by James Tobin
He rose, walked across the room, and climbed the stairs.
* * *
When he awoke the next morning, his legs hurt. He swung them out of bed, placed his feet on the floor, and stood up.
There was something wrong with his knee, the right one. He must have twisted it the day before without noticing, maybe while fighting the forest fire. Or maybe he had slept on it wrong.
From the bedroom, he crossed the hallway to the bathroom. He stood at the sink to shave. That knee—it felt as if it couldn’t hold his weight. He went back to bed.
Eleanor sent Anna upstairs with breakfast on a tray. FDR could see his daughter was worried. He reassured her and they joked for a couple minutes.
But when Anna was back downstairs and Eleanor looked in, he told her he was feeling dreadful. He couldn’t understand it, but his legs were killing him.
Elliott was standing nearby. Many years later, he remembered that his father used the words “stabbing pains.” Others who have gone through the same experience say it felt like someone was hammering nails into their legs.
* * *
Eleanor sent a message from the island over to the mainland village of Lubec. She wanted the family’s summertime doctor to see Franklin. His name was Eben Homer Bennet.
Dr. Bennet got to the island that afternoon. He asked questions and took FDR’s temperature. It was 102 degrees, quite high but not dangerous. He concluded the problem was a severe summer cold. He couldn’t explain why Roosevelt’s legs were bothering him.
In the afternoon, FDR went to stand up, then abruptly sat back down. Now his right knee definitely could not support his weight. By evening, the other knee was feeling weak.
By the next morning, August 12, the needles of pain had spread to his back. He couldn’t clench the muscles of his buttocks or his gut. It wasn’t that his muscles were numb. If he rubbed his legs with his hands, he could feel his hands. But the muscles wouldn’t obey his commands to move.
His arms felt weak. That evening he reached for a pencil. His fingers couldn’t hold it.
The fever rose so high that he drifted in and out of delirium.
By now his legs felt like the floppy legs of a marionette. He couldn’t walk. He couldn’t stand up.
He stared at Howe.
“I don’t know what is the matter with me, Louis,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
* * *
By the next day, Eleanor and Howe realized the problem must be something much worse than a summer cold. They had to find another doctor, one with more experience than their friend Dr. Bennet.
There wasn’t a telephone on all of the island. So Howe had a boat take him over the channel to Lubec. There he made long-distance calls to resorts in southern Maine, where he hoped to find some prominent doctor on summer vacation. In the wealthy resort town of Bar Harbor, far down the coast, he located a famous surgeon named William Williams Keen.
Dr. Keen wasn’t the perfect choice. He’d been retired for nearly fifteen years. He was eighty-four years old. But he had treated other famous patients, including former president Grover Cleveland. He was still respected. And he wasn’t too far away.
So Howe asked: Would Dr. Keen make the trip up to Campobello to examine Franklin Roosevelt?
He said he would.
Keen was indeed a prominent doctor, but he was a surgeon. Surgeons cut people open to fix or remove damaged or diseased body parts—organs, bones, arteries, muscles. Since his earliest days as a doctor on the battlefields of the Civil War, Keen had been cutting, repairing, and stitching. He was not accustomed to diagnosing the causes of mysterious pain and paralysis.
He got to the island late in the day on Saturday, August 13.
A small man with a neat beard, the old surgeon leaned over his tall young patient, asking questions, tapping for reflexes, prodding muscles. He pondered. The next morning, he did the exam all over again.
At last he gave his diagnosis. Mr. Roosevelt had a blood clot in his lower spine, he said. It was pressing on nerves that controlled his leg muscles. That was causing the paralysis.
The clot, he said, probably had formed when FDR took that sudden plunge in icy water when he was fishing. Overexertion in the days since had made it worse.
The paralysis of his legs would pass as the clot slowly dissolved, the doctor said, though it might take quite a long time.
Massage his legs, Dr. Keen told Eleanor. It will hurt, but it might get rid of that blood clot.
