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wreck the President if we don't watch out. He's just getting terrible. I'm in a position to know what he does and says. He makes the most preposterous statements to people who come to his office. He makes the most impossible promises and doesn't fulfill them - couldn't fulfill them. He's in total confusion. He doesn't know what he's doing a lot of the time. He's in a very serious condition mentally as the result of alcoholism. There isn't any question about it.”

“Now,” he said, “I'm a young man. I'm young enough to be his son. It's a dreadful thing for me to say. I wouldn't say this to anybody else. I'm only telling it to you because I know you to be a friend of his. I think you will understand it. I think you will be faithful to him and not make things rough for him. And I think perhaps you have influence enough to do something about it.”

I didn't say it to Blacky Smith, of course, but I was only too well aware that he was sometimes in a bad condition. But he went on and told me details of the promises he had made that were impossible. Anybody ought to have known they were impossible. He told me some of the preposterous statements he had made as to what he had done, or what the NRA had done. They kept him out of the way of the press when he was like that. The press was