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“Well,” he said, “go tell him. It won't do any harm, anymore than it's done harm to tell me.”

I said, “But I don't want to be thought of as attempting to poke my nose into the affairs of the State Department, because I know nothing about this except the outer vision of a person who is a trained social observer. That's all I am.”

He said, “Go ahead.”

So I went over to see Hull. Hull was very nice, very placid and very calm. I told him these impressions, what Marshal Petain had said, how confident that whole group seemed to me, how unconfident the country and the common people appeared to me.

“Well,” said Cordell, doing the same gesture of bringing his two hands together at the fingertips and nodding rather slowly, “our information from every quarter is entirely contrary to that. I think you must have seen a very small segment of the French situation, because our information from many sources, not only from our Ambassador, but from other sources, is contrary to that. You understand that the State Department has a great variety of sources of information.”

I said I understood all that. He thanked me, and we parted. The interesting thing is that when France