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dinner Roosevelt read, watched a movie (two or three times a week), or worked on his stamp collection. His reading ran toward history and biography; among movies, he wanted something cheerful and not overly long. Mickey Mouse shorts were always on the bill.25 But it was his stamp collection that absorbed him. FDR took infinite pleasure in perusing philatelic catalogues and placing orders for obscure issues. By the time he entered the White House, his childhood collection had grown to more than 25,000 stamps in some forty albums. Sometime in the twenties he had begun to specialize, focusing on stamps from the Western Hemisphere and Hong Kong. Roosevelt asked the clerks in the White House mail room to be on the lookout for unusual stamps and literally spent hours alone in his upstairs study with tweezers and hinges, mounting new arrivals in his albums. Shortly before midnight he was wheeled into his bedroom and went to sleep—reportedly within five minutes from the time he was undressed. Unlike other presidents, Roosevelt instructed the Secret Service not to lock the doors of his room at night.26 He also removed the interior guards in the White House (Hoover had stationed two on each floor) and assigned the Secret Service to a post in the usher’s office off the north portico. Both FDR and Eleanor had no fear for their personal safety.

When Congress adjourned June 16, FDR departed for a two-week vacation sailing the New England coast. His son James had chartered a forty-five-foot schooner, Amberjack II, and the president planned to sail from Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts, around Cape Cod, four hundred miles to Campobello—his first trip to the island since he had been stricken twelve years before.27 “I am having a bang-up good time, and I do not intend to go ashore anywhere along the coast,” Roosevelt told newsmen his third day out. “This is my vacation and I am going to stay aboard this boat the whole two weeks.”28

FDR’s crew was the same that had sailed with him to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, after the Democratic convention. But instead of making the trip solo, Amberjack II was accompanied by two destroyers (USS Ellis and USS Bernadou), three Coast Guard cutters, two press boats, and the Navy’s newly commissioned heavy cruiser, USS Indianapolis.* Roosevelt knew the coast thoroughly and put his small craft into places where the naval flotilla could not follow. He had no radio and for three days was stranded by heavy fog in Lakeman Bay, off the Maine coast. FDR savored every moment. He navigated through dangerously rough seas and heavy squalls that terrified the Secret Service.29 In the treacherous shoal-ridden waters off Gloucester, where more than ten thousand seamen had perished, the accompanying naval vessels plowed cautiously along behind Amberjack II, trusting FDR’s navigational judgment.30 Except for charts and a compass, Roosevelt had no navigation aids and relied on memory and intuition to know where he should go. He sailed by dead reckoning, a skill not unlike that he had recently displayed in Washington.

On the afternoon of June 29, 1933, after almost ten hours of coping with fearsome tides and currents, FDR sailed through the Lubec narrows into Passamaquoddy Bay. James hoisted the presidential pennant to the masthead, and FDR tacked effortlessly around Friar’s Head to the dock at Welchpool, on Campobello Island. As Amberjack II crossed the bow of the Indianapolis, the warship rendered honors, ship’s complement manning the rails while the guns boomed a twenty-one-gun salute. When Roosevelt was helped ashore, it marked the first time he had left the schooner since the trip had begun on June 18. He was the first American president to visit Canada while in office, and the outpouring of affection from the islanders, many of whom had known the Roosevelts for two and three generations, was overwhelming. “I was figuring this morning on the passage of time,” said FDR in his arrival remarks, “and I remembered that I was brought here because I was teething forty-nine years ago. I was thinking also, as I came through the Narrows