Howard G. Bruenn (1905 –July 25,1995) was an American physician who served as Physician to the President and attended to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the year before his death. [1]
Bruenn was born in Youngstown,Ohio. [2] He graduated from Columbia College in 1925 and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1929. [2] [3] [4] He interned at Boston City Hospital and completed his residency at the Columbia University College of Physicians &Surgeons. [4]
He joined the U.S. Navy in 1942 and was commissioned a Lieutenant Commander. [2]
Bruenn was transferred to Bethesda Naval Hospital,where he became chief of cardiology. After giving President Franklin D. Roosevelt a routine health check,he was assigned to be the President's physician. [2] He traveled with the President wherever he went,including the Yalta Conference. [5] He was one of the only three people present in Roosevelt's personal quarters in the Little White House when he died on April 12,1945. [1]
After the President's death,Bruenn returned to private practice until his retirement in 1975 as consultant emeritus and retired chief of the Vanderbilt Clinic at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. [2]
Bruenn,a lifelong resident of Riverdale,Bronx,died on July 29,1995,in his summer home in Sorrento,Maine at 90 years old. [2]
Franklin Delano Roosevelt,also known as FDR,was the 32nd president of the United States,serving from 1933 until his death in 1945. He is the longest-serving U.S. president,and the only one to have served more than two terms. His initial two terms were centered on combating the Great Depression,while his third and fourth saw him shift his focus to America's involvement in World War II.
Sorrento is a town in Hancock County,Maine,United States. The population was 279 at the 2020 census.
Harold Lloyd Hopkins was an American statesman,public administrator,and presidential advisor. A trusted deputy to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt,Hopkins directed New Deal relief programs before serving as the eighth United States secretary of commerce from 1938 to 1940 and as Roosevelt's chief foreign policy advisor and liaison to Allied leaders during World War II. During his career,Hopkins supervised the New York Temporary Emergency Relief Administration,the Federal Emergency Relief Administration,the Civil Works Administration,and the Works Progress Administration,which he built into the largest employer in the United States. He later oversaw the $50 billion Lend-Lease program of military aid to the Allies and,as Roosevelt's personal envoy,played a pivotal role in shaping the alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom.
Harlan Fiske Stone was an American attorney who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1925 to 1941 and then as the 12th chief justice of the United States from 1941 until his death in 1946. He also served as the U.S. Attorney General from 1924 to 1925 under President Calvin Coolidge,with whom he had attended Amherst College as a young man. His most famous dictum was that "Courts are not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have capacity to govern."
The unfinished portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt is a watercolor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,President of the United States,by Elizabeth Shoumatoff. Shoumatoff was commissioned to paint a portrait of Roosevelt and started her work around noon on April 12,1945. At lunch,Roosevelt complained of a headache and subsequently collapsed. The president,who had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage,died later that day.
Fala,a Scottish Terrier,was the dog of United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt. One of the most famous presidential pets,Fala was taken to many places by Roosevelt. Given to the Roosevelts by a cousin,Fala knew how to perform tricks;the dog and his White House antics were mentioned frequently by the media and often referenced by Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor. Fala outlived Roosevelt by seven years and was buried near him.
The Roosevelt family is an American political family from New York whose members have included two United States presidents,a First Lady,and various merchants,bankers,politicians,inventors,clergymen,artists,and socialites. The progeny of a mid-17th-century Dutch immigrant to New Amsterdam,many members of the family became nationally prominent in New York State and City politics and business and intermarried with prominent colonial families. Two distantly related branches of the family from Oyster Bay and Hyde Park,New York,rose to global political prominence with the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909) and his fifth cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945),whose wife,First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt,was Theodore's niece. The Roosevelt family is one of four families to have produced two presidents of the United States by the same surname;the others were the Adams,Bush,and Harrison families.
Rayford Whittingham Logan was an African-American historian and Pan-African activist. He was best known for his study of post-Reconstruction America,a period he termed "the nadir of American race relations". In the late 1940s he was the chief advisor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on international affairs. He was professor emeritus of history at Howard University.
Cary Travers Grayson was a surgeon in the United States Navy who served a variety of roles from personal aide to President Woodrow Wilson to chairman of the American Red Cross.
Robert A. Dallek is an American historian specializing in the presidents of the United States,including Franklin D. Roosevelt,John F. Kennedy,Lyndon B. Johnson,and Richard Nixon.
Alexander Sachs was an American economist and banker. In October 1939 he delivered the Einstein–Szilard letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt,suggesting that nuclear-fission research ought to be pursued with a view to possibly constructing nuclear weapons,should they prove feasible,in view of the likelihood that Nazi Germany would do so. This led to the initiation of the United States' Manhattan Project.
Isaac Daniel Roosevelt was an American doctor and farmer. He was the paternal grandfather of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Margaret Lynch Suckley was a sixth cousin,intimate friend,and confidante of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt,as well as an archivist for the first American presidential library. She was one of four women at the Little White House with Roosevelt in Warm Springs,Georgia,when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1945.
William Edward Leuchtenburg was an American historian who was the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,and a leading scholar of the life and career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
James Roosevelt III is an American attorney,Democratic Party official,and a grandson of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. As of 2021,he is the co-chair of the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic National Committee,a position he has held since 1995.
The physician to the president is the formal and official title of the physician who the president of the United States chooses to be their personal physician. Often,the physician to the president also serves as the director of the White House Medical Unit,a unit of the White House Military Office responsible for the medical needs of the president of the United States,vice president,White House staff,and visitors. The physician to the president is also the chief White House physician.
Herman Benjamin Baruch was an American physician and diplomat who served as United States Ambassador to the Netherlands and Portugal.
The Dying President:Franklin D. Roosevelt,1944–1945 is a 1998 book by historian Robert Hugh Ferrell about the cardiovascular illness which Roosevelt suffered during the last year of his life and presidency. Ferrell examines the lengths to which the president and his medical advisers went to keep the public in the dark about the illness,as well as the political and diplomatic problems that arose both from the illness and the secrecy. He argues that Roosevelt was too sick to have remained in office,and that his inability to work led to critical foreign-policy mistakes in the closing year of World War II and a failure to properly prepare Harry S. Truman to take over as president after Roosevelt's death.
Ill-Advised:Presidential Health and Public Trust is a 1992 book by historian Robert Hugh Ferrell examining politically motivated cover-ups of serious medical issues afflicting U.S. presidents while they were in office. Although Dwight Eisenhower is the main focus of the book,it covers the presidency for a century,from Grover Cleveland's mouth cancer in 1893 to the health of George H. W. Bush,then-current president when the book was first published. All of these instances,Ferrell argues,raised serious questions about the fitness of each president to hold office,as well as whether the presidents and their physicians violated the public trust in keeping the incidents secret.