Pearl Harbor (21 page)

Howe was convinced that FDR had been misdiagnosed. Through family connections, he discovered Dr. Robert Williamson Lovett, an orthopedic surgeon from Newport and a leading authority on infantile paralysis, also known as polio. Lovett arrived on August 25. He found his patient in bed, paralyzed from the waist down, with a temperature of one hundred degrees. Lovett made his diagnosis quickly and firmly: FDR was suffering from infantile paralysis. Lovett broke the news to
the family. “I told them very frankly that no one could tell where they stood, that the case was evidently not of the severest type, that complete recovery or partial recovery to any point was possible.... [I]t looked to me as if some of the important muscles might be on the edge where they could be influenced either way—toward recovery, or turn into completely paralyzed muscles.”
²²

Roosevelt now faced the greatest challenge of his life. He was thirty-nine years old, disabled, and a failed vice presidential candidate. He had always fancied himself an outdoorsman and an athlete, but now he could not walk. “He was not accustomed to being confined indoors to bed,” James reflected. He had rarely been sick, and now he could not even stand. “It had to come as a dreadful blow to him.” His illness could easily have spelled the end of his political ambitions.
²³

His mother's solution was retirement at Hyde Park, where FDR could become the country gentleman she always wanted him to be. Franklin had different ideas. In the weeks and months that followed, he revealed a steely determination and strength of character that surprised even those who knew him best. His privileged childhood had protected him from adversity, but it also denied him the opportunity to challenge himself. He had learned to avoid confrontation and unpleasant news, but there was no avoiding the fact that he could not walk. Winning the battle against polio, observed biographer Geoffrey Ward, “would demand of him qualities not conspicuously displayed so far in his largely charmed life: patience, application, recognition of his own limitations, a willingness to fail in front of others and try again.”
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Although the doctors had given him a grim diagnosis, FDR seemed relieved to have an unambiguous diagnosis. He now knew the challenges that he confronted, and he never lost confidence that he would prevail. “I remember when he was told that he had Polio, he seemed really relieved that he knew the worst that could happen to him,” Eleanor reflected. He immediately started developing a strategy for conquering his illness, even though his physicians told him there was no cure. According to James, “He never admitted that this was the way it
was going to be from then on. It was temporary, a test he could meet, a fight he was determined to win.”
²⁵

Just like his mother taught him, FDR refused to show weakness. Eleanor knew that he was experiencing fear, but he never showed it. On the contrary, Roosevelt seemed to work even harder to appear sunny and happy. James recalled that he started to cry when he saw his father propped up on pillows for the first time. His father “just laughed and slapped me on the back and told me how ‘grand' I looked. Soon he dropped to the floor and was roughhousing with me.” He was constantly providing them with upbeat, but false, reports of his progress. “By golly, I can really feel those muscles coming back,” he would say to them.
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I
n the years after he was diagnosed with polio, as he fought to return to political life, Roosevelt worked hard to develop a method of appearing to walk. FDR told his physical therapist that his goal was to “walk without crutches. I'll walk into a room without scaring everybody half to death. I'll stand easily enough in front of people so that they'll forget I'm a cripple.”
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His solution was to develop a tripod method. He would use steel braces to lock his legs into a rigid position and then lean heavily on the arm of one of his sons with one hand while using a crutch under his other arm. The key was for his son to keep his arm as rigid as a parallel bar and held at a ninety-degree angle. He used his son's arm as a second crutch, and the steel braces allowed him to place all of his body weight on his lifeless legs and remain erect. In this position, FDR could “walk” by throwing his body weight forward, swinging one leg at a time while keeping his upper body stabilized.
²⁸

