Joe Steele Read Free

strength?”
    â€œIt’s all bullshit, Charlie, piled up like in the stockyards,” Farley shouted back.
    Like any good politico, he was endlessly cynical. Even more than most, he made a point of knowing—and of making sure Roosevelt seemed to know—any reporter or legislator or preacher or fat cat he ran into. Charlie had heard he kept files on everyone he met so he and FDR would never get caught short. He didn’t know if that was true, but he wouldn’t have been surprised.
    He also wasn’t surprised at the answer. “C’mon, Jim,” he said. “Give me something I can write for a family paper.”
    Farley said something about Joe Steele and a ewe that wasn’t printable but sure as hell was funny. Then, he added, “You can say I said it was much sound and fury, signifying nothing. That’s what it is, and that makes me sound smarter than I am.”
    He was sandbagging, of course. Charlie knew very few people smarter than Jim Farley. He wasn’t sure Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of them,either. But Farley didn’t have his own political ambitions. He worked to put his boss over the top—and he did just-one-of-the-boys better than the aristocratic Roosevelt could.
    After scrawling the answer in shorthand, Charlie asked, “How many ballots d’you think they’ll need this time around?”
    Farley scowled. That was a serious question. “It won’t be a few,” he said at last, reluctantly. “But we’ll come out on top in the end. People don’t care how long the gal’s in the delivery room. They just want to see the baby.”
    Charlie wrote that down, too. Big Jim gave terrific quotes when he kept them clean. Then, spotting Stas Mikoian in the Joe Steele conga line, Charlie hurried after him. The Armenian was another of Steele’s campaign stalwarts. They’d met in Fresno, and stuck together after Steele went to Washington.
    Mikoian might not have been as clever as Farley, but he was no dope. His brother was one of Donald Douglas’ top aeronautical engineers in Long Beach, so brains ran in the family. Dancing along next to him, Charlie asked, “How do things look?”
    â€œWe’ll have a long night once the balloting starts,” Mikoian said, echoing Farley’s prediction. “We’ll have a long two or three days, chances are. But we’ll win in the end.”
    He sounded as confident as Big Jim. Smart or not, one of them was talking through his hat. In ordinary times, Charlie would have figured Roosevelt had the edge. The Roosevelts had been important while Joe Steele’s folks—and those of most of his aides—were nobodies under the Tsar. FDR served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy when Wilson was President. He’d fought infantile paralysis to a standstill. How could you help admiring somebody like that?
    You couldn’t. But these times were far from ordinary. Maybe they needed somebody without history behind him. Maybe Joe Steele’s upstarts had the moxie to go toe-to-toe with the well-tailored guys who’d been finagling since the Year One.
    Actually, Stas Mikoian seemed pretty well tailored himself. The straw boater didn’t go with his sober gray suit, but you put on silly stuff like that when you joined a demonstration.
    â€œCount on it,” Mikoian said, dancing all the while and never losing the beat. “Joe Steele’s our next President.”
    A sly Armenian. And Lazar Kagan was a sly Hebe. And Vince Scriabin made a plenty sly whatever he was. Were they sly enough to lick FDR and his all-American veterans?
    *   *   *
    T he chairman rapped loudly for order. Microphones and loudspeakers made the gavel sound like a rifle. “Come to order! The convention will come to order!” the chairman shouted.
    Oh, yeah?
Charlie thought from his seat in the stands. The floor went on bubbling like a crab boil. You just had to