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about what was the best thing to do, the right thing to do in a difficult or complicated situation, because some of the things we think of doing right off the bat are things that are just terrible to explain a year or two years later.

The President, I know, was in the habit of thinking of how he would explain this or that. He wanted to be right. Franklin Roosevelt wanted to be right. You say that the Republicans might say he was drunk with power. No, he wasn't drunk with power then - nonsense. He may have been angry. That's possible. I suppose he had a streak of vindictiveness. I don't know. I wrote in my book what he said when somebody once said, “That was very magnanimous of you to do such and such,” signing someone's commission who had been nasty to him, or something of that kind. He said, “I'm not magnanimous. I'm a mean cuss at heart.” I heard him say that. Roosevelt had a good deal of self knowledge and he wanted to be right. I don't mean to say that he wanted to be right in the sense that he always wanted to please God. But he wanted always to have a reasonable kind of excuse for anything he did that was sort of out of order.

You ask if he had a streak of salism in him. No! You mention that he sometimes teased with quite a barb