March 3, 1933
The lobby of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington was empty when the Roosevelt family filed through a secure back entrance, followed by handlers and helpers carrying luggage, and Secret Service agents guarding each window and door.
In the months since the jubilation of election night, the celebration had turned somber. Unemployment and homelessness were growing worse each week. Farmers were burning down their barns to collect insurance money and slaughtering their livestock to save the cost of feeding them. The tent village in Central Park had grown to a city. And an anarchist had nearly succeeded at assassinating the president-elect.
“People are getting antsy as hell,” Bill said when I called in to the office from a phone in the Mayflower’s lavish lobby. “What kind of security will they have at the Capitol tomorrow?”
“A whole lot,” I said. “Snipers, armored cars, the whole gamut.” They were worried about more maniacs like the man in Miami, but they knew the greater threat was from the crowds of regular people who would gather around the East Portico. They were not unlike religious pilgrims who knelt before the pope—they were helpless and broken down, but they believed. FDR held a tremendous amount of power for them, but I had the sense that the wind could change direction at any moment. If he said the wrong thing, or if he didn’t go far enough in his promises of help, the supplicants might transform into a violent mob.
“And when will they let reporters into the hotel?”
I hesitated. In my pocket was the key to my own room, which Nora had reserved for me under her name. It was a floor below the suites where she and the president-elect would make final preparations for the next day’s ceremony. Bill, of course, had no idea where I was calling from. All the other reporters were cooling their heels across the street. “We are waiting to hear,” I lied. “Maybe this evening, but it could be hard to get very close.”
“Well, now’s the time to call in all your favors, Hick. I’d sure like to know what they’re talking about in their suite right now. We’re hearing Hoover’s thinking of closing the banks. Hard to believe, after all these years of doing nothing.”
That day, every newspaper in the country had run photos of the runs on the banks: close-ups of panicked faces, and wide shots of the lines stretching around the block, the fights breaking out.
“I’ll try to get you something,” I said.
Bill laughed. “You’d better do more than try, Hick. If you like your job.”
Later that evening, Nora called my room and asked me to come up, and one of the agents brought me to her floor in the secure elevator. I had expected a quiet sanctum, but the hallway bustled with aides and advisers. A porter carrying a tray of sandwiches entered a door about halfway down, and I spotted Nora’s eldest son, James, wheeling a bar cart in behind him.
“Miss Hickok.” I turned to the open door beside me to find Louis leaning on the frame.
“Mr. Howe.” I shook his hand. “Looks like you’re running a tight ship up here.”
He nodded. “I wondered if we might see you tonight. We let your colleagues into the hotel, but they’re still moping about being stuck downstairs. Pays to have access, I guess.”
I gave him an uneasy smile. I had not seen him since the night at the town house, and Nora and I had been keeping a low profile. “N—” I stopped. “Mrs. Roosevelt invited me, and you know her: she doesn’t take no for an answer.”
“Yes, I do know her,” Louis said. “And I work for her, so I am in the business of making sure she has what she wants. But also what she needs.”
I was taking in that remark as the porter came out of the suite and passed between us on his way to the elevator. Before the door swung closed, I heard a snippet of energetic discussion, Roosevelt’s voice and then Nora’s. Without thinking, my reporter’s muscle memory engaged and I strained to decipher their words.
Louis watched me for a moment. “Miss Hickok, we need to get something straight. You are here tonight as Mrs. Roosevelt’s guest— not as a reporter. Do we understand each other?”
Bill had made his threat on the phone, and now Louis was chiming in with demands of his own. I saw that no matter what I did next, I would regret it.
Louis pointed at me. “Whatever you might hear is off the record. We let the reporters into the lobby, but that’s as close as any of them are going to get. No one is coming up here. I won’t have any leaks.”
He must have seen on my face that I was still torn. “If you can’t abide by that, you should go now,” he said. “Mrs. Roosevelt will understand—you have a job to do. And you can do it from the lobby.”
I wish I could say that I stood my ground, but at that moment my career didn’t amount to a hill of beans compared with the chance to be in that room with Nora. The next day she would be off to the White House for four years, at least. It was our last chance to be together, our last chance to say goodbye, even if we had to do it through silent glances and a passed note or two.
I held up my empty palms and tried to look relaxed. “I didn’t even bring my notebook,” I said. It was still in my suitcase, one floor down.
