He ate bacon and eggs and drank strong coffee at a greasy spoon on the way back to his hotel. Coffee or no, in his room he put his alarm clock too far from the bed for him to kill it without getting up.
* * *
Mike Sullivan didn’t like going up to Albany to cover Governor Roosevelt. He didn’t like having to go to Albany to cover FDR. He was an inch taller and two years older than Charlie-two years grumpier, they both liked to say. Mike had a perfectly good apartment in Greenwich Village. As far as he was concerned, if the state of New York had to have a governor and a legislature, it could damn well stash them in New York City, which was where it put everything that mattered.
But no. He had to leave his cat and his girlfriend and come upstate to the front edge of nowhere if he needed to report on Franklin D. Roosevelt. (To him, the middle of nowhere lay about halfway between Syracuse and Rochester.)
Massachusetts did things right. The big city there was Boston, and it was also the state capital. But an amazing number of states, even ones with proper cities, plopped their capitals in towns that barely showed up on the map. Pennsylvania was run from Harrisburg, even though it boasted Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. California had San Francisco and Los Angeles, but it was run from Sacramento. Portland and Seattle didn’t tell Oregon and Washington what to do; Eugene and Olympia did.
The list went on. Tallahassee, Florida. Annapolis, Maryland. Springfield, Illinois. Jefferson City, Missouri. Frankfort, Kentucky. Not one a place you’d visit unless you had to.
Albany met that description. It did to Mike, anyway. It wasn’t a tiny village. It had something like 130,000 people in it. But when you came from a city of 7,000,000, give or take a few, 130,000 were barely enough to notice, even if one of them had a better than decent chance of becoming the next President.
Plenty of reporters camped around the big red-brick State Executive Mansion on the corner of Eagle and Elm. To keep them happy, Roosevelt held a press conference the morning after the Democrats started balloting. The press room was on the ground floor of the Executive Mansion. Despite the electric lamps that lit the chamber and the lectern with the microphone, it seemed to Mike to come straight out of the Victorian age, when the mansion was built. The building’s modern conveniences were, and obviously were, later additions.
Roosevelt already stood behind the lectern when his flunkies let the reporters into the room. With the braces on his legs, he could stand, and even take a halting step or two, but that was it. Somebody would have had to help him into place there. He didn’t care for outsiders to watch him getting helped that way. He and his flunkies really didn’t care for anyone photographing him getting helped that way. Mike understood why they didn’t. It made him look weak, which was the last thing anyone aiming for the White House wanted.
“Hello, boys!” Roosevelt said. Mike thought the governor’s rich tenor voice had an accent almost as affected as the cigarette holder jutting from his mouth. Somehow, though, FDR got away with the holder and with the old-boy accent where a lesser man would have been laughed at. Behind the gold frames of his spectacles, his eyes twinkled. “Nothing much to talk about today, is there? Not as though Chicago’s given us any news.”
He got the laugh he’d surely been looking for. “How many ballots do you think it’ll take, Governor?” asked a reporter Mike had never seen before-surely an out-of-stater.
“You know, Roy, I haven’t even worried about that,” FDR said. The men in the press room laughed again, this time in disbelief. Mike chuckled along with everybody else, but he also saw that Roosevelt knew who the reporter was even if he didn’t. Roosevelt hardly ever missed that kind of trick-and the attention to detail paid off. Looking wounded but smiling at the same time, the Governor held up a hand. “Honest injun, I haven’t. We’ll get where we want to go in the end, and nothing else matters.”
“Joe Steele will have something to say about that,” another newshawk called.
Franklin Roosevelt shrugged. He had broad, strong shoulders. He swam a lot for physical therapy-and, usually where no one could see him, he used crutches. “It’s a free country, Grover. He can say whatever he wants. But just because he says it, that doesn’t make it so.” There was, or seemed to be, a certain edge to his tone.
Hearing that, Mike asked, “What do you think of his Four Year Plan, Governor?”
“Ah, Mr. Sullivan.” No surprise that Roosevelt knew who Mike was. “What do I think of it? I think he thinks the American people want someone-need someone-to tell them what to do. In some distant European lands, that may perhaps be true. But I am confident that here in the United States we are able to look out for ourselves better than he thinks. I believe my New Deal will let us do that, help us do that, better than anything he’s proposed while still cleaning up the mess Mr. Hoover has left us.”
Most of the reporters scrawled down the response, probably without thinking about it much. But one of Mike’s eyebrows quirked as he wrote. If that wasn’t a dig at Joe Steele for coming out of tyrannical Russia, he’d never heard one. It was a polite dig, a well-disguised dig, but a dig all the same. The words behind the words were something like He doesn’t really understand how America works. Maybe it was true, maybe not. Digs didn’t have to be to sting. That Trotsky’s modern Russia was even more tyrannical than the one Joe Steele’s parents had left only gave it a sharper point.
Quickly, Mike tried a follow-up question: “If you get the nomination, sir, what do you think Joe Steele will do?”
Roosevelt smiled his patrician smile. “He’s represented the people of his farm district for a long time now. He can probably get the nomination there again.”
After that, nobody asked whether there’d be a place for Joe Steele in a Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. FDR hadn’t said Go back and tend to your raisins in so many words, but he might as well have. A low hum rose from the press corps, so Mike wasn’t the only one who got it. No, Roosevelt didn’t love Joe Steele, not even a little bit.
And how did Joe Steele feel about Roosevelt? In Albany, that didn’t seem important enough to worry about. The Post got a whacking good story, though.
* * *
Moving the alarm clock proved smart: Charlie squashed his hat trying to make the clock shut up. He staggered down the stairs and out the door. He grabbed more java on the way back to the Stadium. By the time he got there, he made a pretty fair ventriloquist’s dummy of his real self. Progress, he thought.
In the lobby, somebody said, “What I really wanna do is pour a pitcher of ice water over my head.” Charlie was already sweating, and the new session’s politicking hadn’t started. If he’d seen a pitcher of ice water he could have grabbed, he might have done it, suit and cigarettes and notebooks be damned.
At one on the dot, the chairman gaveled the convention to order. “I will summon the secretary, and we shall proceed to the twenty-sixth ballot,” he said.
“Twenty-seventh!” The cry came from several places.
The chairman did summon the secretary, and briefly consulted with him. “The twenty-seventh ballot-excuse me,” he said with a wry grin. “Time flies when you’re having fun.”
They balloted through the night again. In the votes before midnight, Joe Steele forged ahead, a few votes this round, a few more the next. But when the wee smalls rolled around, FDR started gaining again. He kept gaining till the sky lightened once more. This time, Stas Mikoian moved to adjourn.
Roosevelt’s backers didn’t object-they had to eat and drink and sleep (and perhaps even piss and bathe) like anyone else. But they were jubilant as they walked out into the new day. Things finally looked to be rolling their way. The people who liked Joe Steele most seemed glummest.