeful, but comes at the 11th hour.
The GOP agenda for the next two years will consist of violence inciting rhetoric, chaos, paralysis, political retribution, and mass recruitment to a propaganda machine which is simultaneously rewriting history, rewriting our laws, and stoking an increasingly dangerous armed insurgency. The refusal of a vast majority of Republican leaders to condemn Donald Trump for dining with Hitler admiring anti-semites Kanye West and Nick Fuentes speaks volumes to the reality that today's GOP is a new Nazi Party, even going so far as taking the name of the 1930's US pro-Hitler organization "America First." Trump himself publicly reaffirmed his committment to fascism recently by demanding the "termination" of the Constitution to facilitate his being reinstalled to the Presidency.
The majority of Democrats and liberals are tragically deluded. They have accommodated to the Roman Empire culture of mass spectator events of every variety, and are only roused from the sidelines once every two or four year election cycle, by and large. Because of the collapse of modern popular culture into Marvel/DC comics superhero worship and celebrity adoration, (our modern gladiators and arena performers) Americans in the majority do virtually nothing politically, except for voting and talking up a variety of issues and candidates when they are "in season." In between elections, they are content to cheerlead from the sidelines for those who they would believe are the "good guys." They avoid conflict and controversy, and pray for various prosecutors to clean up the out of control fascist mess which they, by virtue of their indifference and inaction over decades, have left us with.
One form this spectator mentality takes is the various pronouncements by pundits and their followers regarding the Hunter Biden laptop. There is far too much glib repetition of the line, "it's just a GOP distraction, a stunt to divert attention from Trump's legal problems," and "I'm sure its a "nothingburger," who cares about it anyway?" Or something to that effect.
The Hunter Biden operation is not simply a "Trump revenge tour." In reality, it is a slow-motion seditious conspiracy to topple President Biden before his term is out, and literally decapitate the US Government. The principle beneficiaries of this plot are a network of fascist Billionaires, now openly joined by Elon Musk (who has just called for the "truth" to come out about the suppression of the laptop by Twitter before he owned it) and Russia's serial killer/genocidalist/dictator Vladimir Putin.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-russian-disinfo-430276
This is a coup/murder plot in progress, not a "distraction." It is an operation to drag the entire Biden family through such a stressful ordeal that it brings harm to the President personally, a man of 80 years. One must ask the awful question, "is the end game of this campaign designed to drive Hunter Biden to commit suicide, and break the President's heart?" Are they aware that this is a possible consequence of their targeting, and is this what Trump and company actually want? To not raise this question is to not take seriously where this all might lead.
They intend to use the scandal to paralyze the Executive branch at a time where states are engaged in virtual secession and nullification, and a QAnon/Neo-Nazi centered terrorist organization is engaged in planning acts of violence against those targeted by Trump personally, beginning with his impending indictment.
The Clear And Present Danger Of The "Entertainment Industrial Complex"--
Far too many Americans who have been zombified by our tabloid/entertainment culture are so deeply ensconced in their mental foxholes, they can't or won't see this. It's gotten to the point where our entertainment addiction is so deep that Americans can't even enjoy sex without bingeing on Netflix first. ("Netflix and chill" is apparently the new expression for sex) And unfortunately those same people compensate for their own deep seated cynicism and lack of involvement by finding pretexts to indulge in euphoric celebrations over apparent victories which aren't even of their own making, (that is, if they are victories at all) which are the heralded successes of their anointed "heroes," the good guys who they've been rooting for from the grandstand. The truth is, our desire to find and adopt "heroes" is a symptom of our own fears and cynicism about ourselves, and our feelings of powerlessness in the face of overwhelming crises. And no amount of heroism on anybody's part can possibly compensate for the uninvolvement of the vast multitudes of spectators in between election cycles. This "spectators syndrome" from which we suffer is the point of maximum leverage of our MAGA enemy in their war against democracy. I believe it is better to admit this now rather than continue lying to ourselves about it.
