The unit had fallen into disrepair and was under threat of closure at the end of the 1970s so, with the blessing of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Savile launched a fundraising drive that captured the imagination of the British public, set the template for many that followed in its wake and, most damaging in the long terms, made Savile feel bulletproof.
That was largely due to the fact Savile figured, correctly as it turned out, that because he saved the unit and spared her blushes, Mrs Thatcher was indebted to him at the start of her premiership. Indeed she spent the next 10 years lobbying for him to be awarded a knighthood.
If The National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville was Savile's crowning achievement, he latterly spoke of it with a lack of warmth. On more than one occasion in the years I spent interviewing him, he talked about ownership rather than pride when conversation turned to the buildings that had risen to replace the wartime wooden huts where the Paralympic Movement was born.
"Stoke Mandeville know that the money I make, if I chose, could go elsewhere," he said in 2008, bragging about the importance to the hospital of the ongoing financial input from the Jimmy Savile Stoke Mandeville Trust, one of two charitable trusts that bore his name. "It's the steel fist in the velvet glove."
The themes of today's report on Stoke Mandeville are sickeningly familiar to anyone who has taken the time to trawl through the hundreds of pages already published on Leeds General Infirmary and Broadmoor, the two other hospitals Savile was most closely associated with.
The same can be said for conclusions, or lack of them, and the curious coincidence that senior staff were not made aware of what Savile was up to.
There, in all its repulsive detail, is the same grooming of staff and officials at the top and bottom of the organisation to attain total access; the opportunist, often brazen assaults on patients, hospital staff, visitors and fund-raisers; the calculation that his fame, perceived influence within the corridors of power and his well-documented catalogue of good works would override anyone with the temerity to challenge him.
There is, however, one key difference to consider. Unlike Leeds Infirmary and Broadmoor, Stoke Mandeville was a hospital that Jimmy Savile regarded as his private fiefdom.
It was an institution where he not only had an office with leather chairs that overlooked the children's ward, but also a private suite with a gold plaque on the door.
The cafeteria named after him; the pictures and mementos of his largesse that lined the walls; the unwillingness of staff to stand up to him for fear that he would pull the plug on his funding - these were all factors that fuelled the rampant narcissism forming one part of what psychologist Oliver James describes as Savile's "dark triad of personality characteristics". The others were psychopathy and Machiavellianism.
In 1978, five years before he had posed for the cameras with Prince Charles and Princess Diana at the opening of the new National Spinal Injury Centre, the moment when his fame and status within Britain were at their peak, Jimmy Savile described what he got out of the association with the Buckinghamshire hospital.
"There are forty wards at Stoke Mandeville... and they are all filled with people; I will be able to do exactly what I feel like doing. If I feel like going on the ladies' ward and pulling their legs, I can do that. If I want to go the kids' ward and have a bit of a knock about, I can do that."
Some might say that this would have seemed innocent at the time. Not true. In the same period a detective constable with the Thames Valley Police was contacted by a nurse at the hospital because staff were said to be worried that Savile was touching girls inappropriately during hospital visits.
When the police officer reported the matter to a senior colleague, he was told: "Jimmy Savile is a high-profile man. He must be OK. He could not be doing anything irregular. Don't worry about it." It was, tragically, just one of many missed opportunities.
There were other areas of the hospital Savile made it his business to visit, too, such as the mortuary. "'I find I've got a great aptitude for dead people," he told one newspaper in 1972, soon after his fund-raising activities had begun.
"When I'm holding somebody who's just died I'm filled with a tremendous love and envy. They've left behind their problems, they've made the journey."
As well making him feel like a dictator, Stoke Mandeville fed Savile's messiah complex. "I see my people there," he once told me.
"I walk across the car park, and there they all are. Sitting outside the front, all crippled in their wheelchairs... but as soon as they see me they all perk up." He saw himself as their saviour, or as he put it, "a geezer who saved their lives".
For all the money he raised for Stoke Mandeville - a level of philanthropy that he believed would off-set the fact that, as he admitted, he was a "great 'abuser' of things, and bodies, and people" - the hospital ultimately gave him access, status, acclaim, security and the freedom to offend with seeming impunity.
It is yet another depressing thread that runs through the three most high profile reports of the many now published by the NHS.
Stoke Mandeville witnessed the final moment of failure in the police investigation that surely had the best chance of bringing him to justice while he was alive.
In 2009, two Surrey Police officers interviewed Savile in his private office at the hospital where, secure in his lair and surrounded by the bricks and mortar he considered to be his own, he obfuscated, denied and then issued threats of his own.
He had dictated the venue, choosing an environment that screamed of what he had done for the country, rather than what he had been alleged to have done to schoolgirls from an approved school in Surrey, or, as we now know, the 63 people whose lives he polluted at a place in which they were meant to be cared for.
