Chapter One
Gentleman Amateurs
THE DATE was May 12, 1938. With three bells announcing his arrival, trailed by
trotting Secret Service agents lugging wire baskets of official papers, FDR
propelled his wheelchair from the first-floor elevator into the Oval Office
where he summoned Missy LeHand. As she came in, the President greeted his
secretary with a blinding smile and an expression that said, what does the
world have in store for Franklin Roosevelt today?
It was nearly 11 a.m. as the softly attractive LeHand sat down and propped her
steno pad on her knee. By now, eighteen years at his side, through his glowing
early promise, the catastrophe of polio, the slow resuscitation of his spirits
and ambitions, she could read FDR's every mood and need instantly. The
President took from a can on his cluttered desk one of the forty-odd Camel
cigarettes he would smoke that day and inserted it into a nicotine-stained
holder. He chose from a wire basket a letter ... read full excerpt from Roosevelt's Secret War ebook
