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chaplains are always long winded. I don't know why. At least, most of the ones I've known have been.

At any rate, the President's message was very brief. He was greeted with resounding cheers and applause, which was an expression of men trying tosay, “We stand with you.”

On the morning after this affair, although we had all been up late, and I had stayed awake trying to think this thing through, I had an instinct to get to my office very early and to see all the people in the Department of Labor - that is, as many of them as I could - right away that morning before the message to Congress, and before I had to go up to the Congress that noon. It was the same instinct you have with members of your own family when they are in trouble. You want to see them right away. I realized that many of these people would have heard the dreadful news partly on the radio, and would have read it in their morning papers, and that they would be in a state of confusion, grief, near despair. We all needed the strengthening of each other's presence. Since I was their leader for that department, they needed my strengthening presence. That is, I must think of myself as mater familias and must be wisdom - I mean truly wisdom - on this occasion.

So I went down a little earlier than usual so as to be in the building about as soon as anybody was likely to come in, and to see that all the doors were open. I got the chauffeur down early with me and told him to go out by the elevator entrances and to tell people that I was in my office