The Dying President

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. According to reviewer Dennis Dunn, the book:

argues persuasively that FDR was too ill (of cardiovascular disease) to be president and that his physical disability led to a series of misjudgments and mistakes in 1944-45, including a lack of study of the need for the use of the atomic bomb against Japan, a nonchalance regarding the evidence of the Holocaust crime, an inattention to China and Chinese Communism, a casual support of French involvement in Vietnam with all of the attendant consequences of that fatal mistake for American foreign policy in the postwar period, an inadvertent backing of the ridiculous Morgenthau Plan, and an unconscionable isolation of Truman.

Ferrell drew on newly available diaries by Roosevelt's cousin and close confidante Daisy Suckley and Roosevelt's cardiologist in 1944–45, Dr. Howard G. Bruenn.^: 1–2