Dear morons, it was pretty much kept from the public that Roosevelt was in a wheel chair.
"As for incriminating images, it took far more than a “gentlemen’s agreement” for the FDR administration to discourage photos and newsreel film of the president in his wheelchair. Rather, the Secret Service used force. As Editor & Publisher reported in 1936, if agents saw a photographer taking a picture of Roosevelt, say, getting out of his car, they would seize the camera and tear out the film. “By what right they do this I don’t know,” the correspondent wrote, “but I have never seen the right questioned.” A 1946 survey of the White House photography corps confirmed this, finding that anyone the Secret Service caught taking banned photographs “had their cameras emptied, their films exposed to sunlight, or their plates smashed.”
The Myth of FDR’s Secret Disability | TIME.com