FDR's cagey juggling

"You know I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does," FDR once said of his strategies in statecraft. "I may have one policy for Europe and one diametrically opposite for North and South America. I may be entirely inconsistent, and furthermore I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war."

Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 81

Harding, in a nutshell

"Harding was not a bad man," [Alice Longworth Roosevelt] wrote. "He was just a slob—a slack, good-natured man with an unfortunate disposition to surround himself with intimates of questionable character."

Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 52

J. Edgar Hoover & Library of Congress

Hoover dutifully recited the devotions of the Presbyterian Church on Sundays, but the Library of Congress was the secular cathedral of his youth. . . . The reverent hush of its central reading room imparted a sense that all knowledge was at hand, if you knew where to look. The library had its own system of classification, and Hoover learned its complexities as a cataloguer, earning money for school by filing and retrieving information. He worked days at the library while he studied in the early evenings and on summer mornings at George Washington University, where he earned his master's degree in law in June 1917.

Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 4