Amerikan Eagle

Miami, Florida, Wednesday, February 15, 1933

His whole life had been focused on keeping secrets, and after the twelve-day voyage south here on the
Nourmahal
, a luxury yacht owned by Vincent Astor—his neighbor from Warm Springs, Georgia—the newly elected president of the United States looked at the swarms of people meeting him at Bayfront Park this warm evening, and amid all the waves and jokes to his aides and puffs on his cigarette, he thought,
Children. They are all children, frightened at what has happened to them, what has happened to their families, what has happened to their country
. That was his latest secret, then, that he looked at the 140 million Americans out there and thought of them as children, even the twenty thousand who had gathered to see him tonight. Children who needed to look to a strong father who would promise to make everything right again. He grimaced, wondering what Colonel McCormack and his damnable
Chicago Tribune
would do with that particular thought. Which was why … secrets, so many secrets to be kept.

But oh, how that made sense, seeing all these people
as children. Their dreams, their lives, everything torn apart since Black Tuesday nearly four years ago, as the stock market crashed and the grinding Depression followed. Despite all the soothing words of Hoover and his administration, it had gotten worse month after month, year after year. Factory after factory shutting down. Farmland turning to desert. Unemployment lines and soup kitchen lines and relief lines stretching for miles through hushed and fearful cities.

So here he was. New York state senator, former assistant secretary of the navy, failed vice presidential candidate in 1924, two-term governor of New York, under a month away from being inaugurated the thirty-second president of the United States, and already he knew he would have enormous power and the authority to use it once he was in the White House. During the leisurely cruise south to Florida, as he fished and talked and drank his own well-made martinis, the work had been under way. He was picking his cabinet, conferring with his smart young men, eager to go to Washington to make the necessary and overdue changes. From getting people back to work to ending the embarrassment that was Prohibition to finally chopping out the rot in the capitalist system that allowed a depression to shatter so millions of lives … There was so much to do!

The heat was oppressive, he thought as the motorcade rumbled its way through the crowds, the excited people reaching out to touch him, he waving at them, enjoying their attention, enjoying, too, the trust they were putting in him. Such a time to be alive. The problems of this blessed and rich and desperately troubled country were not unique in the world and weren’t even the worst.
Japan was in Manchuria, ruthlessly slaughtering thousands of Chinese every day, hurtling threatening remarks about the Pacific and the Philippines. And Europe—ah, Europe, that would have to be faced once again, under two decades after the Great War. The global depression was devastating England and France and Germany. Now, Germany, that was a place to watch. An Austrian beer-hall rabble-rouser had just been named chancellor of Germany, and though elections were to be held there on March 5—the day after his own swearing-in—there was little doubt that Herr Hitler and his Nazi sons of bitches were going to seize power.

And speaking of sons of bitches, there were a handful here he needed to keep an eye on, like Senator Huey Long from Louisiana, the Kingfish himself. Just last week Long grabbed control of the state’s banking system—even though, as a U.S. senator, he had no authority to do so. But the governor there, a weak character named Oscar Allen, did what the Kingfish told him to do—and Long still ran that state as his own private kingdom. Long had campaigned hard for Roosevelt, but he still didn’t trust the man, not for a second. And there was Al Smith from New York, the former governor who believed he should have been the nominee last year. Keeping his enemies and friends in line was going to take a lot of a work, a lot of work, indeed. Certainly not one term; two terms, at least. And in the future, well, why not a third term? There was a tradition of only serving two terms, but the depth of the crisis—banks closing across the country, county judges lynched to prevent farm foreclosures, desperate streams of refugees going from state to state looking for work,
looking for a new life, looking for
hope
—would surely allow for tradition be tossed aside.

He was now sitting on the rear seat of his halted green Buick convertible, helped up by Gus Gennerich, head of his Secret Service detail, his legs with their ten-pound leg braces dangling uselessly before him. Yet another secret, his paralysis of nearly twelve years, a secret he was determined to keep from those who didn’t need to know. This was a time to be alive, but the millions of people who had voted for him might have hesitated had they known just how crippled he was.

The mayor of Miami introduced him, to thunderous cheers and applause. As the microphone was handed down to him, though he had no prepared speech, he would say a few words that would make everyone happy.

The crowd calmed as he talked about how many times he had visited Florida on his old houseboat, the
Larooco
, and how he’d had a wonderful time fishing. But he wouldn’t bore them with fishing stories, he told them, and after a few more words and some laughter from the people, he was done. He passed the microphone back to the mayor, and the crowd surged some more, and now there was a familiar man joining him in the convertible, breathing hard, face subdued. Anton Cermak, mayor of Chicago and one of Al Smith’s fellows. Cermak was here to kiss and make up—the poor man had twenty thousand schoolteachers who couldn’t be paid—and he was also here, hat in hand, to seek federal aid. Politics was politics, and there was always a price to be paid, but he wouldn’t let those teachers suffer because their mayor had backed the wrong horse at the Chicago convention last year.

Times had changed. Times were changing. The problems of a town or city or a state could no longer be settled by the locals. It was time for the federal government to take control, to improve things, to change the economy and rescue capitalism from its corrupt overseers, to give those poor children out there the flickering hope that things would improve, that something new would come, yes, that was it, the New Deal he had announced last year at the convention, a New Deal for the American people, the New Deal that would—

Noises.

Shouts.

Firecrackers?

God, his chest hurt.

He looked down, touched his white shirt. His hand came back bloody. Not firecrackers. Gunshots. Fired at him! More screams, and he felt the Buick begin to move, heard the shouting voice of Gus Gennerich telling the driver to move, move,
move
!

Now he was in the seat, on his side, his shoulders gripped by someone … Tony Cermak, it seemed like, telling him it would be all right, that he had to live, that he couldn’t leave them, not now, that this was wrong, so wrong, and the pain in his chest flared, and as the darkness grew, he tried to fight back because … it was
wrong!
There was so much to do, so much …

The darkness descended upon him. The voices grew distant. Even the pain seemed to subside.

Oh, there was so much to do.

CONFIDENTIAL

Partial transcript, phone call received 01 May 1943, FBI Officer in Charge, Boston Field Office, Federal Bureau of Investigation, from Confidential Informant “Charlie”:

CI Charlie:… sorry, it didn’t work out.

FBI OIC: What do you mean it didn’t work out?

CI Charlie: It didn’t work out. He’s dead. That’s it.

FBI OIC: Did you recover anything from the body?

CI Charlie: Not a goddamn thing.

FBI OIC: Were you seen?

CI Charlie: I don’t think so.

FBI OIC: There’s going to be hell to pay.

CI Charlie: Tell me about it.

FBI OIC: And you should know, something huge is coming down the pike in less than a week and in your neck of the woods. You and your crew better be ready. You can’t afford to screw up again or you’ll be a dead man for sure, along with whoever else gets in the way or screws up.

CI Charlie: But there’s going to be a police presence on this, I’m sure—

FBI OIC: What, you think a local police badge protects anyone nowadays?

CI Charlie: Oh, Christ.