1944

by Jay Winik

  He was still eager, however, to witness action. Once, a shell whistled and landed with a “dull boom” nearby. Roosevelt took off toward the sound, leaving behind a suitcase of important papers on the running board of his car. Yet for all his jaunty enthusiasm, the devastation wrought by combat made a lasting impression on Roosevelt. Later, he would mention the images he had seen in a walk through Belleau Wood: “rain-stained love letters,” or men buried in shallow graves, with nothing more than a weathered rifle butt poking out of the ground to mark their resting place.

  After France, he traveled to Italy, where he tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a command structure for the Mediterranean, then back to England. Determined as ever, on his return to Washington he planned to resign his post and head for the front. Again, another foe intervened: Spanish influenza. Roosevelt was struck on board the USS Leviathan, collapsing in his cabin. His flu was compounded by double pneumonia. Clammy and sweating, Roosevelt lay in his bunk barely conscious, hovering near death. He lived. Many others were not so lucky. Death came often during the passage, and both officers and men who passed away on board were buried at sea. Then, when the ship docked, Roosevelt was transported by ambulance to his mother’s New York town house. Four orderlies carried his prostrate body up the stairs. Eleanor had hurriedly arrived to attend to him and dutifully unpacked his bags. In the process, she discovered sheafs of love letters, neatly tied together, all from Lucy Mercer. These letters confirmed her worst fears, and as Eleanor would later put it, “the bottom dropped out of my own particular world.”

  According to various family accounts, Eleanor offered to give Franklin a divorce so that he might marry Lucy, but both Louis Howe and Sara Roosevelt were aghast at the idea and convinced him that it would derail his political career. Sara may well have threatened to disown him if he left Eleanor for Lucy. In the end, he stayed, as did Eleanor.

  Roosevelt did not recover from either the pneumonia or the discovery of his liaison with Lucy in time to resign his post and enlist in the war. When peace came, he instead pressed his case to return to Europe to preside over the demobilization of the navy, and Daniels finally relented. Franklin and Eleanor were sent together. The trip was a watershed. When they were four days out of New York harbor, word arrived that Teddy Roosevelt was dead. And before the year’s end, President Woodrow Wilson would be paralyzed by a massive stroke. His cherished dream of a League of Nations would collapse, and the 1920 campaign would begin. Roosevelt was there, giving the seconding speech for New York’s Al Smith at the Democratic convention; moreover, he became the party’s nominee for vice president, on the ticket with Governor James Cox of Ohio. Roosevelt again felt no shame in trading on his name: as he had done in running for the New York state senate, he adopted many of Theodore’s characteristic expressions—“b-u-ll-y,” “stren-u-ous.” Yet the campaign soon foundered, and Warren Harding routed Cox and Roosevelt, with more than 60 percent of the popular vote and an impressive 404 votes in the Electoral College. Still, the loss at least proved to be a financial gain for Roosevelt. He became vice president of the Fidelity and Deposit Company of Maryland, for the hefty sum of $25,000 a year, largely for lending his name to the masthead. The Democrats, Roosevelt thought, would be wandering in the wilderness for the near future. With the future ahead of him, he preferred to decamp to his summer home on the island of Campobello, Maine.

  IT BEGAN AS A vague malaise and a dull ache in his legs. Then came the exhaustion and shivering. He only picked at his dinner tray and was cold even under a heavy woolen blanket. In the morning, as he was walking to the bathroom, his left leg gave way beneath him. He shaved and made it back to bed. He could not know it then, but this was the last walk he would ever take unassisted.

  By now, he had a fever, and the pain in his back and legs had increased. The family attempted massage, but to no avail. Within a week, his frantic doctors were desperate for even a glimpse of movement in one of Roosevelt’s toes. They could not see any. In truth, he could not even use the toilet on his own; a catheter was implanted, which Eleanor got up to drain during the night. By the end of August, there was no improvement. By the end of September, significant muscle atrophy had set in.

