Once, when my father was in West Virginia on police business, a man approached him and demanded to know about “rumors” that President Franklin Roosevelt was “crippled.” The man threatened to beat up my father or anyone who said F.D.R. (I have a picture of my father, in a fedora, guarding Roosevelt at a Senators baseball game, with the president standing up with the help of his braces to throw out the first pitch.) Like others around Roosevelt, my dad kept a tight lip about the paralysis of the president, who did not want to seem weak. With the help of a complicit press corps, a censoring Secret Service and a variety of ruses, F.D.R. was even able to campaign giving the impression that he was mobile.

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Persons: Franklin Roosevelt, Roosevelt, West Virginia ruffian Organizations: D.C, Senators, West Virginia Locations: West Virginia