“All right,” he nodded, looking a little surprised—and perhaps even a little disappointed—at how easily I’d acquiesced. “I’m glad we could settle that.”
He went back into his room and I exhaled a long breath.
I knocked softly on the suite door, half hoping I wouldn’t be heard over the noise within, but Nora answered.
“Hick,” she said, her lips painted pale pink and her reading glasses pushed up on her hair. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
Over her shoulder, I saw FDR sitting with his back to us, and James standing beside him.
“I won’t do it,” the president-elect said, more irritated than I’d ever seen him.
“It’s the right call, Father. He’s well out of line to ask.”
I gave Nora a curious look. “Let’s go across the hall and leave them to it,” she whispered.
We passed into an identical suite, this one empty except for her luggage and a rack of dresses. The dining table was cluttered with vases of flowers and bottles of champagne with cards taped to their necks.
“People have been lovely.” She fluffed up a spray of roses so that the stems draped more evenly in the vase. “The bellman has been delivering gifts all morning.”
I nodded at the door. “What were they talking about over there?”
She didn’t hesitate to tell me; for Nora, the matter of my trust had been settled long ago. “Hoover. He wants Franklin to issue a joint order tonight, before he is sworn in. If they close the banks together, I suppose the thinking goes, then they can share the blame if it goes to pieces.”
“Sounds like the president-elect is not too keen on that plan.” My gears were turning, and I imagined James’s quote—that Hoover was “well out of line to ask”—in my lead. I could attribute it to an unnamed source inside the Roosevelt circle. Bill would be giddy.
“They spoke this morning and Franklin told him to do nothing. That it is a matter for the states.”
“Is that what he believes?” The Roosevelt campaign had leaned heavily on symbolism and sentiment, but when you got down to brass tacks, no one quite knew what sort of policy the man intended to enact. Folks had mostly taken it on faith that he had better ideas than his predecessor, but “a matter for the states” sounded a lot like business as usual.
“We will soon find out, won’t we?” She snapped a carnation off its stem and then came close to me and threaded it through the buttonhole on my lapel. My eyes rose to hers and I longed to kiss her. But she was still thinking of politics. “I have a feeling he has something up his sleeve,” she said.
“Is that so?” Whatever he decided, if I could get the story, on the eve of FDR’s swearing in, no less, it would be a scoop for the ages. The urge to start typing it made my fingertips tingle. If he went along with Hoover, the people would be disappointed to see him in league with the devil. If he went his own way and did nothing, the people would be outraged that he was maintaining the status quo after all his promises. Either way, they might need to deploy the National Guard to control the crowds at the banks. Perhaps they already had their orders. If I went to the major general’s office in Arlington with a tip from the incoming administration, I might be able to get someone to confirm the plans. I pushed up my sleeve to look at my watch. I had about an hour to make the evening editions.
Just then there was a knock on the door and Louis entered, followed by James, Anna, the bar cart—with its reserves of whiskey renewed— and, finally, the president-elect.
I backed up to the window to get out of the way and watched as Nora scurried over to help her husband get settled at the table. She cleared away the wine and flowers and the stacks of papers that made up her own work. Anna made a round of horse’s necks—her father’s favorite drink, of whiskey and ginger ale—for the table.
“May I fix you a drink, Miss Hickok?” she said, and the eyes of all the Roosevelts, who stood between me and the door, turned my way. Roosevelt gave Louis a look to confirm that he had dealt with the matter of my access on this most historic of nights. Was I here as friend or interloper? Could they trust me?
I felt as though I were being split in half with a hatchet. Part of me was dying to bolt for the door, for the phone in the lobby, for my typewriter downstairs. But then there was Nora, her gray-blond hair piled high on her head, the vulnerable slump of her shoulders that I loved so dearly. She relied on me now more than ever, she had said. If only I could proclaim what I felt for her. How many hours had I lost to daydreams of the front porch of our someday cottage? I saw Nora on the swing, maintaining a gentle sway with the tip of her toe against the porch rail. In moments like these, my love for her kept me calm, but it had an undertow, like the sea, and I felt at any moment it might pull me down.
Louis was the only one who wasn’t staring at me; his eyes stayed on the papers he held, and he made a note with a red pencil and handed the pages to his boss. It was the inaugural address, I realized. And if I stayed in the room, I might hear it. Good Lord.