Then he left the island.
Eleanor rubbed her husband’s legs. The pain became all but unbearable.
* * *
Hour after hour, Louis Howe watched his friend suffer.
Howe was a newspaperman who had dropped his old career to become a political jack-of-all-trades, helping politicians with speeches, correspondence, and organizing. He had spotted Roosevelt as a young up-and-comer in the New York state senate and had worked for him ever since. Their professional relationship had evolved into a close friendship—Howe like an older brother, more experienced and cynical; Roosevelt the younger brother, needing advice and a firm hand.
In his fifty years, Howe had spent a lot of time with doctors. Small and homely, as he was the first to admit, he had been sickly since childhood and prone to bad luck. As a boy he had taken a bad fall that left tiny specks of gravel permanently embedded in the skin of his face. As an adult he developed serious asthma and heart disease. Doctors warned him so often about his precarious health that he once told FDR, “Sooner or later I [will] ignore the danger signals too long and drop out like a snuffed candle.”
He kept ignoring the signals because he didn’t think doctors knew much, even famous ones like Dr. Keen.
As a reporter, Howe had learned to notice things that other people missed. Now he was noticing conditions in the house that Dr. Keen apparently had overlooked.
Several people in the Roosevelt household that week—including Howe’s wife, Grace, and a couple of the children—had come down with fevers and chills of their own, though there was no problem in their limbs. The symptoms were not as bad as FDR’s, but still, Howe reasoned, didn’t it seem likely that if several people in the same house were sick, there was a common cause? And surely all these people didn’t have blood clots in their spinal cords.
So it seemed to Howe the cause must be an infectious germ. If so, which one? What germ could cause symptoms like the flu in one person and paralysis in someone else?
Howe always kept close track of the news. Even at distant Campobello, the Roosevelts had the New York newspapers sent to them. Over the last couple of weeks, the papers had carried small reports of a dangerous disease, just a few cases here and there across upstate New York.
The disease had two names. Most people called it infantile paralysis, because it usually struck babies and small children, who suddenly lost strength in one or more of their limbs. The scientific name was poliomyelitis—or polio, for short.
Maybe Howe had seen the news reports. Maybe he hadn’t. But something made him suspect that Dr. Keen was wrong about a clot in FDR’s spine and that infantile paralysis might be the cause of the trouble.
Without telling Eleanor, Howe sent a telegram to FDR’s uncle, Frederic Delano, who worked for the government in Washington. Delano knew many important people and was good at getting difficult things done.
Please, Howe said, find an expert on poliomyelitis as quickly as possible.
* * *
In Washington, Fred Delano called his son-in-law, a doctor, who said Delano should consult the Harvard Infantile Paralysis Commission in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Uncle Fred was soon in touch with Dr. Robert Lovett, head of the commission. Lovett was an orthopedist—a bone doctor—and a professor at Harvard University. He agreed to make the long trip up to Campobello.
On August 24, two weeks after FDR had gone upstairs with pain in his lower back, Eleanor Roosevelt greeted Dr. Lovett, a quiet, handsome, serious man with a dark mustache turning gray. Upstairs, he examined FDR. Then he insert
ed a thick needle into Roosevelt’s spine and drew some fluid out of the spinal cord. The procedure causes terrible pain. But it had to be done to confirm the diagnosis. In a healthy person, the spinal fluid is clear. If it looks cloudy, it’s full of the white cells that fight infection—a clear sign of a virus in the spinal cord. Lovett had to be sure.
He looked at the fluid.
It was cloudy white.
Infection in the spinal cord combined with paralyzed limbs meant that Roosevelt had contracted poliomyelitis.
He gave the news to FDR and Eleanor.
Many years later, near the end of her life, someone asked Eleanor about that moment. How had her husband looked when he heard what Dr. Lovett said?
