FDR - Jean Edward Smith [391]
Roosevelt not only rose to the occasion but gave what many believe to be the greatest speech of his political career. Mindful of his problems at Bremerton, the president delivered the speech seated and honed the text through dozens of drafts. He began with a humorous reference to his age: “Well, here we are together again—after four years—and what years they have been. You know, I am actually four years older, which is a fact that seems to annoy some people.” The audience loved it. As they warmed to the president, Roosevelt proceeded with a voice that purred softly and then struck hard, taunting his opponents for their reactionary record and ridiculing Republicans for their quadrennial efforts to pose as friends of labor and the working class. “The whole purpose of Republican oratory these days seems to be to switch labels. The object is to persuade the American people that the Democratic party was responsible for the 1929 crash and the depression.… If I were a Republican leader speaking to a mixed audience, the last word in the whole dictionary that I would use is that word ‘depression.’ ”118
Waves of thunderous applause cascaded through the Statler’s giant ballroom. The outpouring of affection from the audience startled even those who had seen Roosevelt on the campaign trail in many past elections. “The Old Master still had it,” a reporter from Time observed. “He was like a veteran virtuoso playing a piece he has loved for years, who fingers his way through it with a delicate fire, a perfection of timing and tone, and an assurance that no young player, no matter how gifted, can equal.”119
The climax came when Roosevelt delivered his facetious rebuttal to Republican charges about Fala. “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or my sons. No, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them.” The audience howled its delight, and Roosevelt continued with deadpan seriousness:
You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on an Aleutian Island and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself … but I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.120
The Dewey campaign suffered a body blow from which it never recovered. “The campaign of 1944 was the easiest in which I ever participated,” wrote Harry Truman afterward. “The Republican candidates never had a chance.”121 Thomas E. Dewey, a humorless, self-important young prosecutor propelled by his own ambition—the groom on the wedding cake, in Alice Longworth’s dismissive phrase—was an easy man for Democrats to despise and for Roosevelt to hate. The only remaining hurdle to victory in November was the question of the president’s health, and FDR chose to address it head-on. On Saturday, October 21, he undertook a grinding tour of New York City’s four largest boroughs—Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan—riding in an open White House limousine. Roosevelt wanted to make a point, and the weather could not have been more opportune. It was forty degrees and raining heavily when he started out at Brooklyn Army Terminal, pouring when he addressed 10,000 spectators at Ebbets Field on behalf of Senator Robert Wagner, and coming down in bucketsful by the time he reached Times Square. Roosevelt was soaked almost as soon as he got under way, often riding bareheaded and without his cape, waving and flashing his famous smile for four