FDR - Jean Edward Smith [120]
For the first time in years, Sara was not in her house next door. At sixty-seven she had resumed her prewar practice of an annual trip to Europe and on the spur of the moment had flown from London to Paris in an early twin-engine airplane. “It was five hours,” she wrote Eleanor. “I had been told four hours, but I would not have missed it. If I do it again I shall take an open plane as one sees more and it is more like flying.”2
As soon as he arrived, FDR threw himself into a frantic round of island activity: deep-sea fishing in the Bay of Fundy, afternoon sails, swimming, tennis, baseball, whatever else the children expected. On August 10, while the family was sailing, they spotted a small forest fire on one of the lesser islands. Franklin worked the boat in as close as he could—“almost on the beach,” James recalled—and led Eleanor and the children ashore. They fought the blaze with pine boughs for several hours until it was extinguished. “Our eyes were bleary with smoke,” said Franklin. “We were begrimed, smarting with spark-burns, exhausted.”3
It was about four o’clock when they returned home. FDR admitted to feeling logy and decided the remedy would be a quick swim in the relatively warm waters of Lake Glen Severn, a shallow freshwater pond on the other side of the island. He and the children jogged two miles to the lake, splashed around in the tepid water, and topped it off with an icy dip in the Bay of Fundy. Franklin was disappointed that he did not get “the glow I’d expected.” They trotted back to the cottage, and by then FDR was totally exhausted. The mail had arrived, and he sat down in his wet bathing suit to read it, “too tired even to dress. I’d never quite felt that way before.”4
About an hour later Roosevelt felt a sudden chill. He told Eleanor he thought he was catching a cold and had better not risk infecting the children. He would go straight to bed. Eleanor sent up a tray of food, but he was not hungry. He had trouble sleeping that night and continued to tremble despite two heavy woolen blankets.
The next morning he was worse. When he swung his legs out of bed and attempted to stand, his left leg buckled beneath him. He managed to get up and shave and assumed the problem would pass. “I tried to persuade myself that the trouble with my leg was muscular, that it would disappear as I used it. But presently it refused to work, and then the other collapsed as well.”5 FDR dragged himself back to bed, and when Eleanor took his temperature it was 102.
There was no telephone in the house, so Eleanor dispatched a runner to fetch their family physician, Dr. E. H. Bennett, from Lubec. Dr. Bennett was an elderly country doctor, well suited to delivering babies and setting broken bones but not especially qualified for complex diagnoses. He examined Franklin and thought he was suffering from a bad cold; he said he would return in the morning to see how his patient was doing.
Roosevelt knew he did not have a cold. The next morning, Friday, August 12, he could not stand, and by evening he had lost the power to move his legs. They were numb, yet extremely sensitive. He ached all over and was paralyzed from the chest down. His thumb muscles had become so weak he could not write.6
On Saturday Eleanor and Dr. Bennett decided to seek a second opinion. Louis Howe canvassed the nearby resorts and discovered that the eminent Philadelphia surgeon Dr. William Keen was staying at Bar Harbor. Keen had once operated secretly on President Grover Cleveland and had successfully removed a cancer from the roof of the president’s mouth.7 He was a man of discretion, which Howe appreciated, but he was now eighty-four and his experience had been in surgery, not orthopedics. Dr. Keen examined Franklin thoroughly and decided his paralysis was due to a blood clot in the lower spinal cord. He prescribed heavy massages and predicted that Roosevelt would recover, “but it may take some months.”8
Dr. Keen was as far off target as Dr. Bennett,