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a run-off here between our political racehorses.” They wanted to do it in the old-fashioned political way. It's all so emotional that it's hard to describe. There wasn't any reasonable feeling for it at all.
So they turned ugly on Wallace. They could afford to show their ugliness to Wallace. Nobody could afford to show his ugliness to the President. They muttered underneath and they grumbled underneath. At any rate, I called the President to tell him that things were ugly, and not about Wallace, but ugly about everything and about him, about the fact that nobody else was going to have a look-in on being President. It was a kind of distracted ugliness, with nobody actually able to take aim and hit something. They couldn't hit the President of the United States, who was, after all, their President.
It may have been that a day elapsed before I called Mrs. Roosevelt again, but I think I had my whole conversation with the President in one phone call. It is true that Mrs. Roosevelt demurred at going. She was very unwilling to go. I had to persuade her very heavily. By this time things were getting worse and worse. It had become known that Roosevelt wanted Wallace. The feeling was getting worse and worse, sourer and sourer. I felt, and I think some of the cuners felt, that she
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