Anna Rosenberg

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. This week, we're discussing Anna Rosenberg, the civilian woman who became the Assistant Secretary of Defense in 1950, whom the New York Times, upon her death called, "one of the most influential women in the country's public affairs for a quarter of a century." Anna Marie Lederer was born in Budapest, Hungary on July 19, 1899, though some sources say her birth year was 1901 or 1902. After a failed business deal, her father emigrated to New York in 1910, and his wife and daughters followed in 1912. Anna was naturalized in 1919. Her first appearance in The New York Times was during high school when she gave a well received speech during a meeting of students who opposed mandatory military training, an early foray for her into mediation. At age 21, she married Julius Rosenberg, and gave birth to their son, Thomas. In the 1920s, Anna Rosenberg worked as a labor mediator, opening her own public relations firm that specialized in labor issues, in New York City in 1924. At the same time, she was immersing herself in Democratic political campaigns, mentored by activist Belle Moskowitz and Tammany leader Jim Hagan. Rosenberg's work on Franklin Roosevelt's gubernatorial campaign in 1928 brought her to the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, who would continue to champion her career. After Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, and began to implement New Deal programs, Rosenberg served as assistant to regional director of the National Recovery Administration, Nathan Straus, and then succeeded him in the position, becoming the only woman to serve as regional director of the NRA, which she followed by becoming the first woman to serve as a regional manager for the Social Security Board. In the early 1940s, Roosevelt brought Rosenberg to DC to help with various crises, calling her his Mrs. Fix-It. In one such instance, he sent Anna to deal with a labor crisis in Buffalo that could have derailed defense production. The solution she devised, became known as the Buffalo Plan, and served as a national model for the duration of World War II. In 1944, President Roosevelt asked Rosenberg to travel to Europe to assess the situation for soldiers on the ground, and to see how the government could help them when they returned. She went, speaking with soldiers, asking them what they needed, and offering to pass messages to family when she returned. Based on her conversations, Rosenberg saw a need for educational opportunities for returning soldiers, and she supported the GI Bill. Upon returning to Europe the following year, again, at the President's request, Anna saw a liberated concentration camp. She was one of the first women from an allied country to do so. On October 29, 1945, Anna Rosenberg was awarded the very first Medal of Freedom, which had just recently been authorized. She was recommended for the award by Dwight D. Eisenhower, then General of the Army, in recognition of her work in Europe. After the war, Rosenberg returned to New York, where she again did consulting work, now with her son as her partner. However much she wanted to return to private life, not least to rebuild her finances, she was called back into government service just a few years later, when Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall asked her to be the assistant secretary of defense, at a time when the military was ill prepared, as the Korean War started. President Truman supported her nomination, but she faced opposition in the Senate from Senator Joe McCarthy, who investigated her, and tried to tank her confirmation. I will discuss that in more detail with today's guest. McCarthy was unsuccessful in his attempt, and Anna Rosenberg was sworn in on November 29, 1950. In 1951, Rosenberg established the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, an all women board that worked to find ways to make military service more appealing to women. Rosenberg also oversaw the integration of troops that had been mandated by President Truman's Executive Order 9981, in July, 1948. Anna Rosenberg left the federal government at the end of Truman's presidency in 1953, though she continued to serve as an informal adviser to Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson, and Johnson appointed her to serve on the Commission on Income Maintenance. She didn't have as close a relationship with President Kennedy, though she did organize his 1962 birthday party, where Marilyn Monroe famously sang him "Happy Birthday."

In 1962, Anna and Julius divorced, and Anna remarried, to Paul G. Hoffman, who had been Administrator of the Economic Cooperation Administration, leading the implementation of the Marshall Plan. He was later the first administrator for the United Nations Development Program. The Medal of Freedom that Anna Rosenberg had been awarded was superseded by the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, and Paul Hoffman was granted that award in 1974 by President Richard Nixon. Rosenberg spent her later years working at her consulting firm, but she was often called back into public service, selected to serve on the New York City Board of Hospitals, the Business Advisory Council of Governor of New York, W. Averell Harriman, the National Heart Committee, and the New York City Board of Education, among many other boards and councils. Anna Rosenberg Hoffman died on May 9, 1983, after suffering from cancer. Joining me now, to help us learn more about Anna Rosenberg is history teacher and writer Christopher C. Gorham, author of, "The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win World War II and Shape Modern America."

