Bernard Baruch
NOTE: Bernard Mannes Baruch (1870-1965) became famous in the first half of the century as an adviser to Presidents. The legend, exuberantly cultivated by him, was that he sat on a bench in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, and waited for Presidents or Cabinet members to happen along, join him, and ask him what they should do. Sometimes this actually happened. Perhaps because starting from nothing he had amassed a huge fortune, he was considered uncannily shrewd, and his counsel was indeed sought—or, in some cases, fought off—by Presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Dwight Eisenhower. His actual public service was limited; he was on the War Industries Board during the First World War, and after the Second World War was United States representative on the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. But he was happy to give advice whenever it was sought, and often when it was not. Many influential people took him very seriously. As to moneymaking, he told me one day that it was just a faculty. “Some men,” he said, “can make funny faces, others can make fools of themselves, others can make money. How can you define a talent? What makes one fellow able to stand up in the ring and belt the daylights out of someone else? What makes another so good at standing on his head, another able to cut such fancy curlicues on ice skates, and another so clever at saying ‘Blah-blah-blah’?” He did in truth have an astonishing gift for buying at the bottom of the market and selling at the top. This talent, it appeared, made him healthy, wealthy, and, in the popular view, uncommonly wise.
Dew was heavy on the grass beside the long row of stables. A thin blue plume of smoke stood up from the chimney of the mess shack across from the stables, and the early sunlight glistened on the tents of the swipes and exercise boys ranged along the outer edge of the field beside the mess shack. Few sounds broke the stillness of the morning—stamping in the stalls, muffled human and equine coughs now and again, occasional ejaculations and sharp bursts of laughter from the boys, and a distant jubilee of peepers in some flats not far from the track. Many of the stalls were empty; this was the last week of the Saratoga season, and quite a number of horses had already been shipped to other tracks. It was about eight o’clock. Robert J. Kleberg, Jr., owner of the King Ranch, in Texas, of Assault, and of all the horses in these stables, sat alone in a garden chair under a brilliantly colored and incongruous beach umbrella, up toward one end of the row of stalls. Max Hirsch, Kleberg’s trainer, stood under a tree talking with some of the exercise boys. Hirsch, a sharp-faced man with glasses, was wearing a gabardine shooting jacket, with a shoulder patch to couch the butt of a gun; he kept his hands in his pants pockets and his shoulders hunched, and talked in a husky voice. A black mongrel dog lay by the trainer’s feet.
A Cadillac limousine drove up the road that led into the Kleberg stable area. It stopped on the grass not far from the mess shack. “Here’s the boss,” Hirsch said, and turned and walked toward the car. The dog followed him. Kleberg stood up and also approached the limousine. A chauffeur got out and opened the car door. A huge old man stepped out of the car and, behind him, a young woman. The old man—Bernard Mannes Baruch—straightened up and stood like a general reviewing troops. He had on a single-breasted suit, a topcoat parted in front enough to show a Phi Beta Kappa key hanging from a watch chain, and a gray, snap-brim hat. He wore a white plastic hearing aid in his right ear.
“Hello, Boss,” Hirsch said.
“Hello, Max,” the old man said. He shook hands with the trainer and then turned to receive Kleberg. “Hello,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind our coming out to look things over.”
“Delighted to have you,” Kleberg said.
“This is Navarro, my nurse,” Baruch said.
Hirsch asked, “Want to look at the horses now, Boss, or would you rather have your breakfast first?”
Baruch slapped his stomach and said, “I’d better have a bite first. Otherwise, I might eat one of your horses.” He laughed. He had got up, in the Gideon Putnam Hotel, an hour earlier, quartered and eaten three oranges, worked fifteen minutes with dumbbells, taken a cold bath, dressed, and driven out to the track; and he was hungry.
A girl of about twenty, in blue jeans and a tweed jacket, with her hair tightly braided and pinned up on the back of her head, came out of the mess shack. Kleberg introduced her to Baruch as his daughter Helenita, and Baruch stepped right over to her and said, in deep Southern tones, “Well, Miss, I see you like to ride.”
“I do, yes,” she said.
“Do you do any shooting?”
“A little.”
“What kind of gun do you use?”
“A four-ten.”
“A four-ten!” Baruch put his hands over his ears and made a face that suggested he had never before in all his seventy-seven years been the recipient of such astounding news. “Do you realize,” he asked Miss Navarro when he had recovered, “that a four-ten has a muzzle no bigger than that?” And he made a circlet less than the size of a dime with his forefinger. “You must be a formidable shot,” he said to Miss Kleberg gravely.