The GOP's "Biden Is Demented" Campaign, Made In Moscow--
Just like the fabricated Hunter Biden laptop investigation, there has been a drumbeat of accusations that President Biden has dementia, which also emanates from Russia. The laptop operation was launched by Russian asset Rudy Giuliani and his friends at the Murdoch owned New York Post, "One America News Network," (OANN) another front for Russian intelligence, RT (Russia Today), and Newsmax, and the steady flow of lies about the President's health has come from essentially the same sources.
The President does not have dementia. He has a historic speech impediment, and a tendency to go off script and speak from his heart, driving many of his White House advisors to anxiety states because they unsuccessfully try to manage someone who speaks his mind and is sometimes spontaneous. And being human, on occasion he is mistaken. (As opposed to a President whose history is the telling of 30,573 deliberate lies, fabrications, or not even half-truths, in a four year period) Yet it is the centerpiece of the MAGA-verse campaign of personal annihilation against him.
This line of attack will grow in its scope and become the centerpiece of the MAGA efforts to either remove him from the Presidency or render him a lame duck. It will also be used to fuel a rebellion of Red States in defiance of federal laws and Executive Orders which they will dismiss as illegal, illegitimate and the product of a demented person, not simply someone whose election they argue was fake, a Presidency stolen for him by the nation's enemies.
The fake issue of Joe Biden's mental health will, in my estimation, become the centerpiece of the GOP's drive to seize power. And in this context, this is reminiscent of a similar campaign run by the GOP 78 years ago, as they launched a plot to remove Franklin Roosevelt in similar fashion. In a certain way, that campaign worked by causing what many believe to be his premature death. It was the Presidential election of 1944.
Franklin Roosevelt's Very Big "White Lie"---
Unlike President Biden, President Roosevelt's health was rapidly failing toward the middle of his unprecedented third term as President, which was the most extreme factor of uncertainty at that point in the War. Hitler's greatest hope was to forestall an amphibious Allied landing in Europe for as long as possible, while throwing their Armies at the Soviet Union in a holding action of sorts after their defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk. Ideally Hitler hoped for FDR to die and be succeeded by the isolationist pro-Hitler wing of the US establishment which had their assets in the Democratic Party. These were FDR's factional enemies, led by the J. P. Morgan interests and former Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, (whom he fired for reasons of his pro-Hitler views) who might ostensibly be brought in to negotiate a cease fire with Germany and join Hitler's anti-communist crusade to destroy the Soviet Union. Also Hitler hoped that the Churchill government would fall and be replaced by their previous appeasement leadership, which would act to restore the abdicated pro-Hitler King, Edward VIII, the exiled Duke of Windsor who would sue for peace and allow Germany to overrun Great Britain.
With regard to FDR's overall health, his poor lifestyle decisions of smoking and alcohol consumption complicated his already compromised condition due to Polio, which he had contracted 20 years before in middle age. Add to that the extraordinary stress and long hours related to his functioning as President during a time of unprecedented crisis, and there was a marked deterioration during his third term.
From the moment FDR took office in March of 1933, he was fighting a two-front political war. The most urgent was his conflict with Wall Street, who caused the 1929 Crash and Global Depression with their combination of speculative financial bubble creation and economic looting of the real economy and labor force. The economic crimes of the Wall Street robber barons were made fully public in Congressional hearings chaired by former prosecutor Ferdinand Pecora, who exposed in particular the role of the "House of Morgan" and the Mellon Banking interests in collapsing the US economy through their Ponzi type schemes and looting. FDR's flood of regulatory measures and reconstruction/ recovery programs were carried out against the fury and enmity of the right-wing financiers, not unlike the conflict which President Biden finds himself in today.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecora_Commission
When Roosevelt ran for re-election in 1936, his campaign theme was to revive the spirit of the American Revolution by defeating what he termed Wall Street's "economic royalists" in his Philadelphia speech to the Democratic nominating convention. It was a throwing down of the gauntlet, because he understood the consequences of allowing these financiers to come back to power.
His second battlefront, also domestic in nature, was the attempt to wreck his Presidency by these same forces, who actually funded and organized an insurrection of disgruntled World War I veterans in an attempt to run a fascist coup, later known as the "Business Plot." This was run in concert with a growing right-wing movement of anti-semites and isolationists which modeled themselves on Mussolini's Black Shirts, and Hitler's Brownshirts.
