Andrew Ross Sorkin

So this is sort of, to me, one of the most fascinating conversations maybe in presidential history, which is literally, as you described, right before the inauguration.

And by the way, these guys were not

really talking to each other.

And I should say that this phone call was preceded by a letter that Hoover had secretly written to Roosevelt, begging him to come out in favor of the idea of what they called a bank holiday, basically shutting down the banks for a day or two or three or four so that they could try to get a handle on the situation.

And this goes to sort of reputation, ego, and everything else, which is that I think Hoover desperately wanted this to happen because he wanted some credit for it.

He didn't want to go down as the president who left the system in this sort of state of failure.

And on the other side, you had Roosevelt who desperately wanted to be able to start with a clean slate and didn't want to be –

credited with having done anything in cahoots with Hoover and wanted to be able to sort of start anew.

And so you have this sort of unique clash where Hoover's begging him to at least come out and support something like this.

And he's saying, no, no, no, no, no.

And he would tell him he's not really doing it.

But he but Hoover knew Hoover knew that the second he got into the White House, that Roosevelt would go off and do exactly what Hoover should have done effectively and

and he would get the credit for it, and he does.

I think in part because he had made a pivotal mistake, which is he had told the country over and over and over again that this was somehow some kind of psychological problem, that this was not actually an economic problem, that this was like a problem in your mind, that somehow what you were seeing was not what you were seeing.

And by the way, people didn't believe that because they could see what they could see.

Give in to the fact that he had that his biggest mistake was not taking this on in a more meaningful way earlier.

You know, there was just so many there was a series of mistakes that were made after the crash.

That really led to the Great Depression.

I think of the crash as almost just the first domino in a whole bunch of things that he did.

One of the things he tried to do was raise taxes at a time when the economy was flailing.