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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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After all the basic realities of the Greek efforts at government, of the Roman efforts at government, are well-known and are recorded.

I don't think he was abnormally ambitious. I think nearly ever lawyer who got up to his position wanted to get on the Court. He wanted to be recognized. He was a politician. He had been in the Democratic Party a long time. He had been a factor in the Democratic National Committee for a long time. I think he had the interests of the party at heart, insofar as he understood what the interests were.

I think this whole thing stemmed from the fact that he was not a very capable or clever man, that he was accustomed, as a politician, to playing very quietly, not letting other people know what you were doing. That's the way you do it in politics. You don't raise any problems in the local committee that you can take care of some other way. You don't have too much discussion. You don't lay everything out. You deal a little by fooling the people, but not too much. You can't fool all the people all of the time, but you can fool some of the people some of the time. That's an element in political operations. A man who has been a political operator for a very long time inevitably





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