Winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. She is the author of seven books and is appeared on cspan and book tv over 60 times. She is well known for her work on Abraham Lincoln and her book team of rivals with the inspiration for Stephen Spear spielberg film. She earned her phd at harvard, we will reair her indepth appearance where she discussed her entire body of work and took your phone calls. We will show you discussions from her book leadership in Turbulent Times and bully pulpit. We will start with january 1, 1995 appearance on the cspan series book notes. In the hourlong interview she discussed frank gooden Eleanor Roosevelt and the homefront during world war ii, her book, no ordinary time one the posted price for ordinary history here is historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Author of no ordinary time, if you could ask either Frank FranklinElinor Roosevelt a couple questions after all the work he did on the book, what would it be. With eleanor i would like to understand why she was unable at a certain moment in the war when he asked her to be his wife again and stop traveling and stay home and take care of him to say yes to him. I know that he loved hi her andi want to say why did he do he couldve died soon why did he do it. I think for him why he would want to understand why he couldnt stand his self more, he was the most prickly personality and everybody got how warm he was, there such a reserve and i want to understand and give more to the people that loved him. What makes this book different than all the rest. I think what i wanted to do in this book is not only understand the relationship which was looked at many cases but to understand the whole extended family that surrounded them in the white house and they came to an understanding that the two characters needed other people to make the unintended needs that were left over other troubled marriage. What i came upon the sense that the second family quarters were like a Residential Hotel in about seven People Living there in intimate friends, that was a part that was new and fun for me. If you had to ask a question about personal relationships that they had with other people, who would be most interested. The person i most interested in is everybody who assumes the romantic figure in his life because he had an affair in 1918 and almost broke up eleanors marriage. There is another woman i think had even more central to play in his life and that was his secretary. She started working for him when he was only 20 years old in 1920 and she left in the rest of her life and she never married. Everybody in washington knew she was his other wife. When eleanor traveled 200 250 days a year, she was the one that took care of roosevelt and if she had a cold she would bring in the cough medicine to the white house and if you were grumpy she would arrange a poker game at night, she had a cocktail hour every night and was the hostess. She was on a daily basis the person closest him. You right in the book, the scenario, will get a closer shot on some of these names. Why did you put this in the book. It seemed to me what he would get from reading the book, a sense of what it was like 50 years ago to be in the white house and because each of these rooms are occupied by somebody who is very important in franklin eleanor and their closest friends and romantic friends, i wanted everybody to see how close they were and they can Wander Around and not talk to each other. This was 1940 1945. As you can see on one end you have Elinor Roosevelts bedroom and across the hall is Lorena Hickok, who is lorena and what was their relationship read this is the second for the white house. She had been a former reporter for the Associated Press and in fact 1983 she was the leading female reporter in the country, she weighed 200 pounds, smoke cigars, play poker with the guys and was really smart, what happened she came in in the campaign and 32 and she became really close friends. She fell in love with eleanor and more importantly she probably helped her become activist first lady that she d did, it was lorena who came up with the idea that they were Holding Press Conferences every week and the only female reporters can come, hold generation of female journalists got their start because every newspaper had to hire a fema reporter. She gave collins that eleanor wrote every day that her husband died and write eleanor transform the role of the first lady from a ceremonial to an activist one. In the course of that she fell in love with eleanor. I dont think she fully reciprocated it but they were close enough and she wanted their living nearby. She lived in the white house the entire time during the war. On the second floor you have a room in which Terry Hopkins lived in, how long did he live in there and who was he. He was a roosevelt chief during the 1930s and the head of the Works Progress of administration, even a social worker. When the war broke out in europe in the may of 1940, he was staying overnight in the white house and roosevelt decided he wanted him near by any needed somebody could talk to first thing in the morning and late at night, he made the chief advisor on Foreign Policy and he wanted to see Church Health before roosevelt met him and stalin and it was unprecedented. He makes kinzinger look like a mildmannered guy in terms of power that hopkins had. He was incredibly loyal to the roosevelt. He was there from 1940 1942 when he got married and roosevelt was sad when he stayed there for six months with his new wife but she finally wanted a house of her own. This is another bedroom, mr. Churchill. That is roosevelt mother. And martha. Thats an interesting room, whenever the mother came she wanted the guest bedroom suite and that was the suite. She would come to visit once a month with her maids and servants and always being a duchess in the white house. And she had come to washington through the war years and her husband was a crown prince and her fatherinlaw was a king in norway and hes currently the