Trump, the Dragon, and the Minotaur

Yanis Varoufakis, Project Syndicate

a former finance minister of Greece, is Professor of Economics at the University of Athens.

ATHENS – If Donald Trump understands anything, it is the value of bankruptcy and financial recycling. He knows all about success via strategic defaults, followed by massive debt write-offs and the creation of assets from liabilities. But does he grasp the profound difference between a developer’s debt and the debt of a large economy? And does he understand that China’s private debt bubble is a powder keg under the global economy? Much hinges on whether he does.

Trump was elected on a wave of discontent with the establishment’s colossal mishandling of both the pre-2008 boom and the post-2008 recession. His promise of a domestic stimulus and protectionist trade policies to bring back manufacturing jobs carried him to the White House. Whether he can deliver depends on whether he understands the role America used to play in the “good old days,” the role it can play now and, crucially, the significance of China.

America’s president-elect has done little to assuage growing anxiety, both at home and abroad, since his victory. Project Syndicate contributors explain why the fear is justified.

Before 1971, US global hegemony was predicated upon America’s current-account surplus with the rest of the capitalist world, which the US helped to stabilize by recycling part of its surplus to Europe and Japan. This underpinned economic stability and sharply declining inequality everywhere. But, as America slipped into a deficit position, that global system could no longer function, giving rise to what I have called the Global Minotaur phase.

According to ancient myth, King Minos of Crete owed his hegemony to the Minotaur, a tragic beast imprisoned under Minos’s palace. The Minotaur’s intense loneliness was comparable only to the fear it inspired far and wide, because its voracious appetite could be satisfied – thereby guaranteeing Minos’s reign – only by human flesh. So a ship loaded with youngsters regularly sailed to Crete from faraway Athens to deliver its human tribute to the beast. The gruesome ritual was essential for preserving Pax Cretana and the King’s hegemony.

After 1971, US hegemony grew by an analogous process. The Minotaur was none other than the US trade deficit, which devoured increasing quantities of the world’s net exports. America’s burgeoning deficit was financed by billions of dollars of daily net inflows into Wall Street from the foreign (and often US) owners of these distant factories – a form of modern tribute to the Global Minotaur.

The more the deficit grew, the greater its appetite for Europe’s and Asia’s capital. What made the Minotaur truly global was its function: it helped recycle financial capital (profits, savings, and surplus money). It kept gleaming German factories busy. It gobbled up everything produced in Japan and, later, in China. But at the same time, Wall Street learned how to turbocharge these capital inflows through exotic financial instruments. The floodgates of financialization burst open and the world was flooded with debt.

In the autumn of 2008, the Minotaur was mortally wounded after running into the wall of private debt that was a by-product of its appetite. While the Fed and the Treasury refloated US markets (at the expense of weaker Americans left behind since the 1970s), nothing would be the same: Wall Street’s capacity to continue “closing” the global recycling loop vanished. The US banking sector could no longer harness America’s twin trade and budget deficits for the purposes of financing enough domestic demand to sustain the rest of the world’s net exports. From that moment on, the world economy would find it impossible to regain its poise.

Following the Minotaur’s mortal wounding, America has not only the Fed and the Treasury to thank for helping to avoid a new Great Depression. The US was also saved by the Dragon: the Chinese government cranked up domestic investment to unprecedented levels to pick up the slack created by the contraction in spending in the US and Europe. For many years, China allowed credit creation by its formal and shadow banks to run amok, even permitting them to benefit from the Fed’s easy-money largesse by taking out dollar-denominated loans. Put succinctly, the Dragon stepped in to rebalance the West when the Minotaur no longer could.

China’s leaders knew what they were doing. They were creating a bubble of unsustainable investment to give Europe and the US a chance to get their act together. Alas, both failed to do so: America because of the standoff between President Barack Obama and the Republican-controlled Congress, and Europe for reasons too painful to recount. And when the perfect storm hit in 2015, with US interest rates climbing while commodity prices fell, China had to crank up credit creation once more.

Today, China’s credit boom is underpinned by collateral almost as bad as that on which Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and the rest were relying in 2007. Moreover, because the Chinese renminbi is grossly overvalued, corporations are borrowing dollars to repay their legacy dollar-denominated debt early, putting downward pressure on the exchange rate.

Trump’s plan for helping those left behind since the 1970s, to the extent that one is discernible, seems to turn on two axes: a domestic stimulus and bilateral deal-making under the threat of tariffs and quotas. But if he plays hardball with China, pushing the Chinese to revalue the renminbi and employing threats of tariffs and the like, he may well end up pricking the bubble of China’s private debt – unleashing a deluge of nasty consequences that would overwhelm any domestic stimulus he introduces.

In that case, Trump’s infrastructure spending would morph into more corporate welfare, implying a negligible multiplier effect. That, in turn, would set the stage for future austerity, as panic over further US interest rate rises and federal budget blow-ups put the squeeze on the government’s existing unfunded commitments (for example, Social Security).

If Trump’s medium-term economic strategy is to have any chance of success, he must grasp that it is not US public debt, but Chinese private debt, that needs to be restructured. Otherwise, US Treasury yields could go through the roof, severely weakening US debt sustainability.

Likewise, Trump must realize that he cannot make America great again by emulating Ronald Reagan’s unfunded stimulus. That trick worked when the Minotaur was chained and fed; it won’t work when the Dragon has run out of fire. Instead, if Trump truly wants to rebalance the US economy so that growth benefits the abandoned people to whom he has promised so much, he should emulate Franklin D. Roosevelt and pursue a Keynesian makeover of Bretton Woods.

CHRISTINE WHO FED THE HUNGRY

By Emily Gould , The New Yorker

One morning in early 2011, I received an e-mail from a fancy kitchenware store where I’d once taken a knife-skills class, informing me that a soup kitchen, in a church situated a block from my old apartment in Green point, Brooklyn, needed volunteers on Wednesday afternoons. It was a Wednesday. That afternoon, I got on my bike and rode down to Flushing Avenue, then over onto the new bike lane on Kent.

The ride along that stretch of waterfront was beautiful then. To the left, the Steinway Studios lot sat low enough that most of your peripheral vision was taken up by sky; until you got past the Hasidic neighborhood and closer to the bridge, you often didn’t pass a single pedestrian or jogger. The Domino factory still emitted a smell of slightly rotten caramel.

