The large conference room on the second floor of Building 40 was long informally called either the “War Room” or the “Roosevelt Room”. The legend among the WRAIR staff was that in the months before the US entry into World War II, when President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to have military and cabinet meetings away from the eyes of the press and public, he would do so there. For many years before WRAIR’s move to Forest Glen, two celebrated oil paintings by illustrator Dean Cornwell hung in this conference room: Beaumont and St. Martin (1939) and Conquerors of Yellow Fever (1941). (These were part of a series of six much reproduced paintings -- "Pioneers of American Medicine” (1939-1942) -- commissioned by Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories.)
