He inquired about Bookatz's lack of plans during a time of draft and war. Deitz made an introduction regarding a post President Roosevelt created "to commission an artist who would be attached to the National Medical Corps who would create murals depicting men in their line of duty." Bookatz accepted the commission. His official enlistment was recalled by Jan Kenneth Herman, Navy Medical Department historian: "You're in the Navy. Report to the Navy Surgeon General in Washington. You're going to be an artist." He soon became FDR's personal painter and because of short supplies of office and studio space in wartime D.C., was ensconced in the White House in the Lincoln Bedroom for two years. He created official portraits of both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during this time. He wrote, "The best light I had was sitting on the edge of Lincoln's bed and painting with my easel propped up in front of me." His portraits of five admirals hang at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. He painted Vice Adm. Ross T. McIntire (Navy Surgeon General and President Roosevelt's personal physician) and Pennsylvania governor David L. Lawrence as well. In addition to increasingly impressionist still life and landscape paintings, and the realism of portraiture, Bookatz diversified his styles further: the murals were assignments as part of FDR's Federal Art Project of the Depression era "and I felt I had to conform to the social realism that was popular at the time." At the close of the war, his anatomical studies at Harvard allowed him to work for a year in Oakland, California, assisting surgeons with planning reconstructive facial surgery for injured military men. Bookatz showed increasing interest in figurative expressionism in his personal artwork. From his non-commissioned paintings, he began submitting works to Washington's Corcoran Gallery biennial exhibitions in 1945—a practice he continued through 1961—developing a style whereby his "figure drawings are formed out of a complex amalgam of generalized abstraction and painstakingly detailed figuration." In 1948 he was given a one-person exhibition at the Corcoran. In 1950 he was given a one-person exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution. In 1950, he met Joe Morgan, architect for the Marriott Corporation, based in Washington. The Marriott hotel chain was planning free-standing restaurants called the Hot Shoppes. Morgan commissioned Bookatz to create murals for all eight restaurants. The figurative expressionist scenes involved modern flower gardens with figures entwined.