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OCR Page 1 of 14January 20, 1972
REMARKS OF THE PRESIDENT
TO A CABINET DINNER
THE PRESIDENT: This is a family party, and our
program tonight is very unstructured and very informal, and,
we hope, very friendly.
I have been trying to think. I had my fine staff
do a little research to findwhat I should say about Cabinets.
They could not find anything very good. They talked about
Lincoln's Cabinet and others, and Roosevelt's, and so forth.
So after reading about all the others, I said, "We must have
the best Cabinet that we have ever had in the history of this
country."
What I would like to say, however, tonight is that
one idea that was presented by one of my bright young men who
writes all of my speeches under Ray Price's direction, any-
way, this bright young man was asked to prepare some talking
points for this Cabinet dinner tonight. He did a little
research and he found that Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had a
delightful, shall we say, relationship with his Cabinet, and
who knew how to play one off against the other in various
ways, something, of course, I would never do, but in any
event, Franklin D. Roosevelt, of course, had a lot of humor,
and he liked to have fun with his Cabinet.
He had nicknames for them. Anybody who has read that
marvelous book "Roosevelt and Hopkins" by Sherwood will
remember that he had the nicknames. Of course, the names of hi
Cabinet were very fitted to this sort of treatment. He,
for example, in terms of the Secretary of the Interior,
referred to him as "Harold the Ick." And Harry Hopkins he
referred to as "Harry the Hop."
So this bright young man came in to me and he
said, "Look, this is great. Why don't you work out that
kind of routine for your Cabinet?" So I started to go over
the names. I had a tough time. I started, of course, with
the Secretary of State. I said, "What am I going to say
about him?" I said, "Rogers, what do I follow that with?"
and I couldn't really think of anything that I could say.
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