by James Tobin
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TO BEN
AND
LUCY
REMEMBER THIS STORY WHEN SOMEONE SAYS, “YOU’LL NEVER BE ABLE TO DO THAT.”
PREFACE
One day while Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, someone asked him to name his favorite poem. His taste in reading ran more to factual matters, especially political history and geography—even atlases, which he studied so closely that he knew the elevations of various mountains around the world. But he did like one poem in particular, he said. The title was “Invictus.” The author was an Englishman named William Ernest Henley (1849–1903).
It’s a short poem that tells of the writer’s determination to stay strong in the midst of terrible troubles. The title is Latin for “unconquerable.”
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed …
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Why that poem?
Roosevelt may have known that William Ernest Henley suffered from Pott’s disease, a painful form of tuberculosis that invades the bones. When Henley was sixteen, his left leg had to be amputated. At twenty-eight he was told he would lose his right leg, too. But he found a new surgeon who managed to save the leg in a series of delicate operations. In the hospital’s recovery ward, Henley wrote “Invictus.”
This book is about why “Invictus” spoke to and for Franklin Roosevelt.
At first, fate had been kind to him, placing him in a famous and wealthy family blessed with every advantage. But in 1921, when he was thirty-nine years old, fate turned cruel, cutting short the pursuit of his dreams.
That’s where this story begins—with the “bludgeonings of chance” that suddenly fell upon Roosevelt. Then it tells about the decision he had to make—whether to drop back into a quiet life of comfort or to fight on. His choice revealed much about his character. What he did for the next ten years revealed much more, and that is the rest of the story.
The book ends just as Roosevelt is about to embark on his twelve years in the presidency. He was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, the deepest point of the Great Depression. He served until his death twelve years later, on April 12, 1945, near the end of World War II.
Those were the most dangerous years the American people had endured since the Civil War of the 1860s. Without Roosevelt’s leadership, the crises of economic depression and war might have turned into catastrophes. When historians are asked to rank the country’s greatest presidents, four names always appear at the top of the list: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt—or FDR, as he so often signed documents and letters, in bold, slashing diagonals that captured the vaulting energy of his personality.
To understand America in those hard times, you have to know who Franklin Roosevelt really was. As the journalist Joseph Alsop, a distant cousin of Roosevelt’s, later wrote: “One of the central problems facing anyone dealing with Franklin Roosevelt’s personal history is just what made him the man he became.” This story is one of the keys that unlocks that mystery.
He followed a twisting path to the mastery of his fate. He learned that to be unconquerable was not a matter of sheer willpower. It was more complicated than that. It required seeing and facing the truth. It meant failing and starting again, then failing again and trying something new. It depended on flexibility and perseverance, not brute strength. By the time he reached the White House, he had learned that while no one hopes for misfortune, it can lead to unexpected opportunities and rewards—even to greatness.
* * *
Writing a biography is like opening an old box full of the jumbled pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and then discovering that many pieces are missing.
Biographers search for the fragments of a person’s life that have survived the passage of time—things like old letters written in scratchy handwriting, articles clipped out of forgotten newspapers, grainy black-and-white photos. Then they try to fit the fragments together to form a picture that captures the essence of the person’s life.
Pieces are always missing. Some biographers spend decades searching for them. But the puzzle can never be complete, even when the subject is someone like Franklin Roosevelt, who kept just about everything and who was observed as closely and remembered as vividly as any American of the twentieth century. In his case, it sometimes seems as if the holes outnumber the pieces.
So … what to do?
We study the pieces that surround a hole and say to ourselves, I bet I know what goes in that hole—it’s obvious from the pieces all around it.
Or we ask questions and suggest possible answers: What goes there? Maybe this; maybe that. But we never know for sure which answer, if any, is right.
Some biographers pretend they’ve found every missing piece. They tell the story as if they know more than they really do.
Others are honest about the missing pieces. When they have questions they can’t answer, they say so. They tell the reader when they’re speculating.
Doing it the first way can make a story more readable. When all the missing parts are filled in, the biography reads more like a novel.
But if readers get suspicious—if they think, Wait … does the author know that for sure?—then the ground starts to shake beneath their feet. The readers don’t know what to trust. They want a good story, yes, but when they read a biography, they also want the truth.
So I like doing it the second way—being straight with the reader about what’s known for sure and what’s educated guesswork. It’s better to say, I don’t have every piece of the puzzle. I’ll tell you when I’m speculating and when I have questions I can’t answer for sure. I’ll give you my best judgments. But that’s what they are—not the absolute truth.
