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an American newspaper. Why? she wondered. Instinctive self-preservation? In a world where dictators strode and strutted toward war, Americans instinctively did not want to publicize the fact that their own leader could not even walk.
    “We have only the cocktail hour,” said Franklin, “before Eleanor’s young communists join us for dinner.”
    That morning Caroline had heard on the radio in Blaise’s office reports from a congressional committee deeply concerned with something known as “un-American activities.” Various youth organizations had been testifying about
their
suspect activities. Apparently, the September pact between Germany and Russia had been a political earthquake on Capitol Hill, where the President’s New Deal, already sternly labeled communist by American conservatives, was now looking especially vulnerable. With what seemed, to Caroline, either exemplary courage or plain lack of judgment, late the previous evening Eleanor had come down from New York in order to attend the meeting of the House committee, thus demonstrating her sympathy with the young witnesses who wanted no part in old Europe’s war.
    Early that morning, in a green dress, she had left for the Capitol with Caroline, who wanted to hear her testify, but Eleanor had said, “You’re better off at the
Tribune
, influencing Blaise. I’ll drop you off.”
    As it turned out, Mrs. Roosevelt caused a sensation in the Caucus Room: First Ladies were almost never seen in the legislative halls of the republic. She had been received courteously by the congressmen, who had invited her to sit with them on their dais. Gracefully, she had said that she preferred just to sit in the back where she could keep her cold gray alert eyes upon the congressmen while projecting her patented brand of motherly solicitude for the young firebrands.
    “Now she’s asked six of them to dinner.” Franklin sighed theatrically.
    “Are they communists?”
    “Some, I suppose. Or they think they are this week. I shall be benignly noncommittal.”
    “Your greatest role.”
    “Do you think so?” Franklin placed a cigarette in a holder. Caroline lit it for him. “We have some other actors here tonight. For dinner, there’s Melvyn Douglas and his wife, Helen Gahagan. Loyal New Dealers, I’m happy to say. She’s very political and never too shy to advise me. Now you tell me about Daladier.” The President’s love of gossip, Caroline had decided, came from the fact that as he could not move about, either literally or symbolically as president, he must pumpothers. Although he often acknowledged that the peripatetic Eleanor acted as his eyes and ears, he also acknowledged, privately to Caroline, that Eleanor was far too noble ever to meanly gossip, “and since you are too far away in France, all I’ve got, at the moment, is Liz Whitney. She drives over from that place of hers in Virginia and just barges in. Without an appointment. Then she asks me about all the news that was in the papers that morning, which she never reads. Patiently, I tell her. Then she rivets
me
with all the problems that Jock Whitney and David Selznick had in making
Gone With the Wind
, which is about to open at last.”
    During this, a black steward had placed a tray full of bottles and glasses on the President’s desk, to which he now returned. “I think a martini will hit the spot.” The Roosevelt special. Caroline loathed gin but gamely drank the President’s astonishing concoction, whose secret ingredients were two brands of vermouth, each sweeter than the other, and a dash of absinthe to destroy the palate. As he shook the martini, he returned to Daladier, the premier of France.
    “We say that he is more the Veal,” said Caroline, “than what he likes to be called, the bull of Vaucluse.”
    “Yes. Bullitt says he’s scared to death of Hitler. But who else is there?”
    “Léon Blum.” Caroline was particularly fond of the socialist intellectual, whose Popular Front