Hi, Christopher, thanks so much for joining me today.

Christopher C. Gorham  9:11  
Kelly, glad to be here.

Kelly Therese Pollock  9:13  
So I was just fascinated to learn about Anna Rosenberg. I will admit I had never heard of her before, which seems shocking in retrospect. I want to hear a little bit about how you became interested in her and decided to write a book about her.

Christopher C. Gorham  9:26  
Sure, it was, well, I'm a high school history teacher in suburban Boston. And about six years ago, I was up in the school library with my class, and I had opened a book, it might have been on Truman, it might have been on the Korean War, I don't remember. But in that book, there was a picture of President Truman, big smile on his face, and next to him was an obviously civilian woman, well dressed, a big smile on her face. And the caption at the bottom said, "Anna Rosenberg, Assistant Secretary of Defense," and I thought, "Wow, you know, 1950, to have a woman at that high in the Pentagon." And she obviously has a good relationship with the President of the United States from this picture. So I thought to myself, "You know, wow, who is this person? Let's learn more." So I put Anna Rosenberg's name on my list of research topics for my students, and a couple of kids chose her. And immediately, you know, within a couple of days, said, "Mr. Gorham, there's no books on her." So we found out that her papers had been left at Harvard in 1987. So my wife and I, in April of 2019, met these students down at the library at Harvard, and they wheeled out the documents and gave us the you know, the gloves. And about 30 seconds later, one of my students said, "Mr. Gorham, you have to come look at this." And in the first box that we opened up, there was the citation from President Truman awarding Anna Rosenberg, the first ever Medal of Freedom, man or woman in American history. And Kelly, I thought right then and there, "This is a book that has to be written."

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:57  
Yeah, absolutely. So the next obvious question is why in the world have so few of us ever heard of her? She's an amazing, accomplished woman. I thought I knew a lot about important women in American history, and I had never heard of her. So why is that?

Christopher C. Gorham  11:13  
I think there are a number of reasons. And I think, for your, for your listeners to you know, just to set some set a little context, she was a famous person in her day. You know, Anna Rosenberg was on the cover, and in the pages of Time, dozens of times, Newsweek, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, magazines that we no longer have. I mean, she was in The New York Times for the first time as a teenager, in 1917, and for the last time, her obituary in 1983. And in the ensuing decades, she was in The New York Times. So she was a famous person. She was on the radio, she was on in the early 50s on television. The question is what happened? And I think there's multiple reasons for that. The one reason would be she had by her nature, she didn't want to trumpet her own caree. That just, she liked to have interviews with newspaper journalists. She liked to like to have her photograph taken for the magazines. I mean, she was in Vogue at one point in 1942. But it was never about her. It was always about the president, or it was about the war effort, or it was about women in the war effort. And so she had this, this natural disinclination to trumpet her own career. I think that was also exacerbated by the fact that in 1950, the atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested. So she had this unfortunate coincidence of surname. You know, Rosenbergs around the country were shunned, you know, then they had no relation at all to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. And although Anna, I don't ever think was ashamed of her last name, it certainly if she had this disinclination to trumpet her own career, then I think this certainly almost silenced her a little bit. And lastly, you know, she didn't have a college education like Frances Perkins, you know, who can who can say, Penn and Columbia, and keep the fire alive of her memory. But lastly, Kelly, I think it was, you know, Anna Rosenberg had been told, in 150 meetings with Franklin Roosevelt, one on one, which is more than most Cabinet members, had been told things in confidence. And she did not think that publishing a memoir or publishing a book, she just found that distasteful. She had been told these things in confidence, and she wanted to keep it that way.