Anyway, to me, the mystery of the missing pieces makes the past all the more fascinating.
Some people may object to the very idea of a biography of a privileged man who, as president, made certain decisions that now look wrongheaded, even hurtful.
But a biography is not a monument to its subject. It’s not a marble statue to revere as if it symbolizes an ideal human being. Granted, Franklin Roosevelt was hardly that. For all his strengths, even greatness, he had his flaws as anyone does. He could be selfish and petty. He had biases and blind spots. But if we ignore him and others because they made what we now call mistakes, we run the risk of blinding ourselves.
A good biography is much more like a museum than a memorial. The book invites us into the subject’s world, where
we can watch them respond to challenges. We can study the personality behind the deeds. We can see how the world shapes the individual and how the individual shapes the world in turn. In a biography, as in life, that’s the way we learn how to shape our own worlds.
* * *
Readers will see that I occasionally use the offensive words “cripple” and “crippled.” In recent times, our society has learned how damaging those words are. They imply that people with disabilities are somehow less valuable than people without disabilities—or, even worse, that people with disabilities should be hidden away or shunned. Those ideas are profoundly mistaken. Yet they were so common in Roosevelt’s lifetime that few people thought twice about using the words that symbolize the ideas. This was and still is a major challenge for any person with a disability—to overcome the biases that exist in other people’s minds. That was certainly true for Franklin Roosevelt, who wanted not only to live a full life but to lead his nation. So I’ve occasionally used the words that represent the powerful forces of ignorance and prejudice that opposed his ambitions. If readers never see these words, they may never understand just what he was up against.
PART 1
THE INFECTION
AUGUST–OCTOBER 1921
Chapter 1
CAMPOBELLO
Franklin Roosevelt loved to tell stories about his life. He would talk about his ancestors who’d fought in the American Revolution, the towns he’d visited, the people he’d met, the friends he’d made, the moments he remembered.
But he never said much about what happened to him on Campobello Island in the summer of 1921.
At the age of thirty-nine, he was one of the most promising young politicians in the country. Many people thought he might one day be president of the United States. But events at his family’s summer home on Campobello put an end to any such talk.
He had always loved the island. As a boy he spent fall, winter, and spring on his family’s estate on the Hudson River, a hundred miles north of New York City. But at the start of every summer, Campobello beckoned. He learned to sail there, steering his own boat among the rocky islets and drifting mists of Passamaquoddy Bay, the great arm of the Atlantic Ocean that divides the tip of Maine from the Canadian province of New Brunswick. As he grew into manhood he went back nearly every year. After he married, he brought his wife, Eleanor, and their growing brood of children to their summer house overlooking the bay.
But after 1921, he went back to Campobello only three times, and then for the briefest of stays.
Many years later, one of his sons, Franklin Roosevelt Jr., was asked why his father had all but abandoned his favorite spot on earth. He replied: “I think he just couldn’t bear to go back to the place where he had hiked and run and ridden horseback and climbed cliffs, and realize that he could never do those things again.”
* * *
The first hint that something was wrong came into his mind on an oceangoing yacht sailing up the coast of New England as the calendar turned from July to August.
FDR was heading for his first real vacation in a long time. Through the four years of World War I (1914–1918) and its aftermath, he had worked long, difficult hours as assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy under President Woodrow Wilson. In 1920, he had sprinted through a national political campaign as the Democratic Party’s nominee for vice president. When that campaign failed, he had launched himself into a dozen new activities. Now, finally, he could look forward to two glorious weeks of recreation and rest.
He was aboard the yacht of his friend Van Lear Black, a millionaire businessman and sportsman from Baltimore. FDR had invited Black to bring his family and some friends up to Campobello for a few days. The Blacks picked him up in New York City; then they all sailed north together.
He had a wonderful time aboard. He would remind Black later that he “never laughed as much as we all did on the cruise up the Coast of Maine.”
But he also felt a little sluggish and sick, as if he had picked up an intestinal bug.
Then he noticed something stranger. His skin was becoming unusually sensitive; his nerves seemed to be on high alert.
After two days on the water FDR spied Campobello on the horizon—a line of dark conifer trees on a craggy shore. He himself likely piloted the yacht through the tricky, narrow channel that divided the island from the village of Lubec at the easternmost tip of Maine. Campobello, though so close to the American mainland, belonged to Canada. Even in summer, not many people lived there—just a handful of Canadian fishermen, their families, and a scattering of Americans who loved the place for its crisp sea air and long views of the bay.
