♪ ♪ DAVID McCULLOUGH: "All that is within me," Franklin Roosevelt once wrote, "cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River."

"Hyde Park was the center of the world."

♪ ♪ BROADCASTER: We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin from CBS World News.

(train whistle blares) A press association has just announced that President Roosevelt is dead.

The president died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

All we know so far is that the president died at Warm Springs in Georgia.

McCULLOUGH: On April 13, 1945, the funeral train headed north.

In the last car lay the body of the president of the United States.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had led Americans through the Great Depression and the greatest war in history.

Now, along railroad tracks from Georgia to New York, they gathered to say goodbye.

MAN: A whole generation of Americans had grown up knowing no other president.

He was a presence in their living rooms, he'd called them "my friends," he'd been at the helm through the two worst crises of this century.

And to have him suddenly gone was an overwhelming shock.

(train whistle blares) MAN: The boss man come to the field, and he throwed up his hands.

I was supplying a tractor.

He said, "Mr. Roosevelt died today."

I said, "What?"

He said, "Mr. Roosevelt died today."

I just sat there.

I just sat there.

I was stunned.

I felt like I had lost one of the closest brothers I ever had.

♪ ♪ MAN: It was the single greatest feeling of loss... disorientation... uncertainty.

And the sense that the whole world was now without the one man that it needed.

♪ ♪ MAN: This was a man of great ebullience.

He was a man of constant cheer.

He was a man of laughter.

He had the feeling of life.

There was vitality.

This was a country in despair, and he brought us all together.

(crowd cheering) ("Happy Days Are Here Again" playing) McCULLOUGH: He was the man with the big, easy smile... the infectious sense of humor.

REPORTER: Mr. President, how soon are you coming back?

Just as soon as Congress will let me.

(laughter) McCULLOUGH: He loved conversation, company, and good times.

Last year I nearly killed a photographer.

All ready?

(crowd cheering) McCULLOUGH: This was how Americans saw Franklin Roosevelt.

This was the man they trusted so much, they elected him president four times.

MAN: People just idolized him.

The most astounding thing was the pictures of Roosevelt you saw everywhere-- bus stations, libraries, barber shops, homes-- there were pictures of Roosevelt.

The entire country decided he was the savior.

We face the future with confidence and with courage.

We are Americans.

(cheering) McCULLOUGH: Never before Roosevelt had Americans felt that government would take care of them: protect their homes and their farms, guarantee their savings accounts, promise them security in sickness and old age.

♪ ♪ But the president who championed the common man was not like most Americans.

♪ ♪ (birds twittering) McCULLOUGH: "My dear Mama, I am in a great hurry.

"I found two birds' nests.

"I took one egg.

Your loving Franklin."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent his childhood among people so unlike ordinary Americans they modeled themselves after the lords and ladies of England.

♪ ♪ MAN: The world of wealth and privilege that F.D.R.

grew up with was one that was essentially very comfortable for everybody.

And the families that lived on those estates were generally friends with one another, related, very often, to each other and were the only people that visited one another.

I think it's fair to say that even the professional men in the towns who were the doctors and the lawyers and so on were not generally invited to the river houses to dinner.

McCULLOUGH: Franklin Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park, New York, on January 30, 1882, on the big, forested estate his parents called Springwood.

MAN: Springwood was a beautiful, isolated place.

It was its own world and it was entirely built around this privileged little boy.

And I think he spent most of his life trying to replicate the way his boyhood was arranged.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: "At the very outset, he was plump, pink and nice," his mother said.

"I used to love to bathe and dress him."

"He looked very sweet, "his little blond curls bobbing as he ran as fast as he could whenever he thought I had designs on combing them."

Nearly every detail of Franklin's childhood was recorded with single-minded devotion by his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt.

She kept his baby clothes, every childish drawing, each golden curl.

Franklin was eight-and-a-half years old before he was allowed to bathe himself.

♪ ♪ WARD: If it's the job of a mother to make her child feel that he or she can do anything, then Sara Delano Roosevelt was surely one of the great mothers in American history.

McCULLOUGH: Franklin's father was more than 25 years older than Sara.

He was 53 when Franklin was born.

Franklin called him Popsy.

Everyone else called him Mr. James.

Mr. James bred trotters and rode to the hounds.

He smoked cheroots.

He would ride out with his son to survey their estate.

The workers tipped their hats to Mr. James and then to Master Franklin.

The boy accepted these displays of deference as routine.

MAN: F.D.R.

grew up in a very tight little island.

He learned how to please adults from... probably before he remembered.

His activities were related to... showing off for them, relating to them, not to other children.

And he didn't go off to play games with other children.

I don't think he ever swung a baseball bat until he finally went to school.

He was tutored at home or abroad because every year they went abroad for several months.

F.D.R., with all this attention, was undoubtedly a lonely boy.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: Franklin wandered his family estate, secure, he later said, "in the peacefulness and regularity of things."

Then when he was nine, his well-ordered world fractured.

His 63-year-old father suffered a heart attack.

Any irritation might aggravate him provoke another heart attack, and kill him.

WOMAN: His father's sickness must have reinforced the tendency that was already in him as a small child to be a nice boy, to never make any trouble, never make anybody sad.

Now he had to worry, "If I go in there and make trouble, I may weaken his already weakened heart," so it must have put an enormous pressure on this kid.

McCULLOUGH: With an infirm father and a domineering mother, Franklin learned to conceal his true feelings.

Throughout his life, he would remain a charming but distant figure, even to those who were closest to him.

♪ ♪ (train clacking on tracks) When he was 14 years old, Franklin left the rarefied world of his Hyde Park estate.

His path seemed clear: boarding school, Harvard, and an uneventful life of luxury and ease among his own kind.

"Dear Mama, I am getting on very well with the fellows.

"I have not had any black marks or lateness yet and I am much better in my studies."

WARD: His letters are always cheerful, everything's wonderful, he's having a grand time with the other fellows, and yet he wasn't.

He was, I think, quite unhappy.

(chorus singing) McCULLOUGH: At Groton, a private school for sons of the rich, Franklin, with all his charm and self-assurance, expected to excel.

He did please his teachers and took to heart his headmaster's urgings toward public service, but he did not fit in with the boys.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: Groton was his first exposure to other children on a regular basis.

After all, he boarded.

All the children boarded.

So he was with other boys 24 hours a day, and it must have been a rude shock to come out of that nest, that very protected nest where he was the only bird or chick in the nest.

(chorus singing) McCULLOUGH: Sports meant everything at Groton, but Franklin was too slight for success.

His mother worried Franklin might be injured and wrote that he "not have the misfortune of hurting anyone."

He was enthusiastic about baseball, but only carried the bats and fetched the water for the ballplayers.

MAN: He wasn't an athlete.

He'd never played with other boys games much.

And that was very bad indeed, because it made him an outsider, as if he wasn't... no, as if he didn't belong.

And really in a strange way, he didn't belong.

McCULLOUGH: Plunged into an unforgiving world of adolescent boys, Franklin never fit in.

His struggle for acceptance only isolated him further.

POTTER: Franklin's tone was not the Groton tone.

He seemed so desperate for approval.

He was too ambitious and too eager, and he was very much, I would say, from what I've heard, very close to being a Golden Retriever.