These fascist groups were funded directly by FDR's enemies, and they used the desperation of the veterans who had been promised bonuses to organize a massive White House protest. This was done through the Morgan influenced American Legion, and the goal was to overrun the White House, capture and kill FDR, declare a military junta and install retired Marine General Smedley Darlington Butler as the head of the junta. Except that Butler only pretended to go along with the plot, and blew the whistle on it by testifying in Congress, naming the names, and doing it publicly. Amazingly there were no prosecutions, as the US establishment circled their wagons around their cronies and used the media to try and discredit Butler.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/01/13/fdr-roosevelt-coup-business-plot/
But what is non-debatable was the open endorsement and active support of many of these US financiers and industrialists for the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini, and their efforts to transplant their experiments with fascism into the US. President Roosevelt and his Democratic pro-farmer/labor movement stood in the way.
The United States was in an existential crisis at the moment FDR was elected, and it remained that way until the day he died. During this era, it was felt by FDR and the people around him that he should never be photographed in a wheelchair or on crutches, because he believed that restoring people's confidence in government and the economy was tied to their confidence in his personal leadership. Consequently, the media did not write about his Polio disability and photos of him needing assistance were simply not allowed. A large number of Americans never knew that he was handicapped until wartime.
So he, and those around him lied. They lied because so much depended upon his leadership holding the nation together and seeing through the recovery and rearmament programs upon which the nation's existence depended. And this policy continued well into his third term as President, until they could no longer hide the ravaging physical effects of his declining health.
The following description of the President's decision to run, his medical prognosis and the context of it were summarized as thus in a "History Channel" piece which is excerpted here:
["At the outset of 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt was entering his 12th year as president of the United States.
The popular Democratic leader had steered his country through the Great Depression with his groundbreaking New Deal programs, and won an unprecedented third term by a margin of some 5 million votes in 1940. Now, as another election year dawned, Roosevelt faced another monumental challenge: defeating Germany and Japan to win World War II, and negotiating with the Soviet Union to construct a lasting post-war peace.
Just as he did so, however, his health was deteriorating. Soon after returning from the Tehran Conference, Roosevelt developed a violent cough, began losing weight and was constantly fatigued. His daughter Anna was concerned enough to press Roosevelt’s personal physician, Dr. Ross McIntire, who arranged for the president to see Dr. Howard G. Bruenn, a cardiologist at Bethesda Medical Naval Hospital, for an examination on March 28, 1944.
According to Bruenn’s medical notes, which he later published, he diagnosed the 62-year-old Roosevelt with reduced lung capacity, hypertension (or high blood pressure), acute bronchitis and—most seriously—acute congestive heart failure.
FDR’s Grim Prognosis
At the time, medications had not yet been developed to manage hypertension, and the only treatment was regulating a patient’s lifestyle. In addition to a course of digitalis, an herbal drug extracted from leaves of the foxglove flower, Bruenn prescribed the president a restricted diet, reduced alcohol and tobacco use and increased rest. That meant that in May 1944—one month before D-Day—the daily schedule of the U.S. president included only four hours of work a day.
Under Bruenn’s regimen, some of Roosevelt’s symptoms improved, but he remained noticeably underweight. In July 1944, Dr. Frank Lahey, head of the Lahey Clinic in Boston, advised McIntire that he believed Roosevelt would not survive another full term in office. Lahey, one of a panel of medical experts who had examined Roosevelt that March after Bruenn’s diagnosis, also recorded his assessment in an unpublished memo, the full text of which would not be made public until more than six decades after Roosevelt’s death.
"It was my opinion,” Lahey wrote, “that over the four years of another term with its burdens, he would again have heart failure and be unable to complete it.”
