[inaudible conversations] on the moderator. I dont mind you not listening to me. I used to be city editor of the Los Angeles Times and no one listened to me then, so i got used to it. After retiring from the times i wrote began writing for a number of web based evocations. I write mostly for one called truth dig, edited by the famous journalist Robert Scheer and depending on your political views, you will really love or hate this very progressive website. I also write for the Jewish Journal of los angeles and la observed a couple of others. Our subject is women behind the power and our panelists have written about how these famous men, three of them, how they were shaped or influenced by women. One of the women was one of the most famous people in the world intraday, Eleanor Roosevelt. Another was joan kroc, wife of the mcdonald mogul. She was as famous, but also dominant figure. In the third was was influenced by not one person, but by a movement of women and influenced him. He was the great abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglas our panelists have two jobs and as an author i wanted to point out the most important is the first. For them to talk about the book in such a compelling manner that you will all wind up afterward buying copies and have them sign it and that goes on right out here. The second is to shed some light on the changing ways women influence men and things have changed. You know, from the days when busey tricked ricky into doing something he didnt want to do or from the days of madmen where Sexual Harassment exploitation and a glass of bullying and Glass Ceiling were part of every workplace. Just to show how far we have come, monday at 5 00 p. M. , no more bill oreilly. [applause]. Our four panelists have chronicled this history, leigh fought goes back the farthest to the life of douglas, the former slave who became a powerful leader in the abolitionist movement. Assistant professor of history in syracuse telling the story of douglas wife and a mother of their three large family mother of their large family, but beyond that she explores the fascinating story of how you need to talk into the microphone. How douglas career was a shaped by the other powerful social movement of the time, womens suffrage. Blanche wiesen cook when the Los Angeles Times book award in 1992, for the first of her three volumes on the life of Eleanor Roosevelt. Shes here today to talk to us about the third, a fascinating book, how eleanor labored so hard to persuade her husband to live up to the ideals of the new deal and she had been more successful in the early years, but became too much of a it became too much of a strain. She didnt win her battle. She had to compromise on political policy, just as she did in her marriage. Susan quinn offers another look at the relationship between fdr and his wife in her fascinating book eleanor and him the love affair that shaped a first lady. Lorraine hickox was a writer who covered eleanor and became they became lovers and more than that she helped shape and guide eleanor. Finally, trying to trend to, shes a journalist and while on assignment here los angeles she happened upon a great statue by paul conrad, the famous cartoonist and a Chain Reaction. Big tall statue in a park in santa monica right across the street and it was going to be torn down and it was saved largely from a huge contribution from a anonymous source. She tracked down the source and it was joan kroc, the wife of ray, so she tells the story of a marriage. I wrote this out because this wasnt really the woman as i said behind the man. It was like a whole bunch of women. How i phrase it he had a long and seemingly happy marriage. [no audio] unfortunately, we are experiencing some technical difficulties in our live coverage of the Los Angeles Times festival of books. Stay with us and we will return to our Live Programming as soon as possible. I want to know, in reading your book i got the idea that he was also influenced greatly by association with the leaders of the Womens Suffrage Movement as influenced by the leaders of the Womens Suffrage Movement who are largely white middleclass and upperclass people. Could you tell us about how that influence worked . Okay, which park, and or the Suffrage Movement on very interested in the Suffrage Movement because it was such a powerful Movement JustGetting Started at the time. How did his association with the leaders of this movement influenced him . Okay, that actually was the hardest part of the book to write because what most people will tell you about progress Frederick Douglass and women actually its two ways, Frederick Douglass and women and then the other thing will be oh, he was a womens suffrage man and he was very much professed himself to be a womans rights man and he called himself that and when i started to get into its, i found there was really not a lot they are there when i started to get into it and i had two chapters on that and then i had to rewrite them and rewrite them and it was really the last thing i could write because it was so hard because like i said there was not a lot of their their, so i had to go back and look at okay, what did he do and thats kind of how i approached everything, not just what you say, but what you did and even what did he say, which was usually like gay, women. So, what did he do and what i found is all of this started begin in the 1850s, which is a very exciting time in American History with abolition movement, the Antislavery Movement which is becoming very transformative. You