She thought about it, then remarked that she had seen a certain expression on FDR’s face only twice in all the time she knew him.
Once was that moment with Dr. Lovett at Campobello.
The other was twenty years later, on December 7, 1941, when FDR was told that Japanese fighter planes had attacked U.S. ships at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, drawing the United States into World War II.
“His reaction to any great event,” she remembered another time, “was always to be calm. If it was something that was bad, he just became almost like an iceberg, and there was never the slightest emotion that was allowed to show … I have never known him not to be ready to face the worst that could happen, but always to be hopeful about the solution that could be found.”
Chapter 2
QUESTIONS
The Roosevelts struggled to make sense of what Dr. Lovett had told them.
What they knew about infantile paralysis consisted of little more than fading memories of a terrible epidemic five years earlier.
There had been isolated outbreaks in the United States starting in the 1890s. Then, in the summer of 1916, the disease made headlines with a far worse outbreak than any before. It was centered in New York City. Some nine thousand people were paralyzed, many of them babies. The Roosevelts were fearful their own children might catch the disease. Working in Washington, far away from the family, FDR wrote to Eleanor and urged her to swat every fly she saw, since flies were suspected of spreading the contagion.
There had been more cases in the years since, but nowhere near as many, and the polio panic of that wartime summer faded.
The news stories of 1916 had described terribly sick children, not adults. Reporters focused on immigrant children in the dirty, close-packed city neighborhoods called slums—children dying or crippled, with twisted legs and arms; children rushed out of the city to escape the danger of infection. When the Roosevelts thought about infectious diseases, they pictured filthy streets and squalid houses with bad plumbing. Those were hardly the sort of surroundings in which they lived.
So how could FDR—a healthy, vigorous man of thirty-nine who lived and worked in fine buildings that were cleaned every day—get that disease?
Wasn’t it possible, they asked, that something else explained FDR’s condition, something less serious and frightening?
Dr. Lovett could only shrug and say that adults sometimes did catch the virus that caused infantile paralysis, even adults as healthy as FDR. The truth was shocking, but he had no doubt about it.
“I detected some uncertainty in their minds about the diagnosis,” Dr. Lovett said later, “but I thought it perfectly clear.”
The Roosevelts must have asked Lovett where the virus had come from. How had FDR contracted it? And how could this have happened when there was no widespread epidemic?
Dr. Lovett could answer only a few of their questions. Medical scientists were largely mystified about even the most basic facts. They knew the sickness was caused by an impossibly tiny germ called the poliovirus. But it would be many years before scientists detected how the virus spread; or why polio struck in summer; or why it appeared in one region but not another; or why it targeted the young. Doctors knew by 1921 that only a fraction of the people who caught the virus became paralyzed, perhaps one in a thousand. But they had no idea why one person recovered while another became paralyzed or even died.
As to the where and how of FDR’s infection, Dr. Lovett may have asked, Have you been around any children lately?
Not his own children. They had been at Campobello.
But near the end of July, he had spent several hours with a large group of children—Boy Scouts, hundreds of them.
* * *
It had been just another appointment on his calendar. Indeed, Roosevelt’s calendar in 1921 was crammed with events like his visit to the Boy Scout campgrounds north of New York City on July 27. They made up the everyday rounds of a man who meant one day to run for president.
For most Americans, aiming for the White House would be a wild long shot, but not for Franklin Roosevelt.
To start with, he had the most famous name in American politics. He was related by both blood and marriage to Theodore Roosevelt, who had died just two years earlier after a thundering career as a crusading politician, cowboy, writer, war hero, and president.
And FDR had accomplishments of his own. He had been a state senator, then assistant secretary of the navy. In 1920 the Democrats chose him to run for vice president with Governor James Cox of Ohio, the presidential nominee. They lost that race, but FDR made a good showing across the country and proved that “another Roosevelt” was on the rise in politics.
