The Man in the Spare Bedroom Who Won the War
One Ordinary Man by Steve Vesce
I love WWII history. In fact, I spent almost a year reading nothing but WWII history after Pearl Harbor came out. I swear it had nothing to do with a little bit of a crush on Josh Hartnett (ok, maybe a little). I love it when a history writer can take me through the real history, but not in a dry way. I have my favorite history writers of course, David Grann, Stephen Ambrose, Erik Larson, the list goes on. But I also love when fiction can present history in a way that makes it more powerful than just facts by filling in some of the missing details. There, There by Tommy Orange is a great example.
One Ordinary Man by Steve Vesce is one of those books so rooted in fact that you get your history lesson, but the gaps are filled in with fiction. I had heard of Harry Hopkins, but only as an aside, in my wanderings through WWII history. But I didn’t realize that the famed White House roommate was such a pivotal figure until I read One Ordinary Man.
The Ghost in the Room (And the Spare Bedroom)
If you walked into the White House in 1940, you might have spotted a man who looked like he’d been assembled from pipe cleaners and old parchment. Harry Hopkins was a walking medical miracle—and not necessarily the good kind. He was gaunt, perpetually rumpled, and battling a digestive system that had essentially gone on permanent strike. (As someone who occasionally survives on coffee and spite, I feel this, Harry. I really do.)
Yet, this man lived in a suite just down the hall from the Oval Office.
In the grand, cinematic version of WWII—the one with the soaring soundtracks and the Josh Hartnett close-ups in airplane hangers with dog tags (ahem, focus, girl)—we focus on the generals and the front lines. But Steve Vesce’s One Ordinary Man forces us to look at the guy holding the briefcase in the background.
From Grinnell to the Global Stage
To understand how a social worker from Sioux City, Iowa, ended up as the most powerful roommate in history, you have to look at where he started. Hopkins wasn’t a product of the Ivy League elite or a military academy. He was a Grinnell College grad who cut his teeth in the trenches of New York City social work. Long before he was talking to Stalin, he was navigating the brutal realities of poverty and child welfare.
By the time the Great Depression hit, Hopkins wasn’t just a bureaucrat; he was a relief-effort machine. He was energetic, unsentimental, and—most importantly—he didn’t have the patience for red tape. That’s what caught FDR’s eye. Roosevelt didn’t need another yes man; he needed someone who could build things like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) from the ground up while the world was falling apart.
The Man Who Became a Shadow
What I found so fascinating in Vesce’s portrayal is how Hopkins transitioned from a domestic New Deal architect to a wartime ghost. He became Roosevelt’s right hand because he possessed a rare combination: total administrative brilliance and absolute, ironclad loyalty.
When the war began, Hopkins moved into the White House. Literally. He lived in the Lincoln Suite, becoming a 24/7 sounding board for a President who was carrying the weight of the free world. He wasn’t the Vice President, and he wasn’t a Cabinet kingmaker in the traditional sense, but he was the connective tissue of the Allied cause.
Think about it:
The Lend-Lease Lifeline: He managed the flow of war materials that kept the Allies afloat.
The Great Intermediary: He was the guy Roosevelt sent to sit across from Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin to figure out if we could actually win this thing.
The “Deputy President”: He handled the political “dirty work” and the high-stakes diplomacy that FDR couldn’t do from a wheelchair or behind a podium.
The Pragmatic Anti-Fascist
To his critics, he was a suspicious figure—a man with too much access and not enough “official” standing. To his supporters, he was a selfless public servant who was literally working himself to death. His health was a disaster throughout the 40s, but he stayed because Roosevelt needed his judgment.
Vesce captures this beautifully. You see the man who was often described as a “pragmatic anti-fascist,” someone whose only real North Star was Roosevelt and the American war effort. He died in 1946, shortly after the war ended, having left an imprint on the world that most official politicians could only dream of.
He was the ultimate example of the unofficial aide becoming indispensable. And as I read One Ordinary Man, I kept thinking: How did I spend a year reading about Pearl Harbor and almost miss the guy who was actually holding the room together?
The Heartache of Knowing the Ending
There is a very specific kind of heartache I get in reading historical fiction set in the late 1930s. As a reader in 2026, you want to reach through the pages, grab Harry by his rumpled lapels, and scream, “Get some sleep! Buy more steel! It’s coming!” But in One Ordinary Man, Steve Vesce captures something we desperately need to be reminded of right now: the feeling of a country that was actually, miraculously, moving in the same direction.
