Common knowledge.

Charlie Peters is almost always right and informative, but I think he's dead wrong on this one ("Tilting at Windmills," September). I followed government as closely as any other 20-year-old (in the Army in Germany at the time) but I was stunned by the pictures of FDR addressing Congress from a wheelchair on his return from Yalta, and so was everyone I knew, and despite the mandate of de mortuis nil nisi bonum, I must say I never looked to Betty Beale as an authority on what her countrymen thought--particularly of FDR.

FRANK MANKIEWICZ 

Via email

Charles Peters responds:

I've received a number of letters like that of Frank Mankiewicz, but many more that agree with me that most people knew that Roosevelt could not walk unaided. It's hard to believe that anyone could have failed to notice throughout his long presidency that FDR was never photographed walking--or even standing--unaided, usually on the arm of an aide, or holding onto a podium or railing. And tens of thousands of photographs were taken.

While the photographers did not take pictures of FDR in his wheelchair, the print press did refer to it. On January 6, 1941, Time reported to its million readers, "The president came in five minutes before the broadcast on a small rubber-tired wheelchair." A previous issue of Time--August 6, 1940--had described how a special ramp was carried on the presidential train and attached to the president's car so that he could board. The article had also mentioned that the citizens of Hyde Park had watched him use the ramp. So had the people of Warm Springs, Georgia and, indeed, of the hundreds of places Roosevelt visited during his presidency. Thousands of people also witnessed his laborious and painful attempts to walk, including 20,000 at the Democratic National Convention of 1924. Roosevelt drove a Ford that newspapers told us was specially equipped with hand controls.

Furthermore, in the 1930s, polio was known as "infantile paralysis." This was before the breakthroughs of Salk and Sabin, so most people knew one or more victims of the disease, and there was no mystery. Paralysis meant paralysis. FDR's birthday was an occasion for holding dances throughout the country which were sponsored by the polio charily the March of Dimes, which he chaired, and which used slogans such as "Dance so they can walk."

In 1937, my father took me to the White House to a reception for presidential electors, of whom he was one. As we approached the head of the receiving line, we saw Mrs. Roosevelt and Jim Farley, but not the president. When we asked about him, we were told by the people ahead of us in line that he'd been there but had been taken away in his wheelchair. This was not a small, exclusive party. It was attended by five hundred other presidential electors plus their spouses and children.

John Meacham, in Franklin and Winston, quotes an article that Churchill wrote in 1934 and later included in his book Great Contemporaries: "His lower limbs refused their offices. Crutches or assistance were needed for the smallest movement from place to place. In ninety-nine men out of a hundred, such an affliction would have terminated all forms of public activity except those of the mind. He refused to accept this sentence."