In other words, his tail was always wagging, even when it shouldn't be.

McCULLOUGH: Jeffrey Potter's father was the star of the baseball team.

"I can't understand this thing about Frank," he said when Roosevelt became president.

"He never amounted to much at school."

"At Groton," Franklin confessed years later, "something had gone sadly wrong."

♪ ♪ At Harvard, he was determined to win popularity and recognition, and he did succeed.

He campaigned for class office and won and was elected editor-in-chief of the college newspaper.

But what he wanted even more was admission to Porcellian, Harvard's most exclusive club.

CHANLER: You immediately, if you were a member of the Porcellian Club, were recognized as a... as we say in the club, a brother by all the graduates who had ever been in the place that were still alive.

But it was essentially a network of friendships, not of power, but of friendships, but that could lead to power.

McCULLOUGH: The election was secret, held behind closed doors in the Porcellian clubhouse.

Each member was given one white and one black ball.

A single black ball deposited in the wooden ballot box was all it took to exclude a candidate.

His father had been a member.

So had other Roosevelts.

Franklin had every reason to believe that he would be chosen too.

Franklin was blackballed.

CHANLER: No doubt Franklin Roosevelt failed to be elected to the Porcellian Club for the simple reason that somebody who was in there at the time didn't like him.

You didn't have to have done anything particularly significant.

The fellow would just say, "I don't like the cut of your jib, so I don't want you in there," and out you went.

McCULLOUGH: Years later, when he was president and the New Deal at high tide, there were those Porcellian members who would call him a traitor to his class and ascribe his social policies to revenge.

WARD: Certainly none of Roosevelt's classmates at Harvard imagined that he would ever be president.

I think they were the first of many, many people who underestimated Roosevelt.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: While Franklin was at Harvard, his father, 72 years old and grown frail and weak from heart disease, died.

Sara wrote in her diary, "All is over.

He merely slept away."

Now her boy was all she had left.

She moved to Boston to be near him.

A family friend once wrote: "She would not let her son call his soul his own."

Franklin began using a secret code in his diary: he wrote, "E. is an angel."

Franklin had fallen in love with a distant cousin.

"E." Was Eleanor Roosevelt.

From the first, Eleanor Roosevelt saw that there was a serious man beneath the easygoing charm.

For the rest of their life together, even through the most difficult years of their marriage, she would be drawn to the serious side of his nature.

GOODWIN: Franklin and Eleanor come from the same social class.

There are certain mores, customs, rituals that link their childhoods.

Everything else is so totally different, they might have come from the other ends of the world.

♪ ♪ ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: I was a very ugly little girl.

My mother was very beautiful.

I think she always wondered why her daughter had to be so ugly.

I adored my mother, but rather like a distant and beautiful thing that I couldn't possibly get close to.

Oh, my father meant a tremendous amount.

I adored him all the days of my childhood.

He called me Little Nell after the Little Nell in Dickens's story, and I always liked that.

McCULLOUGH: Eleanor's childhood was a series of losses.

Her parents' marriage was troubled.

Elliott Roosevelt was an alcoholic.

Erratic and self-destructive, he left home when she was six.

Less than two years later, her mother died of diphtheria.

The year after, her younger brother died and the following year, her beloved, drunken father died.

Eleanor and her brother were left with dutiful, reserved relatives.

She grew afraid of other children, mice, the dark, practically everything.

GOODWIN: From the melancholy lives of both of her parents, Eleanor took away the feeling that love never lasts, that the world is a dark and forbidding place and that you never can count on anything.

McCULLOUGH: Then when she was 15, she was sent to an English boarding school called Allenswood, where she was encouraged to think for herself, be independent, overcome her fears.

WOMAN: Allenswood was definitely a turning point.

It was the first time that she was really allowed to shine, and her own specialness was recognized.

That is really where she got her sense of security and also her sense of her own power.

McCULLOUGH: The years she spent at Allenswood, Eleanor said, were the happiest of her life.

She was 18 when Franklin began to pursue her.

♪ ♪ WOMAN: He was a gay and outgoing and charming young man.

There was something very sympathetic about him and romantic and they had a very sweet and romantic relationship, according to their early letters.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: "We have had two happy days together," she wrote him, "and you know how grateful I am "for every moment which I have with you.

Your devoted Little Nell."

GOODWIN: Eleanor's relatives and friends thought of Franklin as a feather-duster, which meant somebody who just skimmed along the surface of life and never got very deep into anything at all.

So I'm not sure they thought he was a wonderful catch for her, because even then Eleanor had a certain vitality, a certain seriousness of purpose that made people feel that she was something special.

GUREWITSCH: Can you imagine how different she must have been from the average run of debutantes of the time?

She must have been very interesting besides being tall, with a beautiful figure, fine, light hair, and lovely skin and great warmth.

There was something else, too, and this is not to be underestimated.

It didn't hurt his courtship that her uncle was president of the United States.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: Theodore Roosevelt was a hugely popular president: tireless, voluble, inspiring.

T.R., someone said, was a steam engine in trousers.

(crowd cheering) As a boy, Franklin had watched with pride his distant cousin's spectacular rise to power: assistant secretary of the Navy, governor of New York, president of the United States.

"Theodore Roosevelt," Franklin would later say, "was the greatest man I ever knew."

Now Franklin was courting the president's favorite niece.

♪ ♪ The president was delighted that Franklin had proposed marriage to Eleanor.

Franklin's mother was not.

Franklin had, in fact, concealed from Sara the entire courtship.

GOODWIN: The fact that she didn't even know that he was in love with this girl-- she didn't know the most important thing that was happening in her son's life-- and she thought she knew every waking thought in this child from the time he was born.

McCULLOUGH: "Dearest Mama, "I know what pain I must have caused you "and you know I wouldn't do it "if I really could have helped it, but I know my mind and I am the happiest man just now in the world."

GOODWIN: And finally, she had to accept that this was going to happen and decided that she would control Eleanor and then somehow she wouldn't lose Franklin.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: I think F.D.R.

was very much attracted to my grandmother because they were two lonely people-- two people who were not totally satisfied with the standards and ideals of their upper-class group.

And I think the two of them looked at each other and knew that they could draw strength from each other.

McCULLOUGH: On March 17, 1905, St. Patrick's Day, Franklin and Eleanor were married.

♪ ♪ He was 23.

She was 20.

The president of the United States was there to give away the bride.

"Well, Franklin," T.R.

told the groom, "there's nothing like keeping the name in the family."

♪ ♪ The honeymoon was a three-month grand tour of Europe.

♪ ♪ GOODWIN: On the surface, everything seemed fine.

They're seeing Venice, they're seeing Rome, but at nights, Roosevelt, Eleanor reported, would be tormented by nightmares and he was sleepwalking and then he broke out in hives, all of which suggested that something wasn't right.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: They climbed the Alps, motored through the French countryside.

Few would have sensed that they were ill at ease.

WARD: He loved to have a good time.

All his life he loved to do that.

She wanted someone she could confide in.

She'd been alone, really, all her life and she wanted an intimate partner.

She did not get one in Franklin.

He didn't like sharing intimacies with anyone, even his wife.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: Back in America, Sara was waiting.