The “We” vs. The “Me”
I’ll be honest: reading this while scrolling through my current newsfeed is a dystopian nightmare. Today, we’re so hopelessly torn apart that we can’t even agree on what color the sky is, let alone how to save the world. While I’m reading about Hopkins literally inventing ways to put millions of people to work, I’m glancing at my phone only to see our current administration and Congress stuck in a permanent, ego-driven loop of gotcha politics and performative outrage.
It’s exhausting. And frankly, it’s embarrassing.
In One Ordinary Man, the Depression is still kicking everyone’s teeth in. People are starving, the dust bowl is a literal nightmare, and there’s no safety net. But there’s this palpable sense of collective effort that feels like a foreign language in 2026. Back then, they had bread lines; today, we just have battle lines. We have leaders who seem more interested in their follower count than their constituents, and an administration that treats problem-solving like a dirty word if it doesn’t poll well with their specific brand of extremist.
Vesce writes with a weird, gritty kind of hope. It’s not the cheesy, “everything is fine” Hallmark crap. It’s the “we have a massive, terrifying problem and we’re actually going to try and fix it” kind. Watching Hopkins juggle the New Deal relief programs feels like watching a giant jigsaw puzzle being put together by people who actually want the picture to match the box.
Compare that to now. It feels like the people in charge are intentionally throwing the puzzle pieces out the window just to watch them fall, then blaming the other side for the gravity. It makes our current political bickering look like a pathetic playground spat over a sandbox. Back then, they were arguing over how to save the country from total collapse; now, it feels like they’re arguing over who gets to rule the ashes once they’re done burning it all down for a soundbite. Vesce’s Hopkins is a man with a failing stomach and a rumpled suit who just... got to work. He didn’t have time for a narrative. He had to make sure people didn’t die.
Sitting here in 2026, watching our leaders play chicken with our future while they ignore the actual, screaming needs of the country, makes the “ordinary” heroism in this book feel almost revolutionary. We’ve traded the quiet, relentless work of building for the loud, hollow work of posturing, and I’m just over it.
Walking Toward the Cliff
What’s wild is that Vesce keeps the tone hopeful even though the shadow of WWII is stretching longer and longer across the page.
As a reader, you have the History Spoiler Alert constantly playing in your head. You see these characters arguing about domestic policy or social welfare, and you’re sitting there thinking, “Guys, in about five minutes, none of this is going to matter because the world is going to catch fire.” But the characters don’t know that. They are operating with this beautiful, naive intensity. They’re trying to build a better America for a tomorrow that we know is going to be filled with dog tags and airplane hangars. It gives the whole book this bittersweet energy—like watching a sunset when you know a hurricane is scheduled for midnight. Vesce’s pen does a magnificient job of making even the most critical American feel pride in the country again - at least the country as it was then.
Vesce’s writing doesn’t feel like a dry lecture on “The Greatest Generation.” Instead, it feels like he’s holding up a mirror to us in 2026. He’s showing us that even when things were objectively worse—when people were literally starving and a global war was brewing—there was a version of us that knew how to pull together. It’s a reminder that unity isn’t something that just happens; it’s something guys like Harry Hopkins built out of sheer, exhausted will. It makes me wonder if we’ve just forgotten how to use the tools he left behind. Vesce doesn’t shy away from the messiness or the politics, but he leaves you with the impression that hope isn’t a passive thing. It’s something men like Hopkins constructed out of sheer will and a lot of late nights in the Lincoln Suite. It’s a history lesson that feels less like a lecture and more like a roadmap for how to find our way back to each other.
(Note: Waiting for the movie adaptation. Hopefully, Josh Hartnett is available.)
I sat down (virtually, with my third coffee of the day) with Steve to talk about the man, the myth, the White House roommate. Here’s a look behind the curtain of how One Ordinary Man came to be.
What inspired you to write about a man that was behind the scenes for his entire career?
I was asked to give a talk about Hopkins several years ago to an audience in Florida. When I did a deep dive into his story for the talk, I was inspired by his grit, his savvy, and his remarkable emotional intelligence. I admired his “abiding faith” in Americans and American democracy and recognized that it was that faith that bound him and FDR together. His deep belief in the unique character of America’s democracy guided him through some of the most difficult challenges our country has ever faced - the Great Depression and World War II. For me his was a story of the hero’s journey - an unknown who traveled to meet the wizard and found himself behind the curtain pulling the levers that helped America overcome the Great Depression, defeat fascism, and win World War II. When I realized that, after FDR died in April 1945, this “ordinary man” had become the most powerful man in the world, I was hooked.