“You ought to see her father,” said Hirsch. “I’ve seen Mr. Kleberg stick his left hand out the window of a moving automobile and take the head right off a turkey with an automatic.”
“I remember,” Baruch said, “a man named Wingfield, George Wingfield. He was a man with a gun. He started out as a jockey. Then he was a gambler in Western mining camps, and a prospector. One day, he stopped in at the bank in Winnemucca, Nevada, and asked George Nixon, the fellow who ran the bank, for a stake of a few hundred dollars. Well, Nixon and Wingfield got to be partners, and Nixon became a senator. On the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of December, 1906 (I believe it was), William Crocker, of San Francisco—he had a pointed beard; he was a great believer in the West, a great optimist—came into my office in New York with Senator Nixon and said Nixon needed two million five hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars for a gold mine he and Wingfield were developing. Goldfields Consolidated, it was called. Nixon made a noise like a dividend, so I put up a million and got involved in the enterprise myself. The first time I saw Wingfield was when I went out to Goldfield quite a bit later to look the property over. He was carrying five revolvers—two here, two here, and one here. He also had four Pinkerton detectives with him. Wingfield told me he’d been having labor trouble with some of the I.W.W. boys in his mine. One reason was a company rule he had, to the effect that the men working in the high-grade mines had to strip as they started home, and then they had to jump over a bar, so that any nuggets of gold they might have hidden under their arms or between their legs would fall on the floor. The I.W.W. had beaten up Wingfield’s superintendent and some of his foremen and left them out in the desert. Wingfield had ridden out himself and brought the men in and walked right through a mob of the strikers in front of the bank. He was afraid of nothing. When the strikers tried to knock out a newspaper he published by frightening the newsboys and distributors off the streets, Wingfield went out and peddled his papers himself. One of the strikers waylaid him, but Wingfield knocked the man out with the butt of one of his guns. As I say, Wingfield was the best shot I ever saw. Out at one of the mines, someone would throw a bottle up, end over end, behind him, and he’d wheel around and get one of his guns up in a single motion and break the bottle. Now, that’s shooting…. I’m hungry! Let’s eat!”
Max Hirsch opened the door of the mess shack; Baruch bowed to Miss Navarro and let her pass in ahead of him; Baruch and Kleberg followed; Miss Kleberg went off to exercise a horse. The shack had two small rooms—a dining room and a kitchen. Two places were set at a round table; the Klebergs and Hirsch had eaten earlier. Baruch took off his hat but not his topcoat, and sat down, along with the others. A fat, smiling Negro woman served cuts of melon.
“That’s a fine girl, your daughter, Mr. Kleberg,” Baruch said as he shook a great deal of salt on his melon and began to eat. “A fine, pretty girl. You know, I have reason to remember her grandfather on her mother’s side. He was a member of Congress, as you know. Congressman Campbell.”
Kleberg smiled and nodded.
Baruch ate with relish and said, between mouthfuls, “He took part in the ‘leak investigation.’ First time I was ever investigated. Let’s see—it was in January, 1917. The month before that, there had been a series of peace rumors, and with each one the stock market broke a little, and each time it did, I sold short and made some money. I made five hundred thousand dollars one day. A rumor got around that I had made my money on the strength of some information from the White House, supposedly a leak of some peace negotiations. So these congressmen called me in to investigate me. I got them in the palm of my hand at the very beginning. They asked me my name and address, then they asked me my occupation, and I guess they expected me to say I was a banker, or something dignified like that. I sat up straight and said I was a speculator. That had ‘em. Then I went on to tell them I made my money in perfectly legal ways—just by being faster than the next fellow. For instance, on December 16, 1916 (I believe it was), I was standing at the ticker reading a news report of a speech by Lloyd George. The first part of the story was full of determination; the British would carry on, they’d fight to the last man, and so on. Then the word ‘but’ came over the ticker. I didn’t have to see any more. I knew that whatever followed that ‘but’ would start another rumor and peace scare and a decline. So on the strength of that one word I immediately sold heavily, and that was the day I made half a million. Well, through all the investigation your little girl’s grandfather was very courteous and understanding, but there was this other fellow—I forget his name, he was some sort of a radical from the Northwest—”
