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before 1944. Pics of him from mid 43 on show a very frail president.
Putting Truman on the ticket was a calculated move; Garner was gone, and Wallace was little more than pissed off clown who spent his days looking into the bottom of a bottle. While FDR found Truman "brusque", his resume was impeccable. I think FDR knew what was coming, hoping to last out the closing months of the war, maybe take the postwar era in a slightly different direction, he, like Churchill had no trust in Stalin.
Listening to the few speeches still available from those last few months, one can tell things were not going well at all. In fact, the R's played that angle, but the nation was convinced that after what FDR had done before and during the war, the presidency was his for the asking. The sunken eyes, the look of extreme fatigue...people looked beyond that, they wanted to give him the "win" of WWII, the last hurrah. To most people, he had earned that. The nation wanted this man to outlive Hitler and Tojo, it was not to be.
Sort of the same thing happened w/Reagan to a degree. I find it preposterous that his docs did not see the early signs of Alzheimer's...most of the rest of us did, we knew "something" was wrong. I am no fan or Reagan by any means, but I would not wish Alzheimer's on anyone...I do think it is the duty though, of the medical profession, to be open when discussing the capabilities of the Chief Executive. These people are mere mortals, and things happen. The incredible stress of the job, the 24/7 aspect of a possible nuclear exchange or attack from an enemy take it's toll as it is, adding medical liabilities to the equation can have, or prevent, severe consequences.
I wonder if Lincoln would have served out his 2nd term, he was looking pretty frail in 1865. One thing about Lincoln though, Booth destroyed any chance the South had of a decent reconciliation and doomed that area of the nation to abject poverty till just before WWII, at that point, in 1939, livestock levels and agricultural production of the former Confederacy reached antebellum levels that year. If Lincoln had survived that night in Ford's Theater, the outcome would most likely have been far different and while there would have been animosity, it would have been nothing like the level that was reached when the Radical Republicans ensured the destruction of the South.
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