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FLORENTINE - Wed - Part One 10/1/2014 8:02:41 AM
FLORENTINE – Wed – Oct 1, 2014
As I watched and studied all seven, two-hour episodes in a week’s period (Tues-Mon) I was amazed by how much I had learned. For example, I did not know that Franklin was not only alive but had already graduated from Groton and Harvard and was a lawyer by the time Theodore was President of the U.S.A. (due to the assassination of William McKinley in 1901), and that Eleanor Roosevelt was the ‘favorite’ cousin of Teddy Roosevelt. FDR truly was in love with Eleanor (also his cousin), despite his ‘affairs’ with numerous more glamorous women.
I learned also that Franklin was over six feet tall, athletic and well-proportioned, and had, as a young man, the pleasing countenance that would have been the envy of most Hollywood hopefuls. Yet, why he chose the dour and plain Eleanor as the ‘love of his life’ only he can say! Perhaps he truly loved her, as only a real man can love certain real women.
TR suffered as only a presidential candidate who never wanted to be president in the first place can. He was, in his opinion, the most unseemly of men; he had the uncharacteristic ability to put on weight and not take it off, he was nearly blind, and he had uncontrollable asthma.
Eleanor bore Franklin six children. Bob Burns does not dwell on this, but I shall. In order to become pregnant six times, it seems ‘natural’ that Eleanor and FDR would have had sexual, intimate relationships at least ten times. Those times would indicate, to this writer at least, you would have to be deeply in love with the woman to make this work. After all, Eleanor was more than merely the depository of Franklin’s sperm whenever he felt like ejaculating!
TR’S true love was his horse and his pistol — and his first wife (she died on the same day as his mother; his mother was the 2nd most important person in his life; he met his wife ad later married another woman because of sheer loneliness). He wanted nothing more than to become what he thought was a cowboy.
(During the Spanish/American War, he saw, as he rode up, an American sitting along the roadside.)
(“Get up, you lazy lout!” he called to the reclining soldier. “Look alive, there!” The soldier, frightened, clamored to his feet and stood beside his mounted master. “Yessir!” he said, saluted his superior, and was immediately shot to death by a diligent sniper.)
TR had fifty pairs of pince-nez glasses sent to him out West in case he lost a pair, and FDR once answered a reporter’s question by smiling that famous Roosevelt grin and saying he preferred “the pince-nez because Teddy liked ‘em and wore them all the time! Most of the pictures of me show me wearing regular glasses, but the pince-nez are more comfortable to wear.”
(Another time, one of TR’s Rough Riders had lost his horse, and Roosevelt had invited the unfortunate rider to join him. “Get on, behind me!” the headman ordered. As the horseless man placed his foot in the vacated stirrup, a well-aimed cannon shot blew man’s leg off.)
Former Senator Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not see any action in any war. In WWII, he was exempt from military service because at age 39, while serving as President Woodrow Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he allegedly contracted poliomyelitis or infantile paralysis.
At Campobello Island, a favorite of the many summer homes of the Roosevelts (he and Eleanor had been married in 1906), he suddenly jumped from the boat’s gunwales and swam to shore, some twenty miles away.
The next morning, after his marathon swim, Roosevelt’s legs were so weak he could barely get out of bed. His mother immediately called her physicians who eventually diagnosed FDR with poliomyelitis (they examined him on and off for over thirty days). However, years later they said Roosevelt may have contracted Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a diagnoses I feel may have been the case all along; the incidence of polio in that area was only 3.1 per 100,000 in FDR’s age group, which meant that only perhaps three persons 39 or over normally caught polio in New Brunswick, Canada.
I, one of many, believe the initial diagnoses was incorrect; FDR, I came to understand, did not have polio, nevertheless his mother’s doctors assumed he had contracted the dreaded disease.
END OF PART ONE
Part TWO will appear this coming Saturday. October 3 4 5 6