When I got to the church, I followed signs to the kitchen, and peered through a cloud of steam to find two people washing a mountain of dishes at a big slop sink, while two others bustled before a restaurant-size stove. In an anteroom off the kitchen, several people stood at counters chopping and peeling vegetables. Every work surface was crowded with tools, bags of donated food, random leftovers, and foam cups of coffee. The air was leaden with food smells. A radio somewhere blared the oldies station. Nothing seemed to be organized in any perceptible way.

I said, “Hi,” and then, louder,“Hello?” Maybe half the people turned and nodded, then went back to whatever they were doing. I didn’t know what to do next, so I just stood there at the entrance until one of the women prepping vegetables finished what she was doing and looked up at me with an expression of complete neutrality, verging on uninterest.

“You’re here from the synagogue? They said they were sending over volunteers today.”

“No, I . . .”

“It doesn’t matter. Here, can you take over these onions?” Without saying anything else, she moved to the side of the cutting board where she’d been working, gesturing to the crate of onions she’d been peeling and slicing. “Most of them are half rotten. Just cut out the bad parts.”

For the rest of the afternoon, I did whatever people asked me to do and tried not to get in anyone’s way. At first I tried to insert myself into conversations that were going on around me, but it was as if I were a ghost. I gave up and just eavesdropped, trying to pick up clues to the pecking order.

What the kitchen did was inefficient and nonsensical and probably violated every known rule of food safety, though we cooked everything for so long and at such high temperatures that I’m sure it didn’t matter. But it was a system, and it resulted, each week, in a hot meal large enough to serve everyone who came to dine. Served promptly at 6 p.m., the meal included soup, a salad, an entree and a side dish, and a bunch of donated desserts.

The kitchen was run by a crew of regulars, who almost every week were joined by a new person, a dilettante: a high-school kid doing mandated community service, a visitor from some other branch of the church’s denomination who wanted to talk about Jesus, or, often, someone like me, who’d heard about the soup kitchen and was looking to fill some kind of a hole in her life. There were five or six volunteers who could be counted on to show up each week, but two women, Annie and Christine, were the backbone of the operation, meaning that they were there every week and they were in charge, though they both pretended not to be, saying, if you asked them a question about any aspect of the cooking process, “I don’t know, what do you think we should do?”

With no official hierarchy or assigned tasks, there was always a panicky moment around five-twenty, when it seemed impossible that any food would make it to the serving station on time. At first, I would come home and complain to my boyfriend about how badly the whole thing was run, and how, if I was allowed to be in charge, I could devise a much better, cleaner, more efficient system. I was unemployed at the time, and realizing that I missed having co-workers to complain about almost as much as I missed having paychecks, feedback, a boss.

Salad greens were the one thing we couldn’t count on from the C.S.A. or local shops that donated food to us, so Christine would scrounge in the cupboards until she found the petty-cash envelope and then send whoever was first to arrive out to the greengrocer on Manhattan Avenue, the one with a friendly, elderly cat and big bunches of decent lettuce for only a dollar-fifty a head. When you returned, you’d find that Christine had brewed a giant urn of coffee and was now sipping a foam cup of it, beige with cream, while pulling items out of the kitchen’s two overflowing fridges and arranging them haphazardly on all the counter tops as she devised the meal that would use them best. Annie, a pastry chef turned graduate student, was a great cook and a vegetarian, and she would balk when Christine sometimes padded out her beautifully balanced soups by shoving in chopped bits of kielbasa and ham from the Polish butcher shop up the block. But Christine knew that each meal might be the diners’ only hot one all week, and she wanted to make it as nourishing as she could.

Christine wore a strong perfume that mingled, sometimes unpleasantly, with the cooking smells. She was a unique physical presence: tall and made taller by chunky-heeled clogs, with a mane of thick blond hair that she often wore down, even in the kitchen’s heat and steam. Her waist was tiny and her butt and thighs were not. I didn’t think much back then about how old other people were, but Christine was definitely old enough to be classified as a real adult. She liked to chat and would confide in me and even in the one-off volunteers. There were well-worn anecdotes about her youth on Long Island and her first pre-sobriety years in New York, but beyond those stories there was always something new to learn about her. Every week, as I listened to her introduce herself to a new stranger, another puzzle piece fell into place. She worked as an art restorer in a studio in the Pencil Factory, a few blocks away. Her husband was in the band of a revered female rock star. If you mentioned artists or writers you admired, she often had a personal story about them. She wasn’t showing off; those were just the people she knew. She lived on the same block as the soup kitchen, so she would sometimes go home to fetch a missing ingredient.

Her faint Long Island accent was the same as my aunt’s and my father’s, so maybe that was part of what made me feel immediately comfortable with her. Or maybe she just made everyone feel comfortable. She wasn’t exactly warm or nice, and she could be loud and bossy when she needed to be—when people disobeyed the rules, or cut in line, or showed up so addled they couldn’t hold their plates properly. She also sometimes lost her temper with the church’s pastor, an enthusiastic woman with a penchant for describing the church’s good works in detail while you stood there captive, slicing peppers or peeling potatoes. Their arguments would occasionally lead Christine to storm out of the kitchen in tears, but she would always come back before mealtime, and stand behind the serving table as Pastor Ann made her customary announcement about the rules, ready to make sure that everyone got equal portions of casserole or chicken or sausage and peppers.

Except when we were really short-staffed, few regulars besides Christine ever served the meal. After I helped serve a few times, I understood why. Though some of the people we served were immensely courteous, most didn’t bother with social niceties. Some were rude, or very high or drunk, or just mentally ill. With the exception of kids and the people whose clean clothes and befuddled air marked them as recent Polish immigrants finding their footing in the neighborhood, most of the people who came to eat had lived primarily outdoors for a long time, and they smelled. Sometimes someone smelled so bad that it was hard to breathe, and the other diners would complain. I had begun working at the kitchen in the winter, and by the hot part of the middle of summer I had mostly stopped serving the meal.

