• U.S.

THE CAPITAL: The Ghost

3 minute read
TIME

At press conferences, he always sat behind President Roosevelt’s big desk, a small, stooped man with bright, hooded eyes in a seamed face. Behind the hornrimmed glasses he looked bored and glum. He seldom said a word. He didn’t have to. As the Democrats’ ghostwriter and hatchet man, Charley Michelson got the party’s biggest guns to say it for him.

An ex-newsman (San Francisco Evening Post, New York World), Charley was hired in 1929 by John J. Raskob, then Democratic National chairman, in an effort to rebuild the party. A master of the sly phrase and rankling innuendo, he painted the Republicans as inept, as the party of privilege, of the “corporation lawyer” and the rich industrialist. He hung the depression around Hoover’s neck and kept it there. He made a mockery of Hoover’s optimism and never let the country forget Hoover’s theme that prosperity was just around the corner. He never let succeeding G.O.P. candidates forget Hoover’s prediction that “grass will grow in the streets” if the Democrats were elected.

Silent Orator. Charley wrote first drafts* for many of Roosevelt’s fireside chats. From his littered desk, speeches poured out through a hundred throats. Senators and Cabinet members provided the name and the larynx, Charley the words and the wit. The Republicans cursed him, called him “the puppet-master” and “the greatest silent orator in America.”

Charley was a master of timing. He smothered bad publicity with good. The day the New Deal admitted defeat in its ill-fated attempt to have the Army fly the mail (ten pilots were killed), the Administration announced that Andrew Mellon would be investigated for income-tax evasion.

The son of Prussian immigrants, Charley was brought up in Virginia City, Nev., where his father ran a dry-goods store. It was a brilliant family. His sister Miriam was a successful novelist. His brother Albert became one of the world’s great physicists, whose measurements of the speed of light won him the Nobel Prize in 1907, and helped Einstein develop the theory of relativity. Albert once candidly remarked that Charley was the most brilliant of them all.

Unawed. A sour man with a lurid private vocabulary, Charley never seemed to work. He often needed a shave, spent much time in the Press Club playing chess and dominoes with his newspaper cronies. He held no man in awe. Once Franklin Roosevelt greeted reporters with the remark that there was no news “except that Charley Michelson needs a haircut.” Snapped Michelson: “Somebody’s got to economize around here.” Once he told Jim Farley: “Jim, you’re the most honest man alive. You wouldn’t steal anything—except an election.”

Charley retired in 1942, was recalled briefly for the 1944 campaign. None of his successors filled his shoes. His heart was failing. For the last year, he had lived in an apartment in Washington, cared for by a nurse.

One morning last week Charley woke up around 7 o’clock and asked for a cup of coffee. When the nurse returned with it from the kitchen, Charley was dead. He was 78.

*But only the first. Roosevelt, said Charley, was “a greater phrasemaker than anyone around him.”

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