Roosevelt's relationship with the Potomac was personal in ways that went beyond politics. The yacht began her life in 1934 as the USCGC Electra, a Coast Guard cutter that patrolled for rum-runners during the waning days of Prohibition. When the Secret Service declared the existing presidential yacht a fire hazard, the search for a replacement led to the Electra. The choice resonated with Roosevelt for reasons rooted in childhood trauma: as a boy, he had witnessed his aunt burn to death in an oil lamp accident. A wooden vessel prone to fire held no appeal for a president who already struggled with the daily indignities of polio. The Electra was steel-hulled and sturdy. Recommissioned as the USS Potomac and designated AG-25 -- Navy shorthand for Auxiliary Miscellaneous, hull number 25 -- she gave Roosevelt something he desperately wanted: independence. On the Potomac, he could move freely, fish in the Gulf of Mexico and the Dry Tortugas, and escape the gilded confinement of the White House.

The Potomac was not merely a pleasure vessel. She carried an antiaircraft machine gun when the president was aboard, and her radio room doubled as a broadcast studio. On March 28, 1941, Roosevelt delivered one of his fireside chats to the nation from that radio room, his voice reaching millions of Americans from somewhere on the water. "The time calls for courage and more courage," he told the country, with Europe already consumed by war and American involvement increasingly inevitable. Ship logs recovered from the vessel document voyages throughout the Gulf of Mexico and to the Dry Tortugas in Florida, where the old Fort Jefferson provided a dramatic backdrop for presidential leisure. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the yacht became a potential target, and the Secret Service curtailed Roosevelt's use of her. The president who had found freedom on the water was confined again, this time by a world war that had finally reached American shores.

Roosevelt died in April 1945, and the Potomac lost her purpose. The Navy decommissioned her, and she drifted through a series of increasingly unlikely owners. In 1960, Warren G. Toone purchased the former presidential yacht and ostensibly put her to work as a ferry between Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. In reality, she served as a floating casino for offshore gambling operations -- the vessel that had carried a president through wartime now carried card players beyond the reach of territorial law. A planned voyage to the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle ended with engine failure in Long Beach. By the 1970s, the Potomac was deteriorating, her presidential past fading into obscurity. Then James Roosevelt, FDR's eldest son, intervened. With a $2.5 million government grant, he and the Association for the Preservation of the Presidential Yacht Potomac began the long work of restoration. In April 1993, nearly half a century after Roosevelt's death, the Potomac sailed her first cruise as a restored vessel.

Today the USS Potomac is moored at the FDR Pier at Jack London Square in Oakland, one of only two surviving presidential yachts in the United States. She is a National Historic Landmark, maintained by a team of volunteers, crew, and donors who keep her seaworthy and open to the public. Visitors can walk the same teak decks where Roosevelt sat with his fishing rod, stand in the radio room where he broadcast to the nation, and look out over the Oakland estuary from the same railing where a president once scanned the horizon. The yacht earned three military service medals during World War II: the American Defense Service Medal, the American Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal. Her story spans the breadth of 20th-century American history -- from Prohibition-era rum-running patrols to wartime deception to Cold War-era gambling to historic preservation. She has been a cutter, a yacht, a decoy, a casino, and a museum. Through all of it, she has stayed afloat.