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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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but he's going to be awful mad if you don't: It would be that kind of advice. “I don't recommend your seeing him.”

But sometimes he'd say, “I just recommend you don't see him. You plain don't see him. That fellow's been down here too many times, and he never has anything constructive, and he trades on the fact that he helped you once twenty years ago about something or other. That's all right, you thanked him for that, you don't have to see him every time he turns up.”

I think this was Louis B. Wenle he said this about. I mean, a good fellow, you know, who had helped him, but he had a way of coming in whenever he came anywhere near the White House. I mean it was that sort of--that was the relationship. And Pa Watson was a very alert person. He looked amiable, like a plump amiable Buddha, but he was very alert. He saw things that other people didn't see. He saw things happening. He was conscious of rumpuses. He was very conscious of what went on, and who came and went, and who looked in the office door and then didn't go in. He would punch a button and send somebody right out to find out who that fellow was and what he wanted--what he was looking in for, you know. He wasn't a Secret Service man. There were Secret Service men around, plenty, but he had political savvy about it. Was there some real thing up this man's sleeve, and was he going to be mad about something; was he going to go out and peach that he saw





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