Master of His Fate

by James Tobin

  FDR wouldn’t shatter, but falls were definitely dangerous, especially with braces. Typically, a person who starts to fall goes into a quick crouch, bending at the knees to cushion the impact. Not so with FDR. If he went down, he would go straight down, like a tree sawed through at the ground.

  He practiced just standing up with the braces holding his legs straight, trying to keep his balance. Then he began to make jerky stiff-legged movements across the floor, just a few inches at a time. Sometimes he would start to fall. The nurses would catch him and lift him back up. He would try again and fall again. It was the only way to learn how to do it. It was “a bizarre … system of muscular checks and balances that could not be taught,” wrote a man who went through the same ordeal. “The body had to learn this on its own through days and days of trial and error.”

  When Mrs. Lake was away, FDR was supposed to rest. Instead, he often kept exercising. When she returned, he would talk at length about the methods he was thinking up. “He has all sort of new ideas for developing his muscles,” Mrs. Lake told Dr. Lovett, “and I have to discourage him periodically, as tactfully as possible, otherwise he does considerably more harm than good.”

  “Counsel him not to try new methods,” Lovett replied, “but to trust us to give him the maximum dose that he can stand for … He cannot be too careful.”

  But in his own mind, FDR disagreed. He could be too careful. Caution would never get him where he wanted to go.

  As the winter of 1922 turned to spring, he was still telling friends he would be back in action very soon. He said his hips had recovered their normal strength, but he had less and less power the farther down his legs the muscles went, with about 15 percent of his normal strength in his toes. Still, he said, he was “gaining very surely.”

  “This foolish infantile paralysis germ has not destroyed any of the muscles,” he told a friend, “and they are all coming back.”

  Dr. Draper saw things differently.

  “He is walking quite successfully [with crutches and braces],” he wrote to Dr. Lovett, “and seems to be gaining power in the hip muscles. The quadriceps are coming a little, but they are nothing to brag of yet. Below the knee I must say it begins to look rather hopeless…”

  Chapter 6

  “EVERY AMERICAN STANDS”

  Dr. Lovett suspected FDR “was going ahead a little too fast mentally.” Once again he wanted to see the patient firsthand, and he wanted him to spend time with his associate, Wilhelmine Wright, a pioneer in physiotherapy. So he asked FDR to make the trip to Boston from New York.

  Roosevelt jumped at the invitation. He told a close friend that Dr. Lovett “wants me for about ten days in Boston to get the right kind of braces made and to have his famous Miss Wright teach me how to walk better, so I will be more independent during the summer.”

  * * *

  Wilhelmine Wright knew more than anyone in the world about how people with paralyzed limbs could regain the ability to move around. She had developed her methods year after year in her work with children and young adults recovering from polio. When it came to the basic skills of mobility, FDR was barely in kindergarten. Wright would put him through school.

  Her method was to take the standard ways of getting around—standing up and sitting down, walking with crutches, going up and down stairs—and break them into small steps, each of them manageable if the patient would only think of them as isolated movements. Each step required practice and mastery. Then the steps could be merged into sustained mobility.

  For a person in FDR’s condition, standing up had to be done like this:

  You’re sitting in a heavy chair with arms, preferably a chair with its back pressed up against a wall. Your paralyzed legs are straight out in front of you. They’re locked in braces so you can’t bend at the knees. You hitch yourself up to the edge of the seat. Then, using both hands, you pick up your right leg and lift it across your left leg. Twisting hard to your left at the waist, you reach around to grab the arms of the chair with both hands. Then you flip your whole body around so that you’re in a push-up position against the chair. From there, Wright said, “it is an easy matter to push the hips back and straighten the body while balancing with the chair, and finally to place one crutch and then the other under the arms.”

  Not that easy, maybe, but if you can manage it, you’ve stood up by yourself.