  He was eventually diagnosed with poliomyelitis, or infantile paralysis, although more recent medical speculation has suggested some form of Guillain-Barré syndrome. Whatever the cause, the outcome was the same. He was a paraplegic.

  Nevertheless, on October 15, Franklin Roosevelt reached a milestone. He was able to sit up. He had been transported back to New York City and left the hospital in late October. An intensive exercise regimen was designed to enable him to use crutches. His now-useless legs were laboriously strapped into fourteen-pound steel braces, molded from his ankle to his hips. He could no longer balance on his own or extend one leg at a time. Instead, his crutches became his legs; he stabilized himself using his upper body, and half-dragged, half-swung his legs and his hips along from behind. At Hyde Park, the rope-and-pulley trunk elevator became his conveyance to the upper floors; dutifully, his mother had “inclined planes” installed and removed all the raised thresholds so nothing would impede a wheelchair. Sara Roosevelt hoped her son would retire to Hyde Park, but his political adviser Louis Howe had other ideas.

  “I believe,” Howe audaciously said, “someday Franklin will be president.”

  THE MAN WHO HAD fallen in a heap when he attempted to navigate on crutches across the slippery marble floor at his Wall Street offices, the man who could not lift even one arm and wave for fear of toppling, the man who had once towered over others but was now almost always the one who did the looking up—miraculously returned to politics in 1924 as a lead speaker for the Democratic presidential convention. What Roosevelt could no longer do with his arms, he did with his head, throwing it back, holding his shoulders high. Whatever parts of himself he could still move, he animated. And he now used his voice brilliantly. No longer halting, it had matured into a resonant tenor and was infused with a passion that he had previously lacked. It thrummed, it vibrated, it sang. And wherever he was, the audience felt it.

  In November 1928, Franklin Roosevelt achieved what had once seemed to many to be impossible. He was elected the Democratic governor of New York. He did it by being carried up back stairs to deliver speeches and by riding in the back of a car, from which he could speak without standing up. Indeed, the simple act of standing up and sitting down required more effort for him than most men exert during an entire day. Day after day on the campaign trail, he disguised his disability and seemed to have gained a new equanimity. Frances Perkins, who joined Roosevelt on his run for governor and who would later become his secretary of labor, recalled him telling her once, “If you can’t use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice, you learn to say, ‘that’s all right’ and drink it.”

  Roosevelt was now truly living what his cousin Teddy had preached: “the strenuous life.” And he lived it not in a charge up San Juan Hill or on a big-game hunt in the western plains, but every waking hour of every day. He lived it from the moment he summoned his strength to hoist his useless legs from his bed into his self-designed wheelchair; he lived it when the sweat ran down his face as he said to himself, “I must get down the driveway” or “I must get to the podium” or “I must get across the room.” He did it minute after minute and week after week, always refusing to give up or give in. As never before, he had become a man of conviction and determination. And when the country was on its knees because of the Great Depression, Governor Roosevelt seemed, however improbably, the man who might best be able to lift it back onto its feet.

  ROOSEVELT’S POLITICAL OPERATIVES WERE already preparing their candidate for the presidential election only a few days after he was reelected as New York’s governor. He formally announced his candidacy on January 23, 1932, and proceeded to win all the delegates in Alaska and Washington state in the first week. But he did not succeed in derailing his opposition. In his final speech before the Democratic conventi
on, he promised “bold, persistent experimentation.” “Take a method,” he boomed, “and try it. If it fails admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” He arrived at the convention with a solid lead, but still about a hundred votes short of the nomination. After a night and a day of fierce lobbying and multiple votes, he finally won on the fourth ballot, claiming more than two thirds of the delegates after California and Texas switched to the Roosevelt column. He then made a dramatic flight to Chicago to accept the nomination, and his words to the assembled crowd thundered over the radio: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a NEW DEAL for the American people.”

