Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (30 page)

M
AYBE THEY WERE.
Roosevelt’s reputation didn’t appear to have been damaged by the report, which must have seemed to most honest observers as a late, low blow. But the events surrounding its release—his rush to Washington in the heat of midsummer, his frantic reading of the report and his drafting of the rebuttal, the worry the whole affair caused him—taxed Roosevelt’s constitution more than he realized. “I thought he looked quite tired when he left,” his Washington secretary, Marguerite LeHand—called Missy—wrote Eleanor following her boss’s departure back north. Yet Roosevelt was reluctant to acknowledge fatigue, at least when politics or public duty called, and en route to Campobello he stopped at a Boy Scout camp on the Hudson. The Boy Scout Foundation of Greater New York was one of his many worthy causes, and he was currently president. Reporters covered the camp outing, which involved much waving of flags, marching, and reaffirming of the mission of the scouts. Photographers made a visual record for the papers and for posterity. One picture showed Roosevelt leading a procession; his eyes drooped a bit but his posture, as always, was athletically straight and tall.

Roosevelt generally reasoned, often rightly, that the fatigue he most often suffered was of the mental and psychological kind. His favored cure was fatigue of the physical kind, in particular the weariness of body that comes from sustained exertion of muscle and bone and that pushes aside the cares of office. He administered the cure to himself on his return to Campobello in early August 1921. Arriving aboard the yacht of Van Lear Black, which he piloted through the final tricky passage of the Bay of Fundy, he took Black fishing the next day; for hours he baited hooks, rigged tackle, identified the gathering grounds of the wily cod, and played the tireless host to his new employer. At one point he unusually lost his footing and slipped from the boat into the bay. “I’d never felt anything so cold as that water,” he recalled later. “I hardly went under, hardly wet my head, because I still had hold of the side…. But the water was so cold it seemed paralyzing.” This sensation was odd, given that Roosevelt had been in that same water innumerable times before. He chalked it up to the heat of the August sun and of the boat’s engine, which had caused him to sweat profusely. He gave it little more thought.

A few days later he took Eleanor and the children sailing aboard the
Vireo,
the craft he had purchased to succeed his war donation, the
Half Moon II.
Just as his father had taught him to sail, so now he showed his own sons the ropes. They seemed apt pupils, and the outing went well. On the home leg someone spotted smoke over an uninhabited island in the bay. Forest fires were common enough in the area that neighborhood protocol demanded that whoever noticed one should try to put it out. The Roosevelts landed on the island and attacked the blaze with fir boughs Roosevelt cut for the purpose. The work was hot and strenuous and lasted hours; by the time the flames had been beaten into submission, father and family were soaked with sweat, begrimed with dust and soot, and exhausted from head to toe. They reembarked from the island and reached home around four. Roosevelt thought a swim would be a cleansing, bracing end to the day. The children liked a pond on the other side of Campobello Island, not least because its water was several degrees warmer than that of the bay. Eleanor excused herself, but Franklin led the young ones at a jog across the island. The lake washed them and refreshed the kids, but it didn’t give Roosevelt the lift he’d been expecting. And so he plunged into the bay, hoping its fifty-degree water would have its usual tonic effect. This did help, and though he still felt a little sluggish on emerging, he headed the troops on a quick march back to the house.

By the time they arrived a more profound weariness was setting in. Too spent to change out of his swimming suit, Roosevelt sat down to read the mail. He eventually felt a chill and, with considerable effort, made his way upstairs to bed. He assumed he was catching cold and crawled under the covers to warm up and rest. He told Eleanor to serve the children dinner without him.

His symptoms the next day suggested something besides a cold. He had a fever and found it difficult to move his left leg. He initially attributed the leg problem to a strain or slight tear of a muscle, and he managed to hobble about well enough to shave. But then his right leg began balking, too, and he had to return to bed.

Eleanor sent for Dr. E. H. Bennett of nearby Lubec. Bennett had known the family for years and had ministered to their minor bumps, bruises, and infections with the calming touch of the small-town general practitioner. He crossed over to Campobello, examined Roosevelt, and pronounced the illness a cold. The patient should stay in bed and let time work its healing.

Eleanor accepted the advice with ambivalence. She had seen Franklin with colds, and they weren’t anything like this. Yet Bennett was the doctor, and he had treated many more colds than she had observed. All the same, she remained by Franklin’s side while the children went off on a camping trip previously planned for the whole family.

She grew more worried almost at once. Franklin’s symptoms steadily worsened. His back ached badly; his legs became numb and then completely immobile; the paralysis began to creep up his torso. Even his arms and hands started to go limp. He discovered he couldn’t hold a pen to write.

