FDR Kept Deadly Disease Secret, New Book Claims

(Jan. 3) -- It's hardly news that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was not a healthy man as he led the nation during World War II. But aside from the cardiac problems that the public has known about for years, the authors of a new book argue that he suffered from a deadly form of skin cancer, and that it eventually killed him.

In "FDR's Deadly Secret," authors Eric Fettman and Dr. Steven Lomazow, a neurologist, claim that a melanoma above his left eyebrow metastasized over the last four years of FDR's life and caused a tumor that killed him in April 1945.

Fettman, one of the authors of the book, wrote about the findings in the New York Post Sunday. Fettman is an editor for the paper.

Fettman says he, his co-author and a respected dermatopathologist inspected dozens of photos of FDR's skin lesion, and says the president's "shockingly inept delivery of his final public speech strongly suggests that he suffered from hemianopia-- the inability to see the text in the left side of his field of vision."

Fettman and Lomazow say in the book that FDR ran for a third and fourth term in the White House while knowing "full well that he faced a likely death sentence."

The authors say the president's doctors lied to the public about his health before and after his death.

Read more from Fettman in the New York Post.