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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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I have always retained my friendship with Jim Farley. I have always liked him very much. This doesn't mean that I have any cool evaluation of him after 1940, but he was a vigorous, energetic fellow, whom I thought to have a large endowment of the Irish quality of loyalty. The Irish temperamentally if they like you and once give you their friendship, are yours. They're that kind of people ordinarily. I would have said that Jim had that kind of loyalty and that he would see a person through thick and thin. He was very good about seeing people through thick and thin. They could do quite bad things, quite wrong things, and Jim wouldn't let them down.

I never was aware of the fact that he personally deeply desired to be President. He never told me so with his own mouth, and he told me many things. I was on good enough terms with him so that we talked about a lot of things. There were, during these eight years, a great many times when I had to talk to Jim Farley. He was extremely helpful to me, who was without political experience on the national level at all, in helping me to get and achieve appointments of persons that I wanted in my department without making political rumpusses about it. He would say, “He sounds all right Frances,” when I told him I had selected somebody for Solicitor.





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