DURING THE CONTEST WITH TAMMANY HALL over Billy Sheehan, FDR met a cantankerous reporter for the New York Herald named Louis McHenry Howe. Before long, the reporter was advising the young state senator, eleven years his junior, on Albany tactics. They made an odd couple: the pretty boy and the gnarled scribbler. FDR was naive about politicians but eager to hear gossip about their raffish exploits. Howe was always ready with racy descriptions of the lowlife of the capital, which provided Franklin a welcome relief from the high-minded expectations of his family. From their first meeting, Howe later recalled, he thought of Roosevelt as “presidential timber.” Whether Howe was seduced by the Roosevelt name or simply smitten by the golden boy himself, he was alone in that assessment.
In an earlier campaign, Howe explained one of his rules of political success: “If you say a thing often enough, it has a good chance of becoming a fact.” Howe, wrote his biographer, “had immense confidence in his ability to trick the ordinary man.” Under Howe’s tutelage, FDR never became a con artist, but he did develop a talent for manipulating public impressions.
From the start, Howe cultivated his image as a wizened, abrupt, and invariably rude superloyalist. At five foot four and less than 100 pounds, he was a tiny bag of bones; his hollow face, hideously pitted from a serious boyhood bicycle accident, looked as gray as the gravel road he fell on. He described himself as “one of the four ugliest men in New York, if what is left of me can be dignified by the name of man. Children take one look at me on the street and run from ‘the man with the wicked kidnapping eyes,’ ” he said. Later, he said the same of himself in Washington, again without mentioning the other three.
His most common nickname—“the Medieval Gnome”—suited him perfectly, and he sometimes answered the phone, “This is the Medieval Gnome speaking.” In time, he convinced authorities in Kentucky to make him an honorary colonel, in part because “Colonel Howe” sounded almost like Colonel Edward House, the legendary presidential adviser, who was not a real colonel either. Eventually, Howe had cards printed up with the name “Colonel Louis Rasputin Voltaire Talleyrand Simon Legree Howe.”
By the time he was joking that way, he and FDR had long since bonded. That took for good in 1912, when Roosevelt arranged for Howe to help him promote a dark horse Democratic presidential candidate—New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson was finally nominated on the forty-sixth ballot, Franklin shouted himself hoarse. Former President Theodore Roosevelt, denied the Republican nomination in favor of incumbent President William Howard Taft, ran for president that year as the Progressive Party “Bull Moose” candidate. But by then Franklin was already committed to Wilson.
Wilson’s nomination put FDR in a good position with the national Democratic Party and Howe’s congratulatory letter began, only half facetiously: “Beloved and Revered Future President.” This was exactly twenty years before Howe helped make FDR the 1932 nominee. Soon, Howe got the chance to show his indispensability. If Wilson won in 1912, FDR wanted a job in Washington. But to get a good one, he had to win reelection to the New York State Senate. After Labor Day, Roosevelt was looking like a loser, sidelined by typhoid fever. FDR had no choice but to ask Howe to come take charge of the campaign and essentially run for the seat himself.
With the candidate in bed, Howe toured the district in an automobile and pulled what he later called his “great farmer’s stunt”—a form letter to farmers that was designed to look like a personal note from their fellow Hyde Park agriculturalist. Under FDR’s signature, Howe promised to introduce legislation to standardize apple barrels at 16½ inches instead of 171/8, which would save farmers money by allowing them to include fewer apples per barrel. This was the key to reelection in 1912. Louis Howe saved Franklin Roosevelt’s political career by less than an inch.
“Keep that temperature down so you can get on the job,” Howe wrote FDR. “I am having more fun than a goat. Your slave and servant, Louis Howe.”
But Howe and Roosevelt were not just slave and master. From that point forward, they were two parts of the same political organism, brilliantly complementing each other. Howe, the skeptic, did the worrying for both of them, concentrating on the mechanics of politics—patronage, press manipulation, and intrigue. Roosevelt loved that game, too, but floated above it, projecting a warm aura of smiles and gauzy inspiration.
Sara gave Franklin the confidence he needed to thrive, and Eleanor changed him, making him more liberal and open to new views. But Howe was the indispensable man in the prosaic business of making him president. Over a twenty-five-year period, he devoted his life to Roosevelt—the longest uninterrupted toil by a handler in the history of presidential politics. Howe was FDR’s Theodore Sorensen, Hamilton Jordan, Michael Deaver, and Karl Rove rolled into one, except that he alone among them was older than his boss and thus more influential. His job, he said, was to “provide the toe-weights” that kept FDR’s flights of fancy from becoming political problems and his feet on the ground. Later, Howe would be blunter, saying he had been put on earth “to hold Franklin down.”
For all his bonhomie, Roosevelt was notorious among his staff for the stinginess of his praise. But he knew at some level how important Howe was to his life. “Dear Old Louis,” Franklin wrote him when the presidency was at last in sight. “Just a line to send my love and tell you, if it does any good, to take care of yourself and try not to overdo and worry. All is really coming out so well and you are the main spring!”
The love, of course, went more strongly in the other direction. Howe’s wife and son were subordinated to his worship of FDR. The effects on Roosevelt’s ego must have been significant. When a subordinate is utterly devoted to you, it can give the recipient of the adulation a powerful feeling of superiority—a sense that everyone else in the world must also adore you, or would if they knew you as well.
Louis Howe once confessed that as a child he wanted to be an artist. Franklin Roosevelt turned out to be his canvas. “At heart,” he later told the novelist Fanny Hurst, “I am a minstrel singing outside the window of beauty.”