"I am so glad," Sara had written them, "that although you've had such a perfect time, you are now anxious to see home and mother again."

That winter, as a Christmas gift, Sara gave them a drawing with a note scrawled on the bottom: "to Franklin and Eleanor, from Mama.

Number and street not yet quite decided."

When Franklin and Eleanor arrive home from their honeymoon, Sara tells them, "I've got a present for you.

It's great-- a new home."

Not only that, but it's furnished by her, it's structured by her, it's decorated by her-- it's her.

McCULLOUGH: Sara built them a brownstone and then moved into its twin next door.

COOK: The house is five stories, and on each floor there are sliding doors where she can walk from her side of the house into their side.

And Eleanor Roosevelt writes, "There was never any privacy day or night."

Sara Delano Roosevelt was just part of the scene.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: In a way, my great-grandmother made her dependent.

She wanted both her son and her daughter-in-law to be dependent upon her.

His mother controlled F.D.R.

's purse strings until the day she died in 1941, when he was into his third term as president.

Uh, and... and... but, you know, the president of the United States didn't control his own income, his mother did.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ WOMAN: The first ten years of her married life were spent having children, six children in about ten years.

She loved the children, but she didn't really know how to, how to run that infant stage.

♪ ♪ GUREWITSCH: I think she was totally inept when it came to dealing with children.

She relied on her mother-in-law and on the various governesses and was so unsure of herself not only because she was an unsure person at the time but she had never experienced mother love.

GOODWIN: And because she felt insecure about not knowing how to mother her own children, she once again turned to Sara.

Sara knew, Sara had confidence.

Sara had an opinion about everything.

So it wasn't only that they brought in nurses and grannies to help the children.

Sara was the overseer of the house entirely and of the kids.

♪ ♪ COOK: His mother's ever-looming presence was never challenged.

F.D.R.

never wanted to move out of his mother's home and so they lived in Sara Delano Roosevelt's homes.

At Hyde Park, it's her home, so she sits at the head of the table.

Franklin sits at the other end of the table, and Eleanor sits somewhere in the middle with the children.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: I see her as an upper-class grand dame who knew her place.

She was just doing what came naturally.

She, in a way, knew who she was and my grandmother, in the early years of her marriage, didn't know who she was.

That took a long time for her to find out.

McCULLOUGH: In the early 1900s, the Roosevelts appeared to be an utterly conventional upper-class couple, with Franklin amiably dabbling in the law.

But at 25, he was bored and restless, looking for an outlet for his enormous energies.

To a fellow law clerk he confided a remarkable, secret ambition.

MAN: He said he intended to enter political life as soon as he could, with a view to becoming president.

He said that modestly enough, but very definitely and he laid out a definite plan.

McCULLOUGH: Franklin told Clark he would follow the path blazed by his hero, Theodore Roosevelt: state legislature, assistant secretary of the Navy, governor of New York, president of the United States.

Cousin Theodore had already proved that a gentleman might, as Franklin's mother said, "go into politics but not be a politician."

WARD: Theodore Roosevelt was almost an obsession with Franklin.

When he was told he had to wear glasses, he got pince-nez and put them on his nose because Theodore Roosevelt wore pince-nez.

He would say things like "bully" and "de-lighted" when he was talking to the press early in his political career.

He was fascinated by his energy, his enthusiasm, above all, I think, in his feeling that government could do enormous amounts of good.

Theodore Roosevelt was the great model for Franklin Roosevelt.

McCULLOUGH: In 1910, at the age of 28, Franklin jumped at the chance to follow in his cousin Theodore's footsteps.

He was invited to run for the state senate, mostly because his last name was Roosevelt.

He ran as a Democrat, although T.R.

was a Republican.

WARD: His father had been a Democrat, but I think the real reason was that Theodore Roosevelt had several sons, all of whom, everyone presumed, were going to have political careers in the Republican Party.

And there was simply not enough room for another Republican Roosevelt.

♪ ♪ ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: He was offered the impossible task of running for office in Dutchess County.

No Democrat had ever been elected in 32 years.

♪ ♪ He wasn't a very good speaker in those early days.

There would be horrible long pauses and I would wonder whether he was ever going on again.

And he made a very vigorous campaign... and it just happened that that year was a Democratic sweep and he got in.

♪ ♪ Otherwise, I don't think he would have started then at all.

McCULLOUGH: Franklin celebrated by handing out $14.00 worth of good cigars.

In Albany, in the rough-and- tumble world of state politics, he began his career in the style of his cousin Theodore.

Within days of being sworn in, he led a rebellion against the leadership of his own party.

He lost and the bosses never forgave him.

WARD: Party regulars couldn't stand him.

They thought he was rich, spoiled, unwilling to compromise or cooperate-- uh, a snob.

McCULLOUGH: "This fellow is still young," one of them said.

"Wouldn't it be safer to drown him before he grows up?"

To survive, Franklin would need help, and he turned to a shrewd, strange-looking reporter-- Louis Howe.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: I remember the smell of Louis Howe more than anything else.

A gnome-- gaunt, short, wispy hair.

I mean, enough to scare a child, and I was.

COOK: He's dirty, he never showers or bathes enough.

He smokes these dreadful, smelly, sweet, corporal cigarettes and the ashes, you know, sort of coat his vest and tie.

McCULLOUGH: Franklin's mother especially disliked him.

"That dirty little man," she called him.

Eleanor, too, disapproved.

COOK: They want him out.

He represents the worst, the smelliest, you know, stuff of politics.

Um, he drinks, he smokes, he curses, he's a pain.

Out of there.

But still, Louis Howe was a seasoned politician.

As you might say, he knew where all the bodies were buried.

And F.D.R.

needed to know.

McCULLOUGH: Together, Howe and Franklin formed one of the oddest alliances in American political history.

It would last until Howe's death in 1936.

"I was so impressed with Franklin Roosevelt," Howe liked to say of their first meeting, "I thought then nothing but an accident could keep him from becoming president of the United States."

♪ ♪ In 1913, after only two years in Albany, the Democratic state senator with the famous last name was summoned to Washington.

Impressed by his growing reputation as a reform Democrat and by Franklin's pedigree, president Woodrow Wilson offered him the job of assistant secretary of the Navy-- the same job that Theodore Roosevelt had used to catapult himself to the presidency.

He was just 31 years old.

♪ ♪ Franklin loved the Navy.

He pressed for the largest possible fleet.

He learned to deal with Congress, businessmen, labor, and he built a reputation as enthusiastic, efficient, hardworking.

♪ ♪ But just as he began to walk the corridors of real power, first he put his job, and then his marriage, in jeopardy.

COOK: Washington for Franklin is a great liberation.

You know, he never had a teenage rebellion.

He never had a moment where he defied his mother or his wife.

He had really been a dutiful son and he had really been a dutiful husband.

Washington blew all that out of the water, if I may use a naval term for the assistant secretary of the Navy.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: He was a young man on the make.

He worked for secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, and he wanted his job, ridiculed him behind his back, undermined his decisions.

WARD: F.D.R.

worked as a subordinate under Josephus Daniels for almost eight years, and he was a terrible subordinate.

I think he simply couldn't stand the notion that someone was giving him orders about something he was quite sure he knew much more about.

