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would be able to do within a very short time, we could do better than any newcomer sent in form the outside. I thought we could do infinitely better on it than Hillman could do. We could agree with the Department of Commerce and the Department of the Interior more quickly, more easily, more honorably than any of these new outsiders who were appointed could do. I felt they would be months getting even integrated with each other and that they would be months understanding what the total problem was, that they would have to move in an integrated way before they got through.
I don't know how good Hillman really was, because I gave him Lubin, and Lubin did the planning. I also gave him Tracy, but Tracy was an executive and not a planner. Certainly I had to cooperate. No Cabinet officer was in a position where he could say he wouldn't do what the President had decided he wanted done. But I was in a conflict of interest in myself. I have always felt that I wasn't fully unselfish in a generous way about it. I felt so surely that we could do it better, that we had it all thought out, we could do it quicker, that I had to have an almost weekly fight with myself to keep on building Hillman up, giving our people, digging out our material, and so on. I wanted to win the defense effort. I wanted it to go well. I wanted the President's plan to go well, but I still kept thinking that we could have done it better.
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