THE PRESIDENCY: You and I Know —

The morning was fresh, cold and clear. At the Poughkeepsie railroad station, a few loafers, hands in pockets, gazed blankly at the big open touring car (license District of Columbia 101), its tan top up against the chill. The country’s first citizen, bundled in a grey topcoat, sat alone in the car. Franklin Roosevelt smoked a cigaret and waited, inhaling great puffs, waving the cigaret sweepingly after each draw.

The Presidency is a lonely job, a post that gets lonelier year by year. (Calvin Coolidge, who saw no reason why it should be so, was finally convinced that it was so, the day his intimates could no longer keep from him a rumor that Mrs. Coolidge would divorce him as soon as he left the White House.) At some moments the job seems lonelier than usual. The man sitting serenely in the touring car had become, out of his own choosing, the loneliest of all U. S. Presidents.

Recently he had been forced, for political considerations (there was a campaign on), to banish from his side a number of his closest friends, headed by stringy, loyal Harry Hopkins. The strict procession of his daily chores, his day-&-night responsibility for the U. S. (there was a world revolution on) had left him few minutes in any day for the relaxations a plain citizen may enjoy.

But there was a greater reason for the President’s loneliness. Few had sought and none had won a third election to the Presidency. Knowing U. S. history as a boy knows batting averages, Franklin Roosevelt knew that he had left the shelter of precedent, had pushed off on a course without chart or landmark. Through the vapor that is the future he could steer only by the North Star of his own purpose.

If any qualm or chilly premonitions visited the President last week, he gave no sign. Gone were the pallor and nervousness of last spring. He was ruddy, calm, self-confident. Some of his intimates whispered that even when he is alone, at night, in the history-haunted White House, even then Franklin Roosevelt feels not so much as a tingle of worry over the morrow.

The day before, the President had put aside the fiction that he had been drafted at Chicago, in the ordinary sense of the word draft. Now he was going out to campaign openly for the job, paying obeisance to the word draft only by saying that the misstatements of opponents had forced him to speak. Political writers, combing history for a man who had really been drafted, found one (who was more legend than fact): Cincinnatus of 458 B.C., who was quietly plowing his acres when Roman messengers hauled him away to rule Rome. Nobody last week likened Franklin Roosevelt to Cincinnatus.

Candidate Roosevelt allowed himself five speeches: October 23, Philadelphia; October 28, New York City; October 30, Washington; November 2, Cleveland; and a Hyde Park radio address on election eve, November 4.

In a statement the President had recalled his acceptance speech at Chicago: “I shall not have the time or the inclination to engage in any purely political debate. But I shall never be loath to call the attention of the nation to deliberate or unwitting falsifications of fact.” Now he said there had been systematic falsifications, not unwitting but deliberate; that he had decided to tell the people what these falsities were; that the Democratic National Committee would pay his expenses. The President had eased himself out of the dilemma that always confronts a candidate in office, the dilemma that had embarrassed Wilson and Coolidge, had broken Herbert Hoover’s heart: if you campaign while in office, people think you’re neglecting your work; if you don’t, your opponent mops the floor with you.

The President had said that “only the people themselves can draft a President.” Now, unlike Cincinnatus, he was leaving his plow and going out to look for some Roman messengers. Even Roosevelt-hating Arthur Krock, New York Times columnist, gave the President’s decision to campaign backhanded praise (he likened him not to Cincinnatus but to Coriolanus, the patrician who despised the plebeian voters but went through the form of asking for their votes, because he wanted the office of Consul), even admitted that the decision was “of great value to democracy.” Candidate Willkie seemed delighted and excited. The general feeling was: Here he comes! Now, at last, the campaign will really get down to cases.

At Poughkeepsie station President Roosevelt smoked calmly until the train from the north came in—green coaches emblazoned with the Canadian crest. Protocol-Master George Thomas Summerlin dropped his hand-rolled, brown-paper cigaret, brushed off his pencil-stripe trousers, walked down the station stairs to greet the tweedy Guards-mustached Earl of Athlone, Governor General of Canada, his wife, Princess Alice, their daughter, Lady May Abel Smith.

When the party had creaked upstairs in a freight elevator, the President stretched out a big hand, said warmly, “How do you do?” Princess Alice tinkled, “So nice of you to come.” The Earl, the Princess sat beside the President; their daughter, Lady May, perched on a jump seat. Deafish Sir Shuldham Redfern, secretary, and pretty Hon. Ariel Baird, lady-in-waiting drove off with Mr. Summerlin.

The cars whisked over the eight miles of the Albany Post Road, past the Hudson, grey-blue through the autumn leaves, past filling stations, hot-dog stands, fat-looking farms, to the grey-blue fieldstone walls of the ancestral Roosevelt acres, through trooper-guarded iron gates, and up the half-mile lane of maple trees.

Over the entrance to the rambling mansion (built 1748-51) flew the U. S. flag, the blue, eagle-crested President’s flag. Inside the door, vigorous Mother Sara Delano Roosevelt said to her Canadian visitors: “You must have some hot coffee.” At noon the President, keen as a boy with a brand-new bicycle, took the guests to see the apple of his eye, his pet project, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library: three stories of fieldstone cottage, in whose 60-odd exhibition rooms and offices are being installed one of the greatest collections of memorabilia and historic junk ever gathered—a collection that ranges from a Russian Tsar’s red-felt-lined droshky to Roosevelt’s vast political and naval library, his hundreds of boxes of papers.

After an hour of this, and lunch, the President drove the Princess round the estate (the Earl had a cold), named all the trees and plants and flowers. At 5 o’clock, as dusk settled over the low Catskills, the five visitors, the President, his mother, Mr. Summerlin, and Franklin D. Roosevelt III, 2, gathered for tea and cocktails. Minute, rompered Franklin Roosevelt III sat on a hassock and ate a cookie like a good boy. His great-grandmother said sadly: “His name is Franklin Delano Roosevelt the Third, but everybody calls him Joe.” Joe acted like a little gentleman until his nurse came to take him away. Then he kicked like hell.

That night the President talked international affairs with the big, bluff, grey Earl; again next morning after church.

That night he took the train back to Washington, back to his pressure-shaped, lonely job. This week he would go out and begin his rolling phrase: “You and I know—.” He had cut his margin close: from Oct. 23 to Nov. 4 is only twelve days. Twelve days in which to campaign for a third term; to answer the opposition, to state his own case, to meet the issues, to explain to his fellow countrymen that, if he was not Cincinnatus, he was not Coriolanus either.

*Reverend Frank R. Wilson, Bishop Julius W.

Atwood (ret.) of Arizona, Sara Delano Roosevelt, Princess Alice, President Roosevelt, Bodyguard Thomas Quakers.