(2 of 2)
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."