And Eleanor's husband was the man who did the interning. And I think they - Governor Warren, who was later to become such an impassioned Chief Justice on all sorts of human rights issues, was very big in the internment process. And I think that we simply sometimes tend not to understand or remember how people felt.
William A. RusherWell, I didn't read My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt very carefully. I was away during a lot of that, in the war and so on. She was not all that good a writer. She was a little bit on the banal side, and you know, what happened, and then this happened, and then that happened... But I will say this. She got very well paid for it.
William A. RusherPeople who thought that she was busy going around trying to stir up difficulty where there was none or less than she imagined, were quite critical of her. She was, we must never forget, a public figure. And in democracies, public figures tend to attract criticism as well as praise. The most dangerous thing would be if anybody were regarded as above criticism. And Eleanor Roosevelt is, in recent years, getting there.
William A. RusherIn terms of legacy, I'm not sure that I see some great historic deposit there, as a result of her passing our way. She heightened the sense of social conscience in the New Deal generally. To her great credit, she was early on the side of the blacks in their fight for civil rights. She had a tendency to participate, which easily oozed over into meddlesomeness.
William A. RusherI think she [Eleanor Roosevelt] never was called because she probably didn't know an awful lot. The whole burden of the criticism of her on the subject of Communism is naivetรฉ, not participation. And again, being a public figure and our representative at the UN, there was nothing Communist about her, certainly.
William A. RusherAnd he [Franklin Roosevelt] got the votes of every southern white voting state in the country and wouldn't have been elected president once, let alone four times, if he hadn't. Now, at the same time he acquired over the years a reputation for being sympathetic to blacks, and he got their votes, heaven knows.
William A. RusherI have no idea why she quieted down on the subject. Maybe she was told to. I can imagine that it wasn't a very popular position in the Administration, with her own husband having ordered by executive order the internment. Maybe she was just told: "Look, we're in a war now. Turn off your social conscience."
William A. Rusher