Working at the soup kitchen was for me a purely selfish exercise. I got to lose myself in repetitive physical work. I got to feel a part of something larger than myself. And I got a weekly reminder that, no matter how badly my career was going, no matter how hopeless my work seemed and how low my bank-account balance fell, I was not actually poor, because I was not hungry. In New York, it can be so easy to walk around feeling that every single person you pass on the street has it better than you do. For years, I had walked around so dazzled by the city’s conspicuous wealth that I hadn’t noticed its opposite, even though it was just as conspicuous once you knew where to look, and often hiding in plain sight. There were several regular soup-kitchen diners who were well dressed; for months, I thought they were volunteers, or maybe community-activist types who felt it was important to sit and eat alongside the people they were working to help. Eventually, when I learned to look at diners’ hands as they held out their plates to be filled, I realized that even those people had black-edged nails and raw fingers—the inconcealable signs of life outdoors.

The following October, Hurricane Sandy struck New York, leaving the Rockaways without heat and electricity for weeks. Annie and Christine would get to the kitchen early each morning to cook a meal that crews of volunteers would pack up and drive out to the places that needed it. The city’s response to the crisis seemed so haphazard. Why was a ragtag crew of volunteers from churches and temples across the city responsible for feeding so many people, and why was it taking so long for them to be able to return to their homes? A few days after the storm hit, when the entire Lower East Side was still lacking electricity, I travelled from Brooklyn to Union Square and walked up Broadway on my way to teach a yoga class to affluent teens, most of whom lived uptown. The streets were full of happy-looking people carrying shopping bags from expensive stores. They seemed to have no idea of how many people were cold, hungry, and suffering just a few blocks south.

During those weeks, the soup kitchen was a hub of frantic activity, producing big trays of food almost every day. I remember the squelch of tongs dragging through tray after tray of pasta with red sauce and cheese. When the kitchen overflowed with volunteers, we stood in the back yard of the church prepping giant quantities of donated vegetables. With numb hands, we peeled rock-hard winter squash and sliced turnips and potatoes into wedges. We spread peanut butter on sandwich after sandwich and packed donated toiletries into plastic bags. Christine brought in tons of tiny hotel soaps and shampoos; she seemed to have an endless supply. She also seemed to have endless energy. Bustling in and out of the kitchen, she was a little bit more assertive than usual when new volunteers asked her what they ought to be doing.

I went away for Christmas and then, right after New Year’s, started working in an office for the first time in years. I stayed on the soup-kitchen e-mail chain for much longer than I should have, thinking that maybe some Wednesday I’d get out of work early enough that I’d want to make the trek from midtown to Greenpoint in time to do dishes after the meal. I never did.

Months later, I was sitting at my desk at work when I got an e-mail from one of the soup kitchen’s regular volunteers telling me that Christine had died.

Pastor Ann sent a follow-up note to the volunteer list inviting us to come to the church that evening to talk about Christine informally, and I rushed there after work, hoping that someone would have answers. By then, we’d learned that she had committed suicide, but didn’t know how or when or why. It seemed completely impossible; Christine had sometimes been moody, but had never seemed remotely unstable. Even when, after her father died, she’d clearly been sad, she’d seemed able to convert the sadness immediately into unceasing activity on behalf of others.

That evening, in the pews of the church, we sat and told stories about Christine—her quirks, like the lipstick-stained foam cups of coffee and tea she left everywhere, and her adoration of her cats and all things cat-related, especially online videos. So many people had stories of how she had helped them. It was a strange, tense gathering. The feelings in the room were heavy and sad, but also angry. We couldn’t be angry at Christine, so we tried to figure out who or what was to blame for her death.

A few weeks later, the soup-kitchen crew, plus several hundred other people we’d never met before, packed into St. Mark’s Church in the East Village for Christine’s memorial service. Some of the people who spoke there were Christine’s compatriots in her decades-long sobriety; in A.A., we learned, she’d helped even more people than we knew. We also learned, finally, that Christine had been prescribed an antidepressant to help with the symptoms of menopause, and that she’d experienced a side effect that they warn about in the fast talk at the end of television ads: a sudden onset of suicidal thoughts.

Sometimes, when sadness is most socially sanctioned and appropriate, as at a funeral, it can be hard to feel it, and then it sneaks up on you at some unexpected moment, leaving you feeling devastated in the supermarket checkout line. This was not, I don’t think, anyone’s experience at Christine’s memorial, and it certainly was not mine. As the rock star whose band Christine’s husband played in closed the ceremony by singing “Amazing Grace,” the entire building seemed to shake with sobs.

The last time I had seen Christine was months before; I was on my way out of the new CVS on Manhattan Avenue, where I’d run in for some lip balm or paper towels after a date with my last remaining Greenpoint-based friend. We exchanged a few words about our respective cats, but all I really remember is how happy she was to see me, and how happy I was to see her, and how sure I was that I’d see her again. When her dad died, she’d brought little packets of birdseed for everyone at the soup kitchen, because her father had loved to feed the birds. She’d tied them with a ribbon and attached a little card for each of us. I didn’t have a feeder or a yard, so I just sprinkled the seeds on my windowsill. Juncos and mourning doves came and sat there every morning, and, when the seed ran out, I bought more.

Secret Chinese Code That Sends Information Back To China Found On Huawei and ZTE Phones

By David Richards| Channel News

Chinese phone makers Huawei and ZTE, who are Telstra’s key manufacturing partner for their house brand pre-paid phones, have been caught up in claims that their budget devices are secretly sending user data – including full text messages back to a secret Chinese server.

Huawei who was recently dumped by Telstra and has been banned by the Federal Government over security concerns has not commented on the issue.

Security firm Kryptowire who have a contract with US Homeland Security were the ones who discovered that software installed on some cheap Android phones made by Huawei and ZTE were secretly sending information back to China.

Telstra House Brand Phones are made by ZTE a Company that is part owned by the Chinese Government.

The software, which collects location data and contacts and call history, sends the information to a Chinese company called Shanghai Adups Technology every 72 hours without the owner knowing.

It has been identified on several ZTE and Huawei models of Android phones that cost around $100 -$150 and are sold in Australia.

It’s unclear how many phones have the software installed, but IDC research reveals that it could well affect tens of thousands of phones in Australia where both brands have a significant presence. 

In Australia ZTE which is part owned by the Chinese Government manufacture thousands of smartphones for Telstra.