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:29  
So this is a difficult world for a woman to enter in the 30s, 40s, 50s, to be such a high ranking official in some cases or a private confidante of presidents in other cases. And she manages to do this with both obvious competence and charisma and all of that, but also doesn't doesn't shy away from being a woman, is still very feminine. Could you talk a little bit about that balance? Because it it seems really striking that she's able to do this.

Christopher C. Gorham  14:03  
Glad you asked that question because it's it's kind of at the heart of what made her what the sort of magic recipe was for Anna Rosenberg. She was, one scholar who'd written a paper on her titled it "Honorary Man." And she, this particular scholar, Anna Kasten Nelson, was a sort of, her angle at Anna was military history and her work at the Pentagon. But she could be in the book, I think I use the phrase, "She could be one of the boys and one of the girls." Sometimes women that attain a higher rank, kind of pull up the ladder, and they say, "I've reached the the big boys' table and and I'm good and you know, if I have any followers, then good for them, but I'm not going to help them out." That was not her. She was very eager and really wanted women to follow in her footsteps. So for women, women did not hold it against her that she had attained these positions and for men, both on the left and the right of the political spectrum, they respected her for the competence for sure. Roosevelt, at one point in the middle of World War II, started calling her his "Mrs. Fix- it," you know, so she had this competence in politics, this competence and confidence in business, and later on in the military. But she Anna was also aware of the fact that she was a woman. And she said to Edward R. Murrow, in in an interview in 1959, you know, she said, "It's, I like to dress nicely, I like to wear these fancy hats, and I, you know, I don't feel I need to dress like a man, I, I just don't think that's what I or other women should have to do, to be taken seriously in the, in the rooms of power and in the halls of power." So just this kind of wonderful mix of, of competence and, and the ability to inspire confidence in people that relied on her without, without, you know, being who she wasn't. She was proud to be a woman and love that she that had that pull over men and over people as well.

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:05  
So one woman who did not get along with her is Frances Perkins and Frances Perkins, of course, is one I have heard of, the first woman cabinet secretary. So could you talk a little bit about that relationship? Because as you said, you know, it's not that Anna's shunning all other women. She's friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. Lady Bird, Johnson likes her. But there's this particular tension with Frances Perkins.

Christopher C. Gorham  16:30  
There was tension, and I will, you know, first of all, I venerate Frances Perkins, you know, her wish list became the New Deal. And, you know, just, you know, you bow down, and she's just a tremendous woman in American history, tremendous person in American history, first Cabinet member. But I'm going to put the blame on President Roosevelt for this one, because he had a practice, which must have been tremendously annoying for the people that worked under him, of putting people on these parallel tracks. So he would have a Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, but he would also give what would have should have been under the umbrella of the Labor Department, he would give Anna Rosenberg, these tasks, and then he would want her to go try and find solutions to them. He did this not only between the two women, Perkins and Anna Rosenberg, he did this as a sort of practice, that was a Roosevelt team thing that that he did is put people on these parallel lines where they had to compete against each other, to make him happy, to make the boss happy. So I think that's part of it. You know, newspapers were in the 1940s, would call Anna Rosenberg, you know, the Secretary of Labor, a de facto Secretary of Labor. They would call her Frances Perkins #2. And, you know, that would be probably annoying to both women to be reading that. And the other, you know, as I delve deeper into that relationship, Anna was always very deferential and very respectful to, to Secretary Perkins. Perkins was obviously a little bit older, and more lettered. You know, she had the degrees and she had the sort of the personal history that was very impressive. But they're very different people. In one instance, you know, there were things that that Roosevelt knew Anna could go out and do that he knew Perkins couldn't. And when, when it had to involve going up on the Hill and talking to congressmen, that was more Anna's wheelhouse, because she had that she had the rap, you know, she had the confidence to do that. When it came time to deal with the media, certainly Anna was better at that than Frances Perkins. So there was tension between the two very different people, you know, you have I think, I've alluded to it a little bit, but you have, you know, sort of WASPy you know, Ivy League woman, and also, you know, a Jewish immigrant who didn't graduate from high school. So very different people.

