Disability History Fact: The Oval Office

Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States from 1933 – 1945, was the first U.S. President to use a wheelchair while in office. For enhanced mobility around the White House, Roosevelt was responsible for the design of perhaps the most famous room in the world – the Oval Office.

"There hadn't even been an oval-shaped office in the White House until 1909, when one was built as part of William Howard Taft's expansion of the West Wing, and that one had been in a different part of the building. The room into which [President Lyndon] Johnson walked on Tuesday morning [in 1963] had been created only twenty-nine years earlier by Franklin Roosevelt, who in 1934 had the President's office moved to the West Wing's southeast corner, from which it was easier to roll in his wheelchair to his living quarters in the Mansion, and who, working with the architect Eric Gugler, designed the room himself. ...

" The room was gracious and serene, the four doors leading out of it to other parts of the White House set flush into the walls, so that, closed, they didn't interrupt the walls' long, graceful curves, which were broken otherwise only by book­shelves set into them and topped by graceful seashell designs. Through the French doors one could glimpse a garden with a row of rosebushes along one side. Yet despite the restraint in its decoration, there was something about the room that made it seem special, somehow larger and more imposing than its dimensions, something dramatic, memorable -- unforgettable, in fact.

“But the room seemed special mostly because of what had happened in it. History had happened in it. Franklin Roosevelt had sat at that desk in front of the flags and windows bantering with reporters as he guided a nation through a great depression and a great war; hidden below the desk, his paralyzed legs.”

Quotes from The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2012