Stokes: Who is Roosevelt’s ‘ghost’?
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer
Washington –
Who writes President Roosevelt’s messages to Congress has become an apparently important side issue in the bigger issue between himself and Congress because of the tart, stinging phrases sprinkled through recent communications.
Both Democrats and Republicans would like to blame the much-belabored corps of assistants who are lumped together by the opposition as “the palace guard.”
Some Democrats, in self-defense, would like to place responsibility on the President’s numerous aides, for whom they have little more love than the Republicans.
Degrees, no sense
Republicans would like to create the fiction that a bunch of smart young fellows, dripping with college degrees, but bereft of common sense, are running the government. This is all good politics and good fun, with some grains of truth, for we have those young fellows about and some of them are about as described.
But the real truth is that the author of President Roosevelt’s messages to Congress, in the usually accepted sense, is a fellow named Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Asks for drafts
He gets help, of course. He calls for suggestions, asked for memoranda from various officials and departments and even asks for sample drafts of portions of his messages. All Presidents do that in drafting messages.
Mr. Roosevelt takes all this and then dictates his own version, so that it has, in the end, what is known as “the Roosevelt touch,” and it is a Roosevelt product, branded and stamped.
Sometimes he may lift a sentence or a paragraph or more from something prepared for him, and, occasionally you may run into the author, bragging about his contribution at some cocktail bar.
‘Fraud’ is his own
It took only a cursory examination of President Roosevelt’s message on the soldier vote bill to see that someone else had prepared the technical passages, but that the short, ugly word “fraud” was his own.
What is happening is that President Roosevelt is injecting into his messages to Congress those pungent and biting phrases that can be found all through his political speeches. For he obviously is running for reelection, and he overlooks no opportunity.