FDR - Jean Edward Smith [127]
In the autumn, Franklin returned to the city. “I am just back in New York after a very successful summer at Hyde Park,” he wrote defeated presidential candidate James Cox, now titular head of the Democratic party. “The combination of warm weather, fresh air and swimming has done me a world of good.” To his friend and sometime hunting companion Richard E. Byrd he wrote, “By next autumn I will be ready to chase the nimble moose with you.” To General Leonard Wood he boasted that his leg muscles “were all coming back.”56
ON OCTOBER 9, after an absence of fifteen months, FDR returned to the offices of Fidelity & Deposit on Lower Broadway. Franklin was determined to walk from the car across the sidewalk, in the front door, and through the lobby to the bank of elevators at the far end. As he heaved himself across the sidewalk, his chauffeur at his side, a crowd of passersby gathered to watch. Someone opened the door. Others stood aside to let him through. Drenched in sweat, Roosevelt began to crutch himself across the highly polished floor of the marble lobby. Suddenly his left foot gave way and he began to fall. The chauffeur reached out but was unable to hold him. Franklin crashed flat on the marble, his crutches clattering down beside him. Onlookers rushed in, then drew back, uncertain what to do.
With an enormous effort Roosevelt wrestled himself into a sitting position. He laughed reassuringly. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he told anxious spectators. “We’ll get out of this all right. Give me a hand there.” Two muscular young men stepped forward and with the help of the chauffeur lifted Franklin to his feet. His crutches were restored and his hat was replaced on his head. “Let’s go,” he said. The spectators opened a path and watched breathlessly as FDR hauled himself across the marble floor, smiling and nodding, one laborious step after another, his knuckles white on the handles of his crutches.57
Describing the day to his friend Livingston Davis, Franklin said only that he’d had a “Grand reception at 120 Broadway where I lunched and spent 4–5 hours.”58 In the future, FDR allowed himself to be whisked in by wheelchair. He initially came two days a week, then three, then four. But Roosevelt did not return to his law firm. “The partners are dear, delightful people,” he wrote Van Lear Black, “but their type of law business is mostly estates, wills, etc., all of which bore me to death.” Instead, Franklin decided to organize a new firm “with my name at the head instead of at the tail as it is now.”* This, he told Black, would benefit F & D, “as our connections would be the type of corporations which would help in the bonding end of the game.”59
One of the men who helped pull Franklin to his feet in the lobby at 120 Broadway was Basil O’Connor, a young red-haired attorney whose office was next door to Fidelity & Deposit. A live-wire graduate of Dartmouth (voted “most likely to succeed” by his classmates) and the Harvard Law School, O’Connor was exactly the type of energetic partner FDR was looking for. He had developed a successful one-man practice handling a variety of international clients in the oil and gas industry and thought nothing of working fifteen-hour days for weeks at a time.
The two men hit it off instantly. Franklin respected O’Connor’s aggressiveness and dedication; O’Connor admired the way Roosevelt handled his affliction—his grace under pressure—and saw the advantages that would flow from identifying himself with so illustrious a name. They agreed to form a partnership. The firm would be called “Roosevelt & O’Connor.”60 FDR would be the front man and provide “general legal advice” at a salary of $10,000 a year. O’Connor would do the work.
As with Louis Howe, it was a case of opposites attracting each other. O’Connor’s father had been an impoverished tinsmith in Taunton, Massachusetts, and Basil