ABSTRACT
Loins Louis McHenry Howe died at a major turning point in his old friend's career. The first New Deal was on the verge of merging into the second. Louis would have loved the neatly relevant story which Franklin D. Roosevelt told of the frock-coated banker who had been rescued from the river in 1932 and four years later was berating his rescuer for losing his silk hat. Louis had always carefully shaped his role to his talents, carefully truncated his operations to suit the things he could manage. Howe was Roosevelt's one complete refuge from the job he insisted was the loneliest in the world. Only with Louis could the President let his guard down completely. Eleanor Roosevelt herself remained convinced that Louis might have helped her husband avoid such monumental failures as the "purge ".