Aside from collecting and sending information, the backdoor could also be used to bypass the phone’s security, allowing another party to control the device.

According to a New York Times report, the software was intentionally created and installed on the phones, after Adups was asked to do so by a Chinese manufacturer.

The Times report also claims the backdoor affects “international customers such as in Australia and users of disposable or prepaid phones”.

A lawyer for Adups, which says its software runs on more than 700 million devices, told the Times: “This is a private company that made a mistake.”

It remains unclear what the user information has been used for, though there are concerns over whether it has supported surveillance efforts.

Adups has not confirmed which phones are affected by the software.

ChannelNews strongly suggests that consumers concerned should contact their carrier or Huawei or ZTE directly as there is every possibility that Chinese authorities are tracking Chinese nationals living or visiting Australia via their mobile devices.

We have asked Huawei Australia for a comment, but at this stage the Chinese Company who has also been banned by the US government have not commented.

Kryptowire, the security firm that discovered the vulnerability, said the Adups software transmitted the full contents of text messages, contact lists, call logs, location information and other data to a Chinese server. The code comes preinstalled on phones and the surveillance is not disclosed to users, said Tom Karygiannis, a vice president of Kryptowire.huawei-ascend-smartphone-model

“Even if you wanted to, you wouldn’t have known about it,” he said.

At the heart of the issue is a special type of software, known as firmware, that tells phones how to operate. Adups provides the code that lets companies remotely update their firmware, an important function that is largely unseen by users. Normally, when a phone manufacturer updates its firmware, it tells customers what it is doing and whether it will use any personal information. Even if that is disclosed in long legal disclosures that customers routinely ignore, it is at least disclosed. That did not happen with the Adups software, Kryptowire said.

According to its website, Adups provides software to two of the largest mobile phone manufacturers in the world, ZTE and Huawei. Both are based in China.

Ms. Lim said she did not know how many phones were affected. She said phone companies, not Adups, were responsible for disclosing privacy policies to users. “Adups was just there to provide functionality that the phone distributor asked for,” she said.

A Google official said the company had told Adups to remove the surveillance ability from phones that run services like the Google Play store.

That would not include devices in China, where hundreds of millions of people use Android phones but where Google does not operate because of censorship concerns.

Because Adups has not published a list of affected phones, it is not clear how users can determine whether their phones are vulnerable. “People who have some technical skills could,” Mr. Karygiannis, the Kryptowire vice president, said. “But the average consumer? No.”

Ms. Lim said she did not know how customers could determine whether they were affected.

Retailers who sell Huawei products could start pulling their devices from shelves if the matter is not resolved. “If customers are concerned we may have to act” one retailer said.

When Eleanor Roosevelt Met Her Lover

In Eleanor and Hick, Susan Quinn explores the long affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and reporter Lorena Hickok. Here’s how they met.

SUSAN QUINN

By the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt was nominated for president, in August 1932, some doubted whether a survivor of polio, paralyzed from the waist down, had the strength to conduct a vigorous campaign, let alone lead the country out of the worst economic depression in its history. Even his advisers were worried. FDR came up with a defiant answer to all of them: a 9,000-mile, 21-day trip through 17 Midwestern and western states aboard the Roosevelt Special.

It was a trip perfectly suited to both FDR’s temperament and his physical limitations. As soon as the train came to a stop, FDR stepped out on the rear platform, gripping the arm of his son Jimmy. The railing cut off sight of his lower body, so the public saw only his broad shoulders and chest as he delivered his one-minute address. “It’s nice to be back in Dubuque,” he would begin, flashing his wide smile, adding, “I’m just here to look, learn, and listen.” His speech was patrician, but his message was friendly, and his physical courage buoyed his worried listeners.

Between stops, FDR had only to look out the train window to see just how bad things had become. In Chicago, there were blocks of lifeless factories, overgrown parks, and rows of vacant stores with blackened windows. Shantytowns, clustered along the railroad tracks, sent up smoke from cooking fires. In the rich farm country of Iowa and Ohio, the farmhouses were unpainted, the fences were crumbling, and food was rotting in the fields. By the time the Roosevelt Special reached Seattle, Roosevelt had reason to speak “in the name of a stricken America and a stricken world.”

Even in such terrible times, however, Franklin Roosevelt managed to enjoy himself. He loved everything about campaigning, from the enthusiasm of the local crowds to the sparring with the newspaper “boys.” FDR’s sitting room was open to all comers: local politicians got on and off, and close advisers and future cabinet members huddled late into the night, plotting a future course for a country in crisis. FDR enhanced his listening and learning with healthy doses of jokes, storytelling, poker, and booze.

Eleanor Roosevelt waited until the return journey from the West Coast to join the Roosevelt Special. She didn’t share her husband’s enthusiasm for the cheering admirers on the campaign trail. “It seems undignified and meaningless but perhaps we need it!” she once confided. She wasn’t comfortable with the jocular atmosphere around FDR, either. Try as she might, Eleanor didn’t always get the jokes and was uncomfortable with the teasing. On her honeymoon, she had refused to join a bridge game that involved money, because she had been raised to think it was improper. Drinking, especially, made her uneasy. She had her own reasons for disliking even the smell of alcohol: her father had drunk himself to death, and it now looked as though her brother was going down the same path.

Eleanor had plenty to say about policy issues. But the politicians and brain trusters who surrounded Franklin rarely thought to include her in their discussions. The exception was Louis Howe, a wizened little man with a scarred face and bulging eyes who had been a true believer in FDR’s greatness since they met in 1911. Eleanor Roosevelt had been repelled by Howe in the early days: he was an inelegant chain-smoking newspaperman, the sort of person she had been brought up to avoid. But Howe’s attentions to her in 1920, when FDR was running for vice president on the ill-fated Democratic ticket, went a long way toward changing her mind. When Franklin was stricken with polio on Campobello Island, Eleanor and Louis became a team. They were the only ones who believed that FDR had a political future in those years immediately following the diagnosis. Howe came to understand then that Eleanor could keep Roosevelt aspirations alive while FDR recovered. He urged her to lower her high-pitched voice and suppress her nervous giggle when she spoke in public, and he encouraged her to get more involved in New York politics. In time, he even had the idea that Eleanor should run for president herself.

