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But Grace Tully and I have compared notes about a great many things and she said, “You know, Miss Perkins, So-and-so ran out and you know what a time the President had with him. You know how we barely kept him in line.” They would get mad about various things and go off. He didn't have the corps of mediators. He had to do it himself. His method was an indirect method.

Al Smith, as I said, operated very differently. The personal devotion that people got for him was very peculiar. You could no more let him down than you could let a child down. You could no more mislead him than you could mislead a child. Roosevelt was always vulnerable for you. You knew that he could look out for himself if you pulled the wool over his eyes. You didn't have any sense of, “I shouldn't do this to this man.” Al Smith had a way of letting everybody know that he trusted them to tell the truth - to tell him the truth. “You're an educated man. You wouldn't deceive me,” I once heard him say to a man who was trying to pull wool.

The very fact that he was ignorant of certain areas of life and didn't pretend to any knowledge in those areas at all sort of acted as a defense. The people who were operating in that area couldn't bring themselves to deceive him in the area where he didn't know anything. He was also