  Standing upright, the patient could begin to learn how to walk with crutches. This was not easy at all. In fact, Wilhelmine Wright said crutch-walking with paralyzed legs was no easier than ice-skating or dancing, and like those activities, it took serious practice to do it well. (She knew boys who could speed along a city sidewalk just on crutches, without their feet touching the ground, then whip both legs and one crutch out to the side while spinning around a corner on the tip of the other crutch—an acrobatic feat that a gifted gymnast might be proud of.)

  For the beginner, the method depended on how much strength you had above the waist. If you were weak in the shoulders, you had to use a slow, awkward “rocking chair” style of walking. For someone like Roosevelt, who was strong in the upper body, a better strategy was to swing the crutches out in front, then pull the legs forward with a little hop. This was faster and more graceful than the rocking-chair approach, but it still required careful coordination of arms and legs.

  The hardest thing was to get up and down steps. A strong handrail was essential. You placed one crutch on the step in front of you, holding it steady with your armpit. You slid your other hand up the rail. Then you pushed up on the crutch side while pulling forward with the hand on the rail. That was one step. A typical staircase had thirteen more.

  Miss Wright prescribed exercises, too—dozens of them.

  For ten days FDR learned. Miss Wright was even more demanding than Mrs. Lake. If she said, “Do this,” and he said, “I can’t,” she replied, “You never have before, but you are going to.”

  Dr. Lovett looked in from time to time. At the end of ten days he thought his patient was doing rather well. Confidentially, he wrote to Sara Roosevelt: “I wanted to get hold of him alone and observe him and see whether I thought he had been persistently overdoing at home … as in this way I thought I could control him better. Miss Wright has been able to teach him new tricks about walking and managing himself which have increased his confidence. I have made some changes to his braces, which I think will add to their efficiency, and he is really a good deal better and walks much better than he did when he came.”

  Dr. Lovett’s goal for his patient was the same as it had been for some time—to walk well with crutches.

  FDR’s own goal was also unchanged. He intended to walk well without crutches.

  * * *

  When FDR first got home from the hospital, Anna remembered years later, it was “the beginning of a period of adjustment to an entirely new life for the whole family.”

  At fourteen, she and her father were close. They had tramped the woods together at Hyde Park, gone riding on horseback, skated on the Hudson, swum at Campobello, always talking and joking. The realization that he was paralyzed shook her world. “I gradually grew accustomed to a new relationship with Father—a relationship where I had to go to his room and sit on a chair or at the foot of his bed when I wanted to talk to him. For some months my knowledge that he was suffering made me shy with him. But gradually his gaiety, his ability to poke fun at himself as he learned to move himself around through the use of his arms, broken down the tension we had been feeling.” When she overheard rumors at school that his disease had affected his mind, she was outraged. She had no idea her father’s political adversaries might spread such ideas just to hurt his chances of a comeback. “I did know, however, that the rumors were untrue,” she wrote later. “I watched his courage, his suffering, his humor. I learned fast that he wanted no maudlin sympathy.”

  Instead, he dealt with the children’s fears by bringing them into his confidence and telling them all about his effort to recover. He would invi
te them to his bedside and show them the depleted muscles in his legs, naming each one and explaining what he was doing to build them back up. The tactic worked. It chased away the children’s sense of dread. “He would shout with glee over a little movement of a muscle that had been dormant,” Anna said. “So, gradually, I almost forgot that he had once had well-developed muscles. The battle Father was making became a spirited game.” With the boys he would drop to the floor and challenge them to wrestling matches.

  Still, the family’s focus had shifted entirely to one person—FDR himself—and the children’s longings for him and their mother to pay attention to their own activities often went unmet.

  Even before polio, the Roosevelts’ family life had not been idyllic. The marriage had nearly broken apart when Eleanor learned that Franklin had conducted a love affair with Eleanor’s secretary during World War I. The Roosevelts decided to stay together, but FDR’s faithlessness had wounded Eleanor, and their relationship had been badly strained. She began to put more time into activities of her own, helping women and working people. Then, in the early days after the polio attack, her devotion to his care brought them closer again, though they seemed perhaps more like an adult brother and sister than husband and wife.

