ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: I urge you to study Mr. Kennedy's programs, to look at his very remarkable record in Congress, and I think you will join me in voting for John F. Kennedy for president.
MATT PORTER: Eleanor Roosevelt endorsed President Kennedy as a leading member of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, however, President Kennedy had to earn that endorsement, which did not come easy. We'll talk with historian Barbara Perry, who's working on a book about the political pair, and how President Kennedy was able to earn the New Dealer's approval coming up next on this episode of JFK35.
[THEME MUSIC]
Hello, I'm Matt Porter. Welcome to the latest episode of JFK35. When President Kennedy accepted the nomination for his party in the summer of 1960, there were still deep divisions in his own party they would need to unite. Particularly, Kennedy, who was more of a centrist, had to convince the liberal wing of his party that he was committed to defending, and even expanding policies of the New Deal era. If this sounds familiar, it's probably because you've followed the news and read reports of Vice President Joe Biden, now a candidate for president, looking to do the same with the progressives of today that voted in large numbers for senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
In 1960, the person who represented the liberal wing of the party was Eleanor Roosevelt. Roosevelt had her favorite candidate in the 1960 election, and it wasn't Kennedy. She was well-known to prefer Adlai Stevenson or Hubert Humphrey, who were also in the mix for the nomination. But despite her initial reservations, President Kennedy would make significant overtures to the former first lady after the convention, and eventually visit her in Hyde Park. It was after this meeting that Eleanor Roosevelt endorsed the young candidate Kennedy, and even put out the following political ad during the campaign.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: John F. Kennedy came to visit me at Hyde Park. We talked together, and I learned that he was truly interested in carrying on many of the things which my husband had just begun. Mr. Kennedy is a strong and determined person who, as president, will provide the leadership for greater Social Security benefits, which the social welfare of a civilized nation demands. I urge you to study Mr. Kennedy's programs, to look at his very remarkable record in Congress, and I think he will join in voting for John F. Kennedy for president.
MATT PORTER: Now, we'll take you to an interview with my colleague, Jamie Richardson, and historian Barbara Perry about exactly how Kennedy closed the deal with Eleanor Roosevelt, and how she became one of his most influential supporters. We're here now with professor and Director of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia's Miller Center,Barbara Perry, who's also working on a new book on JFK and Eleanor Roosevelt and their relationship in the 1960s. Barbara, thanks for joining us today.
BARBARA PERRY: Happy to be with you, Matt, as always.
MATT PORTER: Barbara, so happy to have you here, and so interesting to talk about this relationship between President Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt. To start, if you want to set the stage, how influential was Eleanor Roosevelt in the Democratic Party in the 1960s leading into that campaign? What was her place in the country writ large?
BARBARA PERRY: Well, she truly was a worldwide presence, and in fact, President Truman would call her the first lady of the world. And leading up to the 1960 election, she had been a delegate to the United Nations from the United States. She had helped to craft, and really, was crucial in crafting the Declaration of Human Rights, which was a world-wide document adopted by the United Nations.
So she had a worldwide profile going back to her days as first lady and coming up through the 1950s, and then within the party, within the Democratic Party, she had really become a power broker, though she was a woman, and it was really hard for women to break into the most powerful circles of the party, but as a woman, she was considered a power broker even going back to the 1920s in the Democratic Party, certainly, in New York, which obviously, was a very powerful state, not only in the union, but in the party itself, and then she began to work her way up the ladder into the national party circles and the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee. So obviously, then, building on that with her First Lady-ship, and then after her husband died, she was really the embodiment of the New Deal and the era of the New Deal since her husband had left this Earth in 1945. So from that point on, and certainly up to 1960 when then Senator Kennedy was dealing with her, she was a major power broker. Really, the big three would have been former President Truman,Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Now, there would have been state leaders, state governors, powerful people in cities, Mayor Daley in Chicago, for example, and so President Kennedy, leading up to the 1960 campaign, really, for four or five years was courting all of these leaders to try to build as strong a coalition as he could, but Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the main power brokers that he wanted to get over to his side.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And then going into the 1960 election, what did Eleanor Roosevelt think of JFK or his father? We know he was ambassador under FDR, but then there was some falling out. So did the relationship with Joseph P Kennedy play into what she thought of candidate Kennedy?