The cook brought Miss Navarro and Baruch plates with several huge, fat pancakes on them, and coffee. “Ah!” Baruch said. “Flapjacks! Fine, fine! Please pass the butter, Navarro. Now the molasses, please. Fine, fine!…As I say, this other fellow was extremely obnoxious, trying to be as unpleasant as he could. Then, all of a sudden, in one of the afternoon sessions, I noticed he was getting polite and seemed to be very good to me. After the session—some more molasses, please, Navarro…thank you—after the session, Lacey, my faithful attendant for twenty-odd years, was approached by a woman who said she was this harsh congressman’s wife, and she asked if the man who was being investigated was a son of Belle Baruch, from down in Camden, South Carolina. Lacey said I was. ‘Then I’m going to tell my old man to lay off,’ the lady said, ‘or else I’ll tear his eyes out. No son of Belle Baruch could ever do anything wrong.’ He laid off, too. When I got back to New York, I told Mother—she was then sixty-seven—what had happened. You must understand, Mr. Kleberg, that my mother was a remarkable woman. She was very beautiful, and she had a pure and serene heart. She always endeavored to instill into her children lessons of tolerance and kindliness. ‘If you can’t say anything pleasant about a person, keep your tongue between your teeth,’ she’d say to us, and ‘If you touch pitch, it’ll stick to your fingers.’ She was active in all kinds of charities. Whether she worked for the benefit of the Montefiore Home or the J. Hood Wright Memorial Hospital—whether it was for a Jewish or Protestant or Catholic organization made no difference to Mother so long as she felt she was doing some good. Late in her life, the people who used to work with her on these charities called her ‘la Grande Duchesse’…. More coffee? Thank you, yes, I will…. Well, when I told my mother what had happened during the investigation, she said, ‘Now, let me see, let me see.’ I could tell she was trying to think of the nicest thing she could say. Then she told me that when she and Father—he was a remarkable person, too—lived in Camden, there were only four or five Jewish families there: the De Leons, the Levys, the Baums, and the Wittkowskys, as I remember it. Then another Jewish family immigrated to this country and moved to Camden and opened a bakery. And Mother said that one day she saw the baker’s wife breastfeeding her child in the open street, and Mother told her, in the gentlest sort of way, that customs were somewhat unusual in the Southern part of the United States, that there were certain kinds of unnecessary modesty, that it might be better to nurse the child indoors, and so on. Always after that, the baker’s family thought Mother was an angel. And this congressman’s wife was the baker’s daughter. You can see from this how kindness always comes home again.”
BARUCH ON HIS PARK BENCH
“We can fix the world. We’ve got to believe we can, and then we will.”
By this time, Baruch had cleaned his plate and had finished his second cup of coffee. “Now!” he said. “Is Assault going to beat Armed?” Kleberg and Hirsch and he talked awhile about various Kleberg horses, and then they decided to go out and look at some of them. As they stood up to leave, Baruch whispered to Miss Navarro and she opened her purse, took out a five-dollar bill, and gave it to him. “Best flapjacks I’ve had in a dog’s age,” he said to the cook, who was clearing away the dishes, and he handed her the bill. “Always glad to see you, Mr. Baruch,” she said. “Come back real soon.”
The three men and Miss Navarro went outside and stood for a time watching the exercise boys walk a number of horses in blankets around and around a tiny oval. Presently, Baruch pointed at one of the handlers and said, “See that fellow over there—the one in the mutton-pie hat? He used to work for me. There’s a fellow, a few years ago he was down, both mentally and physically, way down lower than a snake’s belly. I got ahold of him and took him down to Hobcaw Barony, my place in South Carolina, and he used to go shooting with me. He couldn’t hit a flying barn, but he’d tramp all day and he’d try. Bit by bit, he began to get feeling better, and now look at him. He’s on top of the heap.” Suddenly, Baruch’s voice became a few tones deeper and its resonance increased; a seriousness and persuasiveness came into his face. “You know, it’s the same way with nations as it is with men. We, as a nation, can’t let all this get us down. Now, Joe Kennedy—the former Ambassador, you know—he’ll say to me, ‘Oh, it’s all gone to hell in a bucket, and you know it, Bernie.’ But he doesn’t believe that: Joe’s got a sense of humor, he’s pulling my leg. None of us believes that. We’ve got to think we can lick this thing, and then, by God, we will lick it.”
The conversation swung back to horses, and Kleberg suggested that Baruch might like to see Bridal Flower, a horse that, Kleberg remarked, was a beauty all alone on the track in morning workouts but not yet calm enough in races with other horses. One of the swipes led the horse out of her stall; she was a slight filly, nicely proportioned and nicely named. Kleberg said to his trainer, “Max, tell Mr. Baruch how fast you think that horse’ll run a mile one of these days.”
The trainer, patting his dog, said, “Bridal Flower’s a horse that can go. She’ll go out there sometime and break the world’s record.”
