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

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Anna was watching her father closely, assessing his physical abilities. She noticed that since she’d last spent time with him at Christmas, he’d learned some new little tricks to “handle himself better,” such as shifting from a wheelchair to a chair more easily, and she saw him get up two steps without help—a significant improvement. But in spite of all his talk about how much the water at Warm Springs could help him, Anna didn’t see him get into it much.

“Ma,” she wrote to Eleanor, “it’s awfully hard to tell whether father is walking better or not. He doesn’t walk very much, & doesn’t exercise overmuch.”

He was simply too busy. He had sacrificed most of his money to buy the place, and now he was sacrificing most of his time to make the place work.

And he had received bad news about his legs.

One of the orthopedists he’d met in Atlanta was Dr. LeRoy Abbott, of St. Louis, Missouri. FDR told him about Billie McDonald’s belief that polio patients could recover faster and walk better if they performed strenuous exercises without braces.

Dr. Abbott was appalled. Yes, FDR might well walk sooner if he followed McDonald’s advice, the doctor said—but in the process he might well ruin the bones of his legs. Damaged muscles must be carefully built back up before the bones and joints could stand up to strenuous exertion. “He is entirely ‘off’ Dr. McDonald now,” Anna told Eleanor.

So much for FDR’s joyous shout at Dr. McDonald’s place in Massachusetts: “I can walk!”

He couldn’t walk—not in the sense of hopping out of a car and setting off free and easy, with no braces, crutches, or canes, the way you’d expect any politician to do.

He wasn’t even close.

Chapter 11THREE STRATEGIES

So why did he keep saying that soon he’d be walking on his own?

No doctors were saying it, except maybe Dr. McDonald. Dr. Draper, Dr. Hubbard, and the others he had consulted certainly advised more exercise. But they knew by now his chances of walking without aid had essentially dropped to zero.

Didn’t he know that himself?

After all, FDR was a realist. His uncle Fred had told him years ago that wisdom lay in “taking things as they are, analyzing the facts, above all not fooling yourself.” The Roosevelts and the Delanos believed in the power of perseverance, but they didn’t believe in miracles.

Yet month after month, FDR kept telling friends and associates he expected soon to discard his braces, his crutches, possibly even his cane—when the plain fact after five years was that his legs were still far too weak to hold him.

We can never be sure why he promised himself and others what could never be. But we can make some educated guesses.

First, he seems to have told people he would walk again simply because he believed it had to be true. He could not concede that he was stuck in those braces. To say that would be to give up the way he had thought of himself since college—as a man like Uncle Ted, bound for the White House.

As he saw it, a successful politician not only was healthy (as FDR was in every sense except his mobility) but looked and seemed healthy. Yet his body shouted to observers that he was “crippled.” To get up or down stairs he still had to be carried. When he walked in the only way he could, the observer saw a man in an awkward struggle with his own body. When he got in or out of a car, others found it hard to watch. For some people it was even hard to watch him get up from a chair. No one was rude enough to say so. But it was true, and FDR knew it better than anyone. He was the one who saw people’s expressions change when he moved around, or look away entirely, unable to suppress their embarrassment and discomfort.

So he would not surrender to the limp muscles of his legs. If he was going to be president, he simply must not look crippled. He had to walk, so he would.

He also thought that saying he would walk again—and believing it—could help make it so. “It’s the mind that matters, anyhow,” he’d told a reporter. He followed the advice he had given his own “patients” at Warm Springs: “You’ve got to know you’re going to improve.” He once told a doctor that to help any polio patient, he must encourage “belief on the patient’s part that the muscles are coming back.” The smallest improvement in a knee, a calf, or an ankle might prove to the mind of that patient that he would come all the way back, given enough time. He assured the same doctor that “there are cases known in Norway where adults have taken the disease and not been able to walk until after a lapse of 10 or even 12 years.” If those Norwegians could do it, why couldn’t he? He’d been trying for only five years! He was young! He had time!

That leads to the final, and maybe the most important, reason he told people he would soon be “back on his feet.” It had to do with calculations of timing.

FDR and Louis Howe were playing a cautious game of chess with the politicians of the state of New York, and in this game, timing was everything.

The king at the center of the chessboard was Al Smith. He had lost his bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 1924, but now he was running far ahead in the race to snatch that prize in 1928. This was partly because his voice was the strongest in opposition to Prohibition, the national ban on all sales of liquor, beer, and wine. After half a decade of that “noble experiment,” as its supporters