have how do you end slavery from a lot of Different Directions and if youre interested in that come at there was a book just written last year called the slave cause thats been up for a lot of prices. Than you have the womens Rights Movement and it wasnt just suffrage. It was a whole lot of things and they didnt want to form organizations because of the fighting going on in abolitionist movement, so they meet annually, but they also meet locally and talk about what our womens rights and what should we do about it and you also have the black conventions which is almost exclusively male, but black civil rights, which is separate from these other two which is talking about discrimination against African Americans and so when i started looking at these three different movements theres this overlap like a diagram and douglas was right in that overlap, so when i started looking at all of the conventions especially the womens rights and the black Convention Movement because they were the most black Convention Movements were maledominated because with we had to be men, so our manhood in a. Of time in which black manhood was being very much demeaned and then the womens Rights Movement, which was predominantly white and middleclass and so every black Convention Movement when they talked about women and should women participate and speak, he was they are saying women should be part of this. Womens rights should be part of this and then when the civil where people tend to focus on a split is when the 15th amendment comes up. When the 15th amendment comes up there had been effort to make the 15th amendment that everyone can vote and what happened was it said just men could vote for a lot of people womens suffrage is which was not their finest moment with Susan B Anthony they said its all or nothing and we oppose this amendment and they said a lot of really like oh, no, no, please dont and others had to say look, take what you can get. Its politics. We didnt write this and we cannot risk everything. What weve got we cannot risk, so douglas said we have to take black Voting Rights and so this created a clash. So, there was a so there was a need for compromise, political compromise. I just interrupted you because it occurred to me that our next author, Blanche Wiesen Cook wrote very much about compromise. Of this is really an unfair question to ask someone who has completed three volumes on eleanor, but what was the essential quality that made her so great . I have a friend who is 90 years old and she still talks with wonder about reading Eleanor Roosevelts column, my day in the los angeles paper. What was that quality that made her so great . Thanks, bill. Before i answer any question i just want to say how grateful and happy i am to be here at the la times book festival and its a place where i had a lot of business in the old days. I want to do a shout out to tom crouch who is head of the la times book festival for decades and to bob scheer who you work with, bill, and a whole lotta folks. Here we are the 21st century needing this festival in this harmonic convergence more than ever, so thank you for coming and thank you for supporting this a great book festival. J, la times. [applause]. So, what makes Eleanor Roosevelt so special and i have to say when i finished my eisenhower book declassified eisenhower i wrote in my journal i have now spent most of my vital youth with one dead gentlemen. [laughter] now i have spent most of my life with Eleanor Roosevelt. Its been a very long time and im so happy i did it because Eleanor Roosevelt never stop growing and changing and what makes her so great is that her friend, lady steller readying, this wonderful woman who ran the wartime emergency help brigade in england during world war ii said Eleanor Roosevelts first love was the people and that really, i think, is the essence of Eleanor Roosevelt. She loves people and she wanted to make life better for everyone in want, in need in trouble. She went around the country and around the world and she said tell me what do you want, what do you need and everyone is always asking how did she get that way and the answer seems to me at this point simple. Her father who she loved very much was alcoholic who died at the age of 34 and so we need to pause and say how much do you have to drink to die at the age of 34 i mean, we are still here. [laughter] and her mother died when Eleanor Roosevelt was eight. She essentially turned her face to the wall and her father died when she was 10 and Eleanor Roosevelt spent the rest of her life growing and changing wanting to make the world better for people in want, in need, in trouble, people just like her own family. It didnt matter that she was privileged or that her uncle is beautiful roosevelt. She really had empathy for humanity and she really did cs as all connected, which i can talk about later as i want to talk about wendell wilkie. Everything that happens anywhere affects everyone everywhere. We are all connected and he wrote that in 1942 and that became Eleanor Roosevelts wartime postwar vision, which he articulated even before that and so for me her work against bigotry and discrimination and segregation, her work for human rights and dignity for all people and she always said what we need above all is education, even before learning Eleanor Roosevelt said we need free, Public Higher Education for everyone,. [applause]. She said that in 1932. In 1934 the first time the educators of the america had a resolution to condemn segregation Eleanor Roosevelt was on the stage and