For Louis Howe, the trip on the Roosevelt Special was a dream come true: he’d been working toward the presidential run ever since Franklin Roosevelt first served in the New York state legislature. Shrewd political operative that he was, Howe was confident that the Hoover campaign was doomed and that FDR was about to become the next president of the United States.Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t want to believe it. The spark that Howe had ignited in her had led to a new, independent life. She was the cofounder of a craft workshop called Val-Kill Industries, a cofounder and teacher at a girls’ school, and an activist with other women in New York politics. What’s more, she knew a fair amount about the ceremonial burden involved in being First Lady: her aunt Edith had been an exemplary one for her uncle Theodore. She didn’t want any part of it. She had been as passionate as Howe about FDR’s political rehabilitation. But she didn’t share his excitement now, as the Roosevelt Special gained momentum.

It was comforting, under the circumstances, when the campaign train went off on a side rail so that she could pay a visit to an old friend who would understand and sympathize. Eleanor and Isabella Greenway had endured “coming out” as debutantes in consecutive years—both looked upon it as more duty than pleasure—and Isabella had been a bridesmaid in the Roosevelt wedding, staying by Eleanor’s side as they organized the myriad presents and even composing some of the thank-you notes. Since then, Isabella had married Robert Ferguson, an old family friend, and moved with him to Prescott, Arizona, in hopes that the dry climate would cure his tuberculosis.

Since Eleanor and her husband kept friends forever, it was natural for them to take a day off from the campaign trail, away from press and public, to visit Isabella and her husband in Prescott. Journalists were more obliging in those days: photographers agreed not to take pictures that included FDR’s wheelchair. No picture of FDR in a crablike position, as his prone and helpless body was lifted in and out of his automobile, ever made the newspapers. Giving the family a day off to visit friends was all right with them.

What did surprise and rankle the reporters, though, was that an exception was made for one rookie Chicago Tribune reporter named John Boettiger, who for some reason was asked to come along on the private visit. No one resented this slight more than Lorena Hickok. Hick was the only female reporter on the Roosevelt Special and one of the top female reporters in the country, and she’d gotten there by fighting for stories. “Most women,” fellow reporter Walter B. “Rags” Ragsdale noted, “were society editors or worked the social beat. The rarities were women who fought and scratched their way to the street as regular reporters.” 

Another reporter who knew her well noticed that a red rash tended to develop on the back of Hick’s neck if she thought she was getting cheated out of a plum assignment.

Hick had already complained when she discovered that all the men on the Roosevelt Special had compartments or drawing rooms in which to sleep and work, while she was stuck with a small berth up toward the engine, in the neighborhood of the local reporters. So naturally she was furious about John Boettiger, an inexperienced reporter, getting special treatment. She decided to complain to Eleanor Roosevelt about it.

Hick didn’t expect the reaction she got: Eleanor Roosevelt invited her to come along, too. Hick was intrigued, and a little puzzled. Eleanor had kept her at a distance in the past. When she had interviewed Eleanor at the governor’s mansion, she had been invited up to the drawing room for an elegant tea, poured from a silver pot. On that day, like all others, Lorena Hickok dressed to be taken seriously: a soft silk shirt collar over a suit jacket and a skirt, of course. She was a presence. Her legs were shapely, her shoes sensible. She had a round face with a strong, determined jaw, and intense, penetrating eyes. At five foot eight, she was broad without look- ing fat.

Though hardly a fashion plate herself, Hick had felt sorry for Eleanor. She could tell that Eleanor felt homely, despite her warm blue eyes and winning smile. She dressed abominably, in Hick’s view: her skirt was too long, her blouse was a terrible green, and she wore a hairnet with an elastic that cut into her forehead. She had inherited the protruding front teeth of the Teddy Roosevelt branch of the family.

Yet Eleanor had a natural elegance when she moved. Hick was struck by her long slender hands and the graceful way she manipulated the tea things. At tea that day, Eleanor kept everything friendly but bland. Hick had a strong impression that the governor’s wife didn’t trust her. That was why she was surprised when Eleanor asked her to come along to Prescott: something had changed. Hick, ever the reporter, soon figured it out: it all had to do with a long conversation she’d had late one night with Eleanor’s secretary, Malvina 

Thompson, as the two of them kept each other company on the Roosevelt Special.

Malvina Thompson, known to everyone as Tommy, was much more than the usual secretary: she was Eleanor’s fiercely loyal friend and traveling companion, always willing to work at Eleanor’s demanding pace. The two had met while both were working on Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign. Afterward, Tommy became secretary to Louie Howe, but she worked on the side for Eleanor. By the time FDR was elected governor of New York, Tommy and Eleanor were a full-time team. Tommy was married until 1939, and had another man in her life after that. But most of her waking hours were devoted to the woman she called “Mrs. R.” Tommy and Hick had a lot in common: they were born the same year, came from the working class, smoked, drank, and held strong opinions. It was natural for them to gravitate toward each other when work was done.

The train moved along at a measured pace during the day, when FDR was sitting up in his custom-built chair in the parlor car. If it went too fast, the jerks and jiggles made it hard for him to steady himself for reading and conversation. At night, the engineer made up for lost time, hurtling though the dark. It may have been a train whistle late one night that prompted Tommy Thompson to share a childhood memory with Hick about her father, who had worked as a locomotive engineer on the railroad. He would sound three short blasts on the train whistle in a private salute as the train roared past the family’s apartment windows in the Bronx.

It was such a touching idea, and so at odds with Hick’s own childhood memories, that it prompted her to open up to Tommy about her painful past. Hick’s mother had died when she was thirteen, leaving her to deal with her violent, abusive father. Within a year, he remarried, and the stepmother kicked her out of the house. From age fourteen on, she had had to make her own way in the hardscrabble pioneer towns of South Dakota, living in other people’s houses as a hired girl.

When Eleanor heard Hick’s story from Thompson, it changed her view of the tough AP reporter. Because her own life had been scarred by loss and disappointment, she was drawn to others who had suffered and struggled. After that, she began to suspect what Hick’s fellow reporters already knew. There was the surface Hick: blasé and shock-proof, a tough-minded reporter who knew how to drink and smoke with the boys, and who fought for her rights. Then there was the tender-hearted and sometimes shy Hick underneath, who bore witness to the suffering of ordinary people in those terrible times.

