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Chapter 6: Don’t Mention Him to Me
The historical film personally directed by a dead president had one final scene left.
The postwar boom, the funeral of unions, the Wall Street bacchanalia, and the wails of the financial tsunami—all receded like ebbing tides. The interface of "Shield Data Services," built from code and algorithms, vanished as well.
The camera’s endpoint was history's resting place.
The last frame zoomed in infinitely, freezing on a face etched with despair and exhaustion.
It was Leo Wallace’s own face.
That bloodless visage, drained of color by the $130,000 final debt notice and the termination letter he received.
The grand narrative of history culminated in his personal tragedy.
This was the closing act of the entire movie.
Then, the screen went dark.
Leo’s consciousness plummeted back into his body as if thrown from a great height. He gasped for air, as though he’d just run a marathon through the torrents of history without an end in sight. A cold sweat soaked through the back of his T-shirt.
The special reading room of the library remained eerily silent, save for the monotonous hum of the air conditioning system.
But the world before his eyes had transformed completely.
He looked at the thick volumes of history on the shelves—texts he once revered like scripture. They were no longer crystallizations of wisdom or objective records. Instead, they were meticulously curated, flawed medical charts filled with outdated diagnoses.
And he was now the latest failed case added to those charts.
Roosevelt’s voice echoed in his mind again.
This time, there was no pride, no anger, no sarcasm—only the weariness of someone who had weathered eighty years of storms and an unyielding resolve.
"The dams I built were meant to contain a flood," Roosevelt said slowly. "I succeeded in my time."
"But eighty years have passed, Leo. The climate has changed. What rages now is not a flood but a tsunami driven by the fury of an entire planet. You cannot block a tsunami with flood barriers."
He paused, letting the metaphor sink in.
"My opponents back then were visible giants—Morgan, DuPont, Ford. They were trusts, monopolists. I could summon them to the White House and confront them face-to-face, armed with laws and public opinion."
"But your opponents are invisible viruses. They have no physical form, yet they’ve infected every vein, every cell of this system."
"You cannot negotiate with a pandemic."
The weariness in his voice grew heavier, as if stating a truth even he found hard to accept.
"My New Deal was a strong medicine for a patient who still had hope. Though gravely ill, that patient still had a foundation, an immune system that could be reactivated."
"But now, this patient has developed complete immunity to all the old remedies of my era. You cannot give a terminally ill cancer patient a box of cold medicine, Leo. That isn’t treatment."
Roosevelt’s voice carried a note of finality.
"That would be euthanasia by comfort."
The voice fell into a long silence.
This silence carried more weight than any impassioned rhetoric. It was like a massive sponge, absorbing all of Leo’s shock and fear, forcing him to confront the raw, brutal truth laid bare before him.
Just as he felt himself about to be consumed by the silence, Roosevelt posed the question—the ultimate question that would thread through everything.
"You’ve seen what happened after my death."
"You’ve seen the feast of Wall Street, the rust of Pittsburgh."
"You’ve seen your own ending."
"Now, child, answer me the first question I asked you."
"—Do you still believe the methods I used, the system I built, are effective for today’s world?"
The oppressive silence of the special reading room was broken by Leo Wallace’s heavy breath.
Slowly, he straightened up from the hard wooden chair, feeling every bone in his body groan in protest. The impact of that mental film had drained him more than any all-nighter studying ever had.
He leaned back against the chair, closed his eyes, and processed the ruins of eighty years of history.
Then, in a voice barely audible, he answered the question echoing deep within his soul.
"…No, Mr. President."
He paused, as if uttering those words had sapped him of all strength.
"The old prescriptions… they’re obsolete."
This was the academic judgment of a history Ph.D. student toward the idol he had devoted his life to studying.
It was also the admission of a young man crushed under debt and algorithms to the reality of his situation.
Yet acknowledging one path as a dead end did not automatically illuminate another.
Leo’s mind—shaped repeatedly by historical texts and post-Cold War textbooks—immediately churned with new doubts.
"But…" His voice brimmed with struggle. "But we’ve seen the outcome of the other path too, haven’t we?"
He opened his eyes, staring into the empty space ahead as if debating with the invisible specter.
"The Gulag Archipelago, tanks in Budapest, purges, the Berlin Wall dividing a nation, the rigid and lifeless planned economy, the collapse overnight—it was the most humiliating failure in history."
His breathing quickened, dredging up the deeply ingrained collective memory of his generation.
"Why should we leap from one fire pit into another that’s already proven to be just as fiery?"
The voice in his head flared with undisguised anger.
But this anger wasn’t directed at Leo—it was aimed at a historical misunderstanding he couldn’t tolerate.
"Don’t mention him to me!"
Roosevelt’s voice exploded like thunder inside Leo’s skull, leaving him dizzy.
"When I dealt with him at Yalta, I knew exactly what kind of man he was."
The anger surged and subsided just as quickly.
"I never intended to copy anyone’s model, Leo. I only wanted to fulfill my own political testament—the one I didn’t live to execute myself."
At that moment, Leo’s breath caught.
His heart began pounding wildly.
As a student who had studied the New Deal as if it were part of his very being, he knew what Roosevelt was about to say.
"Child, you know what I’m referring to."
"It was the last ember I left for this nation in my State of the Union address in 1944."
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