Harry Hopkins Quotes

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 WASHINGTON, D.C. The Nazis invaded Poland on a Friday. At 2:50 a.m., President Roosevelt was awakened at the White House residence by a phone call from William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador in Paris, with news that German planes were bombing Warsaw and that German panzer divisions had punctured the borders. “Well, Bill, it’s come at last,” the president said. “God help us all.” A few hours later, the president met in the Oval Office with Secretary Hull, Undersecretary Sumner Welles, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Harry Hopkins, the commerce secretary and one of Roosevelt’s closest confidants. William Barrett, Hull’s senior advisor, sat in on the meeting to take notes.

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In the course of the meeting the two leaders discussed what terms of surrender they would eventually insist upon; the word “unconditional” was discussed but not included in the official joint statement to be read at the final press conference. Then, on January 24, to Churchill’s surprise, Roosevelt inserted the word ad lib: “Peace can come to the world,” the President read out to the assembled journalists and newsreel cameras, “only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power. . . . The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan.”1976 Roosevelt later told Harry Hopkins that the surprising and fateful insertion was a consequence of the confusion attending his effort to convince French General Henri Girard to sit down with Free French leader Charles de Gaulle: We had so much trouble getting those two French generals together that I thought to myself that this was as difficult as arranging the meeting of Grant and Lee—and then suddenly the Press Conference was on, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it, and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant “Old Unconditional Surrender,” and the next thing I knew I had said it.1977

There he sat,” Churchill wrote of Hopkins, “slim, frail, ill, but absolutely glowing with refined comprehension of the Cause [the defeat of Hitler] to the exclusion of all other purposes, loyalties, or aims.”6 Churchill dubbed Harry Hopkins, “Lord Root of the Matter.

The author writes that key FDR aide Harry Hopkins was in such poor health near the end of his boss's second term that one observer said he didn't know how Hopkins could possibly report to the president. But, at the onset of war and genuine national emergency, Hopkins was animated with a new sense of purpose.

But in other places, they’re symbols of wisdom. And in the Harry Potter world of wizarding, they are faithful servants and masterful spies.

keen observer of FDR: When government is fluid and dominated by the executive branch, [power] goes to the men who have the force to win it – the boldness, the resourcefulness and the sure judgment that command confidence … Like his boss, Harry Hopkins has boldness and resourcefulness in high degree. His admirers think his judgment is not only uncannily swift, but uncannily sure to fit what the president is thinking.

Franklin Roosevelt stood very definitely outside the era’s main academic currents. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest confidant, was a social worker from Iowa. Robert Jackson, the U.S. Attorney General whom Roosevelt appointed to the Supreme Court, was a lawyer who had no law degree. Jesse Jones, who ran

Il faut se résoudre à conclure que l'entente est impossible avec De Gaulle, qu'il est un ennemi du peuple français et de ses libertés, qu'il est un ennemi de la construction européenne (et) qu'en conséquence, il doit être détruit dans l'intérêt des Français. (Note déclassifiée, adressée au secrétaire d'État américain Harry Hopkins, (cité par Éric Branca, "De Gaulle - Monnet ou le duel du siècle", Revue Espoir, n°117, novembre 1998, p 9).)

title nor the institutional support that accompanies the position today, Harry Hopkins was America’s first national security adviser. Sometimes Roosevelt’s ambassadors and State Department advisers failed to grasp the significance of important events and sometimes they gave poor advice, but they often informed the president and helped shape his thinking. In the end, of course, Franklin Roosevelt, alone, made historic decisions about American engagement and leadership in a volatile world. As he told Wendell Willkie after the election in 1940, “Some day you may well be sitting here where I am now as president of the United States … you’ll learn what a lonely job this is.

That the New Deal should have been bigger, sooner, is a conclusion of long standing: John Maynard Keynes told Roosevelt he needed to approximately double the rate of “direct stimulus to production deliberately applied by the administration” in 1934, at a time when Roosevelt had reduced such expenditures in response to political pressure just like the kind that later came from Grassley or King.29 Roosevelt soon moved in the direction that Keynes suggested, getting the so-called big bill—amounting to nearly $5 billion—from Congress and allowing him to create the WPA to employ Americans nationwide under the direction of Harry Hopkins. But a few years afterward, once recovery seemed well under way, Roosevelt again cut relief spending—again in response to political pressure. For many economists—including Keynes—that premature reduction in fiscal stimulus was the cause of the 1937‒1938 recession.30 Only after making that fiscally cautious error did the Roosevelt administration adopt a deliberately Keynesian budget. Soon afterward, mobilization for war began.31 In 1941 Hopkins took a new job, directing Lend-Lease operations; Congress approved nearly $50 billion for the program—an order of magnitude more than the “big bill” that created the WPA.32 So when Grassley says the war ended the Depression, he is not stating an argument against the New Deal: he is stating an argument for a bigger New Deal, an argument that New Dealer Harry Hopkins at WPA should have had a budget more like World War II–era Harry Hopkins at Lend-Lease.33

Harry Hopkins when he arrived in London early in January 1941 for a first-hand view of Britain’s needs and morale. This frail Iowan had directed the New Deal Emergency Relief Administration and was Roosevelt’s troubleshooter, a man so close to the President that he lived in the White House as part of the family household. He arrived in Britain with the self-defined mission of being the ‘catalytic agent between two prima donnas’.

Truman informed Hopkins and Davies that their missions were important moments in the context of this war, and the American people deserved to know about them. In the United States the free press warranted information, and they would get it.

Litvinov

Other disappointments went unlisted. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill had been effusive in his praise at Casablanca, and Eisenhower felt unappreciated. “His work and leadership had been taken rather for granted,” Butcher wrote on January 17. The “absence of clear-cut words of thanks from the president or prime minister showed that they had their noses to the political winds.” Harry Hopkins told Butcher at Casablanca that taking Tunisia would prove Eisenhower “one of the world’s greatest generals,” but without such a victory his fate was uncertain. “Such is the life of generals,” Butcher mused.