FDR encouraged Eleanor to become the ‘conscience of the New Deal’, which she popularized in a daily column. As she travelled around the country, Eleanor was invaluable for Franklin: she tapped the perfect man to direct the Works Progress Administration that created three million jobs, a social worker named Harry Hopkins who, after Howe died of cancer, became Roosevelt’s essential aide. Roosevelt needed his family at his court, but he understood that ‘One of the worst things in the world is being child of a president.’ Jimmy became stressed by serving as his assistant; Elliott became a shady playboy; Anna married twice, but later returned as his favourite companion.
‘I realize FDR’s a great man and he’s nice to me,’ Eleanor confessed, ‘but as a person I’m a stranger and I don’t want to be anything else.’ This was perhaps a coping mechanism after the heartbreak of FDR’s affair, but she found warmth in a special friend, a sturdy cigar-chomping ex-reporter called Lorena Hickock, known as Hick, with whom Eleanor enjoyed something close to love. ‘I couldn’t say
On 30 January 1933, as Roosevelt prepared for his inauguration, Adolf Hitler called on the German president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who at 11.15 a.m. swore him in as chancellor of Germany. Like his polar opposite Roosevelt, Hitler was made by the Crash, but although he insisted his rise was providential, it was far from inevitable. It was made possible by the titanic Old Man, the greatest living German.
THE FIELD MARSHAL AND THE CORPORAL
‘It was against my inclination,’ declared Hindenburg, who had retired to write his memoirs, farm his estate and enjoy his hunting, ‘to take any interest in current politics.’ That was not quite true. In 1919, the ambitious old Junker had testified that Germany had not been defeated – just ‘stabbed in the back’ by mysterious traitors. In 1920 he wanted to run for president, but he had been distracted and heartbroken by the death of his wife.
Then in late 1923 his old quartermaster-general Ludendorff approached him with an extraordinary idea: he was going to seize power with a vulgar rabble-rouser. Hindenburg firmly rejected such impertinence.
On 8 November that year, Hitler, Ludendorff and 2,000 Nazis marched on the Munich Beer Hall where the Bavarian government commissioner was speaking. Firing his pistol into the ceiling, Hitler jumped on a chair yelling, ‘National revolution has broken out! The hall’s surrounded … Nobody can leave.’ After a long night of confusion, Ludendorff and Hitler led the revolutionists towards the Bavarian Defence Ministry, but at the Odeonsplatz soldiers manning a barricade opened fire. Fourteen Nazis and four policemen fell dead; Hitler ran down a side street, jumped into a car and, when the car broke down, limped to a supporter’s house. ‘I opened the door,’ wrote Helen Hanfstaengl. ‘There he stood pale as a ghost, without a hat, his face and his clothing covered in dirt …’ He promised to kill himself.
Hindenburg called for national unity. Hitler was sentenced to a five-year jail term for treason. His nine months in Landsberg Prison were ‘my state-university’, and it was there that he wrote his essential work,
As Hitler emerged from prison, Germany was recovering, even thriving, aided by the US Dawes Plan, under President von Hindenburg, who in 1925 had secured the permission of the ex-kaiser – his ‘king and lord’ – to run for the presidency.