He used the new method for the first time at the 1924 Democratic Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City. FDR had wanted to make a dramatic return to politics, and Governor Al Smith, a leading candidate, asked him to give the nomination speech on his
behalf. It was only three years after his illness, and Roosevelt feared that it was too soon. But he accepted the invitation and decided that he could not use a wheelchair. With a crutch under his right arm, FDR gripped James's arm and moved slowly toward the stage. He was able to propel his body forward by pivoting and throwing his shoulders from side to side. “As we walked—struggled, really—down the aisle to the rear of the platform, he leaned heavily on my arm, gripping me so hard it hurt,” James recalled. “His hands were wet. His breathing was labored. Leaning on me with one arm, working a crutch with the other, his legs locked stiffly in their braces, he went on his awkward way.” To disguise the stiffness of his movements and not “scare everybody half to death,” as FDR said, he and James engaged in loud banter, pretending to laugh to hide the obvious discomfort.
²⁹

Standing at the podium, his head thrown back and his shoulders held high in his trademark posture, FDR launched into the speech that would define his return to politics. “He has a personality that carries to every hearer not only the sincerity but the righteousness of what he says,” Roosevelt declared, his rich tenor voice filling the Garden. “He is the ‘Happy Warrior' of the political battlefield . . . Alfred E. Smith.” FDR's speech, which set off an hourlong demonstration, failed to gain the nomination for Smith. But it provided Roosevelt with the psychological boost he needed. “I did it!” he exclaimed to a friend that evening.
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FDR's return to politics was a dramatic success, but he was determined to improve his method of walking. One day at Warm Springs, he came up with an idea. He would walk holding on to a man's arm and substitute a less conspicuous cane for the crutch. In 1928, Al Smith planned to be the party's nominee, and he wanted Roosevelt to present the nomination speech. As FDR made his way to the platform, this time holding on to Elliott's arm and using only a cane, the 15,000 delegates roared their approval. Everything about his manner—his optimism, broad smile, and relaxed confidence—contradicted the impression that he was an invalid. Invoking again the image of the “Happy
Warrior,” he brought the convention to its feet. As expected, Smith won nomination on the first ballot.

 

 

F
DR also never gave up hope of finding a cure. He consulted with physicians, but he also pursued unconventional therapy. He would spend his afternoons practicing walking with his legs strapped into fourteen pounds of painful steel braces. Somehow, he believed that he could force his lifeless legs to move. “I have faithfully followed out the walking and am really getting so that both legs take it quite naturally, and I can stay on my feet for an hour without feeling tired,” he wrote his physician.
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Roosevelt looked to water for a cure. “The water got me into this fix,” he used to say, “and the water will get me out.” He spent part of three winters between 1924 and 1926 living on a used houseboat, the
Laroocoo
, in Florida, where he hoped that the sun and fresh air would speed his recovery.
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Like his father, Roosevelt believed in the healing power of baths. He discovered Warm Springs in the fall of 1924 after hearing rumors that the eighty-six-degree natural spring waters that bubbled up from the ground held special healing powers. After swimming in the waters for the first time, he wrote his mother about his discovery. “I feel that a great ‘cure' for infantile paralysis and kindred diseases could well be established here.” He spent a considerable amount of his own money fixing up the resort property and turning it into a rehabilitation center for other sufferers of polio. He took a personal interest in the plight of other polio victims, developed an interest in physiotherapy, and soon began referring to himself as “Old Doctor Roosevelt.”
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Many biographers have observed that polio expanded FDR's horizons, making him more empathetic with those who suffered. “There had been a plowing up of his nature,” Labor Secretary Frances Perkins observed. “The man emerged completely warmhearted, with new humility of spirit and a firmer understanding of philosophical concepts.”
Once easily dismissed as superficial, ambitious, and shallow, FDR responded to polio in a way that added new depth to his character. It intensified his ability to set priorities and to focus. “Polio,” Franklin Jr. said, “taught Father to concentrate on the things he was physically able to do and not waste time thinking about the things he could not.”
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When asked how polio had changed him, Roosevelt responded, “If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your big toe, after that anything else would seem easy!” “Having handled that, he probably thought there wasn't anything he couldn't deal with,” said Henry Morgenthau. “Once you've conquered that kind of illness, anything's possible.”
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T
here is no question that FDR's long struggle with polio made him a more resilient and ambitious leader. But it may also have contributed to another quality that became central to his character and his handling of the attack on Pearl Harbor: his propensity for deception.

