Editor’s note: This commentary is by O. Ross McIntyre, M.D., who is the James J. Carroll Professor of Oncology Emeritus of the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.
[I] have been watching and listening to all sorts of otherwise intelligent and experienced individuals struggle with the conundrum posed by the blow-up of Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson’s nomination to become the head of the Veterans Administration. How could a person with a successful military career and apparently good track record of serving three presidents in the role of White House physician suddenly be perceived as having major behavioral and performance problems that required him to withdraw from consideration for the new job?
I am O. Ross McIntyre and my father was A. Ross McIntyre. He was a physician (and you should know that now I am one also). I have spent a lot of time in my life telling people who ask, that we are not related in any way to Adm. Ross McIntire, who was President Roosevelt’s physician. That admiral failed to diagnose Roosevelt’s hypertension and left ventricular hypertrophy, a major health problem undoubtedly contributing to Roosevelt’s death in 1945. Instead McIntire, an otolaryngologist, treated the president repeatedly for “post nasal drip.” When Roosevelt finally was properly diagnosed by a young navy physician at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, this doctor was appalled at the president’s advanced disease state. Yet nothing was done about it. Insofar as we know McIntire never took steps to inform the president of his condition and insist that he and other responsible members of government be prepared for and understand the likelihood of sudden death.
Had the United States sent Harry Truman, the vice president, to the meeting with Stalin and Churchill in Yalta instead of a failing Roosevelt, I believe that Harry would have been a naive participant in decisions relevant to the end of the World War II. However, by the time Harry went to the next meeting, Potsdam, at war’s end, Truman’s presence would have likely changed the post-war story for eastern Europe. Harry, once bamboozled, was an unlikely candidate for a repeat.
As so well described by Doris Kearns Goodwin, in “No Ordinary Time,” her chronicle of Franklin and Eleanor during World War II, Adm. McIntire was a “buddy” of Roosevelt. They sipped cocktails at the end of stressful days and spun tales together during retreats to Hyde Park. The White House physician is, and perhaps should be, above all, a person whom the president trusts; who is a supporter through the hard as well as the glad times that they face together. Whether the physician is competent and is a good leader of the White House Office of the Physician and its team is very much secondary. We should understand that those who make personnel assignment decisions for the Army, Navy and Air Force, are usually hard-headed pragmatists. They recognize that officers who have been able to rise through the ranks on the basis of their ability to schmooze with the right senior officers are perfect candidates for what should be the excellent dead-end assignment: White House physician. The evaluations of this person by those in lesser ranks are unimportant and will never be heard, unless the president is foolish enough to nominate the White House physician for some other task.
