Memories of The Great and The Good by Alistair Cooke

first registering the name—the president of the United States! The second, that he was a cripple. The president of the United States was a paraplegic!! It is something everybody in the world knows now though our not knowing it is disbelieved by succeeding generations who have seen the Roosevelt family’s home movies and documentaries based on, no less, the whole history of his affliction. Yet if, at almost any time during the twelve years of Roosevelt’s presidency, you had put the bare question (“Did you know that the president is a cripple?”) I’m pretty sure that most of the population would have said something like, “I heard he had poliomyelitis at one time.” But since the first fatal attack in 1921, he was never filmed for movie theater newsreels (there was, of course, no television throughout his lifetime) or ever photographed by news reporters in his wheelchair. This taboo was observed for twenty-five years—even by the press chains, like Hearst’s, that hated him—throughout his governorship of New York State and throughout the four terms of his presidency. It is, I should think, a unique example of voluntary restraint. The result of it was to confirm triumphantly the psychologist’s old discovery that the thing
seen
very soon obliterates the thing heard or read. That explained why the vast majority of the American population never thought of Roosevelt as a cripple. What, for a quarter century, was impressed on everyone’s senses was the powerful upper body, the bull neck, the strong hands clasping the lectern, the handsome head tossing the spoken emphases, the happy squire waving to everybody from an open car, the perpetual optimist and Savior of America in the darkest days. So, though most people could accept the reminder, if ever it came up, that the president was paralyzed, it was a truth buried deep at the back of the mind.
    As for the taboo that kept it there, a taboo that was faithfully observed by the national press for over twelve years, it is inconceivable that today it would be maintained for a week or a day. Some British tabloid would be sure to offer a fortune to the first to break it.
    The sharpness of this memory obviously prejudiced me in his favor when, in the spring of 1937,1 came as a news correspondent to Washington fresh from England, to report on the man who by then was a beacon to the peoples of the European countries that had not lost their liberties to Hitler on the rampage or foaming Mussolini or the man of steel (Stalin) in the Kremlin. In England, which I knew best, the old still lived with the memories of the enormous slaughter on the Western Front, and the young found little inspiration in a Tory government on the defensive moving backward, one step at a time, before Hitler’s oncoming shadow. To many of the idealistic young, though, there was a rousing alternative to stomping Fascism and defensive Toryism. The public face of Communism in the Soviet Union had been so brightly painted by an older generation of early believers—Shaw and Lady Astor and the Webbs among them—and the private terror by which the system worked was so well disguised or disbelieved that “to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability” seems a positively Christian doctrine.
    But for the undifferentiated mass of still-free, self-governing Europeans, there was yet another exhilarating choice, and, across the Atlantic, Franklin Roosevelt was the heroic cast of it. To a Europe bereft of notable leaders who were not tyrants, here was a man who, defying the current totalitarian models and denouncing them, was reinvigorating the largest democracy by democratic means and with the enthusiastic consent of the mass of his people. What Europeans didn’t know, or didn’t care, was that Roosevelt had been able to exert a power usually prohibited by law to leaders in a democracy. He had demanded in his first inaugural speech