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:48  
Yeah, definitely. I was struck reading your book about, I wonder how successful Anna Rosenberg would be today, because it seems like so much of her success was in a, I don't care about procedures, I'm just gonna, like pick up the phone and do it and there's proper chain of command, I don't care, you know, and as someone who is working in America today, I know that so much of my job is like, you must do it this way. And there will be legal consequences if you don't do this. So, you know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about her her style, which was clearly very effective and what that looked like.

Christopher C. Gorham  19:25  
You know, that's, I think the first time that I've been asked that. It's something that I guess I've thought about, just me thinking about this because as a as a teacher, obviously even a high school teacher you know, there's obviously you know, there's just so many things that you have to t's you cross and i's you dot, and and things you just have to be aware of in your in your practice. So very interesting question. I don't know that she would have been able to succeed in the in the world that we've developed and maybe that's we should put the blame on the systems that we've erected. Because we would for instance, we would have to insist for most people almost, for most people, we'd want to see the resume. And you know, can you imagine, Anna Rosenberg, you know, who never doesn't have a college education, let alone a law school education, you know, a law degree in charge of like the Social Security Board, where she has literally hundreds of lawyers working for her in dozens of field offices, and she's never cracked open a law book? So, nevertheless, she had the talent to get that job done with tremendous competence. But in the world of today that we live in I, you know, maybe we're snuffing out people with tremendous transcendent ability, because of our demands, you know, to look at the, you know, the check off the boxes on somebody's resume, and not seeing the big picture of who they are. So that's a great question. And I hate to say it, but I think that maybe today, she wouldn't have been able to reach the levels that she had reached in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

Kelly Therese Pollock  20:56  
So I want to talk a little bit about her ability to walk into a labor negotiation and be respected by both sides. I think that's incredibly difficult to do. And I'm curious what your sense is about how she was able to do that. The labor side liked her and respected her, but the management also liked and respected her, how did she manage to do that?

Christopher C. Gorham  21:20  
I think in a similar way to how she reacted or how she was seen by men and women. The men and women respected her, which is very difficult. To be a woman in such a military and political and business echelons that she was in to have the respect of, you know, women and men that were on the Democratic side of the aisle and men that were on the Republican side of the aisle. And that leads right to your question about how she did it with with labor and management. So the other sort of magic, you know, secret sauce here is and her her grandson told me, her grandson, Thomas, in interviews before the book said that she when she talked to you, you were the only person in the world. And his evidence was one of the pieces of evidence was when he was in boarding school as a 16 or 17 year old, he would make three phone calls, collect phone calls, and for your listeners, the collect call was the recipient had to agree to pay for the phone call. He'd make three phone calls on Sunday nights from his boarding school, one to his mother, and they'd have a little conversation; one to his father, and they'd have a short conversation; and one to his grandmother, and they talked for 90 minutes. And it would be about how you're doing in school. And so she was able to do that for union men. One union guy way back in the 1920s, early 30s, said, "When Anna tells you something, you know, she's on the level." And that was true of the unions that she worked with whether they were garment unions, or trucking unions or what have you. But also management. And, you know, we're not talking about small concerns here. Anna Rosenberg was, was a mentor to Nelson Rockefeller. She was a mentor to in fact, two of the Rockefeller brothers. Nelson Rockefeller, who went on to become the Vice President of the United States said everything he amounted to in Washington, he owed to Anna Rosenberg. You know, in, and, in his business life, too, he consulted her. They wrote speeches together, they hammered out things together and solutions together. So you have not only the union guys, the truck drivers, the Teamsters, who respect her, because she's obviously on their side; but at the very same time, you have managers saying, "If I would have talked to her a little bit sooner, I would have saved myself $10,000." And how she did it, is by I think just this sort of magic mediation, where she was able to instill confidence in both sides, and just how few people can do that, you know. Again, just that's why she's kind of superhuman, in a way, you know, to exist in this gray area where to succeed in this gray area where it's very difficult. I think that personal ability, though, to look people in the eye, and let them know that they're the only person in the world while she's talking to them. I think that's the magic.