king of norway now. She was longawaited both of her brothers like them tall, she had a gay spirited conversation that he enjoyed and eleanor understood that he needed that kind of companionship and she would visit on weekends and keeping company in the movies and at dinners at night and eleanor was away and this would be her suite. When churchill came no one else stayed. Churchill was an incredible character during this period of time, he would come and stay three or four weeks at a time and his habits were so exhausting that nobody else could sleep during the period of time, he was awakened in the morning and have wine for breakfast and scotch and soda for lunch and brandy at night smoking his cigar still 2 00 p. M. , when he would finally leave, the entire white house staff would have to sleep, in order to recuperate from churchills visit. You mentioned the relationship between princess mark the norway and fdr was romantic. Some of the people that lived in the white house at that time suggested he was his girlfriend, i suspect thats what the element of the relationship was, was not he was working or a political partner or companion it was a flirtatious relationship whether what beyond kissing and romance in just a sense of pleasure, i do not know but it certainly was not. Anna stayed in one of the rooms on the second floor, she is there in the middle next her father, what was their relationship. Why happened its interesting and some of the most moving moments. She had originally been her mothers daughter and when anna was a young girl and ella lessons, anna told her some the story that her father had to go with lucy long ago and her mother took her side and the two are grown so close that they wrote each of the letters to her three times a week and they saw each other for five times a year even when anna live on the other coast. In many of the war after eleanor rejected franklin to stay home and be his wife again, he got so lonely that he asked their daughter anna and by that point she was only in early 40s and had a stroke and she can never speak again. It was a devastating thing for roosevelt and because he was so lonely in his mother died, he asked anna to come and stay in the white house and then what happened in some way she became his father daughter, she had long legs, she was tall, she loved cocktails and she should gossip at night, all the things eleanor never found easy to do and it did. After a while she was feeling displaced by her own daughter. It was a complicated set of relationships during this time. Where you live right on main street where it all began. Why congress. I think it was a compromise i love the city and grout side of new york. My husband prefers to live in maine. You are not the country that he could feel he was really living outside of the suburb, more country than suburb. His name is richard and he is a writer also and just recently he was involved in the scandal because his first job after cooking was investigate. Hes having a good time right now, being portrayed as a 27yearold actor and feeling like decades dropped off his life. But mostly hes a writer. Where did you meet him. I was teaching a harvard and solid course on the presidency and taught American Government and he came to finish his book and had the office at the Kennedy Institute and he had a office next to mine. You dedicate the book to three people. Three sons the most important people my life, one is in his mid20s and one is a freshman at the college and the youngest one is still at home in high school. I do not wanted to end, i wish they were four, six and eight again. How many books. Three. The first one was Lyndon Johnson and the american dream, that came out of the experience that i wrot i will forever trea, hobby being 2324 years old and working for president johnson the white house and helping him with his memoirs. I still keeping thinking he still around. How can you do that. That was the first book in a great experience to understand a man that i found so sad in his retirement when he was at the ranch it almost like he had nothing else left in his life once politics was taken. That experience has been in my mind forever. The second was a fitzgerald to the kennedys in a pregeneration history of the Kennedy Family. Partly made possible by the fact that i was giving access the had been in the attic over 50 years, my husband had been on the white house staff of john kennedy, we move the Kennedy Family. That is why one of his books means so much, the first time ive had to use an ordinary historian without the advantage of knowing Lyndon Johnson or the Kennedy Family. Is a new information in the book . By choosing this period of time and focusing on the American Home front rather than the battlefront, theres thousands of books that have been written about world war ii, very few focused on what happened at home and mostly have been ethic books like a chapter on civil rights and the japanese incarceration camps and the women in the factories. Theres very little evidence of trying to understand roosevelts leadership and how he mobilized the democracy and i think thats a greatest contribution in a certain sense, more of the strategy having got a country to produce the reference. Thats what when the war and turning it around as a peace economy in isolation and still in the midst of a depression, making itself adoptive. Where did you find the wha we house ushers diary. This is my incredible tool, anybody there to see. In the roosevelt library, they are on microfiche, the end of the day the white house usher who would record everything that is happened during the day, and the waking at seven, massage 715 and then who you had lunch with and dinner and then you could use that as a foundation, suppose we had lunch with henry, i know they had diaries i go to the diaries to find out what he talked about at lunch or they would record the eleanor was with joe and i know he had a diary, it was like the detective tool that was there for anybody to see but they had not been used before, it