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in the sense that he thought it was wrong to fight, or felt, “I won't fight,” but he was a pacifist in the sense that he believed that the prevention could take place and that men should work toward that end. Although he was an old-fashioned Southern gentleman, he was still a person who in his own record had some humanitarian instincts. He thought that war was destructive and ought not to be a necessary thing, that there were ways in which it could be gradually eliminated.

From that first gathering of the Cabinet, therefore, I had a feeling of, “These men mean business. I think the President does. Something will be done. Something will happen. There'll be a great many strange, new things proposed.”

There was no particular feeling of the greatness of Roosevelt at the time. I have always held the view, and I did express it in the book that I wrote, that Roosevelt was a personality who developed and grew from the inside out. He was not a finished product when he was launched into Politics. He developed almost by intuitive processes as circumstances and situations beat upon him. He was much more concrete than he was abstract. He couldn't learn anything from an abstract statement of principles, theories, or policies. I don't know that he ever did listen to anything like that. If he did, he just got the words and would sometimes repeat the words as a trial balloon to see how you took