Franklin Roosevelt wasn't a prince, but when he was a boy he lived like one— in a big house with gardens, a pony, dogs, and lots of servants. That wasn't unusual for children of America's upper class. When Franklin was five years old, in 1887, his father took him to meet Grover Cleveland , the first Democrat to be president in twenty-eight years. It must have been a hard day for Cleveland because this is what he told the boy: "My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be president of the United States."

Just tell a kid what you don't want him to do and he will go for it. So it may have been that day that Franklin first got the idea that he would like to be president. By the time he was twenty-nine-years-old, he was elected New York state senator. Then President Woodrow Wilson made him assistant secretary of the navy . In 1920, he ran for vice president. He lost, but people began to talk of him as a politician to watch .

He by now had a large family : a busy wife, whose name was also Roosevelt—Eleanor Roosevelt—a daughter, and four sons. One night, he went to bed, not feeling well; the next morning, he couldn't move. He was thirty-nine and he had a dreadful disease: poliomyelitis (or, as it was called then, "infantile paralysis"). Usually it struck children, but it was especially hard on adult victims. At first Roosevelt couldn't move at all. Slowly, with painful therapy and concentration, he regained the use of his upper body .