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

called “the strenuous life” and submitted to the daily indignity and discomfort of the braces. But he kept saying his exercises would do more good if his legs were free.

Then, in the summer of 1925, Fred Delano told him about a neurologist—a doctor who specializes in diseases of the nervous system, including polio—who was running an unusual program for polio patients in Marion, Massachusetts, not far from where Louis Howe had a cabin on the beach at Buzzards Bay. The doctor’s name was William McDonald. Until recently he had practiced medicine in Providence, Rhode Island, and taught at the Yale Medical School. In August, FDR, Howe, and LeRoy Jones piled into a car and went to have a talk with the doctor.

In Marion they were greeted by a peppery little man who acted and spoke like the spark-plug coach of a baseball team. He insisted that FDR call him “Billie,” and FDR liked him right away. He was “a peach,” FDR told Dr. Draper. “Talks your language and mine!”—which meant McDonald endorsed bigger, bolder goals for his patients than the sober, cautious Dr. Lovett. In no time, FDR was calling him Billie.

McDonald explained his methods. He worked with only four patients at a time, he said. He coached them through weeks of intensive exercises, some in the water, some on an apparatus of his own invention called a “walking board.” This was a rectangular platform of wooden planks, posts, and rails where patients stood upright and pulled themselves around and around for periods of an hour or more—without braces. He was “hot against them,” FDR reported.

McDonald had a theory. Lovett and most other experts prescribed exercises for just one set of damaged muscles at a time. Those exercises were fine, McDonald said, but he also wanted his patients to exert all the damaged muscles at the same time, in coordination with each other. McDonald’s idea was that braces gave the muscles too much help. Take the braces away and the muscles would have to work harder, and the patient would progress much faster toward the goal of normal movement.

In FDR’s case, that might mean walking—without crutches, canes, or braces. It was the goal Dr. Lovett had never endorsed. Unlike Lovett, who had thought no patient could hope to walk again after two years of paralysis, McDonald had “no hard and fast opinions about the restoring of function in polio cases.” Here was a doctor who believed!

McDonald gave FDR a stern warning: The exercise program would demand every bit of his stamina. But that only made it more appealing to FDR, especially when McDonald said he had “certainly succeeded in dozens of cases.” The doctor recounted the case of a young woman who had been paralyzed below the waist for years, yet after two months in McDonald’s care, she could stand and walk with a crutch on one side and an assistant on the other. As for FDR’s own case, “he swears he can put me on my feet,” FDR told Dr. Draper, “and it’s worth trying.”

So he asked McDonald to take him on as a patient right away. The doctor already had his full slate of four patients, but he agreed. FDR would come back in a few days and stay for four weeks. It was “a grand plan,” he wrote his mother.

It wouldn’t be cheap, and Eleanor may have objected to the cost. Or Franklin may have felt it would be wrong to ask her to approve spending still more on doctors’ bills. In any case, he told Louis Howe to gather some of his valuable nautical prints and books and send them down to New York to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. FDR treasured his collections. But if selling them could help him walk, he was perfectly willing to let them go.

He had been paralyzed for four years now. Even at Warm Springs, further recovery of his muscles was bound to be slow. He was desperate to try something that might work fast.

He arrived in the old whaling village of Marion at the end of August with three assistants—Missy, LeRoy Jones, and a young man he had brought up from Warm Springs. They moved into a cottage lent by the relative of an old friend.

To FDR, Marion looked much like Fairhaven, Massachusetts, just ten miles away, where his mother’s ancestors had made their fortune in shipping a century earlier. FDR had spent many pleasant days in the old Delano homestead there, now owned by his uncle Fred. In that house on Thanksgiving Day in 1903, he had told his mother of his engagement to Eleanor. Like Fairhaven, Marion was a cozy village of narrow streets and saltbox houses weathered by decades of sea breezes. At 99 Water Street, Dr. McDonald’s Cape Cod house backed right up to the calm waters of a secluded harbor. Wavelets lapped at an old stone pier. The sound of flapping sails came across the water. It was the sort of place where FDR felt most at home.

He quickly settled into McDonald’s daily routine. In the morning, he did ninety minutes of swimming exercises like the ones at Warm Springs; in the afternoon, exercises on parallel bars under McDonald’s direct supervision; then workouts of thirty minutes or more on the doctor’s walking board. With no braces on his legs, he would grip the rails and haul himself back and forth, demanding that his legs share the burden of his weight with his muscular arms and shoulders.

At the end of four weeks FDR wrote Dr. Draper: “I don’t hesitate to say that this treatment has done wonders—so much so that I can now get within a very few pounds of bearing my whole weight on my legs without braces.”

That was just his own rough estimate, of course. It was hard to say just how many pounds he still had to go before he could stand and walk without braces—and without leaning on the heavy rails of the walking board.

But he was so