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At West Potomac Park in the nation’s capital on the morning of May 2, 1997, the forty-second president of the United States publicly dedicated a memorial to its thirty-second president. It was a memorial more than four decades in the making. Perhaps not surprisingly, controversy attended the unveiling of the $48-million, 7.5-acre memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt. No stranger to controversy himself, Bill Clinton addressed that controversy directly in his brief remarks: “It was that faith in his own extraordinary potential that enabled him to guide his country from a wheelchair. And from that wheelchair,” the president continued, “and a few halting steps, leaning on his son’s arms or those of trusted aides, he lifted a great people back to their feet and set America to march again toward its destiny.”1 But there was no wheelchair at the memorial in the spring of 1997. Ten days earlier, on April 23, the president had previewed his “wheelchair ” remarks. After intensive lobbying from the National Organization on Disability, Clinton suddenly changed his tack; he announced that he would immediately send legislation to Congress to modify the memorial. Franklin Roosevelt should be depicted not as the public knew him and saw him during his remarkable twelve years in office; rather, he should be remembered as his intimates knew him: as someone whose locomotion was frequently facilitated by a wheelchair. The deception should “officially” end. The new and improved memorial, though, was rationalized by the president less on the grounds of historical realism and more on American exceptionalism : “By showing President Roosevelt as he was we show the world that we have faith that in America you are measured for what you are and what you have achieved, not for what you have lost.”2 And yet the contradiction in metaphysics was palpable; who Roosevelt was and what he had achieved could never be uncoupled from the body he had lost during the summer of 1921. By stipulating that Roosevelt be memorialized, in part, in a wheelchair, was the federal government not insisting on showcasing that loss, rendering it public and permanent in the nation’s collective memory? 1 Introduction Bill Clinton was also on hand three and a half years later when the memorial was rededicated on January 10, 2001. Again he spoke. At the close of his presidency, Clinton again attempted to rhetorically transcend the specifics of Roosevelt’s crippled body: “What matters most in life is the spirit and the journey of the spirit. And we lug along that journey whatever body God gives us and whatever happens to it along the way, and whatever mind we were born with.”3 To close the thought, Clinton might very well have written his own presidential epitaph: “But a clever mind and a beautiful body can themselves be disabilities on the spirit journey.” Nearly eighty years after infantile paralysis had invaded Franklin Roosevelt ’s body, the circle seemed finally to have closed on his disability. The deception was over. The story had finally been told. We would not disagree; the official story does seem to have reached closure—even if prolonged. But we have another story to tell here. In part it is a very private story, played out in letters, diaries, and conversations far removed from the public spaces of presidential politics. At another level, though, our story is an exceedingly public one, for part of Roosevelt’s rhetorical genius lay preciselyinsustaineddisclosure .Itisastoryfirstandforemostaboutoneman’s unquenchable political ambition—but an ambition everywhere informed byadisabledbody.Itisalsoastoryabouthowdisabilitiesdisable,howaculture transforms a bodily wound into a public stigma. It is thus a story about rhetoric and about history and their interaction. To put the matter rather baldly: How does a crippled man become president in the context of a culture that elects only healthy bodies? Deception, yes. But pitiless publicity, too. The relationship between rhetoric and disability, of course, did not begin with Franklin Roosevelt; it has been with us from the beginning. We have only to consult Book II of The Iliad to witness the purportedly blind Homer making the connection. In an assembly of all the Achaeans—both kings and common soldiers—one man railed on against King Agamemnon and the nine-year siege at Troy. Homer the dramatist takes great care to describe not just the rhetorical “rantings” of Thersites but also, more importantly , his bodily appearance. Here was the ugliest man who ever came to Troy. Bandy-legged he was, with one foot clubbed, Both...

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