Description
On March 4, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt took office as the thirty-second President of the United States. He brought with him a willingness to try any new ideas that might help to bring the nation out of the great depression.
The men he gathered around him, known collectively as the Brain Trust, had many ideas and were responsible for transforming a nation.
But one man, who was not a Brain Truster, had a greater effect on the country than any of them. He was a man of action rather than of ideas, a mixture of cynicism and idealism, of pragmatism and sentiment. His name was Harry Lloyd Hopkins.
From the unlikely background of a social worker, he went on to become one of the two or three most powerful men in the nation, serving first to fight the depression and then to fight the forces of tyranny.
When Hopkins arrived in Washington in May, 1933, he did not know Roosevelt well, but it was not long before they became close friends, as far as it was possible for anyone to be a friend of Roosevelt's. FDR called many people friends, and his relaxed manner of calling everyone from kings to laborers by their first names deceived many people into believing in an intimacy which did not exist. Roosevelt had many companions but his real friends can be counted on one hand. There were two women and three men: Lucy Mercer Rutherford and Marguerite "Missy" LeHand; Louis McHenry Howe, Edwin "Pa" Watson, and Harry Hopkins.
ISBN:399118330
