Transcript: Chapter 07

Title Card: Part Two: Fear Itself

Narrator: August 14, 1921 -- "We have had a very few anxious days," Eleanor wrote from Campobello. "Wednesday evening, Franklin was taken ill. By Friday evening, he lost the ability to walk or move his legs. The doctor feels sure he will get well, but it may take some time."

"I tried to persuade myself that the trouble with my leg was muscular," Franklin remembered, "that it would disappear as I used it, but presently it refused to work, and then the other."

Hugh Gallagher, Biographer: It started with a cold, the feeling of malaise, ache in the back and lack of appetite and he said he thought he wouldn't have dinner and he went up to his room, and he never walked again; and ultimately, at the high point, he was helpless.

Geoffrey Ward: For a man as energetic, who'd led such a charmed life, to suddenly be paralyzed must have been almost unbearable. He asked Louis Howe why God had deserted him, at one point. He tried to put on a brave front with the children, but he was terrified. They didn't know what it was. They didn't know what they could do about it. Certainly, it was the blackest moment of his life and seemed to be the end of his life.

Narrator: His fever soared. Eleanor remembered he was out of his head.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: Eleanor responds immediately with help, with support, with courage in facing the severity of what he's going through. She stays up 24 hours, she's by his side. She doesn't run away from it.

Narrator: Desperate, Eleanor called in an orthopedic specialist from Harvard Medical School. The diagnosis, he told them, was perfectly clear: infantile paralysis, polio.

Geoffrey Ward: He couldn't believe this had happened to him, but even in those circumstances, he kept to the Roosevelt code, which was that you did not complain and that you tried to convince everyone that everything was going to be fine. He was very careful to be cheerful in front of his mother, and she was very careful to be cheerful in front of him, and only after she left him did she cry.

Narrator: A private railroad car brought Franklin home to New York City. With every curve and jounce, he winced in pain. He was 39 years old. No one knew what sort of life might now be possible for him, but one thing seemed certain: his political career was finished.

Hugh Gallagher: He was an aristocrat. He was well born. He was good-looking. He had always had everything. All of a sudden, there he was, crippled in a day when it was a very difficult thing to be crippled. In the 1920s, why, polio was a terrifying thing. Something like 25 percent of people who caught polio died of it within the first two weeks. If you survived and you had paralysis, they didn't know what to do, and "nice" families kept their disabled members at home in the back bedroom with the blinds drawn. There was a certain shame attached to it somehow.

Geoffrey Ward: His mother decided that the best thing to do was for him to come home to Hyde Park and to live the life, really, that his father had lived as an invalid. She would take care of him and he could pursue his hobbies and small interests, but he would have to give up politics.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: It's one of those moments that is absolutely a defining moment for Eleanor, because she knows that if Sarah has her way, Franklin's soul will be destroyed. So she has to do something she's never done before. She has to confront Sarah directly to tell her, "You're wrong and I'm not going to let this happen. He's going to be able to get out of this house, he's going to walk again, he's going to get into politics, and I don't care what you say." She may not have said it that boldly, but she definitely was willing to make a major confrontation with her mother-in-law that all of her earlier life she had been unable to make. She became the voice for his inner needs, his inner feelings, and in some ways, that's what she becomes all of their lives.

Edna Gurewitsch: She had a discipline and a willpower that was staggering. She said to me once, "The only time in my life that I cried in his presence when he had polio was when he us called up into the room and he showed us -- 'Look,' he said, 'what I can do.' He was phobic about being caught in a fire, helpless in a fire. He got himself down from the bed and he showed them with great pride how he slithered on the floor, using his elbows to get to the door. And with that, Mrs. Roosevelt broke down in tears and fled. And she said that was the only time she didn't control herself in front of him.

Narrator: Franklin's life was now in limbo. He would devote the next seven years to one single goal: to get back on his feet. The doctors told him that his only hope was exercise. With heavy steel braces grappled to his legs, he began the awkward struggle to learn to walk. "I must get down the driveway today, all the way down the driveway," his daughter Anna heard him say.

Geoffrey Ward: Polio exercises were very painful, very tedious, humiliating. They took up endless time. And I think it's a measure of his ambition and his grit that he kept at them as long and as hard as he did.

Narrator: After a year of unrelenting struggle, the doctors told Franklin it was all but certain that he would never walk again, but he would not accept their verdict.

Geoffrey Ward: The rules that applied to other people did not apply to Franklin Roosevelt, and he refused to believe that he was not going to get better. He tried everything -- sunlamp treatments; special electric belts that were supposed to make him somehow stronger; pulley arrangements to do his exercises automatically.

Hugh Gallagher: Deep massage, light massage, range-of-motion exercises -- and sometimes they hung him on a harness from the ceiling.

Geoffrey Ward: And even in the last weeks of his life, he was trying a new method to see if he couldn't get back on his feet. It's either madness or enormously admirable.

Hugh Gallagher: He never spoke to anyone about the feelings he had with his paralysis. His mother said that he had never spoken to her about it. Eleanor said he simply didn't accept his paralysis and he didn't talk about it and he wouldn't admit it.

Geoffrey Ward: I supposed psychologists might call it denial. It certainly served him well and allowed him to become president of the United States instead of a stamp-collecting invalid.

Hugh Gallagher: Of course, it's denial. It worked, and denial's a very useful thing in its place. I mean, it's a way of coming to terms with a difficult fact.

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