“Don’t talk to me about world’s records,” Baruch said. “I got myself badly burned by a world’s record once. I had a horse called Knapsack, a dandy horse. I had high hopes for Knapsack. One day, he was up against a fast thing—I think it was called Cherry Pie—a very speedy animal, but I really thought Knapsack could win the race, so I sent a boy to put a bet on him. I told the boy to put twenty-five thousand on the nose on Knapsack, but when he came back, he said he was terribly sorry, he’d made an error, he’d put thirty-two thousand on my horse. I said, ‘That’s all right, son, we all make mistakes.’ At that point, I could afford to be tolerant, because I was sure I was going to win. Well, they ran the race, and Cherry Pie broke the world’s record and beat Knapsack by the whiskers on the end of his nose. But he had to break the record to do it. That’s the reason I don’t like to talk about world’s records. Let’s talk about something else!”
Hirsch had a new subject all ready. “Want to see a remarkable dog do some work?” he asked.
“I always enjoy watching a good dog,” Baruch said.
“Well, take a look at this,” the trainer said. He took a quarter out of his pocket, rubbed it hard between his thumb and forefinger to get a scent on it, and scaled it nearly fifty yards across the road toward a field of tall grass and goldenrod. The mongrel sprinted off as soon as the coin left Hirsch’s hand. As the quarter fell toward the field, it hit the white fence along the road and ricocheted into the grass at the edge. The dog, evidently judging his run by the coin’s early flight, ran on under the fence into the field, sniffed about there for some time, worked back toward, and then back under, the fence, and finally found and retrieved the quarter. Next, Hirsch hung a handkerchief over a branch of a maple tree, some ten feet off the ground and almost two feet out from the trunk. He led the dog to a spot about thirty feet from the tree and pointed to the handkerchief. The dog spurted toward the tree, literally ran up the trunk on his momentum, snapped the handkerchief off the branch with a backward lurch, twisted in midair, and landed on his feet. Kleberg now threw a coin well out into the field of grass and goldenrod, and while the dog darted back and forth in the tall growth trying to find it, Baruch walked over with Hirsch and leaned on the white fence, watching, entertained by the dog’s earnest money-grubbing.
During Baruch’s absence, Kleberg asked Miss Navarro, “How’s the old man’s health? I haven’t seen him for several years, but he looks every bit as well as he did the last time I saw him.”
Miss Navarro, who has been Baruch’s nurse for two years (since a mastoid operation, when he was seventy years old, Baruch has had a nurse, mainly to supplement his own firm self-discipline with a nurse’s admonitions and attentions), is a broad-faced, handsome, calm, good-natured woman. “He’s never been better in his whole life,” she answered. “You know, he was a prizefighter when he was a younger man, and he still eats like a prizefighter. Yesterday at lunch he had three fried eggs, three slices of ham, lots of vegetables and bread, and three totally different and distinct desserts. You saw him at breakfast. He weighs two hundred and two pounds, but of course he’s got the frame to carry it. He thought he had a little gout a couple of years ago, but I told him not to be silly, all the matter with him was that he was just like a woman—he bought his shoes too small, to make his feet look better. So then he got some good big shoes and everything’s been fine ever since. He’s as strong as an ox, and I think he’ll live to be two hundred years old.”
When Baruch and Hirsch walked back to the others, after having given the dog two or three more trials, Baruch said to his host, “I was just saying to Max that I’ve never seen a finely bred dog that was really good. I’ve known a lot of dogs in my time: I remember an English mastiff named Sharp that one of my father’s patients gave us when I was a boy, and then we had a bulldog named Fierce, and later De Lancey Nicoll gave me a big brown setter named Dewey—he was a great dog; that dog actually knew what you were talking about; he could even catch crabs in shallow water—and I had a shepherd dog named Peter, and many others. But I’ve always had more success in the hunting field with scrub dogs than with highly bred ones. The thoroughbreds are fine on points and they move beautifully, but they haven’t got the nose of the hybrids. I had an old fellow down at Hobcaw and every time he saw a thoroughbred, he used to say, ‘He can’t find nothin’, he can’t smell nothin’, and he ain’t good for nothin’.’ Is there any thrill greater than hunting behind a good dog, Mr. Kleberg? By God, if there is, I don’t know it!”
Miss Navarro reminded Baruch that he had a ten-o’clock appointment at the mineral baths. He walked toward his car.
“Come out again some morning,” Kleberg said.
“All right,” Baruch said. “I’ll come out and we’ll sit under that umbrella over there and fix up the world. Remember that time in ‘40 we sat in that very spot and figured out how to beat inflation?”
Kleberg laughed and said, “I certainly do. I wish they’d taken up some of our ideas! But if we can’t fix the world this time, at least we can talk about horses.”