Roosevelt undercut his boss time and again.

He went over his head to the president from time to time, and Daniels put up with all of it.

McCULLOUGH: Daniels said he enjoyed Franklin's "spontaneity and gaiety," imagining great things for him.

When they looked at their picture taken together, Daniels told him, "I'll tell you why you're smiling.

"We're both looking down on the White House "and you're saying to yourself, 'Some day I will be living in that house.'"

Franklin just kept smiling.

WARD: Daniels thought Roosevelt a wonderfully charming young man and, I think, must have been the most patient man in American history, because any other man would have fired Roosevelt for insubordination early on.

McCULLOUGH: At the same time, Franklin's marriage was heading for trouble.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: It was not a happy household.

F.D.R.

enjoyed himself.

He enjoyed having a good time and, unfortunately, he couldn't get my grandmother to go along.

She actually disapproved.

She had moral reservations, is the only way I can put it, about really enjoying herself.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: Eleanor was caught in what she described as "the slavery of the Washington social system," dutifully advancing her husband's career.

Overwhelmed with social obligations, she spent her days leaving her calling cards at the stately homes of the rich and powerful.

"I was perfectly certain," Eleanor later wrote, "that I had nothing to offer "and that my duty as the wife of a public official was to do exactly as the majority of women were doing."

And suddenly the most important thing is to be part of the social whirl of Washington, D.C., which is essentially a round of cocktail parties, trivial conversation-- the very thing that Eleanor hates.

Franklin finds out that he's incredibly well-suited for the small talk, gossipy side of Washington life.

He's a great conversationalist.

He loves telling stories.

He loves small talk, and he loves that kind of superficial connection between people, and his vitality and his magnetism are beginning to show.

McCULLOUGH: Franklin was especially attractive to women.

One Washington hostess described him as the most "desirable" man she had ever met.

♪ ♪ Every summer, the Roosevelts seemed to find relief from the strains of Washington on an island off the coast of Maine-- Campobello.

♪ ♪ "We spent so little time alone with our parents," their eldest son James later wrote, "that those times are treasured as though gifts from the gods."

"Father loved life on the island more than any of us, but got to spend the least time there."

(seagull squawking) "Mother always liked it because she had her own home, which she ran."

"Father taught us to sail.

"This was the one activity he loved above all others and wanted us to love."

But as summer after summer went by, Franklin spent less and less time at Campobello.

Eleanor grew anxious and suspicious.

In the summer of 1917, Franklin wrote from Washington to calm her: "Dearest Babs, you were a goosy girl to think, "or even pretend to think, "that I don't want you here all summer, because you know I do."

"But honestly, you ought to have six weeks straight at Campo just as I ought to, only you can and I can't."

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: When America entered World War I, the Navy sent Franklin on an inspection tour of the western front.

♪ ♪ He reviewed the troops, toured the battlefields and got as close to the fighting as the military would allow him.

As he was about to sail back to America, he was struck down by a strain of influenza and brought home severely ill. Franklin was 36 years old.

He had handsome children, a dutiful wife, a famous name, and a rising career.

As Eleanor unpacked his suitcase, she accidentally made a discovery that would change their lives forever-- a packet of love letters to her husband.

Lucy Page Mercer was Eleanor's own social secretary.

She was a refined young woman from an old, southern, Catholic family.

GOODWIN: Lucy was tall and statuesque.

She had a face, people say, that belonged in drawing rooms.

She had a charm that was rivaled only by Franklin's charm.

One thinks of Franklin in those days, and indeed throughout his life, as this incorrigible flirt.

Flirting was a part of his vitality, his magnetism, his charm.

He loved to conquer women in conversation.

So that's probably how it started with lucy, but then I do think it became something more.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: while Eleanor was away at Campobello, Franklin spent time with Lucy alone and even appeared with her at dinner parties.

He had fallen in love.

♪ ♪ COOK: Eleanor Roosevelt really had a very romantic idea that she could have a perfect marriage, that they would love and trust and respect each other and be partners in love the way her parents never were, which is, I think, why her discovery of the Lucy Mercer affair was so devastating to her.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: "The bottom dropped out of my own particular world," Eleanor confided to a friend, "and I faced myself, my surroundings, my world honestly for the first time."

GOODWIN: Eleanor's immediate response was not only to confront Franklin, but from what we seem to understand, to offer him a divorce-- "If this is what you want, go."

GUREWITSCH: Mr. Roosevelt knew that his mother would withdraw all financial help.

She threatened him with that.

He would lose his family life.

And it really meant giving up his political ambitions, and that was something he had to think over more than once.

McCULLOUGH: Franklin would have to choose between his love for Lucy Mercer and his political career, family, and Eleanor.

GUREWITSCH: And he finally decided to stay married and to try to make the best of a marriage, and Mrs. Roosevelt's condition was that he never see Lucy Mercer again.

McCULLOUGH: "After everyone had their say," James later wrote, "Father and Mother sat down and agreed to go on for the sake of appearances."

Eleanor and Franklin would live together, but never again share the intimacies of married life.

♪ ♪ (bird cawing) Devastated, Eleanor went time and again to Washington's Rock Creek Cemetery.

For hours she sat gazing at a monument to a woman who had killed herself.

All her childhood fears had been confirmed.

Those she loved most-- first her father, now her husband-- would always desert her.

Nothing lasted.

♪ ♪ GUREWITSCH: It was a marked turning point in her life.

She had no persona, she felt destroyed.

She'd have to make a life for herself and that's what she did.

(newsreel music playing) McCULLOUGH: The surprise of the 1920 Democratic convention was the nomination for vice-president.

"The young man I am going to suggest," the speaker said, "has a name to be conjured with in American politics."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was 38, one of the youngest vice- presidential candidates in American history.

His cousin Theodore had been 42 at this point in his career.

Franklin was now ahead of schedule.

♪ ♪ (crowd cheering and applauding) As the campaign got under way, he threw open his mother's Hyde Park home for a party rally.

Sara was proud... but appalled when 5,000 loyal Democrats trampled her lawn and invaded her stately home.

♪ ♪ Vice-presidential candidates usually ran modest campaigns, but Franklin barnstormed more than 8,000 miles through 20 states in 18 days.

(crowd cheering) "During the three months in the year 1920," he said, "I got to know the country as only a candidate for office or a traveling salesman can get to know it."

Franklin pressed Eleanor to accompany him on the campaign.

Reluctantly she went along... and hated every minute of it: the smoke-filled rooms, the late-night card games, the hard-drinking politicians and reporters.

Ever since her discovery of her husband's affair, she had been cautiously embracing a life of her own.

GOODWIN: Before Lucy came into their lives, my own sense is that Eleanor was not happy simply as a wife and a mother, but she had no outlet for her energy.

She had torrential energy and there was no outlet for it, because in that day and age it wasn't legitimate for a woman to have a career outside the home.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: The affair with Lucy Mercer enabled her to see herself in perhaps a different light, and I personally believe that F.D.R.

's affair with Lucy Mercer enabled my grandmother to open a door and walk out.

COOK: She meets with all of these political women: they were suffragists, they were progressives, they're dedicated to making things better for most people.

