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

Disability itself is the deception. It makes able-bodied people misunderstand how capable the disabled person actually is.

Of course there were things Roosevelt could not do. Those things did not include serving as president of the United States. He suffered more from the appearance of disability than from disability itself. Appearances, it is often said, are deceiving.

As president, FDR acted the part of the extraordinarily capable man he was. He knew the value of a great performance. Once, in a meeting with the movie actor and director Orson Welles, he is said to have remarked, “You know, Orson, there are two great actors in America. You are the other one.”

Certainly there was no conspiratorial cover-up, as many people believe. Anyone paying attention to public affairs knew the president had made a comeback from an attack of infantile paralysis. The fact was trumpeted every year on his birthday, when fundraising events called the President’s Birthday Balls raised money for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, an organization FDR had started at Warm Springs, as he was proud to say. (The foundation would change its name to the March of Dimes. It paid for most of the research that led to vaccines that would virtually eradicate polio around the world.) So his polio was hardly a secret.

It’s true that he did what he could to dampen public awareness of just how handicapped he was. His press aides discouraged reporters from referring to it—though they occasionally did—and asked photographers not to take his picture in physically awkward moments, a request they almost always granted. He never used his wheelchair in public. Since there was no television news, FDR’s movements were not constantly in the public eye, as they would be today. So the average person wound up thinking the president was simply lame.

Of course, his condition was worse than lameness. He never gained any greater ability to walk than he achieved with his physical therapists at Warm Springs in 1928.

He kept that fact on the down-low for the same old reasons. He didn’t want pity. He didn’t want to fall in public. (He did so as president at least once, during the 1936 campaign, though it attracted little attention.) He didn’t want people to feel uncomfortable in his presence. And undoubtedly he saw no reason to hand ammunition to his political enemies. He had learned they would use any evidence of his paralysis to their own advantage.

In the privacy of the White House he had himself pushed around in a wheelchair, by far his preferred means of mobility. For meetings and receptions he followed the same routines he had established as governor in Albany. He preferred to have his personal helpers or the Secret Service get him in position with as few people seeing his movements as possible. If there was no other way—at his inaugurations, for instance, with many thousands watching—he put on his damnable braces and walked.

If he had to be carried where people could see, he dispelled the awkwardness with a quick remark and a smile. After the death in 1938 of an old friend, Dr. Cary Grayson, Woodrow Wilson’s personal physician, FDR paid a private visit to Grayson’s widow at her home in Washington. When his car pulled up in front, Grayson’s sons came out to greet him. There was a sidewalk twenty yards long from the curb to the porch. The Graysons watched as two Secret Service agents opened the rear door. Then, one of the sons recalled, “they cradled the president between them, his strong arms and hands over their shoulders and his legs lifelessly dangling from their firmly locked hands. With a jaunty smile, he said to my brothers and me, ‘Boys, you’ll have to excuse me, but it’s a relief not to have to wear pounds of steel on my legs today.’”

People who saw him helped into or out of an automobile or a train car were startled. It was the same when people watched him up close as he did his walking-with-braces performance. Afterward they would say they’d never known how bad off he was. Yet as FDR surely realized, he never paid a political price for these small revelations. If anything, people came away more impressed than they had been before.

The great newspaper columnist Ernie Pyle, who would go on to fame as an overseas correspondent in World War II, noticed this effect once during the 1936 campaign.

Pyle happened to be in Rapid City, South Dakota, when Roosevelt’s entourage came to town. They had rooms in the same hotel. On a Sunday morning, Pyle watched from his window as the president returned from church. A crowd was on the sidewalk, waiting to see him. Pyle wrote about the moment from memory a few weeks later:

“Now there have been, out of what I have always felt to be a fine sense of consideration, few mentions in print or in picture of the president’s partial paralysis. But it seems to me there can be no violation of good taste in relating anything as beautiful as what happened at Rapid City that day.

“The crowd stopped clapping, and stood silently watching, as the car stopped at the hotel entrance. It was a 7-passenger touring car, with the top down. The president’s two sons and his daughter-in-law got out ahead of him.

“Then, while everybody waited, the president … with his powerful arms slid himself forward onto the spare seat. Then he turned a little and put his legs out the door and over the running board, with his feet almost to the curb. Gus Gennerich, the president’s bodyguard and personal assistant, stood ready to help. But he was not needed. You could almost have heard a pin drop. The president put both hands on one leg and pushed downward, locking the jointed steel brace at his knee. He slowly did the same with the other leg.

“Then he put his hands on the side of the car, and with his arms lifted his body out and up and onto his