In the car, Baruch said to Miss Navarro, “Did you hear what that young man said? He said, ‘If we can’t fix the world.’ I don’t like to hear the young men of this country talking that way. We can fix the world. We’ve got to believe we can, and then we will…. A nice-looking filly, Bridal Flower…. Imagine that girl shooting a four-ten!…What a fine fellow Max Hirsch is!…”
Baruch stopped in at the Gideon Putnam just long enough to see whether a call had come through from a Mr. Buzzy Appleton, a gentleman with a number of business interests in New York City [i.e., his bookie] who, all through the Saratoga meeting, had been giving Baruch advice on the horses. The call had not come, so Baruch drove to the Washington Bath House, indulged in a mineral bath, suffered a massage, and fell into a deep sleep, which lasted for a little more than half an hour. This nap made him late for an eleven-o’clock appointment with a man named Crampton, and when Baruch returned to his hotel rooms, the caller was waiting for him.
The living room of Baruch’s suite was a large room in the northwest corner of the hotel. It was a standard hotel room, overstuffed and mass-produced, except for one small cluster of furniture at one side of the room. Upon this group Baruch had placed his stamp. It consisted of three chairs—a thronelike leather-upholstered wingback, for Baruch, and two wooden basket chairs, very nearby, for collocutors—and a drum table crowded with papers: letters, among them one from Secretary Marshall congratulating him on his seventy-seventh birthday; copies of the Morning Telegraph and the Daily Racing Form; a pocket-size murder mystery; and various notes and scraps. On entering the room, Baruch took off his hat and coat and sat down at once in the leather chair. “Sit over here where I can hear you,” he said to Crampton, and he leaned forward and pulled one of the wooden chairs to within a couple of feet of himself. Crampton sat in it. “What can I do for you?” Baruch asked in a rather forbidding way.
Crampton was interested, he said—
“Talk louder!” Baruch said. “I’m a little deaf.” He took the microphone of his Zenith hearing aid out of his vest pocket and held it up in front of him.
Crampton, somewhat confused, said he had said he wanted to interest Mr. Baruch in buying some shares in—
“What did you say?”
Crampton began again, and this time he managed to get fairly far into his case before Baruch said, “I don’t really care about money. When I made my first million dollars—I was about thirty then—I went to my father, and I was pretty excited, as you can imagine, and I asked him if he wanted to go down to the bank vaults and see the million, the actual securities and bankbooks. My father was an extraordinary man, Mr. Crampton. My father had the finest collection of natural faculties of any man I ever knew, and he constantly improved what he had. He was able, by reading and by study, to assimilate anything, and he had a mental machine that was able to take in whatever was good and reject what was bad. He was a handsome man, too—six feet tall, slender but straight, with a dark beard and mild blue eyes that looked straight at you. A very imposing personage. He was a doctor and he worked all his life for his fellowmen. His passion was physical therapy. He conducted some of the first experiments in hydrotherapy, and that’s why I’m so interested in this spa. People think I’m up here to see the races. Actually, I’m preparing a report for Governor Dewey on the baths. Well, when I asked my father if he wanted to see my million dollars, he said, ‘No, son, I’m not interested in your money. I’m only interested in what you are going to do with it.’ Father also used to say, ‘Son, remember that there is no such thing as gratitude. Do things for your own satisfaction, and that means: do them well.’ ”
The telephone rang. Baruch shouted to Miss Navarro, who was in the next room, “See if that’s Buzzy!” It was not Buzzy, Miss Navarro reported, but someone from a charitable organization, asking Baruch to make a speech. Baruch told her to find out when the speech was to be. It was, she said in a few moments, to be the next day. “Tell them I can’t do it!” Baruch shouted. “Tell them that I have to prepare my speeches carefully.” He turned to his visitor and said, “People believe in me, Mr. Crampton. They think I’m honest and they listen to my advice. They think I’m always right. That’s the greatest satisfaction I’ve had in life—being right. But it’s a heavy burden. I can’t get up in public and say the first thing that comes into my head. I have to study things out…. Let’s see, where were we?”
Crampton hurriedly presented a couple more of his ideas, and then Baruch said, “The only way you can succeed with a proposition like yours is by hard work—hard work and courage. You’ve got to be ready for anything and fearful of nothing. I believe I can say I’m afraid of nothing. I used to be a fighter in the ring, and I wasn’t afraid of taking a beating. I’m not afraid of death. Some people think I’m an old man (I’m younger than most of them, really), but I’m not afraid of dying. What is it that Horace said—‘Pallida mors…’? I remember the translation:
With equal steps, pale death advances
upon the hovels of the poor
And upon the turrets of the mighty…
I haven’t been afraid of death since I saw my father die. In his very last days, he said he wanted to die without rites. He didn’t want the prayer ‘Shema’ recited when he died—that’s a Hebrew prayer: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one,’ and so on. Father said he didn’t think he wanted to try to fool God at the last minute. Just before he died, my brother Hermann stood over him saying, ‘I’m Harty, I’m Harty’—for Hartwig, another brother. Hermann was testing Father, you see, to find out whether he was compos mentis. Father just shook his head—he always had a clear mind—and closed his eyes and died easily. That was all. I’ve never been afraid of it since then…. You were saying?”