Harry lived in the White House for years, basically in FDR’s pocket. In your research, what was the weirdest or most ‘human’ detail you found about their domestic life that didn’t make it into the history books?
I think most of the unique human experiences have been captured by historians, but are often lost inside the epic events of the era. Not only did Harry live in the White House with Eleanor, FDR, and Lorena Hickok, but so did his young daughter, Diana. Harry lived in the Lincoln Suite down the hall from FDR, and Diana lived on the third floor next to FDR’s personal secretary, Missy LeHand. Harry had named Eleanor Diana’s Guardian in the event he died, and she and Missy LeHand saw to it that Diana lived a relatively normal life in the White House. They saw to it that Diana attended school, had her own Victory Garden during World War II, and engaged in White House events.
A favorite scene is when Eleanor insists that Diana be introduced to Queen Elizabeth, and young Diana believes she has met the “fairy queen.” As far as Harry is concerned, he lived, worked, and slept in the Lincoln Suite. Visitors said that his room was strewn with file folders, boxes, cigarette-filled ashtrays and old coffee cups. And his assistants, who regularly met with him to conduct the business of Lend Lease, became known as “Hopkins’ Bedroom Boys.” There’s no doubt that one of them more unique experiences of his life in the White House was his daily breakfast meetings with FDR in FDR‘s bedroom.
I describe in the book how he would exit the Lincoln Suite in his bathrobe and slippers and walk over to FDR‘s bedroom, where FDR would be sitting up in bed eating breakfast. Hopkins would sit in his regular chair, pour himself a cup of coffee, and they would begin their morning ritual of covering the day’s work. That said Hopkins’ presence in the White House and physical proximity to FDR enable the two men to have meaningful and often vitally important meetings - the kind of informal conversations about critical issues that often resulted in important decisions that had profound positive outcomes for America.
I wrote in my review that Harry looked like he was held together by pipe cleaners and spite. How much do you think his constant physical pain fueled his ‘get it done now’ attitude? Was his lack of time the reason he had no patience for red tape?
Others may have a different view, but I don’t think chronic pain or bad health had anything to do with his get-it-done attitude. It was his nature to be decisive, and he, by his own admission, preferred action to discussion. Ironically, I think he has been driven to repair - not himself - but his country and fellow Americans. One of the most attractive parts of Hopkins’ psyche was his bias for action - a no-nonsense, “let’s not waste time,” attitude about his life and the challenges faced by his country and countrymen. Even before his illness, he was known to live his life with urgency to help others, and he relied on caffeine and nicotine to keep his engine running.
I think his statement to the Congressman in a Congressional hearing captures his view of his own life perfectly. If you recall, a Congressman asked Hopkins how he thought the menial jobs his program, FERA, was handing out to people would affect those people in the long run. Hopkins replied: “People don’t eat in the long run, they eat every day.” That was Hopkins. He saw the issues he worked on as vital to the health of his country and countrymen.
I was struck by how the book portrays a country pulling together, which feels like a fantasy world compared to our current political climate. Did you feel that ‘heartache’ while writing it? Was it a conscious choice to highlight that collective effort?
I wasn’t trying to highlight that aspect of the story. I was simply trying to tell Harry Hopkins’ story well. That said, I don’t believe the political environment then was very different from today. In fact, it is remarkable to recognize the very same forces we experience today at work, then and a similar cast of characters as they do now. There was no shortage of people, across all political stripes and in the media, with strong, differing opinions about what they believed to be the right way to govern and the right path forward for the United States.
Many opposed FDR and Hopkins and despised the idea that the Federal Government would intervene to improve the lives of its citizens. In fact, many of the elite and in the media called FDR a traitor to his class, a dictator, a communist and any other label they could conjure up because he had introduced the new - some would say, “radical” - idea that the Federal Government, not the States, had an obligation to deliver certain basic rights for its citizens. FDR’s New Deal put forward the notion that all citizens deserved the chance to have good health, resources for retirement, protection against unscrupulous financial practices, and an economy that was a level playing field for all. This idea of the Federal Government overseeing the delivery of those basic rights was a radical idea at that time, and even to this day, it remains a bone of contention between Americans.
It is important to remember that FDR also delivered a simple yet profound vision of what America stands for when, on January 6, 1941, he delivered his famous Four Freedoms speech. The Four Freedoms - Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Fear and Freedom from Want- became the war aims of the U.S. Military in World War II and the foundational vision of liberal democracies and the world order from the end of World War II to the present day. Every U.S. soldier received a Victory Medal in World War II, and the Four Freedoms are on the back of each medal. When asked, “Why are you fighting?”, the majority of U.S. soldiers answered that they were fighting for the Four Freedoms.
