On July 30, 1941, a wan, painfully gaunt man in his early fifties was chauffeured through the Kremlin gates and ushered into the office of Josef Stalin. The American presented the Soviet dictator with a letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In it, FDR instructed Stalin that his sickly envoy should be treated with “the identical confidence you would feel if you were talking directly to me.”
The man’s name was Harry Hopkins.
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