Nevertheless Cannadine, an academic historian (Cambridge, Oxford and Prince- ton), guides us through wealth’s triumphs and fortune’s travails to the painful treatment Mellon received at the hands of Roosevelt, the newly elected and vindictive New Deal president, who set out to discredit the highly acclaimed and long- serving Secretary of the Treasury. It was a humiliating trial that allowed Roosevelt to cast Mellon as the pariah of the Democratic Thirties. The trial ended in 1936, but the outcome, which was to exonerate Mellon posthumously, was still not known when Roosevelt invited the beleaguered Mellon to tea at the White House on New Year’s Eve 1936. For almost a decade Mellon had been America’s greatest collector of art, acquiring over half of the magnificent Russian collection at the Hermitage Gallery from the unwitting Joseph Stalin. It was not a confrontational meeting. Rather the two men sought to come to an agreement by which Mellon’s dream to create and endow the National Gallery of Art in Washington would receive the President’s permission, and also that of the Democrat-dominated Congress. It was a decision that had to be made quickly, for Mellon was dying of cancer. Roosevelt did indeed give his authorisation, causing the necessary legislation to be passed. Construction on the gallery began the following year. Shortly after this Mellon died — a somewhat shattered man with an enigmatic reputation. He had, however, in his final months provided the American nation with a peerless gift which remains today a lasting memorial to a conspicuously remarkable life.

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