Becoming Madam Secretary

by Stephanie Dray

Churchill once said that meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne, and that knowing him was like drinking it. That wasn’t far off the mark.

it was best to stride with a purposeful gait, keeping fixed upon my face an expression that said, Ill-intended gentlemen will very much regret trifling with me.

“Why economics?” I echoed gamely. “Because many people in America believe poverty is a moral problem having to do with sloth or some other sin we can blame on individuals. But I believe poverty in America is an economic problem that can be solved…and I intend to solve it.”

“Miss Perkins, stop writing happy endings and start writing stories that change the world.” Stung, I countered, “I can’t imagine why anyone would try to change the world unless they believed in happy endings.” The immigrants in those tenements believed in happy endings, after all; it’s why they came to America in the first place. And I needed to believe in happy endings too. My work would be too depressing without hope.

I didn’t know if it was true, and I didn’t care. Sometimes a lie was a mercy.

A hot new rage smoldered inside me, fueled by moral indignation. To think I’d felt disillusioned. To think I’d considered resigning, quitting, taking a step back from my work… Well, any thought of that burned away in that fire. I had to ask myself why I’d been at a tea party in that square on that day, on that hour. Why had God put me there in that very spot to bear witness? There could be only one answer. God had called me to do something about these injustices. And I would answer that call or die trying.

“Empathy takes imagination, and most people ain’t got any. We’ll get to fire safety reform. But first we need to give the public a little razzle-dazzle.”

“My dear girl, making a few enemies is how you know you’re doing things right.”

Because to be loved, really loved, one must be known, and I find that terrifying. In truth, I think it takes courage—real spiritual daring—to allow oneself to be known.”

“In our form of government, anybody can aspire to be elected. But does just anybody get votes? No, Commissioner, he doesn’t get any votes unless he’s got a crowd of people who are all bound together in some way. That’s what a political party is—a group of people who stand by each other. They get a candidate. They promote him. Gradually a policy works itself out. If you don’t have a two-party system, you’ll have the kind of bedlam they have in France.”

Woodrow Wilson may have won the war and advanced international morality, but he’d been a disaster when it came to racial equality at home. Much to my shame, he’d reintroduced segregation into the federal government, and with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, black people and immigrants were more discriminated against than ever.

“That people want to feel heard. Everybody wants to have that sense of belonging, of being on the inside. No one wants to be left out. So it’s not such a trial to indulge them.” I could see he meant it. Life had given him a big blow between the eyes. The man who’d been born with a silver spoon in his mouth had suffered, and that suffering made him empathetic. The plain truth was that polio had changed Roosevelt, and being with him was changing me.

“When people who are willing and able to work and support their families cannot find a job, then a civilized people must—not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of social duty—prevent the starvation or dire want of its fellow man.”

“Well, my best advice is this,” she said. “Deny it, dismiss it, or diminish it with laughter. When you know to laugh and to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through even if he was serious about it.” Then Eleanor added, “Also, refreshments help.”

I couldn’t imagine the sight of persecuted children would arouse anything but pity in the hardest of human hearts, but in that I was wrong. Almost immediately, angry nativist groups bayed for my blood because—with the help of the German Jewish Children’s Aid society—I’d cleared the way to get two hundred and fifty more Jewish children out of Nazi Germany and into the United States.

FDR liked to joke that a conservative was a man with two perfectly good legs who has somehow never learned to walk forward.

“You know what else New Englanders don’t do? We don’t quit.”

The American experiment goes on, and our democracy isn’t done. In fact, the battle for democracy is never done. And ours is worth fighting for.