num_pages: 384
description: With a searching new analysis of primary sources NBCC award winner James Tobin reveals how FDRs fight against polio transformed him from a callow aristocrat into the energetic determined statesman who would rally the nation in the Great Depression and lead it through World War II.Here from James Tobin winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography is the story of the greatest comeback in American political history a saga long buried in half-truth distortion and myth Franklin Roosevelts ten-year climb from paralysis to the White House.In 1921 at the age of thirty-nine Roosevelt was the brightest young star in the Democratic Party. One day he was racing his children around their summer home. Two days later he could not stand up. Hopes of a quick recovery faded fast. Hes through said allies and enemies alike. Even his family and close friends misjudged their man as they and the nation would learn in time.With a painstaking reexamination of original documents James Tobin uncovers the twisted chain of accidents that left FDR paralyzed; he reveals how polio recast Roosevelts fateful partnership with his wife Eleanor; and he shows that FDRs true victory was not over paralysis but over the ancient stigma attached to the crippled. Tobin also explodes the conventional wisdom of recent yearsthat FDR deceived the public about his condition. In fact Roosevelt and his chief aide Louis Howe understood that only by displaying himself as a man who had come back from a knockout punch could FDR erase the perception that had followed him from childhoodthat he was a pampered too smooth pretty boy without the strength to lead the nation. As Tobin persuasively argues FDR became president less in spite of polio than because of polio.The Man He Became affirms that true character emerges only in crisis and that in the shaping of this great American leader character was all.
language: English
title: The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency
publisher: Simon & Schuster