GUREWITSCH: They were women who knew things, who could educate her, who could teach her parliamentary law, who could tell her about labor movements, labor unions, and so on.

It also was slightly rebellious of her.

She was breaking bounds.

McCULLOUGH: Eleanor was moving into a vanguard of women who were political activists.

In 1920, women were voting in their first national election... and Franklin, never missing a political beat, was ardently courting their vote.

He loved every minute of the 1920 campaign, but when an aide asked him if he thought he would be elected, he replied, "Nary an illusion."

For the Democrats, the election was a disaster.

For the Republicans, "The victory," one observer said, "was more than a landslide, it was an earthquake."

(crowd cheering, fireworks exploding) But for Franklin, the campaign was a triumph.

Americans all across the country now knew his name.

♪ ♪ He had met and won the goodwill of thousands of party leaders.

He stood ready to aim higher than the vice-presidency next time.

At 38, he was young, strong, energetic, and impatient.

In the summer of 1921, he visited a Boy Scout camp serving city children.

He enjoyed himself immensely, posing for pictures for the newspapers and joking with the boys.

This is the last photograph of Franklin Roosevelt standing on his own two feet.

When he said good-bye, he took with him the goodwill of the campers and a mysterious, undetected virus already multiplying and circulating throughout his body.

♪ ♪ (seagulls squawking) McCULLOUGH: August 14, 1921.

"We have had a very few anxious days," Eleanor wrote from Campobello.

"Wednesday evening Franklin was taken ill." "By Friday evening, "he lost the ability to walk or move his legs.

"The doctor feels sure he will get well, but it may take some time."

"I tried to persuade myself that the trouble with my leg was muscular," Franklin remembered, "that it would disappear as I used it.

But presently it refused to work, and then the other."

MAN: It started with a cold, a feeling of malaise, an ache in the back and lack of appetite.

He said he thought he wouldn't have dinner and he went up to his room.

And he, he never walked again.

♪ ♪ And ultimately at the high point, he was helpless.

♪ ♪ WARD: For a man as energetic, who had led such a charmed life, to suddenly be paralyzed must have been almost unbearable.

He... he asked Louis Howe why God had deserted him, at one point.

♪ ♪ He tried to put on a brave front with the children, but he was terrified.

They didn't know what it was.

They didn't know what they could do about it.

Certainly it was the blackest moment of his life and seemed to be the end of his life.

McCULLOUGH: His fever soared.

Eleanor remembered he was "out of his head."

GOODWIN: Eleanor responds immediately with help, with support, with courage in facing the severity of what he's going through.

She stays up 24 hours.

She's by his side.

She doesn't run away from it.

McCULLOUGH: Desperate, Eleanor called in an orthopedic specialist from Harvard Medical School.

The diagnosis, he told them, was perfectly clear: infantile paralysis-- polio.

(insects chirping) WARD: He couldn't believe this had happened to him, but even in those circumstances, he kept to the Roosevelt code, which was that you did not complain and that you tried to convince everyone that everything was going to be fine.

He was very careful to be cheerful in front of his mother.

And she was very careful to be cheerful in front of him, and only after she left him did she cry.

(train clacking on tracks, whistle blares) McCULLOUGH: A private railroad car brought Franklin home to New York city.

With every curve and jounce, he winced in pain.

He was 39 years old.

No one knew what sort of life might now be possible for him, but one thing seemed certain: his political career was finished.

GALLAGHER: He was an aristocrat, he was well born, he was good-looking.

He had had... always had everything.

All of a sudden, there he was, crippled in a day when it was a very difficult thing to be crippled.

In the 1920s, why, polio was a terrifying thing.

Something like 25% of people who caught polio died of it within the first two weeks.

If you survived and you had paralysis, they didn't know what to do.

And "nice" families kept their disabled members at home in the back bedroom with the blinds drawn.

There was a certain shame attached to it somehow.

♪ ♪ WARD: His mother decided that the best thing to do was for him to come home to Hyde Park and to live the life really that his father had lived, as an invalid.

She would take care of him, and he could pursue his hobbies and small interests, but he would have to give up politics.

GOODWIN: It's one of those moments that is absolutely a defining moment for Eleanor, because she knows that if Sara has her way, Franklin's soul will be destroyed.

So she has to do something she's never done before: she has to confront Sara directly to tell her "You're wrong and I'm not going to let this happen.

"He's going to be able to get out of this house.

"He's going to walk again, he's going to get into politics and I don't care what you say."

She may not have said it that boldly, but she definitely was willing to make a major confrontation with her mother-in-law that all of her earlier life she had been unable to make.

She became the voice for his inner needs, his inner feelings, and in some ways, that's what she becomes all of their lives.

GUREWITSCH: She had a discipline and a willpower that was staggering.

She said to me once, "The only time in my life "that I cried in his presence when he had polio "was when he called us into the room "and he showed us: 'Look,' he said, 'what I can do.'"

He was phobic about being caught in a fire-- helpless in a fire.

He got himself down from the bed and he showed them with great pride how he slithered on the floor, using his elbows to get to the door.

And with that, Mrs. Roosevelt broke down in tears and fled.

And she said that was the only time she didn't control herself in front of him.

McCULLOUGH: Franklin's life was now in limbo.

♪ ♪ He would devote the next seven years to one single goal: to get back on his feet.

The doctors told him that his only hope was exercise.

With heavy steel braces grappled to his legs, he began the awkward struggle to learn to walk.

"I must get down the driveway today-- all the way down the driveway," his daughter Anna heard him say.

WARD: Polio exercises were very painful, very tedious, humiliating.

They took up endless time, and I think it's a measure of his ambition and his grit that he kept at them as long and as hard as he did.

McCULLOUGH: After a year of unrelenting struggle, the doctors told Franklin it was all but certain that he would never walk again.

But he would not accept their verdict.

WARD: The rules that applied to other people did not apply to Franklin Roosevelt, and he refused to believe that he was not going to get better.

He tried everything: sunlamp treatments, special electric belts that were supposed to make him somehow stronger, pulley arrangements to do his exercises automatically.

Deep massage, light massage, range of motion exercises.

Sometimes they hung him on a harness from the ceiling.

And even in the last weeks of his life, he was trying a new method to see if he couldn't get back on his feet.

It's... it's either madness or enormously admirable.

GALLAGHER: He never spoke to anyone about the feelings he had with his paralysis.

His mother said that he had never spoken to her about it.

Eleanor said he simply didn't accept his paralysis and he didn't talk about it and he wouldn't admit it.

I suppose psychologists might call it denial.

It certainly served him well and allowed him to become president of the United States instead of a stamp-collecting invalid.

Of course it's denial.

It worked-- denial is a very useful thing in its place.

I mean it's... it's a way of... of coming to terms with a difficult fact.

(seagulls squawking) ♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: In 1924, Franklin bought a run-down houseboat he named the Larooco and headed south.

He was running away.

Drifting lazily off the coast of Florida: swimming, fishing, cavorting with his friends, he filled his days with aimless good times.

♪ ♪ WARD: He was there partly to exercise and get the sun, which he thought was going to help him, but he was also there because life at home with five children and his mother and his wife fighting over him was unbearable.

♪ ♪ GALLAGHER: These were very grim years for him, for the family.

He was struggling to get better.

