Harry Hopkins

More than that, they loved him.

In the midst of a trip through the South, reporter Martha Gellhorn told FDR aide Harry Hopkins how the American people felt about the president.

He is at once God and their intimate friend.

He knows them all by name, knows their little town and mill, their little lives and their problems.

And then what? Is a current subordinate really going to replace George in D.C.

and give him orders? That doesn't make sense to a number of top brass, nor to Republican politicians, who upon even catching wind of this idea, read it as a Democratic ploy to push aside the famously nonpartisan general so Harry Hopkins can get his hands on lucrative military contracts.

Thus, even though many consider George C. Marshall to be the Ulysses S.

Grant of his generation, they have to find someone else.

and not think, perhaps always think in the structures of the treaties.

One of the books I read lately was a biography on Harry Hopkins by a Dutch author called Geert Maak.

And it's interesting to see how this advisor to President Roosevelt basically short-circuited bureaucracy and administrations to make sure that the New Deal would work, and also to make sure that, for example, the US would be re-armed in a record amount of time.

I think he started somewhere in the early 40s when he turned salary in Europe, and end of, beginning of 42, the US is the biggest arms supplier, the arsenal of democracy.

So we have to think outside the box.

It sounds strange for a lawyer, but if you get lawyers on board, it gets complex and slow.

So, short circuit the system, that's what I learned from the book on Harry Hopkins.

Very interesting.

You know, you have to understand also, and this is speculation, you know, the man's parents were driven out of Prussia, uh, one generation prior, um, for some reason that we don't know.

[laughs] And that, uh, he was in-- somewhere in the lineage, there was an 1848-er type communist mindset, and that, um- You know, he was a Democrat and a lot of people he was hanging around, Harry Hopkins, very left-leaning people.

And I think there is a general trend of resentment against Germany.

I mean, in the book, it really describes it more in the 30s and 40s.

He, um, also in the mid and late 1930s is building munitions factories.

And as we learned in your earlier podcast and streams, uh, these were producing non-American ammunition.

And even more interesting, in 1938 and 1939, he's urging Harry Hopkins to take the secretaryship of war, and Harry Hopkins did the lend lease arrangement.

So that's sort of the, uh, administrative element here behind Harry Hopkins and the rearmament and the munitions.