“I didn’t believe any such law as that could be made to hold water and said so, and even he admitted that it was open to interpretation, though he still thought it was perfectly sound. But he also said it wouldn’t make any difference because long before the question could reach the Supreme Court at Washington and be settled, that federal-patronage deal would be so badly scrambled up it wouldn’t affect the outcome of our election in January one bit. He also said he had been telling all our people to take every slick dime of Washington money that was offered to them, and then go to the polls and vote for our candidates, because his program would do more for them than they ever would get out of those lousy WPA jobs. “The main thing he tried to impress on me that morning was that I could forget all my worries about the presidential campaign. ‘Everything’s in wonderful shape,’ he said to me. ‘It’s never been in better shape. All the money we’re going to need we already have in hand, I mean we’ve got it right now, not just pledges but cash; and on top of that we’ve got a load of affidavits and other documents about some of the things that have been going on, a stack of papers heavy enough to break down a bullock.’ “As I remember, I asked if this was the material in the vaults of the Riggs National Bank, and that was when he really surprised me. He said no, everything had been taken out of the Riggs vaults just a few days before he left Washington, and put in another place for safekeeping. But he didn’t say where he had put it, and I didn’t ask. After all, he was the one to decide where he wanted it, and why, and if the time ever came when it was important for me to know where it was, he would tell me. And besides, he was so confident about everything being in the best possible shape, so sure things couldn’t be better, that I felt no anxiety about it. “‘We’re going to handle the campaign exactly the same way as we did in the West for that double-crossing Roosevelt in 1932,’ he told me. ‘Between us, we’ll pick out the main towns in each state, and you’ll go there five or six days in advance and try to line up someone who will serve as chairman of the meeting when I get there.’ That is how we did it in 1932, and it wasn’t always easy, because hunting for Democrats in the Dakotas in those days, or in Minnesota, was exactly like the old one about the needle in a haystack. In some of those towns there just wasn’t a Democrat. But I would stick to it and find someone, no matter who. If the only Democrat I could produce was a truck driver, all right. Huey would have a truck driver for chairman of the meeting he would address on behalf of Franklin Roosevelt for president.