In spite of his optimism, he really wasn't getting much better.

I think that the guy was dealing with depression.

There's a great deal of anger, a great deal of grieving, a great deal of frustration that comes with paralysis-- extensive, severe, serious paralysis-- and, um, this is very hard stuff to... to deal with.

GOODWIN: And he couldn't express that despair and that sadness around Eleanor, certainly not around his mother, nor around the kids.

So I think he went to the Larooco originally because it allowed him a haven to be able to be sad, to mourn the loss of the body that had once been his, and I think it took longer than he thought.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: "There were days on the Larooco," one friend remembered, "when it was noon "before he could pull himself out of depression and greet his guests wearing his lighthearted facade."

"Polio was a storm," one of his physiotherapists said.

"You were what remained when it had passed."

♪ ♪ (insects chirping) His son James later wrote: "These were the lonely years.

"We had no tangible father, "no father whom we could touch and talk to, only a cheery letter writer."

With Franklin gone and the children away at school or grown up, politics was becoming an increasingly important part of Eleanor's life.

Louis Howe convinced her that it was up to her to keep Franklin's name alive.

If Eleanor had not stepped forward, Franklin's political career might well have been over.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: Louis Howe decided that I'd better go in the women's division of the state political setup in New York and I must be able to speak, and so Louis Howe used to go with me to meetings and sit in the back and make fun of me afterwards.

COOK: Louis Howe is absolutely central to Eleanor Roosevelt's political education.

He monitors her every word.

He attends all of the speeches that she gives.

And he tells her, "You said this right, you said that wrong.

"You giggled here; why did you giggle here?

"Your voice went up ten decibels here.

Why did it do that?"

He's really her coach.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: And she very quickly, in two or three years, moved to the top in the women's division in the New York State Democratic Party.

She could get up and talk on pretty much any subject and with some ease.

She talked informally.

She ran a very good meeting.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: Eleanor discovered that she had organizing skills, a talent for dealing with people... and soon found herself in the thick of Democratic Party politics.

Publicly, she spoke in Franklin's name.

Privately, she was developing her own ideas.

♪ ♪ COOK: People go to her for advice.

People go to her to raise money.

People go to her and ask her to speak.

She says in her memoir she's done it all for F.D.R., but the fact is she loves every minute of it.

CURTIS ROOSEVELT: I think she was profoundly impressed and believed in her heart that helping other people, enabling other people, particularly when you were in a position of privilege, was the way she wished to conduct her life.

McCULLOUGH: Eleanor was making all the great reform causes of the day her own: child labor, public housing, worker's compensation, unemployment insurance.

She was becoming a voice for those who had none.

GUREWITSCH: She had abdicated her role as wife.

She had-- he invited her very many times to come down, but he was with the friends whom she didn't specially care for-- the congenial friends, the friends from the Lucy Mercer days, the... the people who liked to live on a houseboat and swim and drink and... and he was with Missy LeHand.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: "Missy" was Marguerite LeHand, Franklin's secretary-- unmarried, Catholic, high-school educated, many years younger.

GOODWIN: Missy had started working for Franklin when she was 20 years old in 1920 and, I think, fell in love with him and never stopped loving him all the rest of her life.

♪ ♪ It would be Missy who would sit by his side as they went fishing.

She learned every activity that he liked and became an expert at it.

So she was the perfect companion for these lazy, aimless days on the Larooco.

(seagulls squawking) Eleanor is nowhere in sight during this period of time.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: Eleanor had now made a life of her own with her own friends.

"Alas and lackaday," wrote her aunt.

"I just hate to have Eleanor let herself look as she does.

"Since politics have become her choicest interest, all her charm has disappeared."

Franklin supported Eleanor's new-found independence.

During the 1920s, they had once again redefined their marriage.

They were bound together by politics, respect and real affection, but they led separate lives.

For the first time, Eleanor had a home of her own two miles from Hyde Park-- a simple cottage, built for her by Franklin.

She called it Val-Kill, after the brook running past its door.

COOK: She can invite who she wants there.

Her mother-in-law has to knock before she enters.

There are no sliding doors.

Sara is shocked that Eleanor Roosevelt would prefer to live in what she calls "that hovel" rather than the proper house-- the big house with the proper number of servants.

Eleanor Roosevelt's very happy at Val-Kill.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: At Val-Kill, Eleanor felt free.

She defied convention, befriending so-called new women who lived with one another.

Eleanor found in these friends the kind of emotional closeness that Franklin could not provide.

♪ ♪ All through the 1920s, Eleanor flourished.

She became financially independent, writing articles for newspapers and magazines.

She taught at a private school in New York, which she co-owned.

She continued to campaign for progressive political causes.

She traveled widely.

She was at ease with herself and for the first time in her life, began to have fun.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Val-Kill was Eleanor's, but throughout his life, Franklin was a frequent and welcome guest.

♪ ♪ Eleanor's friends became his friends, supporting his hopes to one day return to political life.

"I don't want him forgotten," Eleanor said.

"I want him to have a voice."

McCULLOUGH: In 1924, the former candidate for vice-president was invited to the Democratic National Convention.

He delivered a rousing speech, but he played no further part in the presidential campaign.

He was still far too weak.

That fall, there was talk of Franklin running for governor of New York, but he quickly rejected the idea.

He would not seek public office, he said, until he no longer needed crutches.

Determined to find a cure, he once again headed south.

♪ ♪ He had heard of pools of steaming mineral water in Warm Springs, Georgia, whose marvelous healing powers were the stuff of local legend.

Gushing out of the side of a mountain, the waters were 90 degrees and astonishingly buoyant.

Some called them "miracle" waters.

Although the waters would never give Franklin back his legs, they would give new meaning to his life, and new purpose.

"I feel," he wrote his mother, "that a great cure for infantile paralysis and kindred diseases could well be established here."

MAN: Well, there wasn't much here.

There was only one hotel downtown, you know, and a grocery store.

They called it "Bullochville."

It wasn't considered a town-- what I would call a town.

I thought it took a lot of stores to make a town back in those days, but I just called it a greasy spot.

And I think they named it Warm Springs, Georgia, after Mr. Roosevelt, about the time he began to come here.

McCULLOUGH: On the outskirts of town, there stood a once lovely vacation resort, a favored retreat for wealthy Southerners.

By the time Franklin arrived, its glory had faded to a cluster of cottages in need of repair, and a run-down hotel.

Franklin dreamed of restoring its original charm and turning it into a modern rehabilitation center for those with infantile paralysis, but first he would need hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Roosevelt borrowed a lot of money from his mother and put in a lot of his own.

His wife was absolutely opposed and thought it was a terrible idea.

She thought it was going to cost too much money.

She thought that it would give him something else to attend to and take him away from politics, that you couldn't do everything and Warm Springs was going to completely dominate his life.

She worried about it.

One of the few times we know in which he really got angry at her was when she gently suggested that perhaps this was not a good idea, and he was furious.

He really exploded and said, "This is something I really want.

You either support me or you don't."

And then when that was sort of a... sort of an emotional ultimatum, she did support it.

McCULLOUGH: Investing $195,000-- two-thirds of his personal fortune-- Franklin created and designed the first modern treatment center for infantile paralysis in the country.

