Good & Faithful Servant

Harry Hopkins' life had really ended the day Franklin Roosevelt died. But he went on to do one last big job for Harry Truman: healing a serious breach in U.S.Russian relations just before Potsdam. Then he wrote and dictated his memoirs.

There had never been anyone quite like him in U.S. history--the tall, gaunt youth from the Middle West, the harness maker's son who rose to be the second most powerful man in the land. He began as a social worker, but he was always more than that: a politician, a finagler, something of a playboy and something of an intellectual, a man who moved with equal ease in the circles of the rich and the tenements of lower Manhattan. In 1928, he met the man who gave his life direction.

Franklin Roosevelt took him along to Washington, made him WPAdministrator, finally boss of all Federal relief spending. He would be remembered for WPA's boondoggling, for its lasting achievements (WPA guides, etc.), and for his political cynicism ("We will spend and spend, tax and tax, elect and elect").

But above all he would be remembered for his work during the war years when, as F.D.R.'s agent, he was the confidential troubleshooter sent to fix the hotboxes and burnt-out bearings of the worldwide coalition which won World War II. He was the prodder and pusher for more war production, the passionate pleader for unity, the go-between from Roosevelt to Churchill and Stalin. He was and regarded himself as an instrument, with the selflessness of an instrument.

One day last week, in Manhattan's modernistic Memorial Hospital, Harry Hopkins died. General George Marshall cabled from Chungking: "He rendered a service to his country which will never even vaguely be appreciated."

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