Seaborg: Thank you very much, James. I'm going to talk to you today about nonscientific things. About other aspects of my life. The fact that I've been the advisor to ten Presidents of the United States and that I've met a number of other interesting people. I'm going to illustrate my talk with a rather large number of slides. If you can't absorb them all as fast as I show them, don't worry about it. The point I want to make is to show what can happen to a fellow if he isn't careful.
I began actually not working directly with Franklin Roosevelt. My connection with him was during the war working on the atomic bomb project. I was involved in the discovery of plutonium here at the Berkeley Laboratory (or the Radiation Laboratory as it was called at that time) and then moved to Chicago where the work was centralized and where I was in charge of the chemical processes for the production of plutonium.
Franklin Roosevelt is the only President that I didn't meet personally, but he was of course familiar with the work that I was doing. In the course of my talk I'm also going to show slides that will show you the Vice-Presidents (I've met all the Vice-Presidents as well) and the First Ladies. I'm going to try to work all of that into the slides, so I'll be moving pretty fast.
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FDR giving a campaign speech at Soldier Field, Chicago |
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Eleanor Roosevelt at the World's Fair in Brussels, 1958 |
Here's the first slide. Although I didn't meet Franklin Roosevelt personally, my wife Helen and I saw him when he was running for his fourth term as President in Soldier Field in Chicago where we were living. Here it is on October 28, 1944, where Franklin Roosevelt is addressing the crowd at that time. My wife Helen and I were sitting up here, in Soldier Field.
I met his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, at the time of the World's Fair at Brussels, Belgium, in 1958.