The Old Magic

In the Presidential Room of Washington’s Statler Hotel were gathered the elite of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America, and the elite of the city’s political society—assorted czars, administrators and politicians. They were met together to eat roast chicken, Virginia ham, peas, potato croquettes, salad, ice cream and coffee, to drink California sauterne and, more important, to get an answer to the biggest of the Democrats’ political questions: has The Old Master still got it?

The Old Master looked considerably thinner but very fit.* He ate heartily, drank only half of his glass of California sauterne, and sat thoughtfully oversmoking through the banquet. For the benefit of the Teamsters, the band played Don’t Change Horses in the Middle of the Stream, while Franklin Roosevelt made penciled notes on his manuscript. Then it was time to go on the air, before the millions of citizens who were also asking: Has he still got it?

Familiar Tune. Up rose white-haired Dan Tobin, for 37 years the absolute boss of the Teamsters. He stuck out the majestic Tobin stomach, and ordered the waiters to clear out. Then he sat down again, and the show was on the air. When, at last, the Tobin gravel voice had stopped quivering the rosy Tobin jowls, and the six-minute ovation was over, the President spoke.

The Old Master still had it. Franklin Roosevelt was at his best. He was like a veteran virtuoso playing a piece he has loved for years, who fingers his way through it with a delicate fire, a perfection of timing and tone, and an assurance that no young player, no matter how gifted, can equal. The President was playing what he loves to play—politics.

He started smoothly with a reference to the “mess that was dumped into our laps in 1933,” and then got down to cases. His first attack was on those Republicans, who, he said, “suddenly discover” every four years, just before Election Day, that they love labor—after having attacked labor for three years and six months.

“Common Fraud.” He “got quite a laugh,” he said, when he read the liberal labor plank in the 1944 GOPlatform, endorsed by the very men who “have personally spent years of effort and energy—and much money—in fighting every one of those [New Deal] laws in the Congress and in the press and in the courts. . . .” This, he said, was “a fair example of their insincerity and inconsistency.” He described what he called the effort of the Republican Old Guard to switch labels with the New Deal as “the most obvious common or garden variety of fraud.”

He paused in the attack just long enough to defend his Administration’s preparations for war. His defense: the isolationist record of the Republicans in Congress who opposed Lend-Lease and other preparedness measures. He ridiculed Republicans who have changed their views, and said, while labor leaders applauded: “I am too old for that. I cannot talk out of both sides of my mouth at the same time.”

The President, in all his 33-minute address, by his actor’s timing, by the voice that purrs softly and then strikes hard, by the frank ham-acting, kept his audience with him every minute that he was on the offensive.

Who Loves the Soldiers? Tom Dewey had charged in Philadelphia (TIME, Sept. 18) that the Administration is afraid of peace, and had quoted Major General Hershey’s statement, “We can keep people in the Army about as cheaply as we can create an agency for them when they are out.” This was “fantastic,” said Candidate Roosevelt; he had read it with “amazement.” The War Department had announced a plan for speedy demobilization. “This callous and brazen falsehood was, of course, a very simple thing . . . an effort to stimulate fear among American mothers, wives and sweethearts.”

Which party, he asked, was so afraid of the soldiers’ vote that it had tried its best to keep all U.S. servicemen from voting? The President charged flatly: “Millions of soldiers and sailors and merchant seamen have been handicapped or prevented from voting by those politicians and those candidates who think that they stand to lose by such votes.”

Whose Depression? Some Republican had made some remark about a “Roosevelt depression.” This, Mr. Roosevelt thought, was laughable indeed: “I rubbed my eyes when I read it.” Eloquently he recreated the Hoover breadlines, the apple stands, the “Hoovervilles,” thus carrying on the New Deal’s attack on Herbert Hoover into its twelfth successful year. This Republican prating about depression reminded him forcibly of an old adage which Republicans should keep in mind: “Never speak of a rope in the house of a man who’s been hanged.” In fatherly tones, Mr. Roosevelt offered the G.O.P. some advice: “If I were a Republican leader speaking to a mixed audience, the last word in the whole dictionary that I would think of using is that word ‘depression’. . . .”

Mr. Roosevelt feigned some reluctance in saying it, but there seemed to be something a bit “foreign” creeping into the campaign this year—a “propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad.” It was, he feared, a technique out of Mein Kampf; never tell a small lie, make it a fantastic whopper and keep repeating it.

The President kept his tone mainly light and good-humored, even in some of his most savage digs. But at one point his voice dropped into solemnity and he said: “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or on my wife, or on my sons—no, not content with that—they now include my little dog Fala.” The audience roared; even the stoniest of Republican faces around U.S. radios cracked into a smile.

“Malicious Falsehood.” The President then repudiated the “old worm-eaten chestnut” that he has ever “represented himself as indispensable.” This he described as a “malicious falsehood,” to which, he added, he was accustomed—but he still did resent “libelous statements about my dog.”

In closing, the President stressed that his postwar concern was to provide jobs, that that, very simply, was the issue. But, said he, there are three main tasks ahead: 1) winning a speedy victory; 2) setting up international machinery to keep the peace; 3) reconversion. Once before, almost a generation ago, the nation had faced the same tasks. They were botched by a Republican administration. With obvious relish, Candidate Roosevelt rolled out the letters and spelled the word: “Botched . . . botched by a Republican administration.”

The 1944 campaign was on—and Franklin Roosevelt had got off to a flying start.

“Political Bushwhacking.” Press comment was generally divided along partisan lines. The New York Times, which seems to prefer Term IV to Tom Dewey, praised the speech; the Republican New York Herald Tribune derided it. Of the independents, the most significant comment came from the Washington Post, which is more often pro-Roosevelt than not. The Post severely criticized the speech as “a cheap variety of political bushwhacking . . . at a moment when spiritual leadership of a high order is urgently needed. . . . It is doubtful whether the President’s indispensability complex has ever been more boldly exhibited.”

The speech, said the Post, “bristled with the arrogance that inevitably accompanies a feeling of inevitability,” and was the speech of a politician, not that of a statesman.