Crampton made another start. After he had spoken a couple of sentences, Baruch said, “I forgot to add that along with courage you’ve got to have a sense of justice and fair play if you want to succeed. I have a terrible temper, Mr. Crampton, though I never can remember to stay angry. Nothing makes me madder than something that isn’t fair. See that bump?” Baruch made a fist of his right hand, put it under Mr. Crampton’s nose, and pointed with his left hand to a large irregularity—apparently an ill-knit broken bone—on the back of the right hand, just behind the knuckle of the third finger. “I got that because of a bit of foul play. It was eleven years ago, in 1936. I was driving to my apartment in New York in a taxi, crossing Fifty-seventh Street. Just as we approached Fifth Avenue, some fellow slammed his car across in front of my cab and nicked our fender. The driver of this other car got out and walked back, swearing at my taxi driver. My man was getting out to talk back, and the other fellow slammed the front door of the cab shut on my driver’s hand. It crushed the fellow’s hand painfully. That made me mad, and I put my head out the window and said, just as severely as I could, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself!’ The fellow said, ‘Yeah? You get out here and I’ll do it to you, too.’ Well, I unbuttoned my coat. Then I thought, If I get out on that side, I’ll have a crushed hand, too. So I moved over and got out on the other side of the cab and snuck around behind”—Baruch stood up and began walking stealthily in a circle around the room—“and I may as well tell you I used to be a pretty good boxer. I got some pointers, in my younger days, from Joe Choynski and Fighting Bob Fitzsimmons down at Woods’ Gymnasium, on Twenty-eighth Street, the south side between Fifth and Madison. So I came at this fellow on the run”—Baruch began to trot across the room, with his fists clenched, left hand forward, right hand drawn back a little—“and when I reached him—ungh! Right on the point of his chin! Luckily, he had a glass jaw and he went down flat on the pavement, out cold. A policeman came up, who’d seen me going by that corner for years and knew me. He said, Anything I can do to help you, Mr. Baruch?’ I said, ‘Yeah! Pick that son of a bitch up so I can hit him again.’ Excuse me, Mr. Crampton, I was pretty angry. The cop said, ‘If I was you, Mr. Baruch, I’d get moving before some flatfoot comes along here that doesn’t know you.’ So I moved along.” Baruch sat down. “That happened when I was sixty-six. I’ve always kept myself in pretty good condition. Good health is terribly important, Mr. Crampton. If we could just get a nation of people healthy at both ends—clear minds and sound dogs!…Forgive me for interrupting. Go right ahead.”
Rather hastily and somewhat inarticulately, Crampton again began pouring out information. “You can’t start anything with any hope of succeeding,” Baruch soon said, “that is, until you’ve made a study of every possible fact. That’s all that matters—facts, facts, facts. When I was on the War Industries Board, in the first war, Woodrow Wilson used to call me ‘Dr. Facts.’ President Wilson was my first hero, Mr. Crampton. He became my hero long before he was President, because of his policy of democratizing the eating clubs at Princeton. You see, I grew up a poor boy. When we first moved to New York, we lived in the attic of a boardinghouse at 144 West Fifty-seventh Street. I went to City College. I had it all planned out to go to Yale. I was going to work my way by waiting on table. But my mother didn’t want me to leave home, so I used to walk to college. I was a great big fellow and a fighter and not afraid of anything, but I wasn’t elected to a Greek-letter fraternity. I don’t think it was because I was disliked. I think it was because I was a Jew. I think so. Though I can say that that has never militated against me. Somehow, people have been very courteous to me. I give courtesy to everyone, and I get it.” Baruch sat up a little straighter and spoke, suddenly, more forcefully. “I demand courtesy!” He leaned back again. “I come from good stock. On my mother’s side, I am seven generations American from a Spanish and Portuguese line. My father was an immigrant from Prussia. I think he must have been partly of Polish descent, because of his blue eyes. I remember, once, riding out to a farmers’ convention in Chicago with Clemenceau, who was then visiting America, and he said to me, ‘The Polish Jews are very great people,’ and I wanted to ask him why he thought so, but just then the train stopped and there was a crowd on the platform yelling to see the old Tiger. He went out and waved to them, and when he came back, he sat down and said, ‘Oui, mon enfant.’ I was just going to ask him my question when he said, ‘Tell me about your George Washington. Is it true he was not an educated man like Wilson?’ But before I could answer him, he nodded off and was fast asleep…. Go on, Mr. Crampton, go on.”
