Qualla: Walter Reed National Military Medical Center

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center: The Tower Roosevelt Designed

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ex...

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center: Forrestal's Fall

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 transcrib...

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center: Kennedy's Autopsy

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 doc...

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center: The President's Floor

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 bed...

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center: The Merger

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. Cons...