Word: sherwood
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...Sherwood would not deny his bias in favor of Roosevelt and Hopkins, yet it is a bias frequently dissolved by candor. There is enough in these pages to explain why Hopkins was feared and hated by men of all parties. Noting that Harry "was addicted to the naked insult," Sherwood quotes Hugh Johnson without disapproval : "He has a mind like a razor, a tongue like a skinning knife, a temper like a Tartar and a sufficient vocabulary of parlor profanity-words kosher enough to get by the censor but acid enough to make a mule-skinner jealous...
Hopkins, the once selfless social worker, began to show all the signs of an avidly ambitious politician. Writes Sherwood: "Harry Hopkins, in the promotion of his own slender chances, was impelled to connive, plot and even to misrepresent . . ." Then, says Sherwood, when his illness compelled Hopkins to renounce that impossible ambition, "in the war years . . . he became and remained one of the most incorruptible...
...Sherwood says that Hopkins, Wallace and many another New Dealer were slow in understanding the threat to the U.S. in Axis aggression. But F.D.R. valued Hopkins enough to spell out patiently the facts of international life for him, and Harry learned so fast that by March 5, 1941, Secretary Stimson wrote in his diary: "The more I think of it, the more I think it is a Godsend that [Hopkins] should be at the White House...
...Sherwood's picture of life at the White House during the war years is one of the bright features of a very readable book. Hopkins came for dinner one evening, and was invited to stay for the night. He lived in Lincoln's old study for the next 3½ years. His desk was a card table, his bedroom was his office. In a sloppy dressing gown, Hopkins would traipse through the White House corridors to consult Roosevelt or Churchill. Usually he was miserably ill (cancer, ulcers, numerous complications), but at a word from F.D.R...
Roosevelt and Hopkins is full of details that make it far more colorful than historical fiction. Once when Roosevelt complained that he never could have peanuts because his secret service would have to check each one, Sherwood and Rosenman slipped out and got him a bagful which he kept under his coat and devoured. His aides were quick to spot the chief's moods and behave accordingly. Sometimes it would be: "God help anybody who asks him for any favors today." Again: "He feels so good he'll be telling Cotton Ed Smith that it's perfectly...