BARBARA PERRY: Yes. To start with, there is a fraught relationship, and that's why I think it builds such an interesting dramatic tension between these two powerful figures of Eleanor Roosevelt and John F Kennedy, then a senator by the 1950s. But the relationship between the two families really goes back to, as you say, FDR having appointed Joseph P. Kennedy senior to be the US Ambassador to the Court of St. James in pre-World War II England. And there was just a number of issues, particularly, ultimately, between the President FDR and Joseph Kennedy, because Joseph Kennedy was, in some ways, an isolationist at that time, as many Americans were. Having been through World War I, they didn't relish going through another World War.
We have to remember that Joseph Kennedy had two sons Joe Kennedy Jr. and Jack Kennedy, who were of prime military age should a war break out. They were the apples of his eye. He certainly didn't want anything to happen to them.
And he was a business man, and so he knew the disruption that another World War would cause. So because of that, he was viewed as an appeaser to Hitler, and ultimately, became rather undiplomatic in some of the statements that he was making about the future of democracy in the United States and in Britain and had to be released from his position after a couple of years as ambassador. So not only did Eleanor Roosevelt know that story, but she was even more liberal than her husband in the pre-World War II days of trying to get Jewish refugees out of Germany and get them to the United States, and her husband's State Department was much more conservative on that point. So in many ways, Eleanor Roosevelt sort of lumped together Joseph Kennedy and those she was fighting to try to get Jewish refugees to this country and out of Germany.
So, she had that issue with the family and then she differed with John F. Kennedy in the 1950s on McCarthyism. The Kennedy family had been friends with Joe McCarthy, and she thought that then Senator John F. Kennedy was not in opposition, in clearly public opposition to McCarthy and his ways of fighting the communists, and Mrs. Roosevelt was quite the civil libertarian. She thought that McCarthy was just a horrible scourge on this country. So she differed with him on that.
And then Senator Kennedy was also quite moderate on civil rights so that he wouldn't put off the wing of the party, the southern segregationists. FDR had been in the same situation. And so Eleanor Roosevelt was constantly fighting her husband in his presidency on trying to get him to be more liberal on civil rights, and she found herself at odds with John F. Kennedy, the senator, in the 1950s on that. And then I think too, she just, as many people did, thought that Jack Kennedy was too young and too inexperienced. As he came up to the election in his early 40s, she thought he was too young and inexperienced to handle all of the worldly issues of the Cold War, and so she continued to support Adlai Stevenson for president in 1960.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And then Senator Kennedy was the first Catholic candidate to run since Al Smith in the 1920s, and a lot of people, that was something to worry about. Was Eleanor at all concerned, or did his religion play any role in her concerns for him?
BARBARA PERRY: Yes, it did. And we should point out, as you say, there had not been a Catholic at the top of a major party ticket for president since 1928 in Al Smith, who had been defeated in a landslide by Herbert Hoover in 1928. But we want to point out that Mrs. Roosevelt knew Al Smith well, as did her husband. Obviously, they ran in the same democratic circles in New York, and Mrs. Roosevelt worked very strongly in that campaign in 1928 in New York for Al Smith, so she was not against a Catholic running for president.
There is a bit of reference in some of her biographies that she may have had a little bit of a strain of anti-Catholicism personally because she grew up in such a staunch sort of Hudson Valley Episcopalian approach to religion, but I think that had been really put aside by the time Senator Kennedy came on the scene. She was worried that he would have anti-Catholicism facing him and might face some of the same issues as Al Smith, so it wasn't so much her being discriminatory towards him. But she had also had a really public fight with Cardinal Spellman from New York over his approach to wanting the government to support Catholic schools, and she was very much a separation of church and state. She didn't want the federal government to be supporting parochial schools or schools of any religious affiliation, and she knew the Kennedys were very friendly with Cardinal Spellman, so she worried about that tie. But she really wrote very strongly during the campaign of 1960 about how important it was not to judge a candidate based on his religion.