Bennett belatedly recognized his misdiagnosis and the need to consult an expert. Fortunately August was a good month to fall sick on the Maine coast, as much of the northeastern medical establishment vacationed there. Louis Howe had brought his family to Campobello to join the Roosevelt holiday; now he escorted Bennett back to the doctor’s mainland office, and the two began calling around for a specialist. They turned up William W. Keen, an elderly Philadelphia surgeon vacationing at Bar Harbor, who agreed to come over and examine Roosevelt. Howe knew that Keen had been part of a team of surgeons that secretly removed a tumor from the mouth of Grover Cleveland during the summer of 1893. The secrecy had been important, in that Congress was locked in a fight over the nation’s money supply, with advocates of a gold standard battling proponents of silver. Cleveland preferred gold, but his vice president, Adlai Stevenson, liked silver, and the merest hint of weakness on the gold side—such as cancer in the president—might precipitate a financial panic. A Philadelphia paper got wind of the story within weeks, yet the White House denied it, and the doctors, including Keen, maintained their silence for decades. Howe was already worrying about the career ramifications for Roosevelt of a serious illness, and he took comfort in Keen’s ability to keep a secret.

Keen concluded that the patient’s most serious symptoms—the back pain and paralysis—resulted from a blood clot pressing upon the spinal cord. The fever was the consequence of an unrelated infection that would diminish on its own. Meanwhile Howe, Eleanor, and anyone else who could be mustered into service ought to massage Roosevelt’s legs, to enhance the blood circulation there and maintain muscle tone until the clot dissolved.

Accordingly Roosevelt’s wife and his political man Friday took turns kneading his legs. The procedure was painful, for although the legs had lost their ability to move, they had regained their sense of touch, which in fact had grown more acute. But Roosevelt gritted his teeth and told Eleanor and Howe to continue.

The therapy yielded no positive result. The paralysis grew worse. Roosevelt lost control of his bladder and bowels, requiring Eleanor and Howe to treat him like an invalid. His fever intensified, and so did the pain. By the end of the fifth day since the onset of the symptoms, he was almost delirious.

But this was the worst. The next day his fever diminished and the pain began to dull, from a knifelike stabbing to a chronic ache. Roosevelt’s mind gradually cleared, and he and the others focused on what seemed a slight improvement in his muscle control. “We thought yesterday he moved his toes on one foot a little better,” Eleanor wrote Franklin’s half brother, Rosy.

Louis Howe knew from his own childhood illness the emotional dangers of false encouragement, and while Eleanor and Franklin seized on signs of recovery, he looked for evidence of continuing affliction. He wrote to Franklin’s uncle Fred Delano for help enlisting medical opinion more expert and current than that of the bucolic Bennett and the octogenarian Keen. Delano consulted specialists in New York and Boston, who, on the basis of Roosevelt’s reported symptoms, suspected infantile paralysis, as poliomyelitis was commonly called. They recommended Robert W. Lovett of Boston, the country’s leading authority on polio. Lovett had an office in Newport, Rhode Island, and he agreed to travel north.

Lovett required only a brief examination of Roosevelt to determine that his illness was indeed polio. Lovett had seen far worse cases, and he knew that patients tended to improve as the inflammation that accompanied the first infection abated. A complete recovery for Roosevelt was not out of the question, he said. But the massages must stop, as they risked damage to the muscles and caused the patient needless pain. Warm baths would be helpful, not merely to soothe the pain but to facilitate muscle movement that would forestall atrophy. “He can do so much more under water with his legs,” Lovett said. Yet Lovett had seen enough of polio to realize that pain and atrophy were only part of the problem. “There is likely to be mental depression,” he warned.

T
HE MEMBERS OF
the Roosevelt household responded variously to Lovett’s diagnosis. Eleanor thought first of the children. Not for nothing was the disease called infantile paralysis; it typically struck the young. This largely explained why Bennett and Keen missed the diagnosis; adult-onset polio was very rare. The rareness exacerbated Eleanor’s alarm, for if the present strain was virulent enough to fell Franklin, she reasoned, the children must be even more vulnerable. Lovett reassured her. Though considerable uncertainty still surrounded polio’s mode of transmission, he assumed that if the children were going to be exposed, they already had been and would by now have manifested symptoms.

Lovett’s words reassured Eleanor, though for weeks she watched the children covertly for any sign of fever, any indication of muscle weakness. By the end of that time she had discovered a new role for herself with respect to her husband. From the start of their relationship, she had often felt herself the needier of the two. She was much less self-confident than Franklin; she was much more dependent on his love and esteem than he was on hers. Over several years she had slowly convinced herself of the reality of his love and had come to accept herself as worthy of it—only to have her conviction and self-perception shattered by the discovery of his affair with Lucy Mercer. She and Franklin stayed together for the children and for Franklin’s future, but she had never regained the feeling that she meant anything essential to him. She had expected that she never would.

But now, suddenly, he needed her, in a very fundamental way. He needed her to thread the catheter into his urethra and to do so with care and skill, to avoid pain and prevent an infection of the kind that often shortened the lives of bedridden patients. He needed her to sponge-bathe him, to dress him, to lift him from his bed to his wheelchair, to manage his finances, to do the hundred things he realized, day by day, that he could no longer do. She discovered within herself resources she hadn’t known she possessed. She became an able nurse, adept with catheters, thermometers, and several forms of physical therapy. She sharpened her management skills, taking over direction of the family economy. She shouldered much of his part of the parenting burden, becoming half a father in addition to remaining a full mother.