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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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“Then, you know how it is, Frances, he tells somebody something and he doesn't tell it to me. Yet, I've got to operate and I find he's told somebody something by just running into it. It's not what I would have done. At first I didn't feel sure he had because it was so contrary to what I figured out he would have told anybody to do, or to think, or what position to take. I find out that it's so, so I have to take account of that. What do you make of that?”

I didn't know what to make of it. I just knew it existed. I knew that he thought in pieces and I told Harry, “He just doesn't remember to tell you. He has no desire to deceive you as to what he told Henry Wallace or what he told Jimmy Byrnes. He doesn't connect these things. His relationship to Jimmy Byrnes, his relationship to Wallace, his relationship to Ickes are all separate things and not identical. They're not even bound together in his mind. He forgets, or buries in his subconscious, the concept that he's asked you to run everything and to be his operating person. Nothing carries his mind over to make his systematically register or write on a piece of paper, ‘I must tell Harry I told Ickes to go ahead and do this’.”





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