Wild About Harry

...There is a convention in book-reviewing that requires the reviewer, however admirable the book, to find something, somewhere, that is wrong...

...Now George McJimsey, professor of history at Iowa State, has published a major volume on the Hopkins peacetime and wartime activities .* It is a generally excellent piece of work...

...WILD ABOUT HARRY by John Kenneth Galbraith Remembering Harry Hopkins and the New Deal I arrived in Washington to take up a position in the New Deal almost exactly 53 years ago as this issue of The Washington Monthly comes off the press...

...With some notable exceptions, all thought it their wartime duty to protect the economic system from the disruptive regulation they associated with F.D.R...

...Harvard University Press, $25.00...

...There was also, more specifically, considerable talk about what might be accomplished if, as was often desired, "you could get to him !' Those who had access—Leon Henderson, Averell Harriman, Edward Stettinius— were deemed to be, pro tanto, men of power...

...I was not a decisive figure in that great current of change...

...Some were professional spokesmen for their firms or industries and otherwise nonfunctional...

...Colonel North...

...With us in this confrontation was Harry Hopkins at the White House...

...Doubtless he was concerned therewith, but as the person principally coordinated, I have no real recollection of being so moved...

...Elsewhere, also, there is not sufficient distinction between the matters Hopkins touched and those he truly changed...

...the South Building of the USDA, then occupied while still under construction, I would have lingered by a lavatory door just to get a glimpse...

...He was also in those years, in the role in which my associates most admired him, an ally in the great mobilization battle of the time...

...Harry Hopkins, Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy...

...In 1942, for example, he has him coordinating antiinflation strategy...

...F.D.R...

...He had a sense of the issues and, even more important, an accurate view of the motivation (or lack of it) and the personalities, generally, of the players...

...Regan, Admiral Poindexter, and the peripatetic Lt...

...For seven years they had deplored the New Deal intrusion on economic life...

...Let us win the war but not by sacrificing the free enterprise system...

...was a compulsive topic of conversation as was his role as a lightning rod for conservative criticism...

...Later I was much in Washington and, during the war years, was in charge of price control, a job of some responsibility...

...With all else, Professor McJimsey reveals Hopkins's often strained and chaotic personal life and his terrible bouts of ill health, the latter the result of various medical misadventures exacerbated by intense and prolonged strain, and a strong commitment to self-damage...

...Deaver, Mr...

...Alas, my position in the hierarchy did not bring me even remotely in touch with Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman, or Jerome Frank, to whose views I would have been dangerously vulnerable had opportunity allowed...

...In the early Roosevelt years Hopkins was thought the ultimate New Dealer, the man who did not make concessions to the opposition, who did not assume, in the manner of the modern liberal (taking advice from the accomplished political strategists), that his own constituency was safe and seek to enlarge it by selling out to the opposition...

...Such, in those days, was the shortage of economists—a most rewarding deprivation that I hope will always persist—that I was put on the payroll in a matter of hours and there remained until the Harvard term began...

...They were figures of heroic proportions...

...Hopkins was specifically engaged...

...He died only a few months after F.D.R...

...was in general support...

...His influence on F.D.R...

...There must be some display of critical judgment...

...I think Professor McJimsey, especially in the war years, spreads himself a bit thin over Hopkins's exceedingly diverse activities and does not sufficiently assess the depth and reality of his intervention and exercise of influence...

...Hopkins was especially involved with Lend-Lease and policy and strategy in support of our wartime allies, including the intransigent problem of shipping and its allocation between our military operations and the allies' needs...

...It was brought about by the myopic and on occasion perverse vision of the great corporate bureaucrats who came, or were brought, to Washington to mobilize the American economy...

...George McJimsey...

...For determining the outcome of the war it could have been a more important battle than some that were fought with guns...

...As I've elsewhere told, I was passing through the capital on my way from graduate study in Berkeley and a job in Davis, California, to an instructorship at Harvard...

...Had I heard that they were visiting John Kenneth Galbraith is the Paul M Warburg professor of economics emeritus at Harvard University...

...Later, early in the war, Hopkins was a solid anchor of support to Britain (and Winston Churchill) and thereafter of aid to the British and the Soviets...

...I endorse the jacket comment of Frank Freidel, which concludes by saying, "Overall, this is a splendid and important book ?' 1 am not, I must confess, acquainted with the recent generation of White House operatives— Mr...

...My assignment was to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Triple A, a highly improbable center of radicalism at the time...

...Also well above me were such reputable figures as Adlai Stevenson and George Ball, and yet further in the upper distance, Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture, and Harry Hopkins, the epitome of New Deal activism...

...Some had as their principle qualification that they were, in a manner of speaking, employed...

...He then tells in admirable detail of the energy and competence Hopkins brought to the organization and administration of relief and work relief—FERA, CWA, WPA—the tasks that more than anything else expressed the concern and compassion of the early Roosevelt years...

...He goes on to describe Hopkins's role in the months before Pearl Harbor as a bridge between Churchill and Roosevelt, as an ardent and effective supporter of the British struggle for survival, and then as an extended arm of the president reaching out to and dealing with the armed services and the war agencies...

...I yearned to belong...

...Arthur Schlesinger, Frank Freidel, and Robert Sherwood have all dealt with him with competence and respect...

...I somehow doubt, however, that they will ever command quite such an excellent and generally admiring work...

...This conflict, which could take our attention away from Hitler and the Japanese for weeks at a time, is still not sufficiently celebrated in the wartime histories...

...Against this relaxed attitude, solemnly avowed, the New Dealers and their academic allies who had come to Washington were in strenuous, unrelenting, and, as I look back, greatly enjoyed conflict...

...Curtailment of civilian production and consumption, expansion of steel and other plant capacity, manpower and materials allocation, and much else, should be left to the voluntary cooperation and good sense of the American businessman and to the beneficent magic of the market...

...However, as noted, this is in some measure a ceremonial complaint...

...it is a miracle that he survived so long...

...now the war mobilization seemed more of the same...

...Ceremonial complaints Hopkins in his several roles has not been neglected by the historians...

...Some were aging and thus expendable...

...Harry Hopkins, nonetheless, remained for me as well as for others a distant and, in light of all that was said of his influence, a mystical or perhaps mythical figure...

...McJimsey tells of Hopkins's origins in Iowa, his education at Grinnell College, his work as an administrator of diverse social services in New York...