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John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
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other, FDR's campaign trip. It was his third term, 1940 campaign trip, and covered some of his famous speeches, some of which I have not recovered from to this day, they were so wonderful, viz. the famous “Martin, Barton and Fish” speech up in Boston. Finally, one day I sort of hit the high spot, I guess, when one day purely by accident I was sitting next to Arthur Krock, the famous --

Q:

I was going to ask you if you had any contact with him.

Oakes:

Well, I had very little contact with Arthur Krock. Since you asked that, I should say that when I went to Washington as a brand new reporter in Washington I was advised to check in with Arthur Krock who was the big cheese of the New York Times in Washington, just on a personal basis, just to say hello. I did call on Arthur Krock, and I never heard a single word from him after that. He was, in his typical way, very frostily civil, but I never heard a word from him that was the slightest courtesy of any sort. There's really no reason why there should have been except it would have been nice. He was really an extremely pompous person. I never had any contact with Arthur Krock socially or any other way during the entire time I was in Washington. I don't remember even running into him more than maybe once or twice.

Till one day by merest chance toward the end of my career at the Post, which ended when I was invited by President Roosevelt to go into the United States Army as a private, I was sitting next to Krock on a plane, I guess going to New York, purely by chance, and he was reading a story in the Washington Post that morning [tape recorder turned off]. Arthur Krock -- have I told this? I don't think so.





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