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[FDR]Martini Madness
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| Contributor | Penguin |
| Last Edited | Penguin Mar 16, 2013 10:12pm |
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| Category | News |
| News Date | Friday, March 15, 2013 04:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | The first First Martini Drinker was Herbert Hoover, a man who had demonstrated great commitment to the drink while serving as Calvin Coolidge's secretary of commerce during Prohibition: His regular route home from the office took him down Garfield Street, where he would pop into the Embassy of Belgium to wet his whistle on foreign soil. Bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase “Belgian relief,” Hoover developed a keen appreciation for cocktail hour as “the pause between the errors and trials of the day and the hopes of the night.”
His successor, FDR, likewise honored martini time as a sacred space and, further, demonstrated a passion for bartending unlikely to be seen again in a commander-in-chief. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has described the Franklin Roosevelt cocktail hour as an “institution”: “No more was said of politics and war; instead the conversation turned to subjects of lighter weight—to gossip, funny stories, and reminiscences.” Roosevelt mixed martini variations with great zeal and poor sense, slopping booze about unmethodically and even sometimes decorating the drink with not one or three but two olives, a garniture generally considered to be at least poor form—and possibly even a warning from the barman that a mobster is about to break your kneecaps. According to Conrad Black's Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Roosevelt “was proud of his proficiency with a cocktail shaker, but his drinks were almost universally unappreciated.” Elsewhere, Jon Meacham relays the story of Winston Churchill—not exactly a picky drinker—excusing himself to the men's room with a horrible Roosevelt special in hand, extracting the olive, flushing the drink, and returning the olive to a glass refilled with tap water. And some of those weekends at Hyde Park got very long indeed. Modern Drunkard Magazine cuts to the chase: "At the risk of being distasteful, I must say that, although FDR was hobbled by polio, his disease wasn’t |
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