He lit his next cigarette, unconcerned. “I’ve never known Miss Hickok to turn down a drink,” he said.
Everyone laughed, and I felt the blade sever me completely. It left a raw edge exposed, and the next breath I took hurt a little. I am giving up everything for you, I thought, telegraphing the words to Nora across the table. Please tell me it will be worth it.
When I pulled up a chair and sat down, the president-elect relaxed and looked at his wife. “Eleanor, I want you to read it.” He passed the pages across the table to her and rolled the red pencil after them. She snatched it up with glee.
She began to skim it in silence, but he interrupted her. “No, let’s have it aloud.”
Nora cleared her throat and sat up straight. “This is a day of national consecration,” she began in a bold voice, and Roosevelt smiled at Louis, his right-hand man. In that smile was the shared knowledge of countless handshakes and rallies, late nights on trains, mind-numbing fund-raisers, deals and counterdeals and strategy and execution. Finally his day had come.
As Nora read, she used the pencil to add missing punctuation a time or two. When she got to the line about fear—“Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself: nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance”—she stopped.
“So you read the Thoreau I gave you.”
Her husband grinned. There was an electricity between them and it seemed to be fueled by the game of the speech. Point to Franklin for choosing the words that evoked the intended feeling; point to Eleanor for the influence that led to the words. Roosevelt quoted from the work, “‘Nothing is so much to be feared as fear’—that’s the Thoreau. We decided to add the line yesterday.”
“Well, then it is a good thing I lent you the book,” she shot back. Louis hooted and the children smiled, but I felt a sting watching them volley with such pleasure. When Nora and I were alone, the world made sense, but I would never be able to understand what role I should play in this baffling circle. A minor one, no doubt.
Nora read on and, as the words rang out, I tried to listen, not as a reporter but as a regular American citizen. How would the speech strike me, I wondered, if I wasn’t thinking of the machinations behind it but was instead an average Jane listening to my new president? I saw at once that it was written like a clever sermon, in which FDR compared America’s bankers to the money changers in the temple. They had no vision, those men compelled by greed, but now that they had been chased from the seat of power, we had to decide what to replace them with. Could we be good neighbors to each other, finally, and work together to wage a war—an actual war—on economic chaos?
I pictured crowds that would gather in the morning cold to hear the speech and could feel how their throats would grow tight, their eyes full. It wasn’t too good to be true. With this man as our president, change might really come.
“It’s a good speech,” Nora said, laying the pages back on the table when she’d finished. “Full of hope. I just pray it goes far enough.”
The phone rang and Louis sprang for it. After listening a moment, he said, “Let me call you back” and hung up. He turned to his boss. “Hoover is asking to speak to you tonight, sir.” He looked at the clock on the mantel. “It’s eleven thirty already.”
FDR pursed his lips and nodded. “I’ll call him. And I’ll say what I said before: do nothing. Let the governors decide.”
“And then?” Nora asked. She leaned forward on her elbows. Anna and James looked at their father. Louis held his cigarette as the ash crept toward his fingers. The moment held more expectation than I could stand; whatever he said next, I couldn’t do a thing with it.
“At 12:01, put it out to the press—I will close the banks.”
I needed a walk. When Louis heard me murmur to Nora that I was going out for cigarettes, he shot me a look, but I held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor,” I said.
And I wasn’t lying. I had no plans to call Bill on the sly. My bed was made; my goose was cooked. I just needed to get out of that room.
I took the private elevator down and exited through the back door, where two Secret Service agents stood at attention. I thought of Marcus and wondered whether he was somewhere in the hotel and how he would react if we bumped into each other in the dining room. Poor old Marcus had probably seen a thing or two in his time, but nothing quite like what he had seen on Christmas Eve.
I went around the corner to an all-night shop and bought my cigarettes, plus a couple of packs of Louis’s brand as a gesture of goodwill. I smoked one of mine under a streetlamp. Something about the light’s yellow glow called up the quality of sunlight on the prairie of my girlhood. There was a patch of meadow on the land we rented that my father didn’t farm. The bluestem and wild rye grew tall there, and cabbage white butterflies danced above the grass in the sun; it was the perfect place for me to hide from my father. One summer, I lay in the long grass and read Rough Riders so many times that I had dreams of the kickback of the Gatling gun, of digging graves for the men who died of strange fevers in the Cuban jungle. Roosevelt—the first one— had awakened me to adventure, to the intricate stories the world had to tell. He made me want to tell them and to be among others who told them too. In reporting, I had found not just my work but a fellowship, my strange tribe. That work ordered my life.