MATT PORTER: And not just religion, but policy wise, Eleanor Roosevelt and President Kennedy differed a bit. Could you describe a little bit of where Eleanor Roosevelt fell in terms of the Democratic Party compared to where JFK naturally fell and how they differed?
BARBARA PERRY: Yes. Yes. Eleanor Roosevelt was viewed, quite correctly, as being on the left wing of the Democratic Party. And people think of the Democratic Party as being liberal, and certainly, the New Deal Coalition was a liberal coalition founded by her husband in 1933 as he began to propound New Deal policies to deal with the ravages of the Great Depression. But there was also this conservative wing of the party based in the South.
The South was a one party region, obviously, anti-Republican because it was the party of Lincoln, and this region was not going to support the party that had defeated them in the Civil War. So at that time, the South was solidly democratic, big D, Democratic Party, and it was made up of its leaders who were white segregationist Southerners, by and large. So there were these two diametrically opposed wings of the party, and Eleanor Roosevelt was definitely on the side of the left wing and the liberals.
MATT PORTER: And where would you place Kennedy? Because obviously, I don't think I'd place him on the far right, but maybe he wasn't so far left either as Eleanor Roosevelt.Was he somewhere in the middle?
BARBARA PERRY: John Kennedy, as a senator and running for the presidency, getting the nomination then running in the general election, I think quite correctly placed himself squarely in the middle of the party as someone who could try to work with both wings of the party, The Southern Democrats and the Northeastern and Midwest liberals. And that’s exactly where he should have been in order to be successful in running for president. And to this day, it's important for most people who are running for president to try to find that middle ground, because at least up until recently, most Americans considered themselves and were centrist and moderates. But that's why John Kennedy came a cropper with Eleanor Roosevelt, because she thought him too moderate.
MATT PORTER: So when you think about that, and you mentioned today, and that's where the second part of my question is going, when you think of the Eleanor Roosevelt, sort of President Kennedy kind of looking for her endorsement, does it seem familiar today with the current situation with president or Vice President Biden, looking to sort of get the Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren sector to endorse him today? Does that feel familiar from back then?
BARBARA PERRY: It does. And I think you really hit that nail on the head, that history they say doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but it rhymes. And in this case, I really do think it is repeating itself.
What's missing, thank goodness, I believe, from the Democratic Party is no longer have white segregationists trying to run the show, either in presidential races, or on Capitol Hill, at least in the Democratic Party. But yes, the definite parallel, I think, is between the party as it is moving farther left, and then the moderates in the party led by Joe Biden. So the left by Bernie Sanders, or Ocasio Cortez in New York, the congresswoman. It's the case that the party is split now between those two wings, and so it's very important for Joe Biden, if he wants to win this election, to get the support of those in his party who are farther to the left and more liberal, some might even say radical, and to make common cause with them, as eventually, President Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt were able to do.
MATT PORTER: When you think about the economic situation of Eleanor Roosevelt's time with her husband and the New Deal, does it seem strangely almost familiar with sort of the economic inequality that we're seeing between-- the arguments being made today as well?
BARBARA PERRY: Absolutely, Matt. That's a really good point. And everything old is new again, and we've even used the term New Deal again, so that the more left wing of the Democratic Party is talking about the Green New Deal. In other words, to have government do the kinds of programs that helped ameliorate the problems of the Great Depression, which we think are economic.
We think in terms of the stock market collapse in 1929. 25% of Americans were out of work in the 1932 election as it came upon us, but the New Deal included, for example, the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was to try to buy help ameliorate the problems of the Dust Bowl, soil erosion, forestry issue. So it was one of the early environmental programs, and obviously, that's what we need now.