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:09  
So people who are aware of the 50s in the United States may see where this is going. But she's Jewish. She's an immigrant. Her last name is Rosenberg. She's a woman. Not surprisingly, Senator Joe McCarthy says, "Nonononono, not someone we want," and especially when she is nominated to be the Assistant Secretary of Defense, to have this this woman, immigrant woman really high ranking in the Department of Defense. Can you talk a little bit about how McCarthy went after her? And, you know, it's I think it's really interesting if you know anything about that era and what it was like for people even when they were exonerated, you know, how did Anna Rosenberg survive this attack by McCarthy?

Christopher C. Gorham  24:56  
Here I'll go back just a second here. She received a letter from the Secretary of Defense, George C. Marshall, who had been the architect of victory in World War II, just one of the giants of American history. He's been called the greatest soldier statesman since George Washington. So she gets this letter from him in 1950, in the disastrous early days of the Korean War, "I want you to come down to the Pentagon and work as my number two, Assistant Secretary of Defense, to rebuild the size and strength of the US Army that had been decimated by budget cuts after World War II." So she goes down to because she loves the general, she loves her country, she goes down to Washington, leaves a comfortable, you know, she's rebuilding her business. She leaves that all behind in New York, you know, she's working with her son, she goes down to Washington once again. And she starts working at the Pentagon under an interim appointment with the blessing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Senator, as you pointed out, Kelly, Senator Joe McCarthy finds out about this, and although he's not on the committee, he buys time with for the full Senate confirmation, he buys a delay, so that he can conjure up a smear campaign, which had been so successful in the first couple of years of McCarthyism. You know, he would target women. They were they were easy targets. You know, he if they were married to a foreigner, if they were, if they spoke with an accent, if they had New Deal background or liberal leanings, he would just say, "Hey, you're a communist," and they would, they would a lot of them just left prematurely left government service prematurely or had their careers ended prematurely. That was not going to happen to Anna Rosenberg. McCarthy did get in the two weeks, where he bought himself, he found a guy in New York who would come down to Washington to testify that Anna Rosenberg was a secret communist, and this guy, you know, checkered background, he goes down and the Senate Armed Services Committee reopened the hearings, and this guy's story just started to unravel. You know, Senator Lyndon Johnson said, "How can you after 20 years, how can you know for certain that this was the same person with the same voice, the same height, the same look?" And, you know, when his ex wife was called to the stand, she said, "He has a very difficult time for veracity." You know, his employers were called to the stand and they said, "This guy couldn't tell the truth if his life depended on it." So he was obviously a stooge and his his story unraveled, but, you know, it's instead of just bowing down to the pressure, Anna Rosenberg knew she had the bullseye on her chest, she told the general she told President Truman, "I have all those things that you mentioned, Jewish immigrant, New Dealer, I'm a woman, I'm a civilian." And she fought back, she took a phonebook down with her New York City phonebook down to the hearings, and she held it up and she said, "Do you know how many Anna Rosenberg's are in this phonebook? 47! How do you know it was me?" So by her nature, she fought back, she punched back and she was really one of the first maybe even the first person to to, you know, put a welt on Joe McCarthy, rather than that be the other way around. And, to her credit, she withstood that with her career and integrity intact.

Kelly Therese Pollock  28:07  
Probably helped that she had a lot of friends in high places, too.

Christopher C. Gorham  28:10  
Sure. That's a great point. You know, when you think about how she withstood that, that smear campaign, you know, she had Eisenhower on her side. She had Republicans on her side, you know, not just Eisenhower, but you know, like I said, Rockefeller, and others in, in, in the Senate, and in Congress and in the business world. And you wonder if she didn't have those on the Republican side or those people in high places in support of her, you do wonder how that might have turned out differently.

