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Article: Benjamin Franklin, politician, great thinker and schmoozer

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Benjamin Franklin, politician, great thinker and schmoozer

Moral: Combine work and pleasure

Benjamin Franklin, considered to be the third most important founding father after Jefferson and Washington, was a politician, diplomat, scientist, journalist, publisher, author, philosopher, teacher, inventor, and schmoozer. 

Franklin conducted some of his most important work in Paris, negotiating French-American treaties of friendship, trade, and general alliance - essential to the rebellious colonies' victory against Britain.  Franklin achieved this success because he followed another principle of the schmoozer: realize what the other side wants and put the negotiations in that context.  As Barbara Oberg, the editor and chief of the Franklin Papers told The New York Times: "Franklin was enough of a diplomat to realize that the treaties could be attained because they also fit into France's own plans and position in European Affairs." Franklin's diplomatic style was said to be smooth, amiable and yielding - as opposed to his American colleague John Adams, a brusque, unfriendly man.  Franklin's schmoozing is the basis, in fact, of American independence.

This alone would have been a fabulous schmoozing accomplishment - but Franklin also found time for the ladies during his Paris sojourn.  Franklin admitted in his autobiography that he had a "hard-to-be-governed passion that often led him to "intrigues with low women that fell" his way.  And boy, did these women fall.  Although Franklin went to great lengths to keep his lifelong amities affairs, his numerous dalliances with the fair sex were well known - and mocked. The elderly Franklin was condemned by the sour John Adams as a "scene of continual discipation."

But just how did Franklin attract all these women?  He followed a fundamental principle of the schmoozer: flatter others by showing genuine interest.  An associate of Franklin, the London publisher William Strahan, wrote that "women, young and old, loved him because he took a keen interest in them, not merely as objects of desire, but as people with a different outlook, with their own contributions to make.  He listened to them, he was not afraid of them ? obvious principles of courtship too often lost sight of." ~ The ever-curious Franklin took an interest in everything, whether it was studying the phenomenon of lightning, founding America's first magazine and post office, ending slavery, gaining independence for America, or flirting with cute French women.  Today, we remember him as one of America's greatest schmoozers.