Sublime

functionary

FDR’s immediate staff was totally devoted to him and militantly nonideological. Their loyalty was personal. They avoided policy debates and would have followed the president in whatever direction he chose.

sweet Mortimer,

There was an unspoken dignity, an impenetrable reserve that protected him against undue familiarity. Aside from relatives, old friends from college, and senior statesmen whom he had known—men like Josephus Daniels and Al Smith—Louis Howe was the only person to call him Franklin.

Once Johnson realized that he was not to be given a high position in the war, the change in his attitude toward it was dramatic. In O. J. Weber’s recollection, “He regarded it as an interference with his agenda.” He resented its demands on his staff, but, despite the strategic placement of Willard Deason in the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel, and

His frantic grasping for higher office and ludicrous posturing in his wartime jobs had eroded his popularity so deeply that in early 1945 a Daily News straw poll showed that only one out of every four New Yorkers favored his re-election.

Anglo-Saxon warlords did not name heirs; kings were chosen by the political elite from a pool of athelings, those whose blood and personal attributes entitled them to be considered;

Hunt had even instructed Annabelle to produce more daughters in the future, claiming roguishly that it had always been his ambition to be loved by many women.

Britain’s topmost naval official, the first lord of the Admiralty, Winston S. Churchill, sixty-five years old.