On Armistice Day 1940 - twenty-two years to the day after the World War I armistice - President Franklin Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the central tower of a new naval hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. He had personally chosen the site, on a wooded hill above Wisconsin Avenue, and personally sketched the exterior of the tower. The architect Paul Philippe Cret refined FDR's sketch into the final design; the construction firm John McShain had built the Pentagon and would later complete the Jefferson Memorial too. The tower Roosevelt sketched - a Streamline Moderne sandstone monolith rising twenty-three stories - became one of the most recognizable medical buildings in America. The Naval Hospital opened in 1942 to treat U.S. Navy and Marine Corps personnel returning from the Pacific. Within four years it had treated 2,464 men in temporary wartime wards. Roosevelt himself was treated there in his final years for the polio paralysis of his legs. Every president since has had at least one medical encounter there.
FDR was an amateur architect with definite tastes. When Congress appropriated funds in 1938 for the new naval medical center, the president selected the 243-acre site on what was then rural Wisconsin Avenue north of the District line and personally sketched the central tower's exterior - a flat-faced Streamline Moderne block rising from a Greek-cross hospital wing below. The supervising engineer was Rear Admiral Ben Moreell of the Navy's Bureau of Yards and Docks; architect Paul Philippe Cret developed the final design from FDR's sketch. John McShain, the Philadelphia builder who had recently completed the Jefferson Memorial and would soon build the Pentagon, broke ground on June 29, 1939. Roosevelt laid the cornerstone on November 11, 1940. The hospital opened to patients in 1942, designed for 1,200 beds. By the end of World War II in 1945, temporary wood-frame ward buildings on the grounds had increased capacity to 2,464 wounded sailors and Marines. The original tower is now on the National Register of Historic Places. From above, it remains the building's signature element - the white sandstone column rising from a green hilltop, visible from the surrounding Maryland suburbs.
On May 22, 1949, James Forrestal - the first United States Secretary of Defense, who had been hospitalized at Bethesda for severe depression after being forced from office by Harry Truman - fell to his death from a window on the sixteenth floor of the tower. He had been transcribing the lines of Sophocles' Ajax onto a hospital writing pad - the chorus's lament for the suicide of the great warrior - when he stopped mid-word. A robe sash was tied around his neck and to the radiator below the window, but he had apparently jumped before it could catch him. Investigators ruled the death a suicide. The Forrestal case became one of the founding mysteries of Cold War Washington - the first Defense Secretary, exhausted by his fight to unify the Army Navy and Air Force, lost on his hospital floor in the building his president had personally placed there. He was succeeded as Defense Secretary by Louis Johnson, the man whose campaigning against him had pushed him out of office.
President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The autopsy was performed at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center the same night, by Commander James J. Humes, Commander J. Thornton Boswell, and Lieutenant Colonel Pierre A. Finck. The Parkland Memorial Hospital doctors in Dallas and the Dallas County medical examiner had insisted that the autopsy be performed there - Texas law required it, since the homicide occurred in Dallas County. The Secret Service overrode them. Air Force One carried Kennedy's body, his widow, and the newly sworn-in President Johnson back to Washington. The Bethesda autopsy team worked through the night under direction from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and produced findings that the Warren Commission would adopt as definitive. Generations of conspiracy theorists have probed the discrepancies between the Parkland and Bethesda accounts of Kennedy's wounds. The Bethesda autopsy room - in the basement of the original tower - was preserved as a historical space for decades, though the equipment used that night has long been removed.
Walter Reed National Military Medical Center maintains a presidential suite controlled not by the Department of Defense but by the White House - a fact that surprises most members of Congress when they learn it. The suite has a sitting room, kitchen, conference room, hospital bedroom, and an office for the White House Chief of Staff. Presidents and their immediate families have used it for decades. Lyndon Johnson was treated there for gallbladder surgery in October 1965 - briefly transferring presidential authority to Vice President Hubert Humphrey under a private agreement that predated the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Betty Ford had her mastectomy there in September 1974, going public about her diagnosis at a moment when breast cancer was rarely discussed openly. Ronald Reagan had cancerous colon polyps removed there in July 1985, formally transferring power to Vice President George H.W. Bush under the Twenty-fifth Amendment - the first such transfer in U.S. history. Nancy Reagan had her mastectomy there in October 1987. Melania Trump had a kidney embolization in 2018. Donald Trump was admitted on October 2, 2020, for COVID-19 treatment. Jill Biden had skin cancers removed in 2023. The presidential suite has, by now, served every American president since Roosevelt.
On September 14, 2011, the Bethesda hospital was rechristened the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, absorbing the closed Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Washington into a single tri-service institution serving Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard. Construction of the new joint facility began on July 3, 2008, with President George W. Bush officiating at the groundbreaking. The merger cost ballooned from a 2005 estimate of just under 900 million dollars to a 2011 total of 2.7 billion - roughly triple. The Government Accountability Office attributed the overrun partly to post-Katrina construction-material price spikes. The combined facility today operates more than 2.4 million square feet across 100 buildings on 243 acres, treats more than 1 million outpatient visits per year, and serves as the headquarters for the National Capital Region Medical Directorate, the tri-service task force commanding most military medical facilities in DC, northern Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and New Jersey. Walter Reed has continued to serve the same role in the consolidated era it did before: the principal hospital for wounded American service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the place every U.S. president since FDR has eventually walked into.
Walter Reed National Military Medical Center occupies 243 acres at 8901 Wisconsin Avenue, Bethesda, Maryland, centered near 39.0019 degrees N, 77.0936 degrees W. From the air the central white Streamline Moderne tower designed by FDR remains the dominant visual feature, rising twenty-three stories from the wooded grounds, immediately west of the National Institutes of Health main campus and accessible by the Washington Metro Red Line's Medical Center station. Best viewed at 1,500 to 3,000 feet AGL; the site lies just outside the DC FRZ but within the SFRA. Nearest airports are Montgomery County Airpark (KGAI) 9 nm north, Ronald Reagan Washington National (KDCA) 10 nm south, and Washington Dulles (KIAD) 17 nm west.