Master of His Fate by James Tobin (books to read for teens .TXT) 📕

the absolute necessity of saying nothing to anybody about the fact that I am taking any treatment from him. I have told him frankly that I do so only as a supplementary experiment and that I have not given up Lovett, do not intend to, and want to be able to discuss the case with Lovett at any time.”

FDR used the sunlamp and believed it helped. So, to get more exposure to natural sunlight, he made up his mind to return to Florida for another winter cruise in the early weeks of 1924. This time, instead of renting a boat, he struck a deal with an old friend from college days, John Lawrence, to go in together on the cost of a used houseboat. (Lawrence, too, was recovering from an injury to his legs, though not from polio.) For a new name for the boat, Lawrence suggested they mash up “Lawrence, Roosevelt and Company” to make Larooco (pronounced la-ROW-co). FDR waded into the agreeable work of equipping the boat, hiring a small crew, planning a schedule, and inviting old friends to come along.

Then, just a few days before he was to board the train for Florida, he had an appointment with Dr. Draper.

The doctor examined his old friend’s lower body very carefully. He felt the muscle mass in the thighs and calves. He watched while FDR walked with his braces and crutches.

We do not know exactly what Dr. Draper said to FDR when they sat down to discuss where things stood. But the doctor may have given his patient—as gently and kindly as he could—the same assessment he sent to Dr. Lovett in a letter a few days later.

“I am very much disheartened about his ultimate recovery,” Dr. Draper wrote. “I cannot help feeling that he has almost reached the limit of his possibilities.”

It had now been two and a half years since the virus had brought him down. For all that time, hard facts had been bombarding his inborn optimism and his fierce determination to recover. Month after month he had shielded himself from these truths. Every time he told a friend that “my legs are a lot better” or that his doctors were amazed by his progress, he was pushing away the plain fact that his legs were hardly better at all and that his doctors were advising him to make the most of what little mobility he had, not to expect a day coming soon when he would rise and walk on his own.

The problem was not what his body could or couldn’t do. The real work of a political leader has virtually nothing to do with physical ability. Day by day, a politician’s work is to think, to write, and especially to talk—to ask questions, discuss possibilities, give instructions, explain a vision, command an audience. Roosevelt could do all those things as well as ever—better, in fact, since polio had given him much more time to read and think things through. Pain and loss had made him wiser, more compassionate. He could understand people as never before. Certainly his gift for talking, whether to a single person or a crowd, was as strong as ever.

No, the problem was not in himself. The problem lay in what others thought of him. If they saw only an invalid struck down by a tragic accident, he could never succeed in politics again.

One day shortly before his cruise on the Larooco, FDR had welcomed a caller to the house on East Sixty-Fifth Street, a young newspaperman named Lowell Mellett. The two men had never met, and somehow Mellett had never learned of FDR’s paralysis. Recalling that day many years later, Mellett told how he had been admitted to the house by Sara Roosevelt’s butler, who directed him to the second floor, where visitors were customarily received in the library. Mellett saw FDR waiting at the top of the stairs to greet him, standing straight and holding tight to the heavy railing that crowned the staircase. FDR waved Mellett down the corridor to the library and slowly followed. Mellett looked back, and “I realized then that Roosevelt was propelling himself forward by clasping the railing, hand over hand.” Later Mellett went to work for Roosevelt and came to know him well, but “I never got over the hurt of seeing him in his crippled state, either then or afterward.”

FDR must have caught the look of shock and regret on Mellett’s face—and on the face of everyone as they first met this man who had to go through a pitiable struggle just to walk a few steps in his own house. How could he ever run for office if everyone he met reacted with that expression of pity and fear? In letters to friends he could insist all he wanted that he was getting better by the day, and from a distance they might believe him. But the moment they saw him they would know the truth, just as he must have known it himself in the part of his mind that saw facts as plainly as Lowell Mellett saw them that day by the stairs.

Four years earlier, in 1920, he had been his party’s rising star. Now, as the election season of 1924 approached, Franklin Roosevelt was in the thoughts of only one important Democrat—Alfred E. Smith, the governor of New York. Smith was preparing for a long-shot campaign to win his party’s presidential nomination. And in his view, Roosevelt’s physical condition seemed to be not a minus but a plus. A plus for Alfred E. Smith, that is.

The two men, soon to become allies and even friends, were from different worlds.

Al Smith, eight years older than FDR, had grown up roaming the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He came from the sort of working-class Irish, Italian, and German ancestors whom earlier generations of upper-crust Roosevelts had moved uptown to get away from.

Just thirteen when his father died, young Al promptly quit school to earn money cleaning fish