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His whole life had been focused on keeping secrets, and after the twelve-day voyage south here on the Nourmahal, a luxury yacht owned by Vincent Astor—his neighbor from Warm Springs, Georgia—the newly elected president of the United States looked at the swarms of people meeting him at Bayfront Park this warm evening, and amid all the waves and jokes to his aides and puffs on his cigarette, he thought, Children. They are all children, frightened at what has happened to them, what has happened to their families, what has happened to their country. That was his latest secret, then, that he looked at the 140 million Americans out there and thought of them as children, even the twenty thousand who had gathered to see him tonight. Children who needed to look to a strong father who would promise to make everything right again. He grimaced, wondering what Colonel McCormack and his damnable Chicago Tribune would do with that particular thought. Which was why… secrets, so many secrets to be kept.

But oh, how that made sense, seeing all these people as children. Their dreams, their lives, everything torn apart since Black Tuesday nearly four years ago, as the stock market crashed and the grinding Depression followed. Despite all the soothing words of Hoover and his administration, it had gotten worse month after month, year after year. Factory after factory shutting down. Farmland turning to desert. Unemployment lines and soup kitchen lines and relief lines stretching for miles through hushed and fearful cities.

So here he was. New York state senator, former assistant secretary of the navy, failed vice presidential candidate in 1924, two-term governor of New York, under a month away from being inaugurated the thirty-second president of the United States, and already he knew he would have enormous power and the authority to use it once he was in the White House. During the leisurely cruise south to Florida, as he fished and talked and drank his own well-made martinis, the work had been under way. He was picking his cabinet, conferring with his smart young men, eager to go to Washington to make the necessary and overdue changes. From getting people back to work to ending the embarrassment that was Prohibition to finally chopping out the rot in the capitalist system that allowed a depression to shatter so millions of lives… There was so much to do!

The heat was oppressive, he thought as the motorcade rumbled its way through the crowds, the excited people reaching out to touch him, he waving at them, enjoying their attention, enjoying, too, the trust they were putting in him. Such a time to be alive. The problems of this blessed and rich and desperately troubled country were not unique in the world and weren’t even the worst. Japan was in Manchuria, ruthlessly slaughtering thousands of Chinese every day, hurtling threatening remarks about the Pacific and the Philippines. And Europe—ah, Europe, that would have to be faced once again, under two decades after the Great War. The global depression was devastating England and France and Germany. Now, Germany, that was a place to watch. An Austrian beer-hall rabble-rouser had just been named chancellor of Germany, and though elections were to be held there on March 5—the day after his own swearing-in—there was little doubt that Herr Hitler and his Nazi sons of bitches were going to seize power.