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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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that the relationship of the President and his wife almost always was one of friendship and good advice. Things moved very rapidly from then on to the end and she was out of it, except that he would ask her to go and do certain very difficult chores, like going to England in the midst of a war. He couldn't go, obviously, but he wanted Eleanor to do that. He asked her to go out and visit the sick and the wounded in the hospitals in the South Pacific and to cheer everybody up. He couldn't go, but she could. She was his alter ego.

She didn't like that assignment to go to the South Pacific and she undertook it with great reluctance for more reasons than one. It was very hard. She saw not much sense in it actually. It did a great deal for her. She came back utterly exhausted. I'd never seen her tired before and I never saw her admit fatigue, except when she came back from there. She just said, “I'm so tired.” I never saw her admit fatigue before. She was obviously tired. She was just plain tuckered out after that. It did a great deal for her in that it opened her eyes to an aspect of life and to the nature of mankind that she'd never seen before, and to the realities of war.





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