ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)'s, The President's Mystery, both novel and cinematic versions. The President's Mystery Story, is a fictional puzzle, "solved" by a half dozen popular mystery writers. The migration of the mystery story into cinema is also suggestive of the political theater that binds a physically and affectively moving image of an actor's body to the office of the president. Roosevelt argued that "private economic power is, to enlarge an old phrase, a public trust as well", and personal liberties would need to be calibrated anew so as not to conflict with what FDR called the "public welfare". Lester Cole recalls that when he read the proposal for the film version of The President's Mystery, he found in the original source material "an opportunity for a politically oriented subtext, which eventually took over" the project. The striking resemblance between the two men suggests that Blake is at once the hero, audience, and author of Roosevelt's fiction.
