Presidential Agent

(See Cover)

Harry Hopkins, regarded by many as the second most powerful man in America, occupies a 10-by-18-ft. office in the east wing of the White House. The room is entirely devoid of the usual trappings of power and fame. Only a thin coat of white paint covers the walls; bare electric wiring runs up the corners and around the baseboards. Hopkins works at an ordinary-sized desk, reasonably new. The rest of the office furniture is also routine: a brown leather couch, on which Hopkins likes to stretch out when receiving visitors, several imitation brass ash trays, and some WPA paintings on the walls. His office staff consists of one secretary.

Hopkins' daily routine is similarly, and deceptively, simple. He gets to the office at 9:30 a.m., goes back to his Georgetown home for lunch, takes an hour's nap, and is back in the office by 3, remaining until 5:30. Sometimes, but not very often, he takes a sheaf of papers home at night. He has only one fixed appointment a week: the Wednesday morning meeting of the Munitions Assignments Board. But even though he is chairman, he often skips that. He usually sees the President daily, although there are days when they merely talk by telephone.

As the Roosevelt Administration enters its fourth term this week, Hopkins is, more than ever, the President's right arm. But he may miss the cozy, back-porch Term IV inauguration. Washington reports last week had him going to London, to straighten out in advance with Winston Churchill the agenda for the upcoming Big Three meeting.

"Special Assistant." By definition (the Official Register of the U.S.) Harry Hopkins is "special assistant and adviser to the President of the United States." Actually, his job is much more complex. It is a unique position in the U.S. Government. Specifically it calls for the qualities of a secretary, expediter, administrator, errand boy, good listener, executive, idea man, boon companion, and alter ego. There is no law covering it, the occupant need not be confirmed by Congress, he is responsible to no one except the President, and he can make the job what he will. When Hopkins quits (unlikely) or dies, the job will vanish.

The late Raymond Clapper once wrote: ". . . 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.

Hopkins has been in Washington almost as long as Franklin Roosevelt; he arrived ten weeks after the 1933 inauguration. In the early days, as administrator of CWA and WPA, he worked in the glare of white-hot publicity, took the jabs and gave back in kind. Of late, he has labored as secretly and anonymously as it is possible to do in Washington. Journalists began labeling him the "mystery man" of the Administration--a tag taken up and expanded by Hopkins' enemies.

To the milder among his opponents, he is a latter-day Richelieu, moving suavely and powerfully behind the scenes, establishing his own court favorites or giving the knife to those fallen from grace. Extreme critics have pictured him as a kind of Svengali, whose sinister influence covers sinister designs on the President and the country. Others say he is a man of no principles who simply acts through (and hides behind) his idolized principal, the President.

The Inner Circle. Actually, there is not much mystery about what Hopkins does, although there is plenty about how he does it. In the broadest terms, he works on whatever happens to be uppermost in Franklin Roosevelt's mind at the time--usually the most pressing immediate problem before the Administration. The minute such a problem is superseded in importance by another, Hopkins drops it and moves on to the next.

Those who know the details of what Hopkins does form a small circle indeed--Generals Marshall and Arnold, Admirals King and Leahy, Cabinet Members Stimson, Forrestal and Stettinius, and, of course, the President--men not given to idle chatter. On many a problem, the fine line of just where the President leaves off and Hopkins takes up is a matter privy to them alone, and public knowledge of it must await their memoirs, which Hopkins--being the kind of man he is--will probably never write. Said one eminent Washingtonian who has often worked with Hopkins : "The people who dislike Hopkins are the people who like order."

Hopkins can more nearly, and possibly more fairly, be compared to Woodrow Wilson's Colonel House. Like House, Hopkins has been the eyes and ears of a war-time President, roaming the world, attending all the top conferences--Atlantic Charter, Casablanca, Cairo, Teheran and the two Quebecs. But there is a difference. William Allen White said of House: "His daily prayer was, 'Give us this day our daily compromise.'" Hopkins has more imagination, more drive, and, despite his fealty to the President, an innate stubbornness. There is another minor difference: House sought, created and finally landed his job of Presidential agent; Hopkins more or less drifted into it.

The Signals. No matter how he got there, Hopkins' authority and power in Washington stem solely from the position he holds. Said one Cabinet member: "When Tommy Corcoran was in power and would telephone someone to get something done, that person never really knew whether it was something the President wanted or something which merely interested Thomas Gardner Corcoran. When Hopkins telephones, the man on the other end knows damn well that it's something the President wants." Hopkins' 1000% loyalty to the President is deplored by many but questioned by no one. Yet there were other loyal New Dealers who fell by the wayside.

