“I hope you will let nothing interfere with your enthusiasm for helping where help is needed, but don’t let the slow, snail’s-pace progress upward and onward get you down,” he wrote. “Remember always that the dawn of man’s conscience is only 3 or 3½ thousand years behind us.” He had always found this a comforting thought, that the age of barbarism was not long past, that if humans failed to be kind it was because they were still children, historically speaking, and the idea rang true to him as he read and disseminated MAGIC intercepts through the spring of 1942, learning secrets about Japanese
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