Our Navy was very largely sunk. And we were at war in no time at all. I share, in retrospect, the distress we all share at the internment of the Japanese American citizens of the United States. It was not our finest hour. But the Supreme Court had it before it at the time, and justified it and upheld it.
William A. RusherWell, you have to remember that until 1948, when Hubert Humphrey and others forced the Democratic Party to adopt a new policy on civil rights, the Democratic Party was the party of the old solid South. All of the racists, all of the Cottonhead Smith types and so on were Democrats, allies of Franklin Roosevelt - because of their seniority - of all the major committees of the Congress.
William A. RusherI think she [Eleanor Roosevelt] was a shrewd politician, and very good in public relations, although she had the usual media help in this. As a Republican and a conservative, I can say ruefully that the Democrats and the liberals tend to get it; that when she said something, it was put in a nice way and highlighted properly by the appropriate media, so that it sounded good.
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. RusherEleanor Roosevelt had both her admirers and her detractors. And they admired her and detracted from her for many of the same reasons. People who liked her social activism, who thought that she was calling attention to problems that needed solving, were all for her.
William A. RusherYou know, you can't always criticize without somebody being at the end of the stick. And she perhaps did not always grant credit to her opponents for their motives, any more than they granted credit to her for hers.
William A. RusherI don't think she ever had a single initiative at the United Nations that was not previously [vetted] by the people at the State Department, approved of, and authorized. She did manage to get around the world an awful lot, and find other parts of her vast slum project that needed repair. But I don't think that that was the main point. The main point was that she, after all, connoted Franklin Roosevelt, who by then was long dead, and had a certain prestige and power on that account.
William A. Rusher