Long before she joined the AP, back when she was a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune, Hick could be relied on to find and tell the most vivid stories of hardship: long, detailed pieces about girls who came to Minneapolis from little farm towns and got into trouble, about an injured worker who decided to crawl under a bridge and starve to death, about an organ grinder whose monkey was stolen.

Hick was still looking for such stories on the campaign trail. Her fellow reporter Rags Ragsdale would often cover FDR’s whistle-stop speeches while Hick circulated in the crowd and talked to people about their lives. “Many times, she came back aboard the campaign train,” Ragsdale remembered, “fuming and almost tearful over a hard-luck story she had picked up from someone in the crowd.”

There were unending hard-luck stories. During a stopover in Topeka, Kansas, Hick watched 

Franklin Roosevelt address thousands of “deeply tanned, grim-faced farmers, some so ragged that they reminded one of pictures of starving Mongolian peasants in the rotogravure sections of the Sunday papers. They did not cheer. They did not applaud. They just stood there in the broiling sun, silent, listening.”

After her day with Eleanor in Prescott, Hick realized why rookie reporter John Boettiger was getting special treatment: he was having an affair with the Roosevelts’ oldest child, Anna, who was unhappily married to Curtis Dall. Not long after, both Anna and John would divorce in order to marry each other.

The divorce was fodder for the gossip columns when it finally happened. But when Hick came back from her day with the Roosevelts and briefed her fellow reporters, she talked about the ranch and the barbecue, not the affair. It was the first of many family secrets she would keep.

The more important discovery Hick made that day was that Eleanor Roosevelt was at least as fascinating as her husband. “Lorena was as excited as I ever saw her when she came back,” Ragsdale remembered. “From this time forward it became hard for her to write with the usual AP restraint about Mrs. Roosevelt.”

In the past, Hick had avoided writing about politicians’ wives: fashion, teas, and charity events were women’s page stuff, and she’d escaped that long before, during her initiation at the Milwaukee Sentinel. Eleanor, in turn, resisted the curiosity of reporters, especially if it touched on anything personal. Her grandmother had taught her that it was unseemly to appear in the public eye. “I gave as little information as possible,” she explained in her first memoir, “feeling that that was the only right attitude toward any newspaper people where a woman and her home were concerned.”

Eleanor had good reason to be wary of all reporters. As the Boettiger incident would make clear, things went on in the Roosevelt household that needed to be kept away from the scandal-loving press. What’s more, Eleanor disliked the usual portrayals of the devoted political wife at least as much as Hick hated writing them. In Eleanor’s case, as Hick would soon discover, that ceremonial role was a façade that had little to do with who she really was.

At first, Hick cared only a little about Eleanor’s reticence. FDR, not Eleanor, was the story, and he relished Hick’s attention. In April 1932, months before he became the Democratic candidate for president, he invited her up to Hyde Park for a daylong charm offensive.

The big house at Hyde Park was a living museum of FDR’s branch of the Roosevelt family. In 1915, FDR himself had worked on plans to double the house’s size to accommodate his growing family. The enlarged version of Springwood, as the mansion was called, was full to overflowing with the family collections of books, nautical prints, and paintings. There were also portraits of Roosevelt and Delano ancestors hanging on the walls, along with porcelain and curios from China, where the Delanos made their fortune as traders. Very little in the house was connected to Eleanor’s history: she had grown up in her grandmother Hall’s mansion farther up the Hudson. The Roosevelt house she knew and loved was Sagamore Hill on Long Island, the home where Theodore Roosevelt, her father’s older brother, lived with his large family and the souvenirs of his adventurous life.

FDR and Hick sat before the fire in the big house at Hyde Park and talked politics as Eleanor listened, knitting. Then FDR took Hick out in his hand-controlled roadster for a tour of the estate, pointing out the hill where he sledded as a boy, the Christmas trees he was growing to renew the impoverished soil, and the stone cottage, at nearby Val-Kill, which he designed “for my Missus.” It was, he noted, conceived in the Dutch colonial style of his ancestors.

Hick toured the cottage with the “missus” and learned of the small furniture-making company Eleanor was part of. Eleanor and her women friends had founded Val-Kill Industries with the idea of providing local farmers with craft skills. The little workshop turned out colonial reproduction furniture and pewter.

It could not have escaped Hick’s notice, as Eleanor and her two friends took her around the small factory, that they made an unusual trio. One was Nancy Cook, a carpenter who had used her skills to fashion artificial limbs during World War I, and the other was Marion Dickerman, the head of a girls’ school in New York City. Both were avid Democrats and hardly the “ladies who lunch” whom Hick tried her best to avoid. Probably she also realized that Cook and Dickerman were a couple. Hick must have been intrigued by Eleanor and her unconventional friends, but she left them out of her AP piece. Instead, she emphasized 

FDR’s admirable efforts to restore the soil on his property.

Hick became more interested in Eleanor during the Democratic convention in 1932, while she was keeping vigil with fellow reporters outside the governor’s mansion in Albany, waiting for the delegates to settle on a candidate. It was a noisy and contentious convention, and the outcome was still unclear when FDR held a press conference on the first day of July. Hick noticed that he was lively and buoyant, joking and laughing even more than usual. His mood suggested what was later confirmed: a deal was in the making. But what she also noticed that night was that Eleanor looked despondent. “That woman is unhappy about something,” Hick told her Albany counterpart after they left. It was the only really vivid memory she carried away from the press conference. Yet it didn’t show up in the story she filed at the time.

By the time she got off the Roosevelt Special in Buffalo, Hick had figured out that covering Eleanor Roosevelt had the potential to be much more than churning out the standard First Lady coverage of the past. So when the AP reporter who was assigned to Eleanor left, Hick began actively lobbying for the job. She wired her boss, AP city editor Bill Chapin, “the dame has enormous dignity, she’s a person.” In October, Chapin finally gave her the green light. “She’s all yours now, Hickok,” he told her. “Have fun!”

