Stein, you are just wrong.
Roosevelt's condition was carefully guarded from public scrutiny, so much so that there are echoes today.
In finally building the Roosevelt memorial in Washington some years back, it became a huge issue whether the sculpture of Roosevelt should show any indication of his wheel chair.
The sculptor designed it to show something but not feature it. Many voices wanted the chair completely hidden.
I am glad those in favor of showing something finally won out. Roosevelt was a genuinely heroic figure in his fight against paralysis, and it is far more moving to see it.
Of course, some small number of people knew he was crippled. How could they not catch the odd glimpse of him being wheeled around or carried?
But it was always hidden in the press and in official government literature. And without the press picking something like that up, it may as well not exist.
You should understand that in our own day. How many realities are kept out of the press, even though limited numbers of individuals may know about them?
Kennedy’s diseases were only one small example.
The fourth 9/11 plane over Pennsylvania was certainly shot down – witnesses and physical evidence are very powerful – yet all you ever see in the press or films is nonsense about “Let’s roll!”
The ridiculous assertion that Oswald alone shot Kennedy with a crappy 1941 Italian bolt-action rifle has been repeated countless times, yet anyone who takes the trouble to go through the evidence knows it is nonsense.
American soldiers’ horrific acts of murder and bestiality in Iraq have been kept as quiet as possible, even though there are many who know about them. The worst pictures of Abu Ghraib, showing the rape of children and murder, were suppressed by the Senate and the Pentagon.
And what about the three thousand Afghan prisoners who disappeared, shortly after Rumsfeld made his Nazi-like statement in 2001 that the prisoners should be executed or walled away forever? So far as we know, thanks to film-maker Jamie Doran, they were driven out on the desert in vans to be suffocated while American soldiers and CIA agents watched. Do you believe that even one-tenth of one percent of Americans know this?
