Still blunt, Joe Steele went on, “England is running out of money to buy war supplies from us. They can’t turn out enough to fight off the Germans on their own. If we don’t give them credit-or give them what they need now and worry later about getting paid back-they’ll fold up. So get me a draft of a speech saying that’s what we’ll do. I’ll run a bill through Congress to keep it legal.”
He would, too. Congress was as much under his muscular thumb as the courts were. Congressmen who made him unhappy found themselves with legal troubles-or with scandals exploding in their districts.
Charlie wrote the speech. Joe Steele used some of it on the radio. People didn’t jump up and down about the idea of taking a step closer to war. They didn’t do much complaining where anyone else could hear them, then. You never knew who might tell a Jeebie you were a wrecker. Labor encampments always needed fresh backs. Joe Steele’s bill sailed through Congress.
Across the Atlantic, Churchill took note of the new law. “Once again, America is too proud to fight,” he said. “But, luckily, she is not too proud to help us fight. Well, fair enough. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job. If the Devil opposed Adolf Hitler, I should endeavor to give him a good notice in the House of Commons. Thus I thank Joe Steele.”
“Did I just hear that?” Esther exclaimed after Churchill’s speech crackled across the sea by shortwave. She sounded as if she couldn’t believe her ears.
“Yeah, you did, ’cause I heard it, too,” Charlie said. “I wouldn’t go on about it with your friends or anything, though.”
She made a face at him. “I know better than that.”
“Okay.” Charlie left it there. He needed a shortwave set. In his job, he had to hear the news as soon as he could. It wasn’t against the law for anybody to have that kind of radio and to listen to whatever he pleased. But Churchill wasn’t the only foreign leader who threw darts at Joe Steele over the airwaves. If you repeated them, you could find yourself in more trouble than you really wanted.
Was Joe Steele listening to the Prime Minister’s speech? Charlie had no way of knowing. Sometimes Joe Steele slept in the middle of the day and stayed up all night-and made his aides and anyone who needed to do business with him stay up all night, too. Sometimes he kept the same hours as anybody else. He was a law unto himself.
Whether the President was listening now or not, he would hear about the gibe. Charlie was sure of that. And, sooner or later, Joe Steele would find a way to make Churchill pay. Charlie was sure of that, too.
* * *
The Republicans gathered in Philadelphia to pick someone to run for President. Charlie wondered why they bothered. They might not know they wouldn’t win, but everybody else did. A couple of Senators wanted a crack at Joe Steele. So did Tom Dewey, the young Governor of New York. He’d been a crusading district attorney. To Charlie, he looked and sounded like a GBI man.
They didn’t nominate him. Maybe they thought he was too young. Maybe they thought he acted like a Jeebie, too. They also didn’t nominate either Senator. They chose a dark horse, a newcomer to politics-and to the Republican Party-named Wendell Willkie.
“I used to be a Democrat,” Willkie declared in his acceptance speech. “I used to be, till Joe Steele drove me out of the party. He’s driven everybody who cares about freedom out of the party. Now it’s time to drive him out of the White House! Nobody’s ever had a third term. Nobody’s ever deserved one. He sure doesn’t. Let’s put this country back together again!”
All the Republicans in the hall cheered and clapped. Coming out of the radio in Charlie’s front room, the noise was like the roar of heavy surf. He had no doubt that J. Edgar Hoover’s men had already compiled a dossier for every delegate and alternate. Chances were, a list of all those names had already crossed Vince Scriabin’s desk. Beside how many of them had the Hammer scribbled HFP?
Three weeks after the GOP tapped Willkie, the Democrats convened at the Chicago Stadium. Charlie hadn’t been back there since the convention in 1932. He wondered if that diner near the Stadium was still in business. He didn’t try to find out. He also made damn sure he didn’t remind Scriabin about it.
Things were different now. He was working for Joe Steele, not covering his nomination. There wouldn’t be any fight at this convention, either. It would do what Joe Steele wanted. It would, and it did. It nominated him and John Nance Garner for third terms.
“I thank you,” the President told the Democratic politicos (and chances were the Jeebies had files on them, too). “I thank you for your trust. If the world were not in such disorder, I might not run again. But the country needs an experienced hand on the wheel. I will do my best to keep us going in the right direction, and I will do my best to stay at peace with the whole world.”
They cheered him. Charlie applauded with everybody else. You couldn’t sit there like a bump on a log. And the sentiment was worthwhile. The only question was whether Joe Steele, or anyone else, could live up to it.
Wendell Willkie charged around the country. He had energy. He’d make a speech wherever a couple of dozen people gathered. Joe Steele didn’t campaign nearly so hard. He told people he didn’t intend to go to war. He asked them if they wanted to change horses in midstream.
And his organization carried the ball for him. The only way somebody wouldn’t tell you to vote for Joe Steele was if you climbed a mountain, lived in a cave, and ate bugs. Even then, one of his men might try to recruit you for a HERMITS FOR JOE STEELE club.
Charlie wrote the speeches Joe Steele told him to write. Hitler did his best to get the President reelected. The savage air attacks against England and the U-boats terrorizing shipping in the Atlantic warned against picking a rookie to try to run things.
In the last six weeks before the election, J. Edgar Hoover came to the White House almost every day. He might have been briefing Joe Steele about Reds and Nazis doing their dirty work somewhere inside the country. He might have, but Charlie didn’t think so. Every time he saw the GBI boss, J. Edgar Hoover was grinning. Smirking might have been the better word.
Like any bulldog, J. Edgar Hoover usually looked as if he wanted to take a bite out of whoever got near him. A happy J. Edgar Hoover made Charlie wonder how and why such a prodigy could happen. A happy J. Edgar Hoover also scared the hell out of him.
Joe Steele often smiled after he talked to Hoover, too. The President showed amusement more often than the Jeebies’ head honcho did. He would have had trouble showing amusement less often than J. Edgar Hoover did. But a smiling Joe Steele, like a smirking J. Edgar Hoover, made anyone who saw him wonder what was going on behind that upcurved mouth.
People who lived in Washington, D.C., all the time didn’t have the right to vote for President. Joe Steele retained his California registration. He had himself photographed dropping an absentee ballot in the mailbox so it would arrive in good time.
And then election day rolled around. Joe Steele had trounced Herbert Hoover fair and square (as long as you didn’t dwell on how he’d won the nomination, anyhow). He hadn’t pulled any funny business clobbering Alf Landon, either. He hadn’t needed any.
Charlie would have liked to stay with Esther and Sarah and listen to the returns on the radio. When you wrote speeches for the President of the United States, nobody cared what you liked to do, not on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of a year divisible by four. He went to the White House instead.
Colored cooks brought in trays of ham and fried chicken and sweet potatoes and string beans. Colored waiters served the men who served Joe Steele. A colored bartender had set up shop in a corner of the East Hall.
“Bourbon over ice,” Charlie told him.
“Yes, suh,” the barkeep answered with a smile. That was an easy one: no mixing, no thinking. Charlie tipped him a dime anyway. The bartender smiled again. So did Charlie. He used bourbon the way a knight of old used his shield: to hold trouble at a distance.