Explaining his success not long ago, Hopkins said: "You must recognize that the most important thing in dealing with the President is to understand his signal system. With ordinary people you listen to what they say, watch their lips maybe. But with the President, you've got to pay attention to his eyebrows. They're his signals. They're more important than what he says with his mouth. The reason I've stayed with the President so long is that I understand his signals."

That is the kind of whimsical and sardonic oversimplification to which Hopkins is addicted. Actually there are many other reasons why he has lasted as long as he has. For one, he and the President are alike in many respects. Both have been severely racked by illness. The clinical history of Harry Hopkins would alone fill a book, and his friends talk as freely of his illnesses as they do of his other characteristics, like chain-smoking, his fierce pride, his easy rationalizations, or the lean, gaunt frame on which his clothes hang with scarecrow looseness.

The "Hick." One of Hopkins' friends who has made a fortune as a judge of character has said of him: "Harry is a hick. Harry will always be a hick. He still gets a small-towner's thrill out of going to a New York nightclub and spotting famous people." Yet Harry Hopkins is certainly as sophisticated a hick as ever came down the road: the hayseed on him has charmed more notables than an ascot tie ever would have.

Hopkins has been married three times. The first was in 1913 when, as a young Manhattan social worker just out of Grinnell College, he met, ardently wooed and won another young social worker named Ethel Gross. They had four children. One died in infancy. The others, all sons, entered the Army, Navy & Marines when war came. Pfc. Stephen Hopkins of the Marines was killed in action last February on Namu Island. Lieut. David Hopkins of the Navy is in the South Pacific, and Sergeant Robert Hopkins is in Europe.

After 17 years the Hopkinses were divorced. Soon after, Harry married Barbara Duncan, a secretary at the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association, of which Hopkins was then head. They had one child, Diana, now a student at Washington's Potomac School. Barbara Hopkins died in 1937.

In 1942, Hopkins met Mrs. Louise Gill Macy, Manhattan divorcee and onetime Paris fashion expert for Harper's Bazaar. They were married in the White House and lived there for a year before moving to their home in Georgetown. Mrs. Macy was well known in Manhattan cafe society, and some of Harry's old friends of WPA days began mumbling that Harry was deserting them in favor of glitter and wealth. But long before he met his present wife, Hopkins had had many friends among the rich--the Whitneys, the Harrimans, the Forrestals, the Stettiniuses, the John Hertzes--moving as effortlessly in their circles as he once did among the poor of Manhattan's lower east side. Bernard Baruch's wedding present to the Hopkinses was a sumptuous dinner for 50 at Washington's Carlton Hotel-- a fairly routine affair of its kind, which raised the blood pressure of anti-New Deal newspapers.

The Politician. There are two patterns present in Harry Hopkins' life. The first is that he has always been a large spender of other people's money while earning very little himself. As head of New York City's Board of Child Welfare in 1915 (when he was 25) he spent $10 million annually; his salary was $3,000. As head of the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association, he spent $2 million (salary: $10,000). As WPAdministrator he disposed of $9 1/2 billion (salary: $8,500). Now as head of the Munitions Assignments Board, he often has the final say on cutting up the tremendous pie of U.S. munitions. Salary: $10,000.

The second pattern is more certainly the explanation of his rise. The fact that he was a social worker is overrated; by far the most important function of his jobs has always been to bring people together. He did this as head of a city charity, of a large private charity (where he first met the rich and important people who helped him on his way up), and it is one of his principal functions now. It was he whom the President first sent to meet Churchill and Stalin, and he who first suggested the Atlantic Charter meetings where Churchill and Roosevelt met for the first time. He has always been a broker in people--in short, a politician.

One current popular view of Hopkins is that he is a onetime social worker and youthful dabbler in Socialist ideas who has now turned conservative. Business Week, which knows a conservative when it sees one, recently praised him as "one who began kicking New Dealers in the teeth long before Roosevelt did."

But the stories of Hopkins' new conservatism stem mostly from old New Dealers who have found him unwilling to use his influence now for their pet projects; e.g., Hopkins thinks such agencies as the Rural Electrification Administration and the Farm Security Administration have no claim on any money or strategic material while the war is on. The war, he has told his old friends, is everything. But the cheers from conservatives may again turn to jeers.

The Warrior. The present phase of Harry Hopkins' career began one day in May 1940, when he was sick abed at his home in Georgetown. He was a lonely man. He was still Secretary of Commerce, but he was not working at the job. To visitors he explained that he was through with Washington, that he would probably edit a magazine. Then there was a call from the White House inviting him to dinner. He rose from his sick bed, went to dinner, was asked to spend the night. He did not leave the White House for three and a half years.