  Whatever Roosevelt’s promises, no one could overlook the desperate situation the country found itself in. The Great Depression was horrific. At least 25 percent of the American workforce was unemployed; in some industrial cities, unemployment was as high as 80 or 90 percent. International trade was devastated. In less than four years, the American economy had shrunk by $45 billion, or about 45 percent. Even more staggering than the numbers were the haunting images: the bread lines forming in every city; the evicted families, jobless and destitute and dirty, shuffling from one soup kitchen to the next; and the makeshift tents in the dead of winter buckling from rain and sleet, not to mention the filthy children who huddled by bonfires alongside the railroad tracks. And the great midwestern dust bowl was yet to come. Sometimes, the enormousness of the task and the despair must have seemed overwhelming.

  But not to Roosevelt. In his race against Hoover, he gave twenty-seven major addresses, each covering a single topic, and he made his campaign about substance and about organization. Most of all, he believed he would win, and equally remarkably, everyone around him became a believer as well. The embattled incumbent president, Herbert Hoover, accused the Democrats of being the “party of the mob.” Hoover also insisted that despite the Depression, no one was starving: “The hobos,” he exclaimed, “are better fed than they have ever been.” The voters went overwhelmingly against Hoover and for Roosevelt; it was a drubbing—the president carried only six northeastern states. Roosevelt’s Democrats also gained a nearly three-to-one majority in the House and control of the Senate. On election night, Washington seemed to be his.

  And there was this: we think of our presidents as robust, vigorous, capable of striding through any part of the country or indeed the globe. But Franklin Roosevelt could not stride. He could not even stand unbraced or unassisted. Never before or since has a disabled person run for the American presidency, let alone won. That he ran and won in a time of national turmoil is a testament not only to the skill of his campaign, but to something fearless and indomitable deep within himself.

  “HE HAS BEEN ALL but crowned by the people,” newspaperman William Allen White grandiloquently wrote. Actually, this was an overstatement. True, in the New Deal days he was the man whom millions loved, but he was also the man whom millions loved to hate. In his first hundred days in office, he undid the Temperance movement by repealing Prohibition and rebuffed both organized labor and veterans with his sweeping legislative proposals and executive orders. He remade the banking system and began to remake the government and economy. For Roosevelt, no dream seemed impossible. And to many, as inch-by-inch he restored confidence in the economy and tamed the worst of the Depression, it was nothing less than miraculous.

  Yet the heady promise of those early days and months also could not be indefinitely sustained. By the mid-1930s, some of Roosevelt’s presidential magic had begun to wear off. The jaunty, quick-witted president who seemed to relish sparring with his enemies now appeared at times baffled and weary, though he did rebound in 1936—an election year—with a string of legislative achievements reminiscent of the first hundred days of his term. By the end of his second term, however, as he confronted ever-rising difficulties with Congress, continued obstruction from a wary Supreme Court, a persistently sluggish economy, and the ominous sight of Adolf Hitler looming over Europe, he suddenly looked ordinary, much like any other two-term president. Yet once plunged into the throes of World War II, he emerged not only as a great statesman, but as one of history’s originals.

  Callous and cunning, he was careful never to get too far ahead of public opinion, even as he pushed, prodded, and manipulated his two very different wartime allies, Churchill and Stalin. Neatly attired and insouciant, he was the very picture of understated upper-class elegance and seemed strangely immune to mercurial passions—Francis Biddle once remarked that Roosevelt “had more serenity than any man I’ve ever met.” And despite his useless legs, he was still a strikingly imposing figure, with his broad torso and wide shoulders. His charm was without peer. When he famously tossed his head back, or flashed a wide grin, his eyes flickered with emotion. When he chuckled with delight, so did those around him. His smile remained infectious, and his company was irresistible: Churchill felt it; so did Stalin; and so did General Dwight Eisenhower, Roosevelt’s chief adviser Harry Hopkins, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Roosevelt was a magnet to which thousands were drawn. How else to explain the nearly slavish devotion of those who supported his political endeavors, or the unwritten rule among the press corps never to report on his disability or photograph his wheelchair or his shriveled legs?

