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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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good book, an excellent book. It was done as an act of friendship. The amount of money that Sherwood spent doing it was perfectly preposterous. The publisher had already made the big advance on the book and wasn't prepared to make any further advances, or at least not any very great ones. Sherwood once said to me that when he undertook this thing, he had no idea how complicated, difficult and terrible it was going to be. For many things there was just no documentation whatever to be found. Many of the things that Harry did, and it's known that he did them, you can't find one word anywhere that would indicate what authority he had to do a thing like that. Roosevelt might have told him so, but Roosevelt was dead and you couldn't go and find out from Roosevelt if he had told him. There's no record of it in naval communications. There's no record of it in any of the secretary's notes of Roosevelt. There's no record of it in any of Roosevelt's diarics, no notations on his calendar or any other notations. The British Admiralty had no notations on it.

I think Sherwood must have asked everybody if they had any recollections about these things. He came to ask me and there was no reason why I should have special recollection. He was just groping for something.





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