Now, after eight years in Washington, he intended to reestablish himself as a public figure in his home state of New York. Soon he would run for statewide office, and then, when the time was right, he would run for president. In the meantime, he planned to do good things and make influential friends in as many civic and charitable organizations as possible. One of these groups was the Boy Scouts of Greater New York. He had agreed to become chairman of the organization because he thought highly of the Scouts—two of his sons were members—and because it was one more way to meet and befriend important New Yorkers who were volunteering their time to help the boys.
Every summer, Boy Scouts from New York City and its suburbs gathered for weeklong outings at campgrounds near the massive hump of Bear Mountain, fifty miles north of the city. On July 27 there was to be a giant cookout, so FDR and other supporters of the Scouts made a day trip out of it, cruising up the Hudson River to Bear Mountain, then jouncing over dirt roads by car to join hundreds of Scouts for an outdoor supper.
Somewhere at Bear Mountain, it seems clear, there was a virus too small to be seen with even the most powerful microscope available in 1921. If five thousand such viruses were placed in a single-file line, they would barely reach from one edge of a grain of salt to the other. That made it one of the smallest viruses ever discovered. Despite the havoc it could cause, as it had in 1916, the virus was very common and not very dangerous—not for most people, anyway. It was dangerous only if it found its way into a person with a particular vulnerability, and if, by pure chance, it slipped into the wrong part of that person’s body.
In 1921 no one knew the poliovirus passed from one person to another via tiny specks of human waste. An infected bit of human feces could have reached the campground by any of a number of paths.
It might have turned up on the hand of one of the Boy Scouts. If so, it’s not hard to imagine how it got there. The boy could have picked up the virus a few days earlier when he changed his baby brother’s diaper. The virus could have entered the Scout’s system without making him sick—again, most people who caught it never got sick at all—so his parents would have had no reason to keep him home from the campout. Then maybe the Scout used the outdoor toilet at the campground and forgot to wash his hands. Then he might have grabbed a piece of fried chicken from a platter on a picnic table—but right then maybe his friend called him away and he put the chicken back. And then maybe Franklin Roosevelt picked up the chicken leg and took a bite.
Or the virus may have been in a cup of drinking water. Just a few months earlier, the New York Department of Health had sent an expert to see if Bear Moun
tain’s lakes and streams were safe for swimming and drinking. The expert tested the water and said, no, the water definitely was not safe. There weren’t enough toilets for the large number of people visiting the state parks in the area. The expert found signs of human feces in the lakes and streams. So the poliovirus might have been in the water, too. But the state didn’t close the parks. If the Boy Scouts pumped water from wells fed by underground streams or dipped water from the lake, the virus might have been in the water they drank at the cookout, and it could have ended up in a cup of water served to FDR.
Or maybe the boy who forgot to wash his hands ran straight up to the famous man who was the cousin of the great Teddy Roosevelt and stuck out his hand to shake. FDR was a politician, and a good politician shakes every hand that comes along.
Later, scientists would discover that it takes ten to fourteen days for the poliovirus to cause noticeable symptoms. The day of the forest fire, when he felt the first pains in his lower back and went to bed early, was August 10, fourteen days after his trip to Bear Mountain.
* * *
The food or fluid in FDR’s mouth carried the virus into his throat, where it may have lodged in the tonsils. Or it may have gone down the throat and entered the twenty-foot-long coiled tube called the small intestine, which has a velvety lining that absorbs water and nutrients. The cells of that lining have microscopic branches. One virus, maybe many, bumped into those branches and stuck like a ball lodged in a tree.
A strange process began. The virus didn’t just hang on the branch of that unlucky cell. It connected with the branch like a key in a lock, then released its own genes into the cell. Inside, the virus commandeered the cell’s tiny machinery, and then, as if in a sorcerer’s factory, it began to churn out copies of itself—first by the dozens, then by the thousands, too many for the cell to contain. The cell exploded, sending new viral pioneers through the bloodstream.