FDR, a Wheelchair and a King: How Disability Sealed a Diplomatic Friendship

In February 1945, with victory in sight, President Franklin D. Roosevelt met Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Yalta to plan postwar Europe, the Soviet role against Japan and the framework of the United Nations. On the way home he met several Middle Eastern leaders — among them King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia.

King Ibn Saud and President Roosevelt aboard the USS Quincy at Great Bitter Lake, Egypt. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.

A meeting on the Suez Canal

On February 14, 1945, the two leaders met aboard the USS Quincy as it passed through the Suez Canal. They discussed the region’s challenges: the settlement of European Jewish refugees in Palestine, European colonialism and the struggle for sovereignty, and expanding agriculture through irrigation. Newspaper and State Department accounts describe a productive, warm meeting. The king gave the president a jewel-encrusted saber, perfumes and musks, rare ambergris and traditional Arab clothing.

“Twins”

William Eddy, the U.S. minister to Saudi Arabia, arranged the meeting and interpreted. In his report to the Secretary of State, Eddy described how quickly a friendship formed. The king called himself the president’s “twin” — alike in age, in the burdens of leading a nation, and in physical disability. When Roosevelt said the king was lucky still to have the use of his legs, the king answered that the president was the lucky one: his own legs weakened every year, while Roosevelt’s wheelchair would always get him where he was going. Roosevelt replied that he had two such chairs — twins as well — and offered one as a gift. The king accepted gratefully, promising to use it daily and think of his friend.

Years later, Eddy recalled that the king would show close friends his private apartment in Riyadh, where the wheelchair stood with its White House tag still attached, calling it his most precious possession. In fact the chair, built for the slight Roosevelt, was too small for the powerfully built king — and the State Department recorded that “the President requested Mrs. Roosevelt to arrange for a shipment of a new one to the King. This was done in August 1945.” The log of the Quincy’s voyage confirms Roosevelt gave the king a gold Fourth-Term Inaugural Medallion and one of his wheelchairs.

Roosevelt and Ibn Saud confer with their advisers aboard the USS Quincy. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.

Ibn Saud’s later meeting with Churchill went less well: the British tried to outdo the Americans with a bigger ship and grander display, which the king reportedly found dull. Roosevelt, for his part, told Congress he had learned more about the region “by talking with Ibn Saud for five minutes than I could have learned in an exchange of two or three dozen letters.” A newspaper of the time called the wheelchair probably the first gift of its kind between two heads of state.

Sitting before Congress

On March 1, 1945, Roosevelt addressed Congress for the last time — and for the first time there was no ramp to the rostrum. He entered the House chamber in his wheelchair and spoke seated, telling the members:

“I hope that you will pardon me for the unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say, but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me in not having to carry about ten pounds of steel ’round, on the bottom of my legs; and also because of the fact that I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip.”

Roosevelt addresses Congress seated, March 1, 1945. Image from NPS’s page.

Was it ever a secret?

A columnist, Jack Stinnett, wondered why the White House now allowed stories about the president’s paralysis, after years in which the press had avoided dwelling on it, and repeated rumors that Roosevelt no longer cared because he would never run again. The NPS article argues that this rumor wrongly implies Americans would not vote for a disabled person. The public knew: disabled Americans wrote to Roosevelt and mailed canes to the White House; funds were raised in his name for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (later the March of Dimes); and in 1933 a campaign by 42 newspapers raised more than $22,000 to build a warm-water swimming pool in the West Wing for his therapy. Stinnett himself conceded it was no secret that polio had paralyzed the president’s legs. The press examined his fitness during the 1932 campaign — and voters still elected him governor of New York twice and president four times.

Focusing on how few photographs show Roosevelt in his wheelchair treats the chair as a mark of weakness. With Ibn Saud, it became something else: a bond that helped forge ties between two nations.

Sources

Based on "FDR, Wheelchairs, and Diplomacy," by Seth Frost, museum technician, Roosevelt & Vanderbilt National Historic Sites, National Park Service (revised July 11, 2024); a work of the United States government in the public domain, with the accounts of William Eddy, Jack Stinnett and a 1945 newspaper rewritten in hubnx’s own words. The source’s misspelling “Suad” is corrected to Saud.