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Martin Conboy, who had a great reputation around Tammany Hall, largely self-advertised, I think, I just laughed. I said to the others, “Certainly Franklin Roosevelt can cope with him.”

Even so, it didn't seem possible that Roosevelt could do a good job on this. In the first place, how in the world could he understand the record? But he did have the capacity to work like a dog when he had to. Roosevelt liked to have things told to him because he was busy, but he had the same suspicion of things told to him as a scholarly person does. He wanted to look it up himself. The fellow telling you may not tell you the whole story. Unless you go look it up you won't find that there's a footnote to that paragraph that raises a doubt. So he went to work on that case and really had read a great deal of it when it came in.

Roosevelt had some help with it. If Sam Rosenman didn't help him, then some other young lawyer did. I don't know that Sam himself read all the case, but some young lawyer read all the case and digested it, organized it, so that the Governor could read only the parts that were most pertinent and not read the repetitive stuff. He would say, “Read this witness. Five other witnesses (naming them) testified the same thing, but this one is the clearest.” It's the same thing that some of my girls at the Civil Service Commission do on some of our great thick cases that run up to two feet