Churchill and the Daily News.

There is new support for my long campaign to prove that knowledge of FDR's paralysis was widespread and not concealed from the public as some historians have suggested. First is a 1933 New York Daily News full-page photograph of FDR leaving his home on crutches, recently reprinted by The New York Times that was originally seen by the several million readers that the News had then. Now Monthly alumnus Jon Meacham's absorbing new book, Franklin and Winston, quotes an article Churchill wrote in 1934, and included in his book Great Contemporaries, published in 1937.

"His lower limbs refused their offices. Crutches or assistance were needed for the smallest movement from place to place. To 99 men out of 100, such an affliction would have terminated all forms of public activity except those of the mind. He refused to accept this sentence."

Churchill was writing for public consumption. Roosevelt was not his friend at the time. They had met only once. It was during World War I, and Churchill didn't remember the meeting. He had no special source of information that was not available to the public, yet even in then-faraway England he knew about the paralysis and wrote about it, not as news, but on the assumption that others knew as well.