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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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They were cordial, but after all it was a formal dinner. You can't get too cordial. You down at a table of seventy-odd people, and it doesn't become chatty. You talk to the people on either side of you and across from you.

Dan Kimball of the Navy took me in. He sat on one side, and Henry Wallace sat on the other side. Dan Kimball is a very agreeable person and a very interesting conversationalist. We talked about a lot of things. Among other things he said, “It's fun to look around this room and see all these people. Isn't it amazing? All these people have been in President Truman's Cabinet. They've all been in some intimate relationship with him. My, when I look them over and when I think of the things that everybody in this room has said about everybody else, it's a wonder that the room holds us. The number of hatchets that must have been buried to got into this room are fantastic.” Apparently he had recollection of greater storming of Cabinet members against each other than I did, because during the Roosevelt administration, although there was storming, it didn't get into the public very much. The storming of one Cabinet member against another, their sparring for position and their efforts to get activities away from each other didn't come to quite such abrupt crises.

But in the Truman Cabinet, beginning with the allace episode and the Louis Johnson episode, there had been some





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