Hick became Eleanor’s appendage. She spent her afternoons sitting outside her office in New York, trying to guess what was going on behind closed doors. She went to every one of her public appearances. On the night of Eleanor’s forty-eighth birthday, there was a small dinner party celebration with close friends. Hick, of course, was not invited. But she did manage to hear Eleanor comment that it was “good to be middle-aged. Things don’t matter so much. You don’t take it so hard when things happen to you that you don’t like.” The remark intrigued Hick. But it didn’t seem like newspaper copy.

Hick was invited—or invited herself—on Eleanor’s marathon campaign journey around New York State two weeks after the birthday party. Over five days at the end of October, Eleanor spent a total of fifty hours on the train. “Most of the time,” Hick’s AP story reported, “Mrs. Roosevelt was accompanied only by one woman companion.” That woman companion was the author of the story, Lorena Hickok.

On the campaign trail during that trip, Eleanor operated by complicated rules. On one hand, she refused to make campaign speeches for Franklin, because she didn’t think it was appropriate for the wife of the candidate to appeal to voters on his behalf. On the other, she did speak out enthusiastically in support of gubernatorial candidate Herbert Lehman, because, as she explained, he was a good friend of the family. In other words, it was personal not political—a distinction, in Eleanor Roosevelt’s case, without a difference.

Hick noted that Eleanor vacillated between the private and public persona from one day to the next. In Syracuse one evening, she warned an audience of Democratic women that the coming winter was likely to be “desperate” and that the Republicans had no answers. “If you and I were hungry, I doubt whether we’d be so patient as these people have been so far.” Then the next day, she insisted that she was just the candidate’s wife and didn’t talk politics.

There were still more surprises and contradictions to come. Eleanor paid a visit to her husband’s former bodyguard, Earl Miller, and his new wife in Elmira, New York. The Millers had been married not long before at the Roosevelt estate at Hyde Park. But this too was far more complicated than it appeared on the surface.

Earl Miller and Eleanor Roosevelt had an affection for each other that made some suspect they were lovers. At the very least, it was a lively flirtation. Earl, a fit and handsome athlete thirteen years her junior, had encouraged Eleanor in new, bold pursuits: riding horseback with her and teaching her to dive, to play tennis, to fire a pistol, and even to take part in silly home movies when he visited her at Val-Kill. Eleanor, for her part, lavished attention on Earl, helping him set up house and listening to his tales of romantic woe.

Some had suggested that this marriage, which began to go sour very quickly, was a sham, staged only to put off the gossips and protect the woman Miller called “Lady.” Later, there was a second unsuccessful marriage. That time there was a threat that Eleanor Roosevelt would be named as a co-respondent in divorce proceedings. Miller’s special friendship with Eleanor might have become a scandal if it got the attention of the wrong people. Once again, Hick was witness to a potentially damaging family secret; once again, she kept it to herself.

Eleanor had no sooner returned from her New York State tour than she learned that FDR’s personal secretary for the last twelve years, Marguerite LeHand, known as Missy, had lost her mother. Immediately she made plans to get back on the train and accompany Missy all the way to the mother’s home in Potsdam, New York, up near the Canadian border, for the funeral. Hick came along, of course.

On the long train ride to Potsdam, Hick learned about yet another unusual aspect of the complicated emotional landscape of the Roosevelt marriage. Missy was not just a personal secretary to FDR. She had become in fact a sort of second wife. She had lived in the governor’s mansion for the previous four years, and she would go on to live in the White House for much of Roosevelt’s presidency. A tall, stylish woman in her thirties, with gray eyes and a long face, Missy was a highly efficient secretary completely devoted to carrying out “Effdee’s” wishes. She was also the one who kept FDR company, who listened to his jokes and shared in his cocktail hour, the one who came into his bedroom in the morning to plan for the day, and who sometimes could be seen sitting on his lap when work was done. She might have been a lover.

Quite understandably, there were times when Eleanor resented Missy, especially since she was not the first personal secretary to become her husband’s intimate companion. Nonetheless, Eleanor insisted that she was very fond of Missy. This fact says not only a great deal about Eleanor, who tried hard to love almost everybody, but also about the evolution of the Roosevelt marriage. Certainly, Eleanor no longer wanted to play the role that Missy did in her husband’s life. Some months before, in a magazine piece entitled “Ten Rules for a Successful Marriage,” she had observed that a husband “may have many other helpers besides his wife, particularly if his interests are varied and broad.”

It would be hard to imagine a man with more varied and broad interests than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was a lover of people of all kinds. He relished politics and was a brilliant player of the game. But he loved many other things as well: every kind of boat, including those he sailed and the boat models he constructed out of tiny pieces of wood; trees of all kinds, including the virgin timber and the new spruces he nurtured on his 1,100-acre estate at Hyde Park; his stamp collection, which he fussed over in quiet moments; the pleasure of a good stiff drink, preferably mixed by his own hand. FDR liked to enjoy all of these things without fear of disapproval, in the company of an agreeable woman. Missy, though she had her own opinions, was such a woman. Eleanor, though she may have tried to fulfill that role in the early years of her marriage, most certainly was not.

One thing became clear to Hick during her weeks as Eleanor Roosevelt’s constant companion: the complete story of her life couldn’t be told without hurting her and her family. It was going to take a skilled and careful hand to introduce this unusual woman to the public. Lorena Hickok, who had her own secrets, was ideally suited to the job.

At some point during their journeys, Eleanor must have sensed this.

By the time the two of them returned from Potsdam on the train, Eleanor was no longer treating Hick as a dangerous journalist. In fact, she was beginning to see her in an entirely different light: as the person who might be able to fulfill her longing for affection and understanding at a daunting moment in her life.

There was only one room for the two of them on the train, a drawing room with a single berth and a long narrow couch. Eleanor insisted on giving Hick the berth and taking the couch for herself. “I’m longer than you are,” she explained. “And,” she added with a smile, “not quite so broad.”

They talked long into the night, sharing stories of their childhoods—seemingly so different but alike in their misery. Hick told Eleanor about her violent and abusive father and her teenage years as a maid in other people’s houses. Eleanor told Hick about her disapproving mother, about the tragic death of her father, whom she adored, about life in the home of her strict grandmother, and about the aunts who called her “the ugly duckling.”

Hick asked, “May I write some of that?” Eleanor replied, “If you like. I trust you.”