  As for the children, they sensed the change in their parents’ relations without knowing the reason. But that was just the latest development in their hectic history.

  Eleanor had always been anxious about being a parent. Though she’d been born into privilege, she’d grown up in a tragic household. Her mother, Anna, renowned in New York society circles as a great beauty, was selfish, even nasty. Because Eleanor as a little girl was so serious-minded, her mother called her “Granny.” Then Anna died of diphtheria when Eleanor was only eight. The child idolized her charming father, Theodore Roosevelt’s brother Elliott, but he was an alcoholic who alternately adored and neglected her, then killed himself just two years after his wife’s death. So her parents had been anything but models of good parenting.

  As a teenager Eleanor blossomed at boarding school in England, where a brilliant and loving headmistress nurtured her intelligence and ability. But then, without attending college, at the age of just twenty, she married Franklin—and fell under the stern and constant gaze of her mother-in-law.

  Eleanor read progressive advice about modern parenting and concluded that her children needed to be given a long leash and allowed to make their own mistakes. FDR largely agreed, remembering how aggravated he’d been by a mother who had directed his every move.

  But their permissive style of parenting had its downside, especially because Sara often undermined their efforts by giving her grandchildren treats after they’d been disciplined. The kids grew up pretty wild. On Sixty-Fifth Street, James and Anna practiced their aim with bags of water dropped on passersby from the upper-story windows, and Elliott once tried to shoot out stained-glass windows across the street with his air rifle. Then there was a string of badly chosen governesses—young women who supervised the children when their mother was busy. One of them locked the boys in closets and once sent Anna to school with a wad of cotton stuffed in her mouth, saying the cotton had better be there when Anna came home at the end of the day. (She was finally fired only after Eleanor discovered she’d been drinking whiskey on the job.)

  When polio invaded the household, Eleanor had to reengineer the daily schedule to accommodate FDR’s work with nurses and doctors. Anna was forced to give up her bedroom when Louis Howe moved into the house every Monday through Friday. (Howe’s own wife and two children now saw him only on weekends, thus making their own sacrifice to Franklin Roosevelt’s needs.) It would be years before the children came to recognize any good traits in the sloppy, crotchety Howe, and they resented the friendship that grew between Howe and their mother. Sara Roosevelt, still astonished by her son’s decision to try for a political comeback and afraid that his life was still in danger long after the poliovirus had left his body, was free with objections and arguments. In icily polite exchanges, she and Eleanor waged daily warfare over Franklin, the children, Howe (whom Sara detested), and just about everything else. If the children brought complaints to FDR, he would say, “That’s up to Granny and Mother. You settle all this with them.”

  He still loved his wife and he certainly loved his children. But he put his battle against paralysis above everything else. In this Franklin was not so different from many American fathers of his time. He saw his role in the family as that of a chief executive. He would make the big decisions about money and household arrangements, which schools the children would attend and how they would spend their summers. But as for the children’s day-to-day well-being, that was for his wife and mother to worry about. He hated to dole out punishment, even when the children deserved it. When he was paying attention to them, he was loads of fun. But he seems not to have thought very hard about what each of them really needed from him. “When we did have him,” James wrote later, “life was as lively and exciting as any kid could want it to be.” But even in the children’s early years, he said, “we had so little of Father.”

  Now, during the fight of his life, they would have even less of him.

  * * *

  When FDR returned to New York from Boston in the spring of 1922, the family began to make plans for spending the summer together, either in Hyde Park or perhaps at an oceanside cottage in Newport, Rhode Island. But the doctors had their own ideas.

  Dr. Draper believed the endless arguments between Sara and Eleanor were driving his patient quietly nuts. FDR needed a break from “the interplay of those high-voltage personalities.”

  Dr. Lovett agreed. The best thing, he said, would be a few months of exercise with absolutely no distractions.

