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

Physically Fit to Be President? A Man to Man Answer to a Nation-Wide Challenge.” Looker began by saying what no other writer had said, at least not so bluntly: “It is an amazing possibility that the next President of the United States may be a cripple.” For the article, three more doctors confirmed the earlier declaration—FDR was fit in every way except that “his legs are not much good to him.”

The story was published in July 1931, just after FDR had sent Jim Farley on a scouting trip through the western states. If Louis Howe was Roosevelt’s backroom adviser, then Farley was the perfect “outside” man. “As an Irish Catholic,” one astute observer said, “he could talk on equal terms with the big-city bosses. Yet he had no Tammany links; he neither drank nor smoked; he was a man of sterling honesty and great charm; and he could also do business with perfect comfort with rural, dry, southern, and other Democratic leaders of the groups that had tended to vote Republican rather than support Al Smith in 1928.” Many of the Democrats he met were enthusiastic about Roosevelt’s chances and promised to vote for him at the nominating convention—but they also wanted reassurance that he was physically up to the job. Louis Howe was sending them all copies of the Liberty story. “I read the Liberty Magazine article today and think it is a corker,” Farley wrote FDR. “I think it is a mighty fine time to have it appear because it answers fully the question that was put to me many times during the past three weeks.”

But it was not enough.

Moving into the election year of 1932, as FDR amassed more promises of support, other contenders for the Democratic nomination dropped anything from mild hints to outright bombs about his physical condition. All of them had been friends and allies of FDR in the past. But now their own interests congealed in an anyone-but-Roosevelt movement. The Depression had become the worst economic downturn in the nation’s history, and President Hoover’s insensitive and stumbling responses had capsized his popularity.

The Democratic nomination for president in 1932 now looked like a first-class ticket to the White House, and every Democrat with half a national reputation wanted it.

Harry F. Byrd, the former governor of Virginia, told friends that Roosevelt was not strong enough for the presidency.

Senator William McAdoo of California, Al Smith’s rival for the 1924 nomination and still hoping for the prize, said, “I can’t think of Roosevelt as being equal to the demands the White House must make on its occupant in the next four years.”

Frank Hague, mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey, and a close ally of Al Smith, said, “He is crippled both mentally and physically.”

Then came the most painful blow.

For ten years FDR had backed Al Smith’s rise to national power. FDR had submitted to Smith’s plea to run for governor, and Al had attested to Roosevelt’s physical fitness for the job. When Smith lost, he had declared he was through with politics, clearing the path for FDR’s pursuit of the presidency.

But now the glorious chance to reverse the verdict of 1928 shimmered before Al’s eyes. If FDR’s campaign collapsed, Smith would be, once again, the most powerful man in the party and the most likely nominee for president.

So just before the convention, Smith told the Saturday Evening Post that a national campaign “requires a man of great vigor and bodily strength to stand the physical strain of it, to make no mention whatever of the tax he has to put upon his mental qualities to permit him to conduct the campaign intelligently over so long a period.”

It was a savage act of sabotage. The two men, close allies for so long, would barely speak again.

In the face of all these attacks, the Roosevelt forces held strong. When the voting began at the Democratic convention in Chicago, it was touch and go for a couple of ballots. Then John Nance Garner, the powerful Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, instructed delegates pledged to vote for him to shift their support to FDR. Suddenly it was over. Garner was rewarded with the nomination for vice president, and FDR boarded an airplane to fly to Chicago to accept the nomination—the first nominee ever to do so in person, and the first to fly to a convention.

To the shouting delegates in Chicago Stadium he declared: “These are unprecedented and unusual times …

“On the farms, in the large metropolitan areas, in the smaller cities and in the villages, millions of our citizens cherish the hope that their old standards of living and of thought have not gone forever. Those millions cannot and shall not hope in vain.

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”

Even the people closest to FDR—Eleanor, the children, Missy LeHand, Louis Howe—seldom saw him angry. He might snap at someone in a moment of irritation, but his steady state was so cheerful that a moment later he would be smiling again.

There were times, however, when a deep fury would rise. It tended to happen when he perceived some deliberate challenge that called his character and courage into question.

It had happened once in 1921, just before he came down with polio.

A U.S. senator named Henry Wilder Keyes, a Republican from New Hamp-shire, had dragged up a dusty old charge that FDR had mishandled an investigation at the Navy Department, and he laced his charges with insinuations about Roosevelt’s integrity. It especially bothered FDR that Keyes was a Harvard alumnus, since FDR put great stock in the Harvard connection. He let out his feelings in a scathing letter, accusing Keyes of a “despicable action” and calling him the only Harvard man he had ever known “to be personally and willfully dishonorable … My only hope is that you will live long enough to appreciate that you have violated decency and truth, and that you will pray your maker for forgiveness.” He thought better of