It’s President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Birthday. When FDR signed the 21st Amendment, ending the 13 years of the national torture known as Prohibition, he said, “I believe this would be a good time for a beer.” He should have said a Wet Gin Martini with a lemon twist, because that’s what he most often drank. How much? Well, his biographical whitewashers have tried to cut it down to three a night, but sources at the time put it quite a bit higher. They helped ease his back pain, he asserted, and just imagine the media’s hysterical shrieks of horror and doom if a modern president had to sometimes be carried to bed while drunkenly singing college fight songs. Why, it would be the end of the world. Yet somehow, FDR pulled it off.
