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

When he awoke the next morning, his legs hurt. He swung them out of bed, placed his feet on the floor, and stood up.

There was something wrong with his knee, the right one. He must have twisted it the day before without noticing, maybe while fighting the forest fire. Or maybe he had slept on it wrong.

From the bedroom, he crossed the hallway to the bathroom. He stood at the sink to shave. That knee—it felt as if it couldn’t hold his weight. He went back to bed.

Eleanor sent Anna upstairs with breakfast on a tray. FDR could see his daughter was worried. He reassured her and they joked for a couple minutes.

But when Anna was back downstairs and Eleanor looked in, he told her he was feeling dreadful. He couldn’t understand it, but his legs were killing him.

Elliott was standing nearby. Many years later, he remembered that his father used the words “stabbing pains.” Others who have gone through the same experience say it felt like someone was hammering nails into their legs.

Eleanor sent a message from the island over to the mainland village of Lubec. She wanted the family’s summertime doctor to see Franklin. His name was Eben Homer Bennet.

Dr. Bennet got to the island that afternoon. He asked questions and took FDR’s temperature. It was 102 degrees, quite high but not dangerous. He concluded the problem was a severe summer cold. He couldn’t explain why Roosevelt’s legs were bothering him.

In the afternoon, FDR went to stand up, then abruptly sat back down. Now his right knee definitely could not support his weight. By evening, the other knee was feeling weak.

By the next morning, August 12, the needles of pain had spread to his back. He couldn’t clench the muscles of his buttocks or his gut. It wasn’t that his muscles were numb. If he rubbed his legs with his hands, he could feel his hands. But the muscles wouldn’t obey his commands to move.

His arms felt weak. That evening he reached for a pencil. His fingers couldn’t hold it.

The fever rose so high that he drifted in and out of delirium.

By now his legs felt like the floppy legs of a marionette. He couldn’t walk. He couldn’t stand up.

He stared at Howe.

“I don’t know what is the matter with me, Louis,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

By the next day, Eleanor and Howe realized the problem must be something much worse than a summer cold. They had to find another doctor, one with more experience than their friend Dr. Bennet.

There wasn’t a telephone on all of the island. So Howe had a boat take him over the channel to Lubec. There he made long-distance calls to resorts in southern Maine, where he hoped to find some prominent doctor on summer vacation. In the wealthy resort town of Bar Harbor, far down the coast, he located a famous surgeon named William Williams Keen.

Dr. Keen wasn’t the perfect choice. He’d been retired for nearly fifteen years. He was eighty-four years old. But he had treated other famous patients, including former president Grover Cleveland. He was still respected. And he wasn’t too far away.

So Howe asked: Would Dr. Keen make the trip up to Campobello to examine Franklin Roosevelt?

He said he would.

Keen was indeed a prominent doctor, but he was a surgeon. Surgeons cut people open to fix or remove damaged or diseased body parts—organs, bones, arteries, muscles. Since his earliest days as a doctor on the battlefields of the Civil War, Keen had been cutting, repairing, and stitching. He was not accustomed to diagnosing the causes of mysterious pain and paralysis.

He got to the island late in the day on Saturday, August 13.

A small man with a neat beard, the old surgeon leaned over his tall young patient, asking questions, tapping for reflexes, prodding muscles. He pondered. The next morning, he did the exam all over again.

At last he gave his diagnosis. Mr. Roosevelt had a blood clot in his lower spine, he said. It was pressing on nerves that controlled his leg muscles. That was causing the paralysis.

The clot, he said, probably had formed when FDR took that sudden plunge in icy water when he was fishing. Overexertion in the days since had made it worse.

The paralysis of his legs would pass as the clot slowly dissolved, the doctor said, though it might take quite a long time.

Massage his legs, Dr. Keen told Eleanor. It will hurt, but it might get rid of that blood clot.

Then he left the island.

Eleanor rubbed her husband’s legs. The pain became all but unbearable.

Hour after hour, Louis Howe watched his friend suffer.

Howe was a newspaperman who had dropped his old career to become a political jack-of-all-trades, helping politicians with speeches, correspondence, and organizing. He had spotted Roosevelt as a young up-and-comer in the New York state senate and had worked for him ever since. Their professional relationship had evolved into a close friendship—Howe like an older brother, more experienced and cynical; Roosevelt the younger brother, needing advice and a firm hand.

In his fifty years, Howe had spent a lot of time with doctors. Small and homely, as he was the first to admit, he had been sickly since childhood and prone to bad luck. As a boy he had taken a bad fall that left tiny specks of gravel permanently embedded in the skin of his face. As an adult he developed serious asthma and heart disease. Doctors warned him so often about his precarious health that he once told FDR, “Sooner or later I [will] ignore the danger signals too long and drop out like a snuffed candle.”

He kept ignoring the signals because he didn’t think doctors knew much, even famous ones like Dr. Keen.

As a reporter, Howe had learned to notice things that other people missed. Now he was noticing conditions in the house that Dr. Keen apparently had overlooked.

Several people in the Roosevelt household that week—including Howe’s wife, Grace, and