The title is One Ordinary Man. In an era of ‘Main Character Energy’ and ego-driven leadership, what can today’s politicians learn from a guy who was content to stay in the shadows and just solve problems?
A lot. What strikes me most about that era was how selfless Hopkins and many leaders were, preferring to act for the greater good instead of their own ambition. They were far from perfect, but there is no question that during those years, many American leaders did what they perceived to be their duty as Americans for the greater good of their country and its citizens.
I believe that much of their behavior was driven by the scale of the epic challenges confronting them. These were existential threats to America and Americans, and they were real - not one or two manufactured crises for political purposes as we recently experienced. There was widespread recognition by Hopkins and others throughout the country that something had to be done quickly to avert disaster for the entire country. The stakes were life and death, and those who acted with self-interest or to further their own ambition were generally looked upon very unfavorably by most in the country.
There was admiration for those who displayed moral leadership - doing their duty, especially if the person did not benefit directly. That doesn’t mean, however, that everyone was rowing the boat in the same direction during those years. There were many who continued to promote their own selfish causes searching for headlines like Congressman Martin Dies, Jr. who saw communists everywhere in the government, or populists such as Huey Long, or Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-semitic “radio priest” who supported Hitler and Mussolini’s policies and Charles Lindbergh, the anti-semitic hero aviator who with Coughlin was a spokesman for the America First Committee.
You lean heavily on fact, but use fiction to bridge the gaps. Is there one specific scene in the book—perhaps a private conversation between Harry and Churchill or Stalin—that is purely fictional but feels to you like the ‘truest’ moment in the story?
That’s a great question. I am not sure if they are the truest moments in the story but my scenes of Churchill’s dinner in Glasgow, Hopkins’ gift of a radio to Clementine and Churchill, his meeting with Hick when she returns from her road trip, and his press conference when he tells LaBelle, an adversarial reporter what he really believes are all imagined but based on actual events using actual words.
My favorite story in the book is the Glasgow dinner meeting, which I imagined, but the words he said that night are true and documented. For me, this story tells us exactly who Hopkins is - his emotional intelligence, his direct and uncompromising approach to challenges, his confidence in the rightness of his thinking and his relationship with FDR. It occurred during his first trip to England to meet Churchill when all of Great Britain was wondering whether they would survive the bombings, the possible invasion, or if they would have enough food to eat or guns to fight with. When Churchill unexpectedly asks him to say a few words to a roomful of Scottish politicians, he rightly surmises that they would like to know what he was going to tell FDR about Great Britain when he returned home. He quoted from the Bible’s Book of Ruth and, in the most eloquent way possible, told them all that he and America would stand with them.
“Whither though goest, I will go. Whither thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people. Thy God, my God. Even to the end.”
This was a remarkable scene, both for the profound impact it had on Churchill and the audience, but also because it tells us exactly who Harry Hopkins was. Rooted in his Mother’s faith, savvy in the ways of the world, incisively intelligent, and a believer in the shared values of the last remaining democracies of the times.
How do you maintain tension and hope in a story where the reader already knows Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust are coming? How do you keep the characters’ ‘beautiful, naive intensity’ believable?
A key part of the book and story is its grounding in historical fact. Ironically, I think it is our knowledge of the actual epic events and existential threats that help increase the tension in the story. In fact I remember thinking that the first scene in the book - Hopkins’ arriving in Washington D.C. days after FDR’s inauguration - was intended to communicate the idea that while others were running away (the hobos) this man was heading right into the teeth of the storm.
Throughout the book, Hopkins, along with FDR, Eleanor, Churchill and others, always move forward into the next storm. Our knowledge of what comes next for them helps to define the tension. That said, on a human level, the drama or tension comes from the intimate relationships between the characters as they each recognize that they must act in concert if they have any hope of succeeding against the avalanche that threatens to bury them all. The tension comes from their journey, and the hope from their experiences with the other main characters.
Since my readers are always looking for what to pick up next: If Harry Hopkins were alive today and walked into a bookstore, which book—history or fiction—do you think he’d tell us all to read?
The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich by William Shirer. Hopkins would say that Shirer’s factual and practical account of the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany within the bounds of the democratic Weimar Republic should be required reading for anyone hoping to understand just how fragile democracy really is. He would say it was required reading for anyone who believes in American democracy.
One Ordinary Man is available in paperback and audiobook and Kindle on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Strand Books, and other retailers.