Crampton’s salesmanship was interrupted again by the telephone, and this time Miss Navarro shouted that it was Buzzy Appleton. Baruch said, “Excuse me, sir. This is an important call I’ve been waiting for,” and went into the next room. Crampton could easily hear Baruch’s loud shouts into the phone: “That you, Buzzy?…Say! I got out on your last one yesterday. That horse named Aralak…. Sure I had him! You told me that whenever you gave me a horse with three stars, I could take out the family jewels and let myself go, and you had three stars on Aralak. I got out nicely. Any three-stars today?…Wait a minute. Navarro’ll take them down. Thanks, Buzzy. Don’t forget to call me tomorrow.” As Baruch returned to the living room, Miss Navarro’s quieter voice could be heard repeating the names of horses that Appleton liked that day.
Again Crampton picked up his raveled thread. He had spoken a few rather forlorn sentences when Baruch took a large gold watch from his vest pocket, looked at it, and said, “Nearly lunchtime. I can’t be late for lunch. Now, let me see if I have your story straight.” He proceeded to summarize Crampton’s appeal. From the half sentences, the false starts, the strained recapitulations, and the blurted statistics that Crampton had squeezed into the half hour’s conversation—scraps to which Baruch had scarcely seemed to listen—the old man now pieced together a succinct, pellucid, and persuasive sales story. “Yes, that’s it! That’s it!” Crampton exclaimed. “I didn’t think—”
“I’ll mull it over,” Baruch said, standing up, “and let you know in a couple of days. Goodbye. Thanks for coming in.”
Baruch went to lunch, in the hotel dining room, at precisely noon, with Miss Navarro. He ate three lamb chops, a hill of rice, some salad, and several rolls, and was getting into his third dessert—a slice of watermelon, following a dish of ice cream and a pastry—when he looked at his watch again and found that he would barely have long enough for his nap before post time for the first race at the track, and so, though still not exactly sated, he ate only five or six forkfuls of the melon before he asked Miss Navarro for two dollars, which he put under his plate for the waitress, and left.
In his bedroom, he lay down and slept until, twenty minutes later, Miss Navarro awakened him. He arose, fresh, and though the afternoon was fairly warm, he put on his topcoat. He gathered up his Morning Telegraph and Daily Racing Form, slung a binoculars case over his shoulder, told Miss Navarro to make sure she had Buzzy Appleton’s list, and hurried out with her. His chauffeur drove him to the clubhouse at the track. Waiting for the elevator to the tier of boxes on the second level of the stand, he encountered an acquaintance. “Look at that!” Baruch said, indicating with a sweep of his hand the tables at which clubhouse patrons were eating and drinking, the general-admission crowd walking around on the cement apron in front, the straightaway of the track, the laborers with their tractors and harrows and water trucks preparing the soil of the stretch, and, beyond, the tote boards twinkling with chance. “This is a country,” he said. “There’s nothing philosophical or metaphysical about the difference between our country and others. People here can drive along and buy hot dogs wherever they want, cross state lines without permits, and come to this track and throw their good money after their bad with no one to stop them.” In heavy accents of irony, he added, “Rotten country, isn’t it?”
The acquaintance, a sportsman, who seemed not at all surprised at this patriotic outburst, countered Baruch’s question with one of his own: “How you doing on the nags?”
“Fortunately, I put my mind to my work yesterday, and I prospered,” Baruch said. He did not mention Buzzy Appleton’s three-star recommendation, which had abetted the prosperity, but he remembered to knock on the wooden wall by the elevator door. The elevator came and, with Miss Navarro, Baruch ascended. He went to his box—in the fourth tier, at some distance to the right of the finish wire—and prepared himself for the day’s work: focused his binoculars, folded his dope sheets and put them on the shelf at the front of the box, persuaded Miss Navarro to turn over to him a roll of cash, put his pince-nez beside the papers on the shelf, and riffled the afternoon’s program, reading it through his tortoise-shell glasses. Presently, a man named Schuyler, with a red face, a felt hat the front of whose brim was turned upward, and a voice that expressed the most commonplace thoughts in an extremely confidential tone, presented himself and waited about for orders from Baruch. After the trumpet had announced the horses for the first race and they had danced out in front of the stands, and after Baruch had taken off his tortoise-shells and put on his pince-nez and had a good look at them, and taken off his pince-nez and put on his tortoise-shells and had one last look at the experts’ opinions and at Buzzy’s list, he leaned forward, spoke in a very low voice to Schuyler, peeled a fifty-dollar bill from his roll, and handed it to him. Schuyler, looking as if he had just been told the details of the trigger mechanism of the atomic bomb and was trying to look as if he knew nothing, went off to place the bet. In a few minutes, the race started. Baruch stood up and watched through his binoculars. His horse did not win. To Miss Navarro, he said, “Here, as elsewhere, the experts lead us astray. They know the words to deceive us.”