Soon people with polio from across America were making the pilgrimage to the Georgia backwoods.

♪ ♪ As Franklin struggled to rehabilitate his own withered limbs, he devoted himself for the first time to helping others.

♪ ♪ (shrieking and laughing) "You would howl with glee," he told a friend, "if you could see the clinic in operation "and the patients doing various exercises in the water under my leadership."

GALLAGHER: Warm Springs was a wonderful place.

Roosevelt was a patient just like all the others.

"Doctor" Roosevelt, as the others called him, was really remarkably creative.

He brought in blacksmiths and they designed braces and crutches-- a crutch design that's still used, the Warm Springs crutch.

Roosevelt invented a muscle testing technique, a way of grading how strong a muscle is that is still in use, and it was a remarkably inventive time.

McCULLOUGH: Always he believed in recovery.

His prescription: swimming, sunlight, and belief on the patient's part that the muscles are coming back.

♪ ♪ MAN: He had charisma.

He was just glowing with it, and he'd do that smile and he'd laugh.

(shrieking) (indistinct chatter) ♪ ♪ WOMAN: After everybody had treatment, they would all go out into what was called the play pool and they would play vigorous games of ball.

He played with them, and he was just as tough as any of the children.

They loved him.

(children playing) WARD: Whether or not people got better at Warm Springs, they felt that they were better and they felt that with him present, anything was possible.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: Warm Springs was Franklin's creation.

For the rest of his life, in times of stress, he would retreat to the piney woods and the warm waters.

It became his second home.

(no voice) Franklin loved to drive... and he drove fast.

He designed his car himself with ingenious levers and pulleys so he could drive without his legs.

For the first time since he was paralyzed, he felt free.

Over the years, his drives through the Georgia countryside would provide him with a valuable political education.

MAN: He was interested in the people and he got out and visited with them.

Even after he was president, he would slip away from his bodyguards and get out and ride the back ways and back roads and meet people and stop and talk with them.

But he'd never met people like that before.

LOFTIN: He usually talked to you.

He started the conversation.

And whatever he wanted to know, he'd ask.

He didn't hesitate about asking if he saw something he wanted to know.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: Everywhere he went, he heard stories about the lack of electricity in the countryside and the exorbitant rates paid for it in town... about bad schools and low farm prices-- stories that left their mark on him.

♪ ♪ COPELAND: I didn't know how come I loved him like I did.

It wasn't... he hadn't done anything for me personally.

(train chugging) We would walk to Warm Springs just to see him disboard the train.

He'd come on down to... "Hello, Warm Springs, hello, Warm Springs."

That's the way... we wanted to see him greet the little town, and we walked for miles to see that.

Well, he wasn't the president then.

He wasn't even the governor of New York, I don't guess.

But he was just Mr. Roosevelt in those days.

After he became president, they were very, you know, polite.

But they used to call him in the early days "Rosey," which I think was a wonderful name.

Everybody loved him.

It goes beyond like; they loved him.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: I don't think he changed completely.

There were certain things that were always there.

But he certainly learned to understand what suffering meant in a way that he had never known before... because he could understand how people could suffer in ways that he had not experienced, and I think that grew out of his polio experience.

♪ ♪ And he certainly gained enormously in patience.

That gave him some of the patience that was needed to meet the problems both of the New Deal and the war.

♪ ♪ I've heard people say to him, "but if we do this, we don't know if we will be successful."

And I've seen my husband time after time say, "There are very few things we can know beforehand.

"We will try, and if we find we are wrong, we will have to change."

McCULLOUGH: Throughout his long struggle with polio, Franklin remained determined to return to politics.

But he knew he would have to convince voters that he was not an invalid, and year after year of arduous exercise had not improved his wasted leg muscles.

GALLAGHER: He wanted to be president, and it was just unthinkable in those days that a person in a wheelchair could be elected president of the United States-- and in fact it's pretty unthinkable right now-- and so he had to walk, and since he wasn't getting better, he developed better techniques for appearing to look better.

McCULLOUGH: In 1926, physiotherapist Alice Converse taught Franklin how to walk more effectively with crutches.

CONVERSE: He was very anxious to walk.

He would plant the crutches on the floor so hard, you'd think that the boards would break and then drag himself along.

It had been five years since the onset of polio.

His upper body was very strong but his legs were pretty weak, so we tried to get him to use his body muscles in such a way that they would help lift up a leg at a time and take a step.

McCULLOUGH: But crutches weren't good enough.

He knew they were political poison.

They would, he said, "inspire pity."

He learned instead to appear in public with a cane.

GALLAGHER: And he developed this technique that looked like walking.

His sons were strong men.

They took exercises so their arms would be as strong as a parallel bar, and he would lean on one son's arm, putting all his weight on it, and then he would switch his weight from the son's arm onto a cane, which he carried in the other hand, so that he could switch his weight from side to side and thus progress, and he instructed his sons, "you must not let people see that this is difficult or takes effort or hurts."

They would chat and joke and laugh as they went along.

It was a slow process, but they looked as though they were taking their time so they could smile at people and say hello to the crowd as they went along.

And it was showbiz, but it worked.

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: Only four seconds of film exist which clearly show the walk Franklin so tirelessly practiced.

WARD: The goal really was simply to take enough steps to get from a car into a building or from his seat on the stage to the podium and back again.

If he could do that without seeming hopelessly crippled, he'd succeeded.

GALLAGHER: Roosevelt had no hip muscles, and if a breeze, someone should jostle him, something like that, he could just pivot and fall down.

He was not stable at all.

It was not a safe way of locomotion, of moving around, not a practical way, but it was a political way.

McCULLOUGH: By the summer of 1928, Franklin was ready at last to make his way back into the political world.

♪ ♪ The Democratic Convention was in Houston, and Eleanor had written him, "I'm telling everyone you're going to Houston without crutches."

As he boarded the train for Texas, he knew he was about to risk everything.

♪ ♪ All through the 1920s, Franklin had kept up his contacts with Democratic Party leaders.

Now he'd been asked to nominate the governor of New York-- Al Smith-- for president.

Smith was a tough, worldly Catholic from New York City and one of his advisers argued, "You're a Bowery mick and he's a Protestant patrician.

He'll take some of the curse off you."

With 15,000 delegates watching, Franklin set out to walk to the podium with a cane, without the aid of crutches.

An accidental fall would leave him sprawled helplessly on the convention floor, his political hopes destroyed.

With one hand he gripped the cane.

With the other he balanced precariously on his son Elliott's powerful arm.

He appeared to be walking.

One reporter described the scene: "Here on the stage is Franklin Roosevelt-- "a figure tall and proud even in suffering, "pale with years of struggle against paralysis, "a man softened and cleansed and illumined with pain.

For the moment, we are lifted up."

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: We offer one who has the will to win, who not only deserves success, but commands it.

Victory is his habit.

The happy warrior, Alfred E. Smith.

(wild cheering) ♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: The nomination was Al Smith's, but the victory belonged to Franklin Roosevelt.

When Smith urged him to run for governor of New York, Roosevelt said he was ready.

(crowd cheering) Someone asked Smith why he had put Roosevelt back in the political limelight.

"Aren't you raising up a rival who will one day cause you trouble?"

