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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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raised a terrible rumpus and sent emissaries to see him. They arrived in Teheran and Roosevelt was very anxious to see Teheran. He had the usual romantic ideas, that all of us have, of a Persian city - the peacock throne - not that he expected to find it all over the sidewalk but anyway, the color of an Oriental city, particularly Persia, which has a name that rings, you know. To his astonishment, instead of taking him into town by the principal highway from the airport and down the principal street, he was taken a round about way. It had been announced that he was coming down the principal street, and the crowds had gathered on the principal street to see him, but instead of taking him down that street where the crowds were waiting for him, he was taken around by a roundabout back alley kind of way where there were no crowds and no nothing. He didn't see the people. He didn't see the town. He didn't see anything but some of the most humdrum commonplace little side alley streets. They took him around that way and in the back door of the American Embassy.

He was very much astonished, but he was told that this was a security precaution; that there had been discoveries of plots and counterplots and bombs and counter bombs. He and Churchill took very little stock in it, shrugging their shoulders and saying, “Well this of course is what the people of Persia are up against. Nobody knows anything.





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