New View of FDR Includes Disability

Sixty years after his death, Franklin Delano Roosevelt remains largely an iconic figure, regarded by most scholars as the greatest president of the 20th century. The architect of the New Deal and Social Security as well as the U.S. involvement in World War II, FDR seems impressed on the public mind as the confident politician in a flowing cape, wearing a toothy grin that’s gripping a cigarette holder at a jaunty angle.

But now FDR is being reimagined for television audiences in the very way he went to extraordinary lengths to hide -- as a polio survivor whose paralysis formed the core of his adult experience. The result is a much more visceral impression of Roosevelt’s day-to-day life after he contracted the disease at 39, showing how, through an unprecedented four terms and four election campaigns, he had to be carried up and down stairs and required locked leg braces and bolted-down lecterns so that he could appear to be standing when he gave speeches.

In the HBO drama “Warm Springs,” which airs next Saturday and depicts the little-discussed years he spent recovering at a rundown rural spa in Georgia, TV viewers will see a Roosevelt who needed help with intimate routines such as getting dressed or going to the bathroom.

Along with a new History Channel documentary, “FDR: A Presidency Revealed,” which re-airs Sunday night on the basic cable channel, the HBO movie completes an image shift that brings Roosevelt squarely into the post-Lewinsky media age, in which presidents’ private struggles and foibles are automatically offered up for public consumption. These shows, continuing the work of recent advocacy campaigns and biographies, paint vivid portraits of a gregarious but lonely paraplegic whose character and political successes emanated from, as much as they signaled a triumph over, his disability.

“I wanted to out him as a disabled man,” said Margaret Nagle, the screenwriter of “Warm Springs,” who grew up with a disabled brother. “Historians say his personality is worth endless examination.... My argument is if we understand his disability, we would understand a lot more about him.” Her film is an attempt to show, she said, how a man like Roosevelt made sense of his life after being dealt a tragic blow. “It’s about how a great man is made,” she said.

At Warm Springs, FDR encountered in relative anonymity people in similar circumstances who spoke to him in a more direct way than he was used to, Nagle said. When he was given a car with hand controls, he drove into the country to talk about employment issues with farmers or people living in poverty. Behind the wheel of a car, he could appear virile and active without having to stand up.

“Some might regard it as a politician’s trick or an affectation, but it happened for so long, and he saw so many people that it added up to more than pockets of anecdotal information,” said Kenneth Branagh, the British actor who plays FDR in “Warm Springs.”

“It seemed to do this strange, paradoxical thing -- of producing eventually an image of a man who came from the most patrician and most privileged background, and least likely to connect with the most common man and woman in America into the president who seemed to most embody that.”

Historians take a different view of the role paralysis played in FDR’s development as a leader.

“He certainly had ambition before he was stricken,” said Stanford history professor David M. Kennedy, author of “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945,” who was shown a preview of “Warm Springs.”

In placing so much weight on FDR’s disability, the drama is a product of “our moment in history,” said Kennedy, who serves on the board of Environmental Traveling Companions, a pioneer in providing wilderness programs for people with disabilities. “We’re more attentive to those among us who have disabilities. It’s a way to sensitize the larger community to the plight of the disabled.”

Although FDR’s disability could certainly have made him appreciate less privileged folk, Kennedy said, he was already well-known as a progressive Democrat and the Democratic Party had begun to position itself as the party of the people. And as the film makes clear, any initial humility that Roosevelt’s illness instilled in him was quickly overshadowed by the drive to dominate the stage that was by then a well-established character trait. At Warm Springs, Kennedy pointed out, “he naturally takes on the dominant leadership role. He runs the show. He becomes Mr. Warm Springs.”

In more practical terms, FDR’s illness took him out of the 1920s presidential races and positioned him to make his first bid in 1932, after the Depression had hit. “If he were not dealing with his illness, he would have been the one presiding over the Depression. He would have had the reputation Herbert Hoover had,” Kennedy said.

In these newly revised narratives of Roosevelt’s life, the fascination of his disability also lies in the amount of sheer deception once possible for the most public of public figures. Roosevelt knew that if he ran as a person who used a wheelchair, he would never be elected, said Thomas Fleming, author of “The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II” (2001). “The idea of the president is so profoundly emotional. It’s like a member of their family, the image of their father. They are not going to vote for someone who is inadequate,” he said.

