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of people. It was only in Cabinet that I heard Cummings make comments of this sort. I never heard him discuss it outside of Cabinet, except when you went to him deliberately about something having to do with a Supreme Court decision. If you went to him and said, “What do you think I can safely do in this, that or the other field in view of such and such a decision?” he would then be lugubrious again. That's the only word I can think of to describe it - lugubrious. That was his line.

I now know what I only suspected, but didn't know when I wrote the book called The Roosevelt I Knew in 1945. That is that as early as '34, certainly, Cummings was working privately, in his own office, on a variety of projects which might be set in motion for the reconstitution of the Court, or the redefining of the Court's authority, or the Court's relationship to the other two branches of government. I know that this was being done before the Schechter case. These plans may have been worked on after January '35, but I know it was before the Schechter case. My informant in all this is Harold Stephens. He was an Assistant Attorney General and the number two man in the Department of Justice.

Stephens knew not too much about the specific plans, because he and others in the Department were never