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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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were buried. Nobody said a disagreeable word do anybody. Most people were very cordial and very polite, whether they had been on intimate terms in recent years or not. Even those who didn't like each other and had been on poor terms, like McGrath and McGranery and Biddle, were seen talking to each other in pleasant conversation.

I felt that this was the end of a twenty-year era. It was done so badly. Those things can be done so well so easily. It's not difficult to do that. It's difficult to run the government and to decide who's to be the Secretary of War and it's difficult to decide that you really will ask So-an-So to resign. That's hard. But it's not difficult to say a few pleasant remarks. There are plenty of speech writers around who will be glad to write them for you if you can't do it yourself. It's no trouble. There were plenty of people there who know the correct thing and how to do it. It was a though the more corny elements in our group were left riding the fast horse, while we just disappeared. It was dissipated at the end, rather than brought to a focus that we would all remember. Somebody should have said something that we would never forget.

The Roosevelt-Truman administration for the last twenty-odd years was gathered there. The occasion just dribbled





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