"No," Smith replied.

"He'll be dead within a year."

Six months later, Smith had lost his run for the presidency and Roosevelt was governor of New York.

Roosevelt won office by the slimmest of margins, campaigning more vigorously than anyone expected.

Now as governor, he would continue to surprise everyone.

He took command at once.

In his first six months, he advocated tax relief for farmers and cheap electric power for consumers.

But when disaster suddenly struck the economy, no one was sure what Roosevelt would do.

♪ ♪ On October 24, 1929, the stock market crashed.

It was the beginning of the worst calamity the United States economy had ever known.

Banks closed, millions were put out of work.

Homeless people were soon camping just a few blocks from the town house Sara Roosevelt had built for Franklin and his bride years before.

Eleanor gave instructions to the cook to provide anyone who came to the door with hot coffee and sandwiches.

MAN: There's only one word that adequately describes it, and that's surely despair-- a sense of helplessness, a sense of hopelessness.

About a third-- imagine a third of labor totally unemployed.

14 million people.

There was a sense of fright, a sense of horror.

It was a feeling that, what was happening?

Was it possible that something like this could occur in the country?

McCULLOUGH: Since the start of the Depression, the Republican president, Herbert Hoover, had settled into a dismal pessimism.

After one gloomy White House meeting, his secretary of state said, "It was like sitting in a bath of ink to sit in his room."

Hoover believed there was nothing he could do to turn the economy around; the crisis would have to resolve itself without the aid of government.

At first, Roosevelt agreed with Hoover.

"Industrial and trade conditions are sound," he wired a newspaper the morning after the crash.

But as the crisis deepened, Roosevelt began to change.

All his life he had believed that relief should come from private charities, but face-to-face with the problems of the Depression, he became convinced that only massive government intervention could help.

For the first time, Roosevelt began to experiment with bold new ideas-- assistance for the aged, and the country's first program to provide relief for the unemployed.

"The important thing," he told the New York state assembly, "is to recognize that there is a duty on the part of government to do something about this."

In 1932, President Hoover invited the nation's governors to a White House dinner.

With his presidency in jeopardy, he wanted to size up the man from New York with the progressive programs who was rapidly becoming the Democratic front-runner.

MAN: And the night of the dinner, with a cane in his hand, he started going to the dining room, dragging his legs from his hips and supporting himself from the cane and his bodyguard's arm.

And he walked to the angle, that 45-degree angle of the table, and I was alerted to a nod that was telling me he was going to take the seat.

Well, when he did, he literally fell in the seat, and that scene was witnessed by all the guests at the dinner table.

And everybody said, "Well, that man, what is he thinking about?

"How's he going to be president?

He's only a half man."

(crowd cheering) ("Happy Days Are Here Again" playing) McCULLOUGH: On July 1, 1932, after five tension-filled days at the Democratic National Convention, the delegates rallied behind the man who had fought his way back from despair.

MAN: Franklin D. Roosevelt-- having received more than two-thirds of all the delegates voting, I proclaim him the nominee of this convention for president of the United States.

(cheering) McCULLOUGH: Now F.D.R.

was ready to begin the race he had been preparing for all his life.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: This is more than a political campaign.

It is a call to arms.

Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.

(cheering) McCULLOUGH: He refused to let his crippled legs keep him from running hard and with confidence.

I used to say, "If I go to Washington on the fourth of March next."

But now at the... very nearly the end of this swing, I'm not saying "if," I'm saying "when."

The great war against depression is being fought on many fronts in many parts of the world.

McCULLOUGH: His Republican opponent, the president of the United States, appeared overwhelmed by the Depression.

...the last 18 months to carry our financial structures safely through the worldwide collapse... McCULLOUGH: One observer remarked, "If you put a rose in Hoover's hand, it would wilt."

MAN: He gave the impression to the American public that he was just out of control.

And Roosevelt gave the impression that he knew what the country needed and he was going to give it to them.

We face that crisis.

We face it with singleness of purpose and, above all, with faith.

Keep that faith constant.

Keep that faith high.

So shall we win through to a better day.

(cheering) McCULLOUGH: In spite of the crisis the country faced, it was a campaign of personalities.

Americans wanted a leader, and people everywhere warmed to the big smile, the confident toss of the head, the clear delight in people.

(crowd cheering) ("Happy Days Are Here Again" playing) (car horn honking) McCULLOUGH: When it was over, Roosevelt had won a smashing victory.

(cheering) MAN: By midnight, the country already knew that Franklin Roosevelt was the winner, and a very large winner.

One man sent Herbert Hoover a wire saying, "Vote for Roosevelt and make it unanimous."

Let me thank you again and tell you that I hope to see you all very soon and bid you an affectionate good night.

(cheering and applause) McCULLOUGH: "I was happy for my husband," Eleanor later wrote.

"I knew that it would make up "for the blow that fate had dealt him when he was stricken "with infantile paralysis.

"But for myself, I was deeply troubled.

"This meant the end of any personal life of my own.

The turmoil in my heart and mind was rather great that night."

♪ ♪ McCULLOUGH: It would be four months before Roosevelt would take office, the worst months yet of the Depression.

5,000 banks closed.

Each month 20,000 farmers lost their land.

The economy had collapsed.

Americans everywhere waited for the president-elect to tell them what he was going to do, but Roosevelt gave no clues.

LEUCHTENBURG: At one point, reporters ask him a question and he simply holds up his finger and goes "shh."

He will... he will not be drawn out.

McCULLOUGH: One month before the inauguration, Roosevelt went cruising in the Caribbean with his wealthy friends on Vincent Astor's yacht-- the biggest and fastest ocean-going motor yacht ever built.

During the campaign, he had promised what he called a New Deal for the forgotten man.

But as yet he had said nothing about what that new deal might be.

(newsreel music playing) Meanwhile, Eleanor was expected to give up her teaching and writing to become the nation's first lady.

To get together as you are here and forget that there is such a thing as a depression for a time and forget all the troubles that weigh us down and simply sing is a grand thing to do.

CROWD: ♪ There's a long, long trail winding ♪ ♪ Into the land of my dreams ♪ ♪ And the nightingales are singing ♪ ♪ And a white moon beams... ♪ McCULLOUGH: On March 2, 1933, with the Roosevelts on board, the Baltimore and Ohio train headed toward Washington.

In two days, Franklin Roosevelt would become the 32nd president of the United States.

(train whistle blares) Eleanor sat quietly by herself.

She feared she was about to lose her hard-won independence.

"I never wanted to be a president's wife," she said, "and I don't want it now."

The president-elect's mother, Sara, was, as always, confident in her boy.

"I am not in the least worried about Franklin," she told a friend.

(train whistle blares) In the last car, Franklin Roosevelt sat alone.

"In all the years I knew him," his son James wrote, "there was only one time "when father worried about his ability.

It was the night he was elected president."

"You know, Jimmy," he said to me, "all my life I have been afraid of only one thing: fire.

Tonight I think I'm afraid of something else."

"Afraid of what, Father?"

I asked.

"I'm afraid that I may not have the strength to do the job."

♪ ♪ (crowd cheering) On March 4, 1933, a man who could not walk would begin to lead a crippled country.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: "American Experience: FDR" is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.

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