“Wealthy staff people4 want to have cocktail parties in the afternoon, card parties in the evening and get up next day at 10 o’clock,” he wrote to Secretary Hull. “That tends to reduce effective study and work … and also to cause men to be indifferent to the cost of their reports and telegrams.” Telegrams should be cut in half, he wrote. “Long habit here resists my efforts to shorten telegrams to the point where men have ‘fits’ when I erase large parts. I shall have to write them myself.…”