Kelly Therese Pollock  28:40  
You mentioned that before she got that letter from Marshall, she was trying to rebuild her business. So can we talk a little bit about that the the way that government service for her really meant sacrifice, a real sacrifice?

Christopher C. Gorham  28:56  
It did it and it started early on. It started with with as she got ever closer to World War II, or as World War II got ever closer, she became ever, ever tighter with Franklin Roosevelt. So at one point, you know, she's the executive of the Social Security Board in New York, it's 1938. But then you get closer to 1940, 41, and Roosevelt gets her an office in the East Wing of the White House. And she's starting to work on what they call it at the time manpower issues, but we would call those personnel issues related to the army and so forth, and labor, you know. The things that she was working on would be for instance, we have these highly technical guys with a lot of know how we're being drafted, you know, and they need to be like naval architects or something like that, and we're being drafted as ensigns or they're being drafted as privates in the army. We just can't have that. So that's, in fact, how she met George Marshall and World War II, but it was a sacrifice to go down to New York. She basically had to put her her business which was growing and growing, her person her personal relations, labor relations business  where her mediation was, was sought after and paid for, by big, big companies like Macy's and Encyclopedia Britannica. She had to put all that on ice during the war years. So much so that, you know, it wasn't till after World War II that she was able to buy her apartment that she'd rented for decades. So it was a real sacrifice to go to Washington and work on behalf of the government. But it also speaks to her commitment that she learned way back when, as a young immigrant girl, when her father who had also emigrated a couple years before her instilled in her, the need to do whatever you can to help your country achieve what it can, you know, to add your voice and to add your efforts to the United States. So that was very, she was a lifelong patriot, Kelly, and a lifelong, you know, she was just devoted to Roosevelt, to Marshall, and to her country.

Kelly Therese Pollock  30:53  
So I want to talk a little bit about how progressive she was. So it might not be a surprise, we're talking about she's a New Dealer, she you know, she's working with FDR, she's obviously progressive; but she's even much more progressive than Roosevelt. You know, she's she's looking out for women, especially as her career develops. She is really pushing for civil rights and integration. Can you talk a little bit about that and how she was able, despite the fact that she never held elected office that she was really able to push some of these things through?

Christopher C. Gorham  31:25  
Yeah, the big one was civil rights goes back to in hers was a lifelong commitment. It goes went back into the 1920s and forward into the Vietnam era. But the real big event that she was involved in, in terms of civil rights happened in the summer of 1941, just about six months before Pearl Harbor. The defense industries were already cranking out material in our ordinance and tanks and planes. And these were good paying jobs, they were only being given to white Americans. The Black leader of the day, A. Philip Randolph, says to the White House, "Well, I'm going to march for equality. I'm gonna have a march in Washington for equality and hiring." Roosevelt says, "How many marchers?" Randolph says, "Perhaps 100,000, Mr. President." Even Eleanor was okay with this. But for Roosevelt, he had, you know, Southern lawmakers that he knew were not going to be on board with this. And it was just a real predicament. So he calls upon Anna and he says, "I need you to mediate solution between the White House and the Black leadership." So over two weeks, in the summer of 1941, Anna was at every single meeting. Roosevelt demanded that she was every single meeting in New York and Washington. And what she hammered out, after those two weeks, became Executive Order 8802, which mandated fairness in defense hiring and actually had a watchdog provision. But Kelly, she still had to get the president to sign it. So Eleanor says to her, "Anna, what I want you to do is go down to the boutiques of Georgetown. Get yourself one of those fancy hats that you love, buy yourself a new one, give yourself the confidence to come back and get the boss to sign it." So that's what she did. She came back to the White House that afternoon, spread out the executive order on his desk and said, "Sign it, Mr. President, sign it." And he did. And it's a story. And David Kennedy calls that the the first significant federal action on civil rights since Reconstruction. But her commitment to Black equality and to quality for women was lifelong. I kept waiting in my research Kelly, to find something where she took a wrong step. But it just never happened. The commitment was real and the commitment was consistent.

Kelly Therese Pollock  33:30  
Well, let's talk a little bit about her work ethic. Because, you know, people may get the sense from everything we're talking about that she was doing that this will take a lot of time and she was doing it a ton of commuting back and forth. And of course, there was no laptop with Internet back then. So it's not like she could get everything done while she was on the train or whatever. Can you talk about how hard she was working? Like how much this is almost like superhuman?

Christopher C. Gorham  33:56  
Yes, I think I've used that word too, superhuman, to describe her work, her capacity for work. I'll give you just one example. It's at the Pentagon. She's, you know, even from the interim appointment from the very first day and she was at the Pentagon for 26 months. You know, there's the full Senate came around. And she spent 26 months during the Korean War, as the assistant secretary of defense, made two trips to Korea, and in fact bases around the world, like circumnavigated the globe, practically. But at the Pentagon, she found out early on that they were using form letters to inform families of you know, either killed in action, missing in action, wounded, and she said, "We're not going to do that anymore. We're going to write handwritten letters." So she and her staff started staying at work until it's when everyone left at five. That was tea time in her office, which was also Marshall's office. The same, they literally had adjoining offices, they shared a coffee pot, and she would stay till 9, 10 o'clock and sometimes even later and then go back to the Shoreham Hotel and have a solitary dinner. And her staff, rather than resenting this, they loved her. They called her Aunt Anna because she was just so wonderful to work with and so forward looking. So they didn't resent the hard work. But she always had three phones on her desk. And, you know, she would have her assistant was, you know, "Rockefeller's on line one and this other union leader Dubinsky is on line two and, you know, a general or admirals on line three." So the telephone really supplanted the pen for her and helped her be efficient with her time. She said, "I issue no memos. I'm not going to have anything with eight carbons. When I need something done, I hop on the telephone, and I talk to a friend and I said, 'Let's get a solution. Let's get it done.'" So that really helped her. And commuting, you know, she was always she had her files with her. She'd be working on the train, she'd be working as she was being driven from place to place, she didn't drive. So she always sat in the backseat and got work done so, but she's superhuman, you know. Something that really shows her work ethic really stands out, and is another reason why she's such a remarkable figure.

Kelly Therese Pollock  35:57  
Well, I have a million more questions I could ask but I want people to just go read the book. So can you tell people how they can get a copy of the book?

Christopher C. Gorham  36:04  
Sure, you know, anywhere from the big places where you all know, you can get the books to your your wonderful local bookstores, of which there are many in Chicago and Boston and Philadelphia and elsewhere. So there's an audio version, if that's your thing. There's a Kindle version, but the hard copy is widely available. So I've I've even seen it in many, many airports. So...

Kelly Therese Pollock  36:26  
It would be a good airplane read.

Christopher C. Gorham  36:28  
It would be That's right. Right. So yes, so it's out there. And, you know, hopefully, folks go out there and pick it up.

Kelly Therese Pollock  36:36  
Was there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about?

Christopher C. Gorham  36:38  
I love your questions. And I love the question about who what made her tick, you know, that the one about the the sort of the respect between men and women and between people of modest backgrounds, and also the very wealthy. And I think that, you know, just to reiterate that that's kind of what made her special. You know, she was a unique human being, because she would make everybody feel, and she meant it, she would be sincere about this, you know, she would make you feel that you were the only person in the world and I think that as a personal trait, that's just such a wonderful thing to have and to, to hone, and she had it to an amazing degree. And that's what made her a remarkable woman, a remarkable American.

Kelly Therese Pollock  37:17  
Yeah. Well, Christopher, thank you so much for speaking with me and for introducing me to Anna Rosenberg.

Christopher C. Gorham  37:23  
Kelly, thank you for having me. Thanks to your listeners too.

Teddy  37:49  
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