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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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on it. One person he didn't like. One person he couldn't bear to think of sitting in the Labor Department, couldn't trust him. He had come to trust me to keep my mouth shut about what he said to me and what went on in the Cabinet. It was that kind of uneasiness he had about a successor.

So I said to Mrs. Roosevelt, “Will you kindly find out just when he's going to act on my resignation? If he's absolutely not unwilling, for heaven's sakes let me know now because I have two or three opportunities that I can stir up and move right into, and I ought to be attending to them.” Those jobs were outside the government.

She said she would. She said, “I don't always get a chance to talk to him about anything serious. It's some-times as much as a week before I get a word in about anything that is purely business and not just personal matters, such as ‘Have you paid that bill?’ I can ask him that occasionally, but political business is hard to get to.”

In about a week or ten days she wrote me a note. She said, “I have talked to him about it, and the answer is no, absolutely no.”

I telephoned her and said, “What does that mean?”

She said, “That's it. He says that he can't be bothered with it. He can't have another problem on his hands. Everything's going all right so far as he's concerned. He's





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