Master of His Fate by James Tobin (free ebooks for android txt) 📗

To reach his goal, FDR simply had to find some new treatment, some new exercise, some way of transforming his condition so that he might finally bring his legs back to life.

He talked it over with Dr. Lovett. He knew the orthopedist had no miracle medicines to offer. Still, there had to be something else he could do.

Well, Lovett said, some of his patients had made commendable progress by exercising in tanks of water, even in the Atlantic Ocean.

The foundation of Lovett’s whole approach to helping polio patients was exercise. But as FDR knew by now, working out with damaged muscles led quickly to exhaustion. Even a determined patient couldn’t keep it up for long. So improvement over time was agonizingly slow. But water helps to support one’s weight, making it easier to exercise for long periods.

The logic struck FDR immediately, and he decided to try it out.

Chapter 7“I AM INTERESTED IN TOO MANY THINGS”

Deep in FDR’s memory, well-being was linked to water.

In 1890, when Franklin was eight years old, his father had suffered a heart attack at the age of sixty-three. To recover his health, James Roosevelt crossed the Atlantic with his wife and son to visit a town in Germany called Bad Nauheim. Here, people with heart trouble and other ailments soaked in warm pools fed by mineral-rich springs that foamed out of the earth. Many people of the late 1800s, including a number of doctors, believed the bubbling waters brought benefits to people with heart trouble. Maybe they did, or maybe they didn’t—even then many other doctors doubted it—but it was certainly soothing to soak in the warm, salty pools. The treatment went on day after day, often for several weeks. The Roosevelts returned to Bad Nauheim for several summers, and they believed the mineral waters did James a great deal of good, since he lived for ten more years.

So when Dr. Lovett recommended exercising in water, FDR’s enthusiasm may have drawn upon those pleasant memories of his father’s experience with the “water cure” in Germany.

When the spring weather of 1922 turned warm enough, FDR asked the men who worked on the Roosevelt estate to lower him into a narrow pond where a dam blocked the creek that ran through the woods. He had splashed and swum there as a boy. Now, as long as he could stand the cold, he could enjoy the benefits of exercising in water not far from his back door.

And he had another idea. A friend of his, Vincent Astor, one of the richest men in America, owned an estate in Rhinebeck, New York, just fifteen miles up the Hudson from Hyde Park. One of its remarkable features was an indoor swimming pool, perhaps the first of its kind in a private residence in the United States. When FDR told Astor about Dr. Lovett’s suggestion, Astor invited him to drive up and use the pool, which Roosevelt found to be even better for his exercises than the pond, since the water was warmer. “The legs work wonderfully in the water,” he told Dr. Draper, “and I need nothing to keep myself afloat.”

“All is going well,” he wrote a friend in July, “and I am getting more muscular control every day.”

“Swimming is our great sport,” he wrote to one of Eleanor’s aunts, “either in Vincent Astor’s tank or our own pond!”

One day at the pond, a man who worked for the Roosevelts, Louis DePew, heard FDR call out: “Well, the water got me where I am, and the water has to bring me back!”

Now, what did he mean by that?

Was he thinking of Bear Mountain, where the poliovirus may have tainted the lakes at the Boy Scout camp?

That’s possible. There’s no record of FDR saying he believed he’d picked up the virus from the water at Bear Mountain. Then again, as a leader of the Boy Scouts, he might have kept any such suspicion to himself.

Or was he blaming his accidental dunking in the Bay of Fundy, where the water had felt “so cold it seemed paralyzing”? That’s unlikely, since he knew that polio was caused by an infectious virus, not by immersion in cold water.

Either way, that stray remark reveals that when FDR’s mind wandered to the origins of his paralysis, he thought of water. Then, it seems, he drew an imaginary line between the water that had carried the virus and the water here in his own pond. And for just that moment, he conceived a little game of magical make-believe: In the summer of 1921, water had left him paralyzed. Now, a year later, he imagined that he might be immersed in water and come back out on the strength of his own legs.

As the fall of 1922 gave way to winter, the Roosevelts were back in New York City, where there was no place for FDR to continue his water exercises. Soon he went to Eleanor with a new idea.

He was thinking, he told her, of renting a houseboat for a long cruise through the Florida Keys, the string of low, semitropical islands that stretch for 120 miles into the Caribbean Sea. He could invite a few friends along and try some fishing, and he could get into the warm waters of the Caribbean for more exercise. What did she think? Would she come along?

She hesitated. She had the children to manage. She didn’t like vacations in the wintertime. And she wasn’t sure they should spend the money. (For six weeks of cruising, the cost of a boat and crew would be about $1,500—no small expense even for the well-off Roosevelts.)

“Well,” he said, “I think I might as well do as much as possible in order to improve as much as I can, because I shouldn’t be any greater burden than is necessary.”

Eleanor later said this was the only time she ever heard him speak so bluntly about the trouble his