And Eleanor Roosevelt, by the way, when she found out that the Civilian Conservation Corps was only accepting recruits from among young men who were unemployed, she went to bat for women and said they should also recruit women, and she was successful at that. So yes, it feels very similar to my reading of history from 1932 '33 in the midst of a terrible depression. Thank goodness, we were not in the midst of a pandemic, although that had happened here obviously in 1918 and '19. So the country has gone through these crises before and we've come out well on the other side. We hope for the same now.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: So we wanted to jump ahead or kind of get back centered on to 1960. So when President Kennedy-- part of your book will be talking about when president--or not president, but candidate Kennedy meets with Eleanor Roosevelt at Hyde Park in her home. What was the importance of that meeting, and then why was it so important that he come away with her endorsement?
BARBARA PERRY: I have called it a summit. It had almost all of the tension and drama of an international summit meeting, and it certainly had the importance of that, where instead of two countries trying to come together to make peace and move forward and reason together, you had the clash of the two titans in the Democrat Party, because now, with the nomination in hand, Senator Kennedy was a power broker as well and needing the endorsements of the other power brokers. And Mrs. Roosevelt had been at the 1960 convention the previous month, July out in Los Angeles, but she was still supporting Adlai Stevenson for a third run for president, and so she was very disappointed when he didn't get it and Jack Kennedy got it. And then Senator Kennedy tried to reach out to her as she was leaving Los Angeles, and she wouldn't even take this phone call. She just said if you need to talk to me, you can talk to my son Franklin Roosevelt Junior, who was a friend of Senator Kennedy.
So this meeting in August of 1960 at Hyde Park is just all-important for Senator Kennedy to try to win over Eleanor Roosevelt and get her support as one of the three major national power brokers in the party, along with Truman and Stevenson, and to try to get her on board, see if she will endorse him, see if she will campaign for him, particularly in New York, but also around the country. Because I should point out that when they started asking people in the polls in the late '40s, who's the most admired woman in your view, Eleanor Roosevelt came at the top of the list from 1948 until 1962. She was America's most admired woman.
And in 1962, by the way, she was displaced by Jacqueline Kennedy. But to imagine the had an admiration people had for her, so Senator Kennedy knew if he could get her on board, it would mean a lot of votes in what he thought was going to be a very narrow popular vote victory should he win. It turned out to be the case.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And then after that convention, or at the convention, Senator Kennedy picks his running mate as Lyndon Johnson. Was that important in Eleanor Roosevelt’s view of his candidacy?
BARBARA PERRY: Yes. I think she was pleased about that. She had thought in terms of her ideal ticket, when she decided that Senator Kennedy was getting more and more power she could see in the party, she thought, well, maybe she could compromise and have Adlai at the top of the ticket and Senator Kennedy could be in the vice presidential slot, but when he got the top of the ticket position, then she was hoping that one of the Democrats who was, in her mind, more liberal and more experienced and she liked might go into that second slot. And so I think her two choices would have been either Hubert Humphrey or Lyndon Johnson.
Lyndon Johnson, though he was from the South, from Texas, was going to bring in, everyone hoped, the Texas electoral vote, which I think was about 24 volts in those days. But also, he had been the majority leader, was the majority leader of the Senate, of the Democrats at that time, so Eleanor knew he had that power in the Senate, and she also knew that he had been more liberal on the 1957 Civil Rights Act that had gone through than had Senator Kennedy. So she felt more comfortable with the idea that LBJ would be at the second spot on the ticket.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: So now that we have the former first lady, the most admired woman in America onboard with Senator Kennedy, did he ask her to do any sort of active campaigning? Did she go out of her way to help him, or what was her role in the campaign?
BARBARA PERRY: Well, back to the Hyde Park summit, boy, that just changed everything. And I always point to photographs that you can see of them having lunch in her study at Hyde Park, and it looks very serious, and she's clearly bending his ear on her views, but when they come out of the lunch, they're both just broadly smiling ear to ear, and I think it’s both a combination of her realizing she could work with him, and that he was going to-- she would say, look, I'm not trying to tell you what you have to do as president, but these are the things I would like you to do, and he seemed open to that. She was impressed by his intellect, and I think he charmed her with his charisma and his wonderful sparkling personality. So they both look really happy.
