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

FDR wondered who owed whom. Hadn’t he done what Al wanted? Hadn’t he given up his last chance of walking when Al said he needed Roosevelt’s help?

He had no intention of being anything but his own man as governor. He was in. Al was out. That was it.

It worked—for the moment. People in Albany saw that Al was indeed out.

But the former governor nourished a simmering anger.

As a private citizen, FDR had been managing his affairs without much one-on-one contact with strangers. But a governor can’t conduct business from a back office with a couple of aides—not if he wants to get big things done.

So FDR developed routines for being a public man who couldn’t walk on his own.

Since 1921 he had learned a lot about managing his movements in public and making people feel comfortable in his presence. Now, in the endless flow of meetings and receptions, he raised that ability to a high art form.

He made no attempt to hide himself away in inner offices. Quite the contrary: He made himself available to practically everybody. “There is no disguising the fact … that he is a crippled man,” reported Milton MacKaye, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, who spent time watching Roosevelt at work, “and one of the admirable things about Roosevelt is that he never attempts to disguise it. Getting in to see the Governor is hardly more difficult than dropping in on your pastor. He will see anyone, and by anyone I mean that even insurance salesmen have eluded his secretaries.”

Mobility was a little easier now, since as governor he could hire more help. Irvin McDuffie stayed on as his personal valet, helping especially with morning and evening routines. He was joined by two state policemen, Gus Gennerich and Earl Miller, who acted not only as bodyguards but as physical helpers. These three plus the man FDR appointed as his official secretary, Guernsey Cross, a former All-American basketball player at Cornell University, gave FDR round-the-clock help getting where he needed to go. Any of them—in pairs or even alone, if necessary—could carry FDR quickly up or down steps and stairs, and each became proficient at managing FDR’s wheelchair.

Since 1921, Roosevelt had relied on his plain wooden wheelchairs to move around inside whatever home or office he happened to be using, whether at East Sixty-Fifth Street, Hyde Park, or Warm Springs. He put on his braces and stood up to walk only when he felt he had to—typically at public appearances where he wanted to display the extent of his physical recovery.

In other words, walking was essentially for show.

In private there was no need to walk, so the wheelchair was brought out. It made everything easier and quicker. If new employees were uneasy at first sight of the governor in a wheelchair, they soon became just as used to it as they were to his long cigarette holder. “The first physical thing that struck you on meeting Roosevelt was that huge, powerful body without the use of legs,” Sam Rosenman recalled later. “As you got to know Roosevelt, it was also the first thing you forgot. The wheelchair, always present in the background, soon became a normal part of the furniture of the room. Wheeling him in to dinner or to bed became as routine as offering your arm to your dinner partner. It was something that he himself seemed never to think about much. In fact, when he wanted to end a conversation or a visit, he frequently would say: ‘Well, I’m sorry, I have to run now!’—and I’m sure it never struck him as a strange thing to say.”

For people outside his inner circle, he developed different habits.

He preferred to be seen in the wheelchair as little as possible by people who didn’t know him well. He had to talk with them—dozens of them every week—easily and confidentially. So the wheelchair was used, but used carefully.

When a meeting was about to occur, one of FDR’s attendants would make sure the governor was already seated in a regular chair and ready to welcome his guest. Meanwhile the wheelchair was put away until it was needed next.

When Al Smith had said a governor didn’t need to be an acrobat, he hadn’t known much about wheelchairs. Moving from a wheelchair to a regular chair or back again—an action FDR performed several times each day—was something of an athletic feat, and his attendant had to be agile, too. Only a few knew how to help—the bodyguards, McDuffie, and the Roosevelts’ sons.

When FDR was ready to get into the wheelchair, his helper would hold the chair at a right angle to where he was seated, making sure to hold it rock-steady with both hands and a knee to brace one wheel. Then FDR would push hard on the arms of his regular chair, thrust upward, twist his body in midair, and land on the seat of the wheelchair. The family called this “the flip.” There was always a danger that the chair would slip or that FDR would lean too far to one side or the other. He didn’t wind up on the floor often, but it happened. The family always watched the move with a little twinge of nerves. This, too, was a reason he couldn’t use the wheelchair in front of strangers. The risk of an embarrassing fall was too great. So, as often as possible, “the flip” was done behind closed doors. When he was back in a regular chair, the doors were opened, and the guests found a busy executive ready to greet them. He just shook their hands without standing up.

Often the governor would host receptions where important business was done in casual snatches of conversation. A governor who was able to walk on his own could move around the room, chatting for a moment with this member of the state assembly or that Democratic donor, fitting in