Back at the rear entrance, the guards’ shift had changed and the new ones didn’t believe that I had a right to come through. There was no phone outside, and I had no ID on me to prove my case.
“Journalists to the lobby, ma’am,” one of them said.
“Come on. I was just here ten minutes ago.”
“Journalists to the lobby,” he said again, looking, as he’d been trained to do, not at me but at something about three inches to the left of my head.
I sighed and walked around to the grand front entrance of the Mayflower, where I stepped into a kind of chaos rarely seen in the stately room of marble and silk and majestic low-hanging chandeliers. The lobby was packed, and people were also crammed up against the ornate rail of the mezzanine balcony. On the far side of the room, controlling access to the elevators, more agents stood in their standard-issue black suits. Back by the entrance was a cluster of men who were the agents’ exact opposite: my proud cohort. Wise-cracking, half-drunk, or both; dressed in threadbare suits five years out of fashion, clutching pens with ink-stained fingers. In the middle of the crowd I spotted John.
I kept my head down and tried to pass through the lobby along the wall, but just when I thought I’d succeeded, I heard John’s voice calling me: “Hick!” It was like buckshot in my back, but I didn’t turn around.
“Gentlemen,” I said to the agents blocking the hall. “I am expected upstairs.”
“Nice try,” one said.
“Hick!” I heard John yell again. It was agony not to turn around, but agony too to imagine the look on his face if I acknowledged him and continued on to the elevator instead of joining him where I belonged. I remembered what John had said to me that night at Dom’s—we all pay the price to get what we get.
“Please,” I said to the agents, desperation in my voice. “Just call up to Mrs. Roosevelt. My name is Lorena Hickok. She’ll tell you—I’m supposed to be up there.”
The second agent walked over to the phone at the desk. By now, some of the other reporters had spotted me and began to protest. “What a crock!” I heard, and then a terrible wave of booing rose up behind me. My heart was hammering.
The agent finally met my eyes and I clung to this spark of humanity. “And who are you with?” he asked. “Times? AP? Globe?” His partner returned and gave him a nod. The men moved aside to let me pass into the hallway and I felt simultaneous explosions of victory and defeat.
“I’m not with anybody,” I answered him. “I’m here for Mrs. Roosevelt.”
Darling,
I must apologize that your historic interview of a first lady in the White House today became such a comedy of errors. So many interruptions and prying eyes and ears. Did you get a single quote you can use? And poor Hick, how resourceful of you to suggest escaping to the powder room, only to have me dash your plans. You must know by now that when we are alone I cannot think of politics or historic interviews but only my beloved—your eyes, the soft lobes of your ears. Oh, my darling, how will we bear being apart? I miss you so much already that it is like a physical pain.
There I go again. Maybe I can help rescue your piece with a few notes on the day. And what a day it has been! Years long, it seems. It began rather drearily with a raw wind that seemed to claw our hats from our heads. After church, we followed the custom of separating into two cars. I rode with Mrs. and Franklin rode with Hoover, who is furious about last night. He wouldn’t speak, Franklin says, wouldn’t even smile for the photographers. We had the agents on motorcycles zipping all around us like horseflies, and all the people in the grandstands to watch the procession. The scale of the thing!
What did you think of the speech? I must say I was very afraid to take my eyes off him and look out at the crowd. So many thousands of people, and I could feel the great weight of all of them hanging on his words. It’s as if they are willing to do anything, if only someone will tell them what to do.
But then the feeling changed when he got to the end, didn’t it, and everyone cheered? We were all so enormously relieved, as if he had changed the ship’s course just in time to avoid the iceberg.
And then our interview and then luncheon, and receptions and parties and meetings. Franklin swore in his cabinet. It has never been done so quickly before. In fact, there was so much to do today, solemn work, that he declined to go out again in the evening. I dressed in my silly gown and fur and was off to the ball, Eleanor alone. Or that is what they all will write. They don’t know, do they, whose ring I wear, whose signature is on my heart?
Good night, my dear one. My love enfold thee all the night through.
Nora