Do you realize that at the moment we have Barry Goldwater fighting the Moral Majority, with The New York Times rooting for Goldwater? Times have changed.

And 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.

Do you realize that at the moment we have Barry Goldwater fighting the Moral Majority, with The New York Times rooting for Goldwater? Times have changed.

I 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.

People 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.

One has to say that they [Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt] were pioneering to some extent. They didn't know that some of the housing projects that they were putting up for the poor were going to turn into crack dens and rapists' bowers and things of that sort, which they have since become. But you can't always foresee the future. I'm sure their intentions were the best.

Most of her participation in the United Nations, which [??] history, as I say, I don't take too seriously, because I know how that UN operation works, and it is essentially a facade in which the work is done back in Washington and in the capitals involved, and the people up front are just going through the motions.