Joe Steele Read Free Page B

Steele and FDR were as close as two rivals could get. For once, everyone seemed to be right.
    As if plucking the thought from his mind, another reporter asked, “How many ballots did they need to nominate Davis?”
    â€œA hundred and three,” Charlie said with sour satisfaction.
    â€œChrist!” the other man said. “They’re liable to do it again. If anything gives Hoover a fighting chance, this is it.”
    â€œYeah. If anything. But nothing does,” Charlie replied. The other reporter laughed, as if he were kidding.
    They balloted through the night. Gray predawn light showed in the Stadium’s small number of small windows—they were there more for decoration than to let the sun shine in. At last, the chairman came up to the microphone and said, “A motion to adjourn till one this afternoon will be favorably entertained. Such a motion is always in order.”
    Half a dozen men proposed the motion. Several dozen seconded it. It passed by acclamation. Delegates and members of the Fourth Estate staggered out into the muggy morning twilight.
    A newsboy hawked copies of the
Chicago Tribune
. He bawled the front-page headline: “No candidate yet!” Charlie didn’t think that would tell the Democratic movers and shakers much they didn’t already know.
    He ate bacon and eggs and drank strong coffee at a greasy spoon on the way back to his hotel. Coffee or no, in his room he put his alarm clock too far from the bed for him to kill it without getting up.
    *   *   *
    M ike Sullivan didn’t like going up to Albany to cover Governor Roosevelt. He didn’t like
having
to go to Albany to cover FDR. He was an inch taller and two years older than Charlie—two years grumpier, they both liked to say. Mike had a perfectly good apartment in Greenwich Village. As far as he was concerned, if the state of New York had to have a governor and a legislature, it could damn well stash them in New York City, which was where it put everything that mattered.
    But no. He had to leave his cat and his girlfriend and come upstate to the front edge of nowhere if he needed to report on Franklin D. Roosevelt. (To him, the middle of nowhere lay about halfway between Syracuse and Rochester.)
    Massachusetts did things right. The big city there was Boston, and it was also the state capital. But an amazing number of states, even ones with proper cities, plopped their capitals in towns that barely showed up on the map. Pennsylvania was run from Harrisburg, even though it boasted Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. California had San Francisco and Los Angeles, but it was run from Sacramento. Portland and Seattle didn’t tell Oregon and Washington what to do; Eugene and Olympia did.
    The list went on. Tallahassee, Florida. Annapolis, Maryland. Springfield, Illinois. Jefferson City, Missouri. Frankfort, Kentucky. Not one a place you’d visit unless you had to.
    Albany met that description. It did to Mike, anyway. It wasn’t a tiny village. It had something like 130,000 people in it. But when you came from a city of 7,000,000, give or take a few, 130,000 were barely enough to notice, even if one of them had a better than decent chance of becoming the next President.
    Plenty of reporters camped around the big red-brick State Executive Mansion on the corner of Eagle and Elm. To keep them happy, Roosevelt held a press conference the morning after the Democrats started balloting. The press room was on the ground floor of the Executive Mansion. Despite the electric lamps that lit the chamber and the lectern with the microphone, it seemed to Mike to come straight out of the Victorian age, when the mansion was built. The building’s modern conveniences were, and obviously were, later additions.
    Roosevelt already stood behind the lectern when his flunkies let the reporters into the room. With the braces on his legs, he could stand, and even take a halting step or two, but that was