And she then makes a turn on a dime and she starts writing in her syndicated column called My Day that she'd started writing every day in 1935, but at this point, I think it was every other day, that was published in newspapers all over the country. Millions of people read it every day, and so from that meeting at Hyde Park onward, she began supporting President Kennedy and saying-- at that time, Senator Kennedy, saying, he should be president because he's a quick study. I've met with him. I'm very impressed with him.
I did have my doubts at one time, but he's alleviated most of those. And then she started writing privately to all the power brokers she knew in the state of New York and telling them they should support him. And then in my view, most important, she went around the country campaigning for him, and she specifically went to West Virginia, where, because of the poor, the coal miners, the impoverished people there in the depression, and everything that had been done for them by FDR and Mrs. Roosevelt, the Roosevelts were deities to the people of West Virginia.
So she would literally get-- by this time, she's in her mid-70s. She would get in a convertible and have someone drive her from little town to a little town in West Virginia, where people would just flock to her and want to literally touch her and bring their children up to her and have them touch Mrs. Roosevelt, and she'd get on a loudspeaker, and she'd make a speech, and she'd go to the next town, then she'd end up in a big city in West Virginia and do a big rally. So that, and then going across the country with these speeches and these press conferences, I think it made all the difference in a race that turned out to be a winner for President Kennedy by 1/10 of a percentage point.
MATT PORTER: Thank you so much. And just a couple more questions here. As we think about-- we started at the beginning of where Eleanor Roosevelt was and her thoughts of JFK's father, but how did the relationship from JFK and Eleanor Roosevelt evolve? Compared to where do you think it stood when she died, are there any specific examples of that relationship's evolution that come to your mind?
BARBARA PERRY: It really does evolve, Matt. And I think it's something that we can look at now, when people are so polarized and they're fighting all the time, that here are these two people that had their differences going, again, all the way back to their families in the 1930s, but by 1960, had this come let us reason together view. And the examples that I see, you can watch the interviews that Mrs. Roosevelt did of President Kennedy.
She had her own television show on public television, or educational TV, it was called at the time, and she would go to the White House and she would interview President Kennedy.One of the first ones is in March of '61. He's only been president for two months, and she goes to the White House, she interviews him about the new Peace Corps, and they just have the loveliest conversation about how she's so supportive of that, and the president puts her on the advisory committee.
And then he also takes her on a tour of the White House to show her things that have changed, and he introduces her to his two beautiful little children, to Caroline, who was only three at the time, and John Junior, who was a newborn, had just arrived at the White House. And she writes then back to him and Mrs. Kennedy, thank you so much, and you've such a beautiful family. And then another conversation they have, and this, I think, is the most important link that they developed during the presidency was that President Kennedy made Eleanor Roosevelt, the chairman of his President's Commission on the Status of Women, and he did that at the end of 1961, and she was running that commission all the way until her death in November of '62.
And what you see on screen in those interviews is that she feels very comfortable with him. He is very deferential towards her. He always calls her Mrs. Roosevelt or Ms. Roosevelt, he says.
But there's always sort of a sparkle in his eye, and I think it's because there's such a generational difference between them, he could really have been her son. He was the age of her children, and she was the age of his mother. She was about six years older, but the same generation as his mother, and his mother could be quite pointed with him and criticizing him or how he looked or how he sounded, and Mrs. Roosevelt never held back on things like that. She would write to him while he was president and say, I think you need to take voice lessons. And he would respond to her as he did his mother. He'd write back with a sense of humor and say, thank you so much. I was taking voice lessons, but when I became president, I was a little bit busy, but thank you for letting me know that.