In the era before television, most people developed their impressions of Roosevelt from the upbeat edited newsreels in movie theaters, his famous fireside chats over the radio and magazines. But in order not to alarm people, including members of the media, Roosevelt spent months developing a “walk” for his public appearances. He “walked” from his shoulders, balancing between his cane and the arm of a companion, often his son James. FDR’s grip was so hard, James’ arm was often bruised. To distract any viewers, he and James would pretend to laugh uproariously as they walked.

Beneath the bonhomie, the films suggest that FDR, who famously told Americans they had nothing to fear but fear itself, was himself afraid that his companion would stumble while he was holding him up as they walked, afraid of pitying looks, of being trapped by fire, of not having enough strength to do the job.

“All politicians are actors to some extent,” Fleming said. In the process of his elaborate production, Roosevelt also became a skilled manipulator of the media.

David Taylor, producer-director of “FDR: A Presidency Revealed,” said he encountered 53 scholarly books about Roosevelt’s policies but little about his physical disability. Of 35,000 photos of Roosevelt, only two show him in a wheelchair, and they were not published while he was alive.

When Taylor researched archival newsreel footage looking for rushes that might show Roosevelt in a wheelchair, he found none. “I saw no evidence of a cut or a splice. I would see the cameraman filming Roosevelt on top of steps, coming off a ship, then the camera switches off. The next thing you see, he’s in a car. It wasn’t just a decision on what you choose to broadcast, but what you choose to put in the camera. It was an understanding -- you don’t film the president’s disability.”

Branagh said, “He was clear with the American people that he had polio. What he was not clear with them about was the extent to which it affected him. The truth is, when ‘standing’ for long periods of time or doing the ‘walking,’ he was in a great deal of pain.”

Taylor said he was amazed to find White House Secret Service men in the FDR era who had no idea the four-term president was a paraplegic.

A revisionist view of FDR began to emerge in the 1980s. In 1985, the late historian Hugh Gregory Gallagher, a former polio patient at Warm Springs, published his book, “FDR’s Splendid Deception: The Moving Story of Roosevelt’s Massive Disability -- and the Intense Efforts to Conceal It From the Public,” which provided a new level of detail about Roosevelt’s struggles with polio and his cover-ups. The book reveals among other things that Roosevelt regarded himself as one of the greatest actors of his time.

Then in the late 1990s, when the FDR monument was under construction in Washington, D.C., disability advocates protested a statue of Roosevelt seated with his cape covering his legs.

The complete Roosevelt story is important, not only to inspire the disabled but also to help the general public think about what a disability means, said Brewster Thackery, a public relations advisor to the advocacy group National Organization on Disability. “It doesn’t limit a person’s ability in other areas, and sometimes it does lead to resourcefulness and other strengths that might not otherwise be there,” he said.

Eventually, the advocates raised funds for a second statue of FDR seated in a wheeled kitchen chair that he designed himself.

Although certain elements of his times made it possible for FDR to hide his disability from the public, it is now both more difficult and easier still, Thackery said. “Technology allows people to do things they could not possibly have done in the ‘40s, but it’s much more difficult to hide things from the media, or to get the media to cooperate in minimizing.”

The public has elected several men with disabilities to national office, including Sen. Bob Dole, who has just published a book about his own recovery from the war injury that left him without the use of his right arm, “One Soldier’s Story: A Memoir.”

In his final years, weakened and dying, FDR let the mask slip. He freely wheeled himself into a hospital ward to talk to wounded soldiers. And in 1944, on his return from Yalta, he asked the Senate’s indulgence for not standing to deliver a speech, explaining he had “10 pounds of steel” around his legs.

Because it was the first time he had ever made a speech not standing, Fleming said, the event was big news.

Speculation on how FDR would regard his revised image ranges widely.

“He would have been uncomfortable with the emphasis on [his disability],” Kennedy said. “He had the characteristics of an overcomer -- a person who doesn’t want to acknowledge his disability any more than he has to. They do extravagant things, like the paraplegics who climb El Capitan, to show it doesn’t matter.”

Branagh said FDR would not have considered his efforts a deception and would have rejected the notion of spin.

All things considered, Fleming surmises FDR would not mind that his disability had become part of his historical image.

“As FDR would say, ‘I’m not running again,’ ” he said.