Roosevelt’s parents—James and Sara Delano Roosevelt—had purchased property there in the 1880s because they thought it would be a healthy summer spot for their only child, who seemed to get sick so often. They had a fine house built, and twenty years later, when FDR married, his mother purchased an even finer house next door and gave it to the bride and groom. It was a broad, comfortable place with a red roof, loads of bedrooms, and wide windows overlooking the water.
A loud houseful of people greeted FDR and the Blacks. There was Eleanor Roosevelt, who was not only FDR’s wife but his distant cousin, the favorite niece of the former president Theodore Roosevelt; FDR and Eleanor’s daughter, Anna, who was fifteen; their four sons, James, thirteen; Elliott, ten; Franklin Jr., about to turn seven; and John, five; the children’s nanny; the nanny’s mother; and the family of Louis Howe, FDR’s close friend and assistant.
For Roosevelt, free time meant time on the move outdoors. He was a sailor, golfer, and tennis player. In Washington, D.C., during the war, he had joined other government executives for daily workouts with a famous football coach. At work he often jogged from one appointment to the next. He took stairs two at a time.
So once he reached Campobello, he wasted no time lounging around. He announced the first order of business: a fishing expedition on Passamaquoddy Bay. The next morning, he and the others boarded Black’s yacht and cruised out across the gray water. Then they got into the vessel’s “tender” boat, a long, narrow craft with two cockpits, one at either end, with the engine taking up most of the space in between.
FDR gave himself the job of baiting fish hooks for everyone. To carry the hooks from one cockpit to the other, he had to step carefully along a narrow, wet plank beside the hot engine.
Suddenly he lost his footing and plunged into the water. It took only a minute for the others to haul him back on board, and right away he was laughing at himself.
“All you landlubbers” were still dry on board, he said, yet he was the one, an “old salt” with many years on the water, who had become the only “man overboard.”
Funny thing, that slip. He’d been dashing around slippery boat decks forever. He’d hardly ever fallen off a boat. Yet that day he had done it. And although he had been swimming in the frigid water there for many years, it never had felt as cold as it did that day—“so cold,” he remembered later, “it seemed paralyzing.”
* * *
Once the Blacks had gone, FDR turned to having fun with his children. “Father loved life on the island more than any of us, but got to spend the least time there,” remembered Jimmy, the oldest boy. In this family, fun was strenuous. They played tennis. They went swimming and sailing. They played a pursuit game FDR loved called Hare and Hounds, which sent the players racing up and down the rocky slopes along the shore. For two or three days, Jimmy remembered, they had “a wild, whooping, romping, running, sailing, picnicking time.”
On the morning of Wednesday, August 10, FDR arose from his bed feeling worn out, though he had slept all night. He thought another good day outdoors might restore his energy. So he piled everyone into the family’s sailboat, Vireo, and steered for a deserted island out in the bay. On the beach they shared a picnic lunch. Then, sailing for home, they spotted smoke rising from an island in the distance—a forest fire.
At his home in upstate New York, FDR raised trees as a hobb
y. He couldn’t bear to see trees destroyed. So he steered toward the smoke and beached the boat. The family tumbled out to fight the fire. Other people who had spotted the smoke joined them. For hours, the Roosevelts worked as an emergency fire brigade, swatting at flames with evergreen branches and stamping on sparks. Anna was standing near a tall spruce when she heard “that awful roar of the flames as they quickly enveloped the whole tree.” They sweated in the heat and smoke until the fire was finally out.
After an outing like that, most families would have been ready to collapse on the couch. But when the Roosevelts got back to the cottage, someone suggested a swim. FDR was still feeling that unfamiliar sluggishness. He thought a quick dip might drive the feeling away. So he and the children set off at a jogging pace for Lake Glensevern, a long, narrow pond with water warm enough for comfortable swimming. It was about a mile and a half away. They all dove in. While the children splashed around, FDR left the pond and ran a little farther for a plunge in the colder waters of the ocean. Then they all straggled back along the trail toward home and dinner.
In the living room, FDR dropped into a wicker chair. He said he was too tired even to change into dry clothes. He just wanted to sit still. “I’d never felt quite that way before,” he remarked later. He and his friend Louis Howe paged through the newspapers and opened mail.
After a while Eleanor called everyone to dinner.
“About halfway through the meal,” their daughter, Anna, remembered later, “Father very quietly announced that he thought he had a slight attack of lumbago”—pain in the lower back. He felt a chill, too, he said, and he wanted to get completely warm. “He thought he’d better excuse himself and go up to bed. There was no fuss.”