According to Lahey, McIntire agreed with his assessment of the situation, although it’s unknown exactly how much information he passed along to his powerful patient. In any case, Lahey dated his memo July 10, 1944. Ten days later, Roosevelt accepted the Democratic nomination for a fourth term as president."]
https://www.history.com/news/franklin-d-roosevelt-health-final-term
Because of the President's tenuous condition, far more thought went into the choice of his Vice-Presidential running mate, who had previously been the left-leaning Henry Wallace, considered by some to be even more radical than FDR in his views on economy, government, and the world order after the War. He was considered a liability and unacceptable to the conservative and Jim Crow wings of the Democratic Party. Therefore they settled on Missouri Senator Harry S Truman, who had made a name for himself crusading against the corporate war profiteers who stole from the American people. In some cases such as the pro-Hitler Prescott Bush, Roland Harriman, and the "Brown Brothers Harriman" Bank, they were exposed in Truman's committee as trading with the enemy, extending loans to the Nazi's Thyssen Steel Company DURING the War. (Yes, that Prescott Bush)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
The Thomas Dewey Campaign, Wall Street's Second Anti-Roosevelt Coup Plot--
In assessing the role of the New York Governor Thomas Dewey, his career and character are reminiscent of today's US Senator Lindsey Graham. Dewey built his political career grandstanding repeatedly in his crusade against celebrity mobsters such as Lucky Luciano and Legs Diamond, similar to how Graham built his career with his theatrics during the partisan attack on President Bill Clinton throughout the GOP's frivolous "Lewinsky Affair" Impeachment.
Dewey, while very partisan and serving the interests of his Wall Street backers, still on occasions stood up for the national interest and that of his home state. He had actually supported the leading features of the New Deal, supported FDR's wartime economic measures, and cooperated with the government's deal with Luciano to use the mob controlled Longshoreman Union to protect our ports from sabotage, in exchange for Dewey commuting his prison term and deporting him to Italy. However, like Graham, who had worked for a time in a bipartisan manner with Senator John McCain, a combination of ego-driven ambition and possible blackmail leverage broke him, and made him a tool of our "Fifth Column" enemies at the time.
Dewey was essentially controlled by FDR's fanatical opposition, who were beating the drum in 1944 for the administration's strict anti-depression financial regulations to be lifted, on the grounds that the war was winding down, and the economy doing well. In effect, they were demanding the freedom to resume the speculative looting and gouging of working people which caused the Depression to begin with. Simultaneously, the operations of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC, later the main stage for the McCarthy Witch hunts) escalated their campaigns to brand the New Deal a communist plot, and FDR's political allies as radicals.
This was the backdrop for Dewey's campaign and his choice of extreme right Senator John Bricker as his running mate. And unsurprisingly, he began his campaign with attacks on the New Deal, which he had previously supported and used to upgrade his own state. (This will sound familiar to many who observe the MAGA Republicans today who voted against President Biden's infrastructure bill, then took credit for its benefits, and then attacked it for causing inflation)
Because Americans were beginning to tire of the war and the wartime rationing, there was a belief among Republicans that Roosevelt could either be defeated, or made a lame duck. (He won the electors overwhelmingly, but the popular vote was too close for comfort)
So, Dewey did what he was told, what no GOP candidate had dared to do in the previous three elections, which was to make FDR's health the main issue. First, as a quiet rumor campaign followed by much innuendo of him being unfit, then openly questioning his capacity to continue and finish his term.
["One of Dewey's most effective gambits was to raise discreetly the age issue. He assailed the President as a "tired old man" with "tired old men" in his cabinet, pointedly suggesting that the President's lack of vigor had produced a less than vigorous economic recovery."]
https://millercenter.org/president/fdroosevelt/campaigns-and-elections
The result was that FDR was forced to leave the White House and go out to campaign, defying all medical advice and the admonitions of those close to him. He insisted he was up to it, but he was not. This led to extreme difficulties, both physical, logistical, and psychological.
The President still had a war to run, with the prospect of an allied invasion of Europe being imminent, which as we know had it failed (due to either bad weather, or Hitler guessing correctly where it would land) the war could have been set back and dragged on interminably, and pressure for a negotiated cease-fire would have increased. But because of Dewey's unprincipled and selfish decision to go after the President's health, FDR had to both campaign and be President, and dragged himself from city to city to prove he was still fit.
