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

His arms and hands bobbed upward as if propelled by hands below the surface. He had the sudden sense of shedding twenty or thirty pounds.

A chemist might have told him the minerals made the water denser than ordinary water, so anything floating in the pool at Warm Springs would rise higher and faster than it would in ordinary water. But whatever the chemistry, the sensations were akin to magic.

Squeezing the handles of his canes, FDR eased away from Roy. Then he was standing alone on his own two feet. He began to move around. After three years of struggling to accomplish his exercise routine, this seemed so amazingly easy.

He shouted, “I don’t think I will ever get out!”

Day after day through the rest of October 1924, he became more convinced that, as he wrote to a disabled friend back in New York, “it is a really remarkable cure. The swimming pool is splendid and I walk around in water 4 [feet] deep without braces or crutches almost as well as if I had nothing the matter with my legs.”

Riding in Tom Loyless’s car, exercising in the pool, sitting on the porch of the Meriwether Inn, he began to imagine what the water at Warm Springs might mean to other people struggling in the aftermath of polio.

Eleanor said that since the diagnosis at Campobello, she had never heard her husband mention golf, the sport he loved most. But now, at Warm Springs, he allowed himself to dream about it. Before long, he wrote an old friend, “I hope … I shall try my hand at golf again.”

To his mother he wrote: “When I get back I am going to have a long talk with Mr. George Foster Peabody … I feel that a great ‘cure’ for infantile paralysis and kindred diseases could well be established here.”

He revised his calendar for the coming months—late 1924 and early 1925. After Christmas and New Year’s at home, he would return to Florida for two months of cruising the Keys aboard the Larooco and exercising in the warm Caribbean. Then, when spring reached central Georgia, he would come back to the water at Warm Springs.

Missy LeHand was proving to be not just an excellent secretary but an all-around assistant. She had learned to read her boss superbly, knew his moods, spotted what he needed before he knew it himself. Shrewd and practical, she had learned which people he wanted to cultivate and which he wanted to avoid. She learned his writing style so well that she could draft many of his letters for him. She worked hard and was utterly dependable and efficient, but she knew how to relax and have fun, too—a skill that Eleanor, for all her remarkable qualities, never learned.

Gradually the professional relationship between boss and secretary turned into an affectionate friendship, then a mutual dependence that would lead many to say that Missy was FDR’s “office wife.” Was it more than affection? No one ever knew. When Eleanor had learned of her husband’s romantic affair during World War I, she had insisted that Franklin break if off. She realized now that FDR, in his long absences from home, enjoyed his “times with Missy.” But she treated Missy like a member of the family, even as a daughter, and never suggested that Missy and her husband were inappropriately close.

Quite possibly she realized that Missy, by tending to the details of Franklin’s busy life, freed Eleanor to pursue her own increasingly crowded schedule. She was becoming a power in New York politics in her own right, a leading voice for the role of women in the Democratic Party. She cared for her husband’s welfare, but she had no desire to trail along in his wake and serve his every need from New York to Florida to Georgia and back again.

What mattered most about Missy LeHand were her sharp intelligence and her cool good judgment. She had come up by her own wits, leaving a working-class Catholic family in Boston to make her own living in Washington and New York. She was one more person, like Louis Howe and Basil O’Connor, who helped FDR see the world through the eyes of people who hadn’t grown up on a landed estate and gone to Harvard.

As a veteran of the news business, Tom Loyless, the manager of Warm Springs, knew what a single well-placed story could mean to the fortunes of a struggling business. So he got in touch with editors at Georgia’s biggest newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

He said, Why not send someone to write up a story about Franklin Roosevelt’s quest to recover from infantile paralysis in a forgotten little resort in west Georgia? It would be a good story for a Georgia paper, especially with FDR back in the public eye after his performance at Madison Square Garden.

So the newspaper sent a young writer named Cleburne Gregory, who spent most of one day chatting and rambling around with FDR. Roosevelt could hardly stop talking about the wonders of the place. Gregory went back to Atlanta captivated by the man’s enthusiasm and charm.

He wrote:

“Mr. Roosevelt does not know how he contracted the dread disease … All he does know is that he was hit, and hit hard, with the result that both of his legs were immovable for many months. Gradually he acquired the skill necessary to drag himself around on crutches …

“The distinguished visitor has the large swimming pool all to himself for two hours or more each day. He swims, dives, uses the swinging rings and horizontal bar over the water, and finally crawls out on the concrete pier for a sun bath that lasts another hour. Then he dresses, has lunch, rests a bit on a delightfully shady porch, and spends the afternoon driving over the surrounding country, in which he is intensely interested …

“‘I am deriving wonderful benefit from my stay here,’ Mr. Roosevelt said.