okay. well, with that, um, i want to thank each and every one of you. i hope that the great spirit will be at your side in your studies and your endeavors and thank you very much. [applause] >> you're watching booktv on c-span2, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. .. [applause]

>> >> cit is great to be back at the lincoln library. as i lean mentioned, did some of the research, scrolling through newspaper microfilm reels, and letters across the hall, doing research at the lincoln library. it is a great thing and a terrible thing in a way. it is a great thing because the people are absolutely amazing as you know. people like eileen who is an expert in foreign policy in her own right. people like dr. james cornelius, curator of the lincoln collection who is a living, breathing encyclopedia of all things linkedin, those are the good things. the terrible thing is when you are here doing research you are surrounded by the 15,000 books about abraham lincoln that have

already been written. it is a stark reminder that anybody who comes here and asks you to put another book on that shelf really has some explaining to do right at the beginning. that is what i want to start off doing because i came to linkedin in a backwards way, his foreign policy which is something that has been written about very infrequently and my background is in journalism, not academia. i was foreign correspondent for many years mostly in the middle east reporting on the ground in places like syria and libya and yemen, always used to covering foreign affairs and the street level, several years back i was going to stick a step back and look at the framework of american foreign policy, the traditions of american foreign

policy i started reading, started studying this from the early days of the republic through a post world war ii empire building and discovered diplomatic history is a surprisingly small academic field. the former pakistani ambassador spoke this past summer and said americans are the only ones who say that is history, that is irrelevant. he had a point. there is some truth to that. i felt like studying how americans acted historically in international affairs would lead to a deeper understanding of the way we act now. so i stumbled across this period but i was sucked in right away first and foremost because the characters are amazing. something out of a novel. lincoln's minister to russia walks around the streets of st.

petersburg with >> host: dangling from his waistband and picking fistfights. this is the kind of guy we are dealing with, john hay, lincoln's personal secretary said it was $0.25 of yellow covered romance. charles sumner, the powerful and pompous share of the senate foreign relations committee, one journalist said he works his adjectives so hard that if they ever got him alone they would murder him. lord palmer, the british prime minister, victor hugo said he belonged the little to history but much more to fiction. eugene, the strong-willed, strongly anti-american french empress. the stories told whether it is true or not, indicative of her character she was stabbed herself in the arm with a dagger to prove how tough she was. and of course you had lincoln himself and for all that has been written there has been very little about lincoln's foreign

policy and there hasn't been a holistic human account of his role on foreign affairs in nearly 70 years and that is before the lincoln papers were made public in 1947. there is a lot of water under the bridge since then. if you reasons for that. the obvious reason we think of the civil war as a domestic conflict and it was so there was a lot going on at home. another reason is lincoln had a very powerful and shrewd secretary of state in william henry seward so lincoln delegated a lot of day-to-day diplomacy. if you situate lincoln in the center of his own foreign policies end up with a biography because lincoln didn't do everything. part of my approach is how you slice it. the great lincoln biographer james randolph said if you compare lincoln to teddy roosevelt or a theodore roosevelt he didn't do that much in international affairs the things he did do were very important and so my approach was

to be very selective and hone in on those things and look at five key episodes i feel reveal what ellingtonian foreign-policy is about. one of the reasons it is possible to do this is there has been a genuine and astonishing bloom in lincoln scholarship and i don't just mean quantity of stuff because there has been a lot of stuff but quality of lincoln books that coming out right now and i want to explain how they have done this because i think it is fascinating because there have been so many biographies of lincoln, the greatest historians that have written about him have become figures of importance so they leave their research materials, there note cards to university libraries, library of congress where other scholars can flip through their note cards and you have to be careful, fact check, it is useful because historians look for bits that end up on the cutting room floor and useful and include those in their own words and a great one at this at

recent years, if you haven't read his book read it, the gold standard, massive two volume biography of lincoln and he has done just this, his trademark technique, go to these papers, did out old newspaper clippings, note cards, this sort of thing in addition to all the ordinary primary sources in newspapers, diaries, letters and that sort of thing. that works well on a project like this since i could go and look through the lens of foