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1 Hate Communism, But . . ." Nothing in the diaries so far shows that Ickes was a great man. They help bear out his reputation for personal honesty, his enormous capacity for work, his dogged loyalty to old-fashioned leftish principles. He was candid enough to say of other New Deal liberals in general: "There personally was more comfort in going along with a bunch of reactionaries who knew where they were and where they were going than in trying to get along with a bunch of prima donnas."
And he was naive enough to say as late as 1939: "I hate Communism, but it is founded on belief in the control of Government, including the economic system, by the people themselves. It is the very antithesis of Nazism." Many a liberal "prima donna" thought the same. Ickes, who died in 1952, lived long enough to learn otherwise.
-Ickes was 64, had that year married his second wife, Jane Dahlman Ick.es, 25.