Master of His Fate James Tobin (free e books to read online .txt) 📖

get suspicious—if they think, Wait … does the author know that for sure?—then the ground starts to shake beneath their feet. The readers don’t know what to trust. They want a good story, yes, but when they read a biography, they also want the truth.

So I like doing it the second way—being straight with the reader about what’s known for sure and what’s educated guesswork. It’s better to say, I don’t have every piece of the puzzle. I’ll tell you when I’m speculating and when I have questions I can’t answer for sure. I’ll give you my best judgments. But that’s what they are—not the absolute truth.

Anyway, to me, the mystery of the missing pieces makes the past all the more fascinating.

Some people may object to the very idea of a biography of a privileged man who, as president, made certain decisions that now look wrongheaded, even hurtful.

But a biography is not a monument to its subject. It’s not a marble statue to revere as if it symbolizes an ideal human being. Granted, Franklin Roosevelt was hardly that. For all his strengths, even greatness, he had his flaws as anyone does. He could be selfish and petty. He had biases and blind spots. But if we ignore him and others because they made what we now call mistakes, we run the risk of blinding ourselves.

A good biography is much more like a museum than a memorial. The book invites us into the subject’s world, where we can watch them respond to challenges. We can study the personality behind the deeds. We can see how the world shapes the individual and how the individual shapes the world in turn. In a biography, as in life, that’s the way we learn how to shape our own worlds.

Readers will see that I occasionally use the offensive words “cripple” and “crippled.” In recent times, our society has learned how damaging those words are. They imply that people with disabilities are somehow less valuable than people without disabilities—or, even worse, that people with disabilities should be hidden away or shunned. Those ideas are profoundly mistaken. Yet they were so common in Roosevelt’s lifetime that few people thought twice about using the words that symbolize the ideas. This was and still is a major challenge for any person with a disability—to overcome the biases that exist in other people’s minds. That was certainly true for Franklin Roosevelt, who wanted not only to live a full life but to lead his nation. So I’ve occasionally used the words that represent the powerful forces of ignorance and prejudice that opposed his ambitions. If readers never see these words, they may never understand just what he was up against.

PART 1THE INFECTION

AUGUST–OCTOBER 1921

Chapter 1CAMPOBELLO

Franklin Roosevelt loved to tell stories about his life. He would talk about his ancestors who’d fought in the American Revolution, the towns he’d visited, the people he’d met, the friends he’d made, the moments he remembered.

But he never said much about what happened to him on Campobello Island in the summer of 1921.

At the age of thirty-nine, he was one of the most promising young politicians in the country. Many people thought he might one day be president of the United States. But events at his family’s summer home on Campobello put an end to any such talk.

He had always loved the island. As a boy he spent fall, winter, and spring on his family’s estate on the Hudson River, a hundred miles north of New York City. But at the start of every summer, Campobello beckoned. He learned to sail there, steering his own boat among the rocky islets and drifting mists of Passamaquoddy Bay, the great arm of the Atlantic Ocean that divides the tip of Maine from the Canadian province of New Brunswick. As he grew into manhood he went back nearly every year. After he married, he brought his wife, Eleanor, and their growing brood of children to their summer house overlooking the bay.

But after 1921, he went back to Campobello only three times, and then for the briefest of stays.

Many years later, one of his sons, Franklin Roosevelt Jr., was asked why his father had all but abandoned his favorite spot on earth. He replied: “I think he just couldn’t bear to go back to the place where he had hiked and run and ridden horseback and climbed cliffs, and realize that he could never do those things again.”

The first hint that something was wrong came into his mind on an oceangoing yacht sailing up the coast of New England as the calendar turned from July to August.

FDR was heading for his first real vacation in a long time. Through the four years of World War I (1914–1918) and its aftermath, he had worked long, difficult hours as assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy under President Woodrow Wilson. In 1920, he had sprinted through a national political campaign as the Democratic Party’s nominee for vice president. When that campaign failed, he had launched himself into a dozen new activities. Now, finally, he could look forward to two glorious weeks of recreation and rest.

He was aboard the yacht of his friend Van Lear Black, a millionaire businessman and sportsman from Baltimore. FDR had invited Black to bring his family and some friends up to Campobello for a few days. The Blacks picked him up in New York City; then they all sailed north together.

He had a wonderful time aboard. He would remind Black later that he “never laughed as much as we all did on the cruise up the Coast of Maine.”

But he also felt a little sluggish and sick, as if he had picked up an intestinal bug.

Then he noticed something stranger. His skin was becoming unusually sensitive; his nerves seemed to be on high alert.

After two days on the water FDR spied Campobello on the horizon—a line of dark conifer trees on a craggy shore. He himself likely piloted the yacht