The Franklin Scare — Jerome Charyn

It is May, 1944. An ordinary sailor named Oliver Beebe, a handsome man with a head full of eyebrows, arrives at the White House to cut the Presidents hair, and quickly, mysteriously, becomes a live-in, full-time companion and confidant to the Chief Executive. An odd nimbus surrounds the young man. The president has installed him in the attic of the White House, he comes and goes from FDRs bedroom without knocking, he is the only man who seems to be able to bridge the warring camps surrounding Eleanor and FDR.Reporters and newsmen of the nation interview and probe, but they can find no clue to the secret of Oliver Beebe. The Secret Service digs into his past, but they can only come up with questions: What is Beebes strange relationship with his sister? Why does he go to meetings of the Fascist organization called The Liberty Club? What is the basis of his remarkable friendship with J. Edgar Hoover? As the security forces watch in frustration, the President, increasingly dependent on young Oliver, and caught up first in his election battle against Tom Dewey and then with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, remains oblivious to his own and the nations jeopardy. What happens then, and how, is more than historic.