The Lowlands had just been invaded, and the President's eyes were on Europe. But Hopkins' first major chore was to devise and stage the Third Term Democratic Convention in Chicago. Hopkins himself is now somewhat dubious of the quality of his tactics there, but he got the result the boys wanted: Franklin Roosevelt was nominated and elected. Immediately after election, the President took Hopkins along on a Caribbean cruise. The U.S. had already helped Britain--notably by the destroyer deal. But the outlines of bigger and bolder help were in the wind. Lend-Lease was mapped out before Franklin Roosevelt got back to Washington. He had also decided to send Hopkins to London.

Hopkins spent six weeks in England, two-thirds of the time as Winston Churchill's guest. While he was planning aid-to-Britain in the quiet recesses of Chequers, Wendell Willkie arrived to acquaint himself (and the U.S. public) with the plight of the British. When Hopkins returned to the U.S., the Lend-Lease Act was ready for passage, and he was made administrator. The constant tone of his cables had been: Britain will hold.

On the morning, some months later, when Germany invaded Russia, Hopkins was telephoning Government lawyers to see if Russia could be included under Lend-Lease. The consensus was that she could. Six weeks later, when Franklin Roosevelt found out that no shipment of munitions had yet been sent, Harry Hopkins was in England arranging the Atlantic Charter conference. He got a cable ordering him forthwith to Moscow. Two days later he was closeted alone with Stalin in the Kremlin.

He had two audiences with the dictator, was given a glimpse of Russia's huge arsenal of planes and tanks, found out that most Russian generals were warriors first and Communists second. He made up his mind that Russia, too, would hold. This was an opinion then scouted by virtually all U.S. military men.

By now all Washington knew that Harry Hopkins had "gone to war." For many a month, his chief job was to wheedle and wangle more & more U.S. supplies for Russia, and see that they got there. He was living in the Lincoln Room at the White House, and had the President's ear night & day. When Franklin Roosevelt tried to have the Neutrality Act repealed, Harry Hopkins lay down on his couch one day after lunch, called in legal counsel, and dictated a message to Congress in 90 minutes. It was delivered, over the President's signature, with hardly a comma changed.

The Sight Raiser. Harry Hopkins was in the President's study, munching an apple, when Franklin Roosevelt got the news of Pearl Harbor. Now the job of being a constant goad on production was added to Hopkins' functions. He listened to the bustling airmen, and agreed without batting an eye that the U.S. could meet their seemingly fantastic wants. It was he who always put the ostrich egg in the hen coop, who always raised the sights over the last highest production estimate. In 1941, shown the estimated merchant-ship construction for the year, he blandly doubled the figure. At year's end, the total construction was even higher.

He urged the President to establish the Office of War Mobilization, and helped persuade Jimmy Byrnes to step down from the Supreme Court and take the job. He lost one fight: he wanted a National Service Act right after Pearl Harbor. But the President vetoed the idea, on the grounds that public opinion would not accept it. (Once a Presidential course is set, Hopkins stops arguing. He also defers to no one in his estimate of the President's ability to gauge public opinion.)

In London he had been known as "Mr. Hurry Upkins."* He was the same at home. Generals and civilians in the Pentagon swear that they could always tell when Hopkins was absent from the White House, on trips or because of illness, by the slowness with which papers and orders moved through. When he returned, there was a prompt flurry of activity. Lately, Hopkins' influence on Presidential appointments has been strongly felt--notably in the new State Department "team." But to people who insinuate that Hopkins forces the President's hand, his private reply is that they do not know Franklin Roosevelt's Dutch temper.

At 54, Hopkins makes no bones about liking his job, criticism and all. It is a good job: a chance to share in the making of history without any direct responsibility. The most legitimate criticism of his position comes from those who are dismayed over the immense influence he wields without being answerable to the people. Thus, while Hopkins' friends howl that he is the mere whipping boy for those who want to lash the President, his acts are, in effect, the President's; Franklin Roosevelt must accept responsibility for them.

Meanwhile Hopkins takes criticism of himself without public comment, philosophizing that he has everything that a man in public office can want. And he has got everything--except a constituency. He could never be elected to anything, and he can never enjoy the ultimate thrill of the public leader, of thousands or millions of people acclaiming him as their man. But this, apparently, is something he does not want anyhow.

The present Mrs. Hopkins is credited by his friends with slowing down his tempo considerably, putting him on a sane regimen, and keeping him from overwork. It was not always so. In the days immediately after Pearl Harbor, when Hopkins was working 18 hours a day, one of his male friends once counseled: "Cut it out, Harry, you'll kill yourself." Harry, who is no man to overlook a little quiet drama, looked up over his shell-rimmed glasses and replied: "Do you know a better way to die?"

* In non-aspirated Russian, he is "Garry Gopkins."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.