Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 915

would have been mad a thousand times and pulled out. But he understood the workings of this mind and of this extremely complicated individual who had such a variety of impulses, variety of drives, and such an almost clairvoyant knowledge. Temporarily he would have flashes of almost clairvoyant knowledge and understanding of a terrific variety of matters that didn't seem to have any particular relationship to each other. He couldn't always hold that. He couldn't always verbalize on it, but sometimes he could. Sometimes he could act on it and sometimes he could verbalize on it, often taking for granted that you too saw clairvoyantly, as he did, the whole area, when you didn't even know it existed. He would act as though you knew about the atomic bomb when you didn't and had no way of knowing. He would have died before he would have told you about the atomic experiment, but he would sort of verbalize on the destruction that could be and what would happen if you did this and this.

In Roosevelt this aptitude for knowing all kinds of diverse things at once in a flash did not stay. It would come and then it would go. It would only stay a minute or two. It would stay long enough sometimes to solve the problem, sometimes long enough to give him a hunch, sometimes it would just disappear. You would try





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help