  So FDR went up to the big estate at Hyde Park. He was accompanied only by Nurse Rockey and a full-time helper, LeRoy Jones, an African American man whom FDR called Roy.

  Almost nothing is known of LeRoy Jones. He was one of many people the Roosevelts could afford to pay for doing the nitty-gritty work of daily life—cleaning, cooking, shopping, hauling, driving. In Jones’s case, much of his job was even more intimate. He helped FDR get in and out of his clothes, right down to his underwear. He helped him in and out of chairs and his bed. He had to learn the delicate task of lowering FDR onto the toilet, then hoisting him off again, with FDR’s hands encircling Jones’s neck in a tight grip—a job he performed several times every day. For FDR that was one more loss to his sense of privacy and independence. What did it mean for LeRoy Jones? If others ever asked him, they made no record of what he said.

  Once FDR was at Hyde Park, the family mostly stayed away. Louis Howe came for visits, as did a distant cousin invited by FDR’s mother. Her name was Daisy Suckley (pronounced SOOK-lee), and in time she became one of FDR’s closest friends.

  The Roosevelts’ estate at Hyde Park spread over many acres of lawn, field, and forest between the Albany Post Road—the old thoroughfare between New York City and the state capital—and the Hudson. The main house, built in stages from about 1800 to the 1910s, was more bulky than graceful, with squared-off rooflines and stubby chimneys. But for a big house it was inviting and comfortable. Tall windows afforded lovely views of the trees, the river, and the far shore. Inside the house, FDR knew every column and cupboard. Outside, he gazed on woods, slopes, and trails he had known since his boyhood.

  All that summer and early fall of 1922, FDR exercised.

  Indoors, he did pull-ups on his bed. Then he would sit at the bottom of a staircase, put his hands on the stair behind him, and hike himself up all the way to the top, stair by stair.

  On the lawn, wearing his braces and a tight corset to keep from bending at the waist, he would stand between two parallel bars—one at waist level, the other at the height of his head—then reach forward and pull himself along from one end of the bars to the other, back and forth.

  Often he would talk while he exercised. If his companion was Louis Howe, they would discuss politics and business.
If it was Daisy Suckley, who had grown up and still lived in the nearby village of Rhinecliff, they would gossip about Hudson Valley relatives and friends.

  She often heard him say, “I’m not going to be conquered by a childish disease.”

  * * *

  Week by week, the muscles of his neck, shoulders, arms, and chest swelled. Friends continued to be astonished at the new bulkiness of his body above the waist. In a letter, a navy friend who had seen a recent photo of FDR remarked that he appeared to be “passing from the Battle Cruiser to the Dreadnaught class.”

  “Don’t worry about my getting fat,” FDR replied. “The upper part of me weighs, of course, more than it did before, but that is because my arm and shoulder muscles have developed tremendously in the effort of getting about with crutches.”

  Actually, “getting about with crutches” was the one activity he seemed to be neglecting. Eleanor, who came to Hyde Park from time to time, and Nurse Rockey, who watched him every day, told Dr. Lovett the patient was slacking off on his crutch-walking exercises.

  Lovett gave FDR a talking-to by mail, saying “walking on crutches is not a gift, but an art, acquired by constant practice.”

  FDR was all assurance, promising that “I have faithfully carried out all the walking.”

  But he really hadn’t done so, and he didn’t start. Within a few weeks, Nurse Rockey was sending Dr. Lovett her own tattletale letter. FDR was doing too much of the “mental work” the doctors had told him not to overdo, she said. If she didn’t nag him, he would “make excuses and put off going to bed until very late, etc.” When he did try his exercises with crutches, he wasn’t ready for them. Just the other day, she said, “he was compelled to walk one-quarter of a mile, which completely took him off his feet for about four days.” And his pain was back. “All this lovely fall has gone with only a few minutes devoted to walking,” she said, “[and] not every day.”