"In the last couple of years I used Howard"

In 1951, as a result of a renewed accusation that FDR was "the sick man at Yalta" byJames A. Farley, Ross McIntire went into a "protect the boss" mode and, as the keeper of FDR's Deadly Secret granted an interview to U.S. News & World Report to squelch the rumors.

Of course the good and ever loyal Dr. McIntire went to his grave in 1959 denying that FDR had basically nothing more than a cold during his presidency. The whole interview is classic Mcintire, a collection of fabrications that even present day "mainstream" FDR historians would recognize as such. But there is one very revealing sentence that does irreparable harm to the fairy tale concocted by Howard Bruenn in 1970, one that that the very same historians consider gospel.

On the top of the third column of the page above, Mcintire, when asked about Bruenn, casually states "In the last couple of years I used Howard as I had used Dr. Duncan before him." The two year time period is also noted in his 1946 book and in 1946 correspondence back and forth between McIntire and Bruenn. Yet Bruenn, in his highly calculated 1970 work of medical half truths states unequivocally "I first saw the President in March 1944", something he made up as the keeper of the secret after Mcintire passed the torch, either actively or by his demise. Yet every major biography of FDR since continues to buy into this poppycock.

My Lahey Clinic lecture with Harry Goldsmith is in four days. Barring miracles, It will be the highlight of my FDR year.