During the afternoon, a succession of people dropped by Baruch’s box. Some of the visitors were friends; some said they knew his son, or one of his two daughters, or a friend of his; one said he had admired Baruch’s rubber report during the war; another wanted to shake his hand because of his atomic plan; some offered no pretext whatever. All of them asked his advice on the horses, and most of them annoyed him. “I know nothing about horses,” he said to one visitor. “There are lots of experts on horses, but I’m not one of them. Of course, I’ve noticed that these noisy experts never have two nickels to rub against each other—but don’t come to me for advice.” To another, he said, “I’ve been in a lot of businesses in my day—ranching, gold mines, stocks and bonds—and I just tuck away what little I know and try to keep quiet. You find some men who think they know everything about everything. They succeed in one business and then they get up on their little dunghill and shout about all kinds of things.” To another, who querulously wondered whether a race just won by a long shot had been fixed, he said, “I’ve been in all walks of life and I’ve seen men under temptation. In the stock market. Here at the track. The big dog of truth eventually catches up with those who succumb. But I’ve never lost faith in human beings. I remember, when I was a kid, I read a story about a white man who fell into the hands of some Choctaw Indians, and they began torturing him to get some information from him. But he stood steadfast and said nothing. Integrity! See what I mean?” To hear his visitors, Baruch held up the little microphone of his hearing aid. When he tired of their questions, he simply shut down the rheostat on the microphone and put the contraption away in his vest pocket. After that, the visitors, unable to get through to him, went away.
Some of his callers he welcomed. Joseph P. Kennedy stopped by for a few minutes, and the two men joked about their losses. After Kennedy had left, Baruch mentioned Kennedy’s son Congressman John F. Kennedy to Miss Navarro, then said, “The children of famous men generally have a hard time. They remain in the penumbra of their fathers. Not young Kennedy, though. He’s stepped out.” Later in the afternoon, Herbert Bayard Swope, in a straw hat and track tweeds, dropped by with rapid-fire information on developments in Geneva, prospects at Lake Success, the Republican outlook, and the next race. Later still, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt came to pay his respects and was treated to a recitation by Baruch of trout-fishing experiences in Canada, complete even to the names of streams and the locations of pools that used to abound with delightful speckled trout. When Vanderbilt had left, Baruch said to his nurse, “That young man’s mother came down to Hobcaw once to hunt. She was the loveliest thing I ever saw. She had on a boy’s costume and a little cocked hat with a feather, like Robin Hood’s. She crept and crawled through the underbrush after those turkeys all day long. By God, she was a fine creature!” At about four o’clock, Baruch asked Miss Navarro, “Did you bring anything to eat?” She opened her handbag, took out something wrapped in pink tissue paper, removed the paper, and handed Baruch two large biscuits. At the same time, Schuyler arrived with some Coca-Cola. Baruch said, “Aha! Mr. Schuyler, you’re a gentleman and a scholar…. Schuyler the scholar.” Baruch wolfed his snack. Buzzy Appleton had not provided any three-star choices for this afternoon, and Baruch, though playing his bets secretively through the security-minded Schuyler, appeared to be losing. He stayed for the last race.
Baruch had offered Swope a ride back to the hotel. As Swope stepped into the car in the driveway in front of the clubhouse, he bumped his head on the top of the car doorway. “Abominable car!” he said, rubbing the top of his head. “You’ll have to get a bigger car, B.M., if you want my patronage.”
“If a man’s head gets too big, no car will contain him,” Baruch said. “I mean that generally. No reflection on yourself, Herbert.”
Back at the hotel, Baruch changed into a dinner jacket and took a hearty dinner with Miss Navarro. Afterward, although he would have preferred to stay at home, he felt he owed it to the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt to appear at a performance in Saratoga of a play starring Faye Emerson, Elliott Roosevelt’s wife. He sat watching and thinking in the darkness of the theater through the first act, unable to hear a word of what was being spoken on the stage. At the end of the act, he returned to the hotel. He undressed, took a cold bath, and was in bed at ten-thirty.
“A Day at Saratoga,” The New Yorker, January 3, 1948.