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doubt in my mind that things would not be done just the same way, as indeed they weren't. Looking back on it, one period was over and something else takes over and goes on. At the moment you felt sorry that Al was no longer Governor. It was too bad. I think a good many people who were Democrats and close adherents of Al Smith had that same feeling. Roosevelt was after all an unknown quantity as a Governor. You took him on faith and he'd been sick. You didn't quite know what he was like now, or whatever he'd really been like as a political leader.
I'm sure Al felt that. As you look back on it afterwards, Al's planning for what Roosevelt should do was definitely the planning of a man who had been Governor of the State of New York for a long time and knew exactly what ought to be done in the year 1929-'30. He had been Governor and he knew what he was going to do next. He didn't have this kind of subtlety and wouldn't have analyzed things himself this way, but he thought of Roosevelt the way people think of their children as an extension of themselves. This, of course, is what ruins family relationships - mother-daughter, father-son relationships. Father thinks of the son as an extension of himself and says, “Now, I have this all planned for you all right. You'll get through college. Then you'll come back and I'll put you right in to learn
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