One of the things for me, as a biographer, that is so significant is for Eleanor Roosevelt.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOKAnd Eleanor Roosevelt’s really the dynamo and the spearhead of that effort.
More Blanche Wiesen Cook Quotes
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She was going to redeem her father’s honor. And publishing his letters, reconnecting with her childhood really fortified her to go on into the difficult White House years.
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The amazing thing, I think, historically, is that he says, “Go do it. If you can make this happen, I’ll follow you.”
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And during the campaign of 1936, she writes that she and her brother would always rather be out doing things when they’re sick, rather than take to their beds.
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On international relations, Eleanor Roosevelt really takes a great shocking leadership position on the World Court. In fact, it amuses me.
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I think Eleanor Roosevelt always had a most incredible comfort writing letters. I mean, she was in the habit of writing letters. And that’s where she allowed her fantasies to flourish. That’s where she allowed her emotions to really evolve.
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I think FDR was very dashing and charming and debonair, and probably reminded her of her father. A great bon-vivant. He loved to party.
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They’re partners in a big house where there are two separate courts, and they both know they have two separate courts. But these are courts that are allied in purpose, united in vision.
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She really is a completely different First Lady. Eleanor Roosevelt was not going to suffer and withdraw in the White House. And I think he’s a very different President. He does not want his wife to suffer and withdraw in the White House. And they really are partners.
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And I think Eleanor Roosevelt always responded to pain by doing more, by doing something, by being active. And I think she just couldn’t bear to look at her childhood grief. And she didn’t.
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Eleanor Roosevelt started off almost every early article she wrote, starting with, “My mother was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.” And I think her life was a constant and continual and lifelong contrast with her mother.
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Well, the reality of her father was that he was a very diseased alcoholic, who died at the age of 34. And one always has to pause to wonder how much you have to drink to die at 34. And he was a really tragic father.
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I think that Hick was in love with Eleanor, and Eleanor was in love with Hick. I think it’s very important to look at the letters that are in my book, because unlike some of the recent published letters.
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Politics is not an isolated, individualist adventure. Women really need to emerge as a power to be the countervailing power to the men.
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She’s very warm about her grandmother, even though, if you look at contemporary accounts, they’re accounts of horror at the Dickensian scene that Tivoli represents: bleak and drear and dark and unhappy. But Eleanor Roosevelt in her own writings is not very unhappy about Tivoli.
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In 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt goes on the air; she writes columns; she broadcast three, four times to say the US must join the World Court.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK