Four years before I had gone into the President's Cabinet, humbly and a
stranger. I was grateful for what I found there; a team composed for
the most part of persons of outstanding ability, with a strong sense of
dedication, a capacity for leadership, and integrity; and at their head a
man whom I had come to know as one of the great and good Ameri-
cans.

Samuel Johnson said, "The superiority of some men is merely local
They are great because their associates are little." The President's
superiority was not local, but, in a sense, universal; he was great even
among big men.

Now two of the original members of the Cabinet were no longer there:
Martin Durkin and Douglas McKay. A third member, Mrs. Oveta
Culp Hobby, who had entered the Cabinet when the Federal Security
Agency became the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in
April 1953, had gone back to Texas because of her husband's serious
illness. In July 1955, Marion D. Folson, a man of long experience in
government and business, had replaced her.

James p. Mitchell, who had had an extensive background in labor
relations and who owned the respect of labor and business leaders alike,
followed Durkin; and Fred Seaton, a Midwestern newspaper and radio
station executive and a figure in Nebraska politics, succeeded McKay.

As for the rest, Dulles, Wilson, Humphrey, Summerfield, Brownell,
Weeks, and I were still on the job.

"Have you found your position as a Church official incompatible with
your work as Secretary of Agriculture?" This question, put to me by a
newsman had loomed large in my mind when President-elect Eisen-
hower had invited me into his Cabinet.

-345-