The End Is Nigh

MAUREEN DOWD NY TIMES

WASHINGTON — When historians write about this bizarre, ugly and dispiriting campaign — and oh, my, will they ever! — the epic dark saga will unfold this way: A man, filled with fear and insecurity, created a hatemongering character and followed it out the window. And a woman, filled with fear and insecurity, hunkered down and repeated bad patterns rather than reimagining herself in an open, bold way.

When Donald Trump moved to Manhattan from Queens, drawn by the skyscrapers and models with sky-high legs, he felt he needed to invent a larger-than-life character for himself.

Author and former ABC correspondent Lynn Sherr remembers that back in 1975, Trump had a starter apartment down the hall from her at 65th and Third, and she saw different women in cocktail dresses leaving almost every morning.

“I think he felt it wasn’t a fancy enough place for them,” Sherr said. “That was the beginning of the gilt and marble.”

Trump started hanging out at Yankee Stadium with a group of towering characters — George Steinbrenner, Roy Cohn, Rupert Murdoch and Lee Iacocca. Sometimes Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant would stop by. Donald modeled himself on these men, living large and talking big.

From Cohn, he learned about winning, without regard to right and wrong. And from Steinbrenner, he learned about indiscriminately grabbing the limelight. As Trump once said to his Yankee pals, “good publicity, bad publicity, as long as it’s publicity.”

They would sit in Steinbrenner’s suite at a big conference table watching Reggie Jackson slug home runs on TV. They got together all over town, especially at Elaine’s and Le Club, a hub in Midtown for wealthy guys, models and actresses.

“Donald was not a big night life person, except for Le Club,” said one former Steinbrenner staffer. “He was always very likable in those days. He had a big personality, but he was the youngest of the group. He was never arrogant or full of himself. He always was respectful and pleasant to everybody.”

Steinbrenner taught his protégé too well. When Trump asked his pal for the contract to build the new Yankee Stadium, the Boss said no. “If I do that,” he said, “it’s gonna be Trump Stadium, not Yankee Stadium.”

In those days, when Trump showed up at sporting events, he paraded around with beautiful women, but he seemed to be in on the joke.

“You felt he was winking at you, as though he were saying, ‘Hey, kid, what do you think? You could be successful like me,’” said one sports executive who ran into Trump at basketball games.

Before he jumped into the presidential race, Trump was seen as bombastic, vulgar, a bit of a buffoon and a cave man, but there was also, as Tina Brown put it, “a cheeky brio.” He was not regarded as a bigot or demagogue. He was seen as a playboy, not a predator. And when he leveraged up to “The Apprentice,” as his biographer Gwenda Blair notes, “he was set up as the Decider and a very discerning judge of character.”

If he had stuck with his judicious TV boss persona in a race that fused politics, social media and reality TV, who knows what would have happened?

But he created another character for the Republican primaries, playing to the feral instincts of angry voters, encouraging violence at his rallies, hatred toward journalists and disrespect for democracy itself.

“He’s so used to playing a role in different areas of his life,” said Donny Deutsch, the ad man and TV personality who appeared on “The Apprentice” a few times and was once friendly with Trump. “He saw the crowd’s adulation and it drove him. He started to get the biggest cheers for saying the most offensive things.

“He detached himself from himself. I don’t think he believes in the Muslim ban or half the things he’s saying. It was more, ‘If this gets applause, I do it,’ in a Pavlovian dog kind of way. He just got into this character. He was so taken with the whiff of his own musk. And the irony of all this is, he didn’t have to. He could have run as an outsider with a populist message without all the evil and mean components.”

Hillary Clinton could also have run without indulging her worst instincts.

People have been telling her since Wellesley that she should be the first woman in the Oval Office. And after Barack Obama usurped her in 2008, she had eight years to figure out how to run and govern without surrendering to traits that have so often proved self-defeating and exhausting.

But the first day of her Senate confirmation hearings for secretary of state is the day she registered her server domain name: clintonemail.com.

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It was a reckless and entitled move that drew the F.B.I. into the election and set off a frenzy among House Republicans, who are now threatening years of investigations during a Clinton administration and talking impeachment months before she would even be inaugurated.

Hillary started as a young lawyer on the House Watergate committee, yet she never learned how paranoia can act as an acid on dreams. She couldn’t dismantle her wall of secrecy and defensiveness and level with the public and the press; instead, she built the wall higher and clung to attack dogs like David Brock and Sidney Blumenthal, needing to surround herself with people, no matter how dubious, who would walk the plank for her.

In the hacked emails, the candidate’s advisers Neera Tanden and John Podesta recoil from the Hillary henchmen.

When Brock attacked Bernie Sanders about his health during the primaries, Tanden worried about Hillary’s trust in the “kind of a nut bar” Brock: “Hillary. God. Her instincts are suboptimal.”

About Blumenthal, the Hillary consigliere who helped smear Monica Lewinsky and was part of the ethically blurry Clinton Inc., Podesta said to Tanden: “It always amazes me that people like Sid either completely lack self-awareness or self-respect. Maybe both. Will you promise to shoot me if I ever end up like that?”

And why didn’t Hillary retire the Smithsonian-worthy tin cup? The Clintons have earned $230 million over the last 15 years, and if Hillary becomes the first woman president and Bill becomes the first first lad, they will reap many tens of millions more in book money and speeches afterward. So why buckrake on the eve of her campaign with Goldman Sachs speeches?

On the cusp of becoming Hillary’s campaign manager, Robby Mook called it “troubling” that Goldman Sachs was going to host a Clinton Foundation event.

In the leaked emails, Hillary’s advisers also worried that she has an apology “pathology,” as Tanden put it to Podesta, fretting about Hillary’s inability to offer a sincere apology for putting classified information at risk with rinky-dink servers.

They worry that her battles have made her so guarded that she can’t convey authentic emotions.

“Eventually she will sound like a human,” Tanden said.

Her staff tried to script spontaneity. Tanden suggested having a party where Hillary could “let loose” to music and have a beer and maybe it would go viral.

And even Chelsea was concerned about the foundation’s ethical morass.

The problem with Donald Trump is: We don’t know which of the characters he has created he would bring to the Oval Office.

The trouble with Hillary Clinton is: We do know. Nobody gets less paranoid in the White House.