  In spite of his disability, Roosevelt remained a man of constant action, loving to drive, loving his stamps, loving the interplay of politics. Largely motionless himself, he instead made motion orbit around him, perfecting the tilt of his head and using his cigarette holder like a conductor’s baton. He was given to drumming his fingers when excited. He could infuse equal gusto into discussions of grave international issues such as the “survival of democracy,” as he did into mundane politics such as the fate of a ward heeler in a Pennsylvania precinct. And when angered he could point a threatening finger or display a menacing scowl.

  Like all great leaders, he was not above simple demagoguery or ruthless invective when it served his purpose: Roosevelt blithely referred to isolationists as “cheerful idiots”; when he appointed a Republican, he joked to the press corps that he couldn’t find any dollar-a-year men among the Democrats; and when Ambassador William Bullitt fell out of his favor, Roosevelt encouraged him to leave Washington and run for mayor of Philadelphia—and then promptly instructed the Pennsylvania Democratic bosses to “cut his throat.” He once derided Congress as “a madhouse,” and denounced the Senate as “a bunch of incompetent obstructionists.” The commander in chief even thought that his own vice president, Henry Wallace, who served with him for his entire third term, was a crackpot. And he liked to make fun of his secretary of state, cheerfully imitating Hull’s lisp.

  But intuitively, Roosevelt understood Adolf Hitler’s bloodthirstiness as much as anyone—ironically, he and Hitler had come to power at the same time, in 1933—and knew that with each new battle and each month of the war, “we are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.”

  IN 1933, AFTER HIS first hundred days in office, Roosevelt had brilliantly managed to usher fifteen historic pieces of legislation through Congress. When it was necessary to hold firm, he did that; when it was necessary to compromise, he did that; when it was necessary to make a bargain, he did that as well. “It’s more than a New Deal,” his secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, boasted: “It’s a new world!” Even when a bleak recession and unemployment lingered and when he failed in his attempt to “pack” a restive Supreme Court, he never lost the adulation of vast segments of the public or the interest of the press.

  Yet when it came to the darkening situation in Europe, Roosevelt flinched. Instead of showing his customary confidence, he played it coyly. Despite Hitler’s onslaught, the ghastly memories of World War I remained as fresh as ever—the sights and sounds of exhausted armies shadowboxing from their trenches; the tedium of siege and the billowing clouds of dense, roiling smoke; and the stabbing bursts of gunfire that never seemed to fade away. America had buried over 117,000 soldiers in World War I, while Eu
rope and Russia lost 10 million. Many Americans thought that was plenty, and two decades later they had little appetite for what they still thought of as Europe’s wars. By the summer of 1939, with Europe bounded by France’s Maginot Line against Germany in the west and the provisions of the Munich agreement in the east, Roosevelt had all but decided not to run for a third term.

  But then came a stark phone call at 2:50 a.m. on August 31, 1939, informing him that ten armored German divisions had stormed across the Polish border, and that war had been declared. Roosevelt cleared his throat and rasped to his ambassador in Paris, William Bullitt, who was relaying the news from Warsaw, “Well, Bill, it has come at last. God help us all.” It was then that Roosevelt began the process of reversing himself: he would ultimately decide to seek an unprecedented third term in office—breaking a tradition begun by George Washington himself. Over the next eight months, during the period known as the phony war, Roosevelt publicly promised to keep America out of Europe’s conflict. “I’ve said this before and will say this again,” he told the nation; “your boys will not fight in foreign wars.” Anyone who suggested otherwise was perpetrating a “shameless and dishonest fake,” the president said, adding, “The simple truth is that no person in any responsible place has ever suggested the remotest possibility of sending the boys of American mothers to fight on the battlefields of Europe.” Still, he also did what he could to nudge Washington and indeed the nation at large closer to action and to the growing reality of future conflict. But whereas Churchill had lectured Neville Chamberlain about his policies of appeasement (“The government had to choose between shame and war,” he bellowed. “They chose shame and will get war!”) Roosevelt instead searched for a middle way. He informed members of the Senate Military Affairs Committee that if England and France fell, all of Europe “would drop into the basket of their own accord. . . . I cannot overemphasize the seriousness of the situation. This is not a pipe dream.”