This led to near disasters, such as when he rode in a motorcade in the rain in New York City, insisting on an open Limo so he could be seen, and arriving finally at the speakers podium on a very cold wet Autumn day, soaked completely through. It was miraculous that he didn't die of pneumonia during the campaign.
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Also very problematic was the stress of leaving the White House and traveling. It is not well known that FDR hated traveling because he had an extreme phobia of being trapped in a burning building and dying by fire, due to his paralysis from Polio. He was very comfortable in both the White House and Hyde Park which were both made handicapped accessible for him, but being on the road was different. For security reasons, the President would sleep in upstairs bedrooms, but elaborate measures were needed to construct make-shift fire escapes from bedroom windows made with tarps, which he could use to throw himself out the window and slide to the ground. He insisted that doors to his rooms never be locked. This was done mostly everywhere he traveled to ease his mind, and he insisted on test runs to make sure they worked because he was terrified. This, poignantly coming from the President whose inaugural appeal to Americans was to overcome fear.
https://npg.si.edu/blog/fears-fearless-fdr-president%E2%80%99s-superstitions-friday-13th
These things, the grind of travel, the stress of campaigning, and the onerous functions of his Presidency combined to exacerbate his medical conditions and negate his Doctor's recommendations, which even they feared would not greatly extend his life. All because Thomas Dewey was ambitious, and his Wall Street GOP controllers were so greedy, so soft on European fascism, and so fearful of FDR's revival of the American Revolution, that he capitulated and helped drag the President to a possibly premature death. (Which finally came in his Warm Springs Georgia home in April of 1945) The Dewey campaign to question his fitness was designed to wear him down, and/or to force his exposure to Americans as a sick man, at a time when his leadership was indispensable.
While it cannot be stated with certainty that Roosevelt might have lived longer had Dewey not done this, it can be said that like today, the GOP operated with flagrant disregard for the national interest in a hateful and unprincipled way, because their loyalties lay with financial oligarchs for whom the national interest was secondary to their own.
The movement which elected FDR four times forced Wall Street to finance the recovery and war effort against their will, therefore the President's physical decline during his third term brought out the rabid and ravenous Hyenas of their nature, primed to stalk and capture the presidency from their most dangerous ever adversary. What the GOP feared most then, just like today, was the movement which the President helped bring into being, which he led, and the newfound qualities of those people who he inspired and lifted up. They feared his proposals for the United Nations, the post-war economic order, and the end of colonialism. It wasn't just about him, they feared his legacy.
Conclusion: What This Means For 2024, For Us--
While the comparison to today is not one of equivalence per se, in that Joe Biden is healthy for his age and at this time fully capable of campaigning and governing, it does hold when we look at how low the opposition descends to, because of their disgusting moral terpitude. Likewise, it is difficult for us today to rationalize the decision by Roosevelt and those around him to lie about his health, regardless of the well-intentioned motivation to do so. They were different times, and such lies today would be both untenable and unacceptable.
Their campaign to declare President Biden mentally incompetent when he is emphatically not, is an attack on the United States, the institution of the Presidency, our Democratic system, and the American people, coming from the same movement for sedition and insurrection which would prefer we had no elections at all. Like FDR's enemies, they hate what America was founded to be, and they have operated as a Trojan Horse for our leading strategic adversary, presently the resurgent Russian Empire of Vladimir Putin.
This campaign against President Biden is more than just "politics" or a blast from the past. This is their next gambit for wrecking the 2024 Presidential election, and one which combined with their campaign to annihilate the President's son and family, is the most dangerous line of attack from the nation's enemies.
This is what they do, and they have done it before. The question remains, will we rise to the occasion to finish President Roosevelt's presidential mission, the one being continued today and advanced upon by President Biden. Can we learn enough, and do enough in time?
The answer to that question is whatever we want it to be. It is in our hands, because there are no "superheroes."
(For reference, the two part series by Martha Rosen on "The Miracle of Franklin Roosevelt"
https://therosenreport.blogspot.com/2020/10/article-by-martha-rosen-miracle-of.html
https://therosenreport.blogspot.com/2020/10/franklin-roosevelts-miracle-part-ii.html