was so easy and wonderful. Harold dickies was a secretary whose son was in mr. Clintons white house staff and he was called gold crunch enough the time. Henry was the secretary of the treasury and he is a subject of one of my favorite stories in the book because roosevelt had an annual poker game every year end it would always be held on the day that the congress was going to adjourn and whoever was ahead of the moment the speaker of the house called adjourned woodwind, one particular night he was way ahead when the speaker called to tell roosevelt he was a journey not 930 and he pretended somebody else saying i cant talk im in the middle of a poker game, finally at midnight roosevelt wins any hands the phone to me and he says mr. Speaker your journey, roosevelt wins the game, total manipulation, everything is great until the next morning when he saw in the newspaper the congress adjourned at 930 and he was angry he resigned at secretary of the treasury and said seans getting back into it. There was i remember somebody else resigning at one time and fdr wrote of a letter and he said he resigned several times, he would get upset about policy issues and resign so roosevelt wrote him a very gracious letter saying you cannot resign, i need you youre so important and youre absolutely right. When i wrote your letter, they did talk that way and that was an all in some ways for the man that was still there president. Isidro letter that is gratefully replied in itself watery. Have you write about me like you did with that accolade to my spirit. He goes on, how did you go about this, where did you work. I worked in terms of research and the wonderful thing that is in new york as it makes you feel like youre going back in time because the place were house roosevelt was born in eleanors cottage, it looked exactly as it looked when they were there but sometimes when youre in the middle of the working and you take a walk around the environment, you can feel like youre back 50 years in time, it was wonderful and little motels around the area and you stay across the library and you feel like this is what a scholar is supposed to be doing and where they live themselves. Where is the library. It is in hyde park new york, it was about three and half hour drive, a beautiful drive in the hudson river far below, the house where roosevelt was born since a few feet from the library with a Beautiful House down to the hudson river. You are surrounded by beauty why youre doing the oldfashioned research. You mentions alcoa, what is that. That is the cottage that roosevelt built for eleanor and the cottage was 22 rooms it was not a small cottage. But what happened in the 1920s after his affair and they decided to Stay Together it gave eleanor the freedom to go outside the marriage to find fulfillment and she became involved with women who were activists, voters fighting for reform in child labor laws and franklins mother always look at these women that would come into the house with the battle shoes on and they were not the fancy people that she was used too so eleanor did not feel comfortable bringing her political friends to the big house where franklin and sarah lived. I want to show the picture of mrs. Roosevelt, the mother in the middle. When franklin went to harvard he got a townhouse in boston and when franklin and eleanor got married there were two townhouses in new york one for her and one for them, doris went riding in between. Roosevelt seen helen comfortable and having her friends in the big house suggested he would build her her own cottage it turned out to be a beautiful 22 room house a mile and a half or so from the big house and allowed eleanor to have the home of her own but after she died he lived there. Somebody has never been to that part of the country. How far from new york city . A couple hours from new york city. Along the hudson. And dutchess county. In those years in the war years that youre writing about domestically, where did Franklin Delano roosevelt spend the time beside the white house in hyde park. Hyde park was most important, he went during the whole president about 200 times the hyde park, that is the most important. How would he get there. Training, in washington at ten or 11 at night and it would reach hyde park by the morning he would go to sleep on the plane, he loved traveling by train he had his own compartment and because of paralysis he did not like staff moving but he could feel grounded on the train. Eleanor was the opposite she like to get places fast so she did not travel by train but she would go as well. What year did he die. 1945. To remember the exact date. April 12. What your duty contract polio and have billed legs and arms. When he was like 37 years old he contracted polio. One of the things i understood more by doing this book and how much the paralysis was a part of his everyday life. I like so many in the country had a saying that he conquered and he was left a bit laying. But he was a full paraplegic, he could not get out of bed in the morning without turning his body to the side of the better being helped in the wheelchair to get to the bathroom. He cannot walk had six braces on and feeling john the arm of two strong people he could appear to be maneuvering forward. It was an extraordinary moment when i was doing research, a interviewed betsy who is married to Jimmy Roosevelt and she said she asked him once in the middle of the war, how do you fall asleep with the burdens that you have to face. I knew polio was a huge part of his imagination because he described his own method of counting sheep and he would imagine he was a young boy and the favorite hill behind his house which life of the hudson river fall below. And the president he would imagine hes a young boy getting on the slide and sending every curve and when we got this led to the bottom he would run to the top and go over and over again until he would fall asleep. The most powerful man in the world he is imagining when he falls asleep in getting solid by thinking he can run, slide, walk