And so when you see the pictures of President Kennedy at her funeral in November of '62, so sadly, just one year before he would pass, he looks truly bereft as he stands there in the rose garden of Hyde Park and watches the funeral service and the burial service for her. So I think they really developed a friendly relationship, a respectful, mutually respectful relationship, but a very happy and productive one. And he, by the way, wrote to her just before she died. He got word that she was fading from her daughter, Anna, and her son, Franklin Junior, and he hand wrote a lovely note to her. And I'd like to think that that was one of the last things that she saw and that she left this Earth, shuffled off the mortal coil with a happy feeling about him and thought that the country was in good hands.
MATT PORTER: Oh, wow. That's amazing. I think we might-- I think Jamie was just telling me we might have one of those letters, and even the video of when Eleanor Roosevelt talked to JFK about the Peace Corps. So we're going to look back at that.
BARBARA PERRY: Yeah, you can find-- those are all available. And before you signed on, Jamie and I were talking about how the Kennedy Library, because thank goodness, Mrs. Lincoln kept all of that correspondence, and it's all digitized, and it's in separate folders. So you have it from 1958, and then you have it while he was president, and it includes that handwritten letter.
He and Mrs. Kennedy also sent her flowers for her last birthday, which was in the fall just before she passed. They sent her flowers and then sent her this hand-- the president sent her this handwritten note just shortly before she died. So you can see all that. You can see their interviews where they're-- again, there's this formal relationship, because she recognize she's the president. She always writes to him as Mr. President, and he always calls her Ms. Roosevelt.
So it's not a Jack and Eleanor kind of thing, but you can just see the mutual respect that they have. And also, he obviously wanted her support. Not knowing she would pass in '62, he wanted her support for '64. And I think there was also some pragmatism in making her the head of this women's commission that he put together, but she had been fighting for women's rights from the 1920s onward, and so she was the person to put in charge of that. And he signed, by the way, in 1963, even before he got the final report from the commission, which he got in October of '63, so Mrs. Roosevelt did not live to see that, nor did she live to see the fact that he signed even before that the first equal pay act for women.
MATT PORTER: It's amazing the archives that we have here. I have one last question. We think about Eleanor Roosevelt and the time that she made her-- became one of the most influential women in the country and really did all her work, and now, we look at the generation that's beyond her. We're talking right now about which woman the current democratic presidential candidate is going to pick, and we saw a number of really smart, talented women run for the presidential nomination this year. We have seen a strong woman as Speaker of he House right now, Nancy Pelosi, and my question is, what do you-- what do you think of the influence Eleanor Roosevelt had on future women in politics, and how do you think she'd look at the current crop of women that are doing political work?
BARBARA PERRY: Sure. Well, great question, because it was something she did think about, literally, when would there be a female president? And in the research on my book that I'm just doing now, I just came across two things that are important for then, and then we'll come up to the present.
But one was that in probably 1935 or so, a very close advisor to her husband who was called Louis Howe came to Mrs. Roosevelt, could have been facetious, his question, but he said, do you want to run for president in 1940? So he was thinking that he'd have two terms with FDR in the White House. Presidents typically did not run for a third term then, though they could. We didn't have the constitutional amendment banning that at the time. And so he thought FDR would go out of office in '40, and then he could help Eleanor Roosevelt become president.
And she said, oh, no. One presidential candidate in the family is enough. So there's no evidence that she ever seriously considered running herself, but I think it's important that a very savvy presidential advisor and someone who had literally made FDR president would look at her and think presidential material.
The other is that because from the 1920s onward, she was working to get women into the powerful positions in the state parties, in the local parties, the county parties, and the national party, she was therefore pushing women not only to be power brokers behind the scenes, but she hoped one day would be able to run for office. And yet, she said, I'm hoping that it will be a qualified woman. It'll be a worthy woman who will be president, and it should be one who gets the votes of both men and women.
She didn't want a female candidate for president just to run because she was female and only to get women's votes. So she made that clear. And she said, unfortunately, I think-- and she was saying this in the 1930s and '40s. She said, unfortunately, I think that there will be both worthy and unworthy men in the White House before there will be a worthy woman elected. And one can make the argument that has come true.
