FDR's courageous battle to walk again inspired me when I was struck with cancer at age 43. That was 25 years ago. Since then I have gone often to the Little White House in Warm Springs, where he founded his polio clinic, and I wrote "The Gatekeeper," the only biography of Missy LeHand, his private secretary, confidante, and partner there. We often forget why FDR is on the dime. The organization he founded, the March of Dimes, funded all the research on the polio vaccine, which was announced on April 12, 1955, ten years to the day after his death. We might ask, what if the government under Dwight Eisenhower had not hailed it as the major medical breakthrough it was? I can tell you: millions of children and adults would have been paralyzed, and thousands would have died.
Amazing story
FDR's courageous battle to walk again inspired me when I was struck with cancer at age 43. That was 25 years ago. Since then I have gone often to the Little White House in Warm Springs, where he founded his polio clinic, and I wrote "The Gatekeeper," the only biography of Missy LeHand, his private secretary, confidante, and partner there. We often forget why FDR is on the dime. The organization he founded, the March of Dimes, funded all the research on the polio vaccine, which was announced on April 12, 1955, ten years to the day after his death. We might ask, what if the government under Dwight Eisenhower had not hailed it as the major medical breakthrough it was? I can tell you: millions of children and adults would have been paralyzed, and thousands would have died.