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ROBERT H. FERRELL, The Dying President: Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1944-1945 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998),185 pp., $24.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8262-1171-2).
This short but satisfying study reviews, updates, and adds to our knowledge of the tragic medical history of Franklin D. Roosevelt both before and during his final year or so as president. With his previous studies of Harry Truman and Roosevelt, Robert Ferrell is exceptionally well qualified to work in presidential history. And he has placed his account of Roosevelt's illness in a rich, insightful, and informed context of the political, diplomatic, and other events or demands of Roosevelt's presidency
The meat of the present work is its analysis of the alarming wartime decline in the president's physical capacity to cope with the demands of his office. The root causes of this decline were, for a considerable time, anything but clear to those around Roosevelt. Thus, one of Ferrell's purposes, and his most original contribution, is to reconstruct the lamentable story of the...