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I remember thinking that February 5th that Hatton Summers was right, that there was no need for this fight, that they would get two retirements because of this bill. My hindsight memory seems to make me think that I said that day in Cabinet meeting, “Wouldn't it be best to try what Hatton Summer' bill would do first?” but I'm not sure I said that. That's probably one of the things that I thought of saying, but didn't say it. It's one of the things that I can't be positive that I ever contributed. Certainly if I did, it didn't merit any discussion.
Homer Cummings was shrewd in a kind of narrow way. He was politically shrewd, but in a kind of narrow way. I never felt that he had any broad grasp of the Constitution of the United States, of the Magna Carta, of the British Constitution from which all of our ideas spring, or that he had even any broad understanding of human nature. This doesn't mean that he didn't feel sorry for people suffering and all that sort of thing, but I don't think he had any understanding of the elements that make up the human mind and the way human beings behave under certain kinds of conditions. His mentality was not stocked with knowledge either of history, or philosophy, or the history of thought.
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