Now, bring it up to the present, Hillary Clinton very much admired Eleanor Roosevelt, and there were comments that Hillary Clinton made that as first lady, she really sort of called upon the memory of Eleanor Roosevelt to inspire her. So we know that she inspired that generation of women leaders. And the answer to the question of when will we have a woman president, I'd hope that would have been answered in 2016 with Mrs. Clinton's election, but it was not to be. And so I can't make a prediction now about when it will be, but I can say that whoever is that woman who becomes the first woman president will be standing on the shoulders of Eleanor Roosevelt.
MATT PORTER: Thank you so much, again, Barbara. This is Barbara Perry, professor and director of the Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia's Miller Center. Thank you so much for being here.
BARBARA PERRY: Well, Matt and Jamie, I love being with you as always. And you can imagine what a great resource the Kennedy Library is with all its archives for all the work that I have done over the years on President Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Rose Kennedy, Edward Kennedy, and now, this amazing relationship between President Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt. So thank you to the library for that as well.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Thank you. I love hearing about Eleanor Roosevelt. She's such a wonderful, wonderful woman, an inspiration.
BARBARA PERRY: She is, Jaime. And I'm embarrassed to say that I should have known more about her. I mean, I had kept up with the biographies about her, and just as someone who's interested in presidents and first ladies, I'd read, but I hadn't really delved into her life as much as I had the Kennedys, and so I'm just learning so much about her, and I feel a bit bad that-- don't you feel like she's not thought of as much as she used to be, and she's kind of faded, I fear, from the scene. Although I hear from Doug Brinkley that-- who is it? It's a famous biographer. It's, I think, a journalist who's writing a biography of her.
So I think that's good. I think that's to the good that there will be another new biography out about her, and I think it's meant to be one volume. So Blanche Wiesen Cook has made the biggest contribution in most recent years, but it's three volumes, and I'm not sure people want to sit down and read three giant, thick books about one person, but also this Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project. Allida Black was the head of that until recently, and she's worked very closely with Hillary Clinton.
In fact, Allida and I are going to be leading the Hillary Clinton Oral History Project together. So I feel like maybe the combination of Hillary Clinton speaking about her inspiration from Eleanor Roosevelt and Allida's work in the papers, and now, Christopher Brick is the name of the new head of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, we'll certainly continue to try to keep her memory alive, but I just feel, as I said, that it's faded. And because of the way she looked, she was very Victorian in how she presented herself, and so she's very old-fashioned in how she looks and sounds, and I think it's harder, perhaps, for people to relate to her than someone like Mrs. Kennedy, who still appears fresh and modern because of the way she looked and dressed, and maybe not sounded, so much. Her breathy voice is a bit. But I do think people can relate to Mrs. Kennedy more than they can relate to Eleanor Roosevelt.
MATT PORTER: Barbara, thank you so much.
BARBARA PERRY: You're welcome. Thank you, Matt and Jamie, for reaching out. You can't make a professor happier than to let them talk about their work. And thank you for your interest and for your great questions.
MATT PORTER: And we look forward to reading your book when it comes out.
BARBARA PERRY: Well, thank you. It'll still be a couple of years down the road, but it's sure fun to write. And I hope I'll be able to come to the library and talk about it as well.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MATT PORTER: Well, thank you for listening to this episode of JFK35, a podcast from The JFK Library Foundation. We hope you enjoyed this episode. This is the end of our fourth season of the show, and we are so happy for those of you who continue to listen every other week. Next, we'll have a special series on the 60th anniversary of the 1960 election coming up in August, so please keep a lookout for that in a couple of months.
If you have questions or story ideas, email us at JFK35Pod@jfklfoundation.org, or tweet at us JFK Library using the hashtag #JFK35. You can also follow the library on Facebook and Instagram, and if you like what you heard today, please consider subscribing to our podcast or leaving us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening, and have a great week.
[MUSIC PLAYING]