give a brilliant speech and this is in volume two in volume three in which she concludes by saying, why dont we understand . We all go ahead together or we all go down together and thats where we are today and her legacy is immediate and because she had hoped and she said courage can be a as contagious. I hope we have hope and we come back to a relationship with her husband. She was his conscience and he was her barometer i wanted to ask susan about that. It was very interesting. By the way i was taken with your with lorena hickok. Who is the star reporter of the Associated Press in the 20s and 30s and i had worked for the Associated Press for 10 years in the 60s and at that, 30 years later, it was sexist like all news organizations at the time. It was a sexist men only pretty much organization with a Glass Ceiling that no woman could penetrate and yet, he was this female reporter who moved ahead and didnt do the little feature stories that they made women do about sick kids or things like that, but who covered political campaigns, i mean, who is out there with the guys and rose to the top of her profession. She came from a very poor background. What were the qualities that pushed her head and what the qualities that made her the woman behind the woman that endeared her to a litter roosevelt because she mustve been like no one roosevelt avenue. Well, actually not because Eleanor Roosevelt actually like to sort of workingclass people. She had had a relationship even before the arena with fdrs bodyguard and she was attracted to kind of rough edged people and she was one of those people and it was remarkable. Im glad to hear you affirm how sexist the ap was because it was definitely that in the 1930s and i quote her in my book talking about how angry she was about getting assigned to triplea trivial stories and she said sometimes it makes me savage. Hick was full of indignation, full of feeling, full of empathy , but she did fight to cover the big stories and at first she didnt even want to cover eleanor. She wanted to cover fdr, but then she began to perceive the Eleanor Roosevelt was not an ordinary first lady and she wasnt going to have to just right for the womens page about Eleanor Roosevelt because eleanor had a much more serious message and was a much more serious person and that was the beginning of the relationship and she had been at the top of ap and had written about the lindbergh kidnapping, for instance, kind of the big stories, the front page of stories and in 1932 she met eleanor. She knew eleanor little bit from the years of her being the governors wife in new york, but she really really got to know her when she was covering the fdr campaigned in 1932 and they began to confide in each other and as blanche has said, despite her privileged childhood, eleanor had a very lonely and sad childhood in many ways and so did lorena hickok, but a very different kind. She came from a very poor family, violent abusive father who could not keep a job and they traveled from one Little Railroad town to the next in the dakotas and he will everyone called her hit hick, but he beat and killed her pets and he beat her, also. Finally, her mother died when she was 12 and she was pretty much kicked out of her house at 13 and lived life as a girl, working as a girl in other peoples houses , barely making it through high school, so its quite remarkable that she became so successful. There was a determination, a deep kind of fight in her and that one out in the end and she was also tough. She was very tough and in fact the beginning of that relationship with eleanor was when she got another reporter got to go on a private trip with the roosevelt and she didnt and she was very angry about it and she spoke up and thats when eleanor had noticed her for the first time. She was a fighter, but she was also very very empathic person. Her stories always when she was at the Minneapolis Tribune and also as it ap reporter with these empathic stories often about people going through hard times. There was another reporter on the train he said that hick would go out when they made these whistle stops and talk with people who were coming to the whistle stops year after and she would come back on the train was tears are streaming down her face because she heard these stories of hardship and she like eleanor had tremendous empathy for peoples struggles. Then, of course, she gave it all up for love in a way, but also its important to say that the title it was like the women behind the men , but she was actually the women behind the woman and hicks really did help eleanor to shave her first lady hood if that is the word and to help her to become the unique first lady that she was and you mention in that kind of grew out of the correspondence between hicks and eleanor and eleanor sort of doing a kind of diary for hick of her day out of that came the idea, it may been hick or both of theirs to do this call him, which she continued to do her entire life, almost to the end 60s and week and introduced her to the American People and to the world and that was one of the ways and there were a number and we can talk about the others in which hick was the woman behind the woman and had a really important fact on Eleanor Roosevelt role in leadership is the first lady of the world. Can you imagine a better way of getting a message through to your husband president when he wouldnt talk to you and he had to pick up the paper in the morning [laughter] how many of you have seen paul conrads greatest sculpture in santa monica called Ch