Although his battle with polio was central to understanding FDR's character, he was determined to prevent the public from ever knowing the extent of his paralysis. The grand deception began almost immediately. Howe needed to move Roosevelt from Campobello to New York without the press knowing the severity of his illness. To avoid having reporters see Roosevelt being carried on a stretcher, Howe brought him by boat to a secluded dock and loaded him on a private train car. He then propped him up so that local residents and reporters would see him in his familiar and reassuring position: smiling and waving from the window. He must have still been in tremendous pain, but appearances were more important. The next day, the
New York Times
ran a story quoting FDR's physician, who assured readers that “he definitely will not be crippled.”
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Roosevelt developed effective ways to disguise his disability. At state dinners, he was always wheeled into the room and seated before his guests arrived. When traveling by train, he spoke from the rear car, where he could support himself with a metal rail or reinforced podium.
He would ride in the back of an open automobile to greet voters. He had ramps specially constructed to allow the car to maneuver up to the podium. He even painted his steel braces black so they would match the color of his pants and shoes.
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Although he was the most photographed man of his times, of the thirty-five thousand photographs of him at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, only three show him seated in his wheelchair. There are no photographs, or newsreels, that show the time-consuming task of lifting him from his car into a chair, or of his strenuous, and awkward, effort to walk. An amateur filmmaker, Dr. Harold Rosenthal, captured the only moving images of Roosevelt “walking” in August 1933, when FDR attended an event at Vassar College. Reporters who wrote about Roosevelt rarely mentioned that he had no use of his legs.
³⁸

Although most Americans knew that Roosevelt was once inflicted by polio, they were not aware of the extent of his paralysis. In cartoons, he is often depicted as walking, running, jumping, and even boxing. When J. B. West was hired as the chief White House usher in 1941, he was shocked when he saw FDR for the first time. “It was only then that I realized that Franklin D. Roosevelt was really paralyzed,” he recalled. “Everybody knew that the president had been stricken with infantile paralysis, and his recovery was legend, but few people were aware how completely the disease had handicapped him.”
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FDR's upbringing, and his struggle with polio, had taught him how to hide his feelings and to be deceptive when necessary. He knew how to deflect attention and to disguise uncomfortable realities. Those qualities would be on full display on the evening of December 7 as FDR met with congressional leaders to discuss the attack on Pearl Harbor.

 

 

T
emperamentally, Eleanor did not share her husband's cool, calm way of dealing with crises. She pointed out that it was much harder for her. “I can be calm and quiet, but it takes all the discipline I have acquired in life to keep on talking and smiling and to concentrate on the
conversation addressed to me. I want to be left alone while I store up fortitude for what I fear may be a blow of fate.”
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It may have been harder for her to stay calm, but Eleanor shared her husband's activist spirit. On the afternoon of the Pearl Harbor attacks, while FDR prepared to meet with his cabinet, Eleanor was in her study, writing remarks for her regularly scheduled weekly radio address. It revealed a great deal about her stature as first lady that the first Roosevelt the nation would hear from was not Franklin, but Eleanor.

Shortly after 6:30 p.m., she sat down in front of the microphone and addressed the nation. “I am speaking to you tonight at a very serious moment in our history,” she told her listeners. “The Cabinet is convening and the leaders in the Congress are meeting with the President. The State Department and Army and Navy officials have been with the President all afternoon.” She claimed that the Japanese ambassador was talking to the president “at the very time that Japan's airships were bombing our citizens.” No doubt, Eleanor had seen the Chinese ambassador meeting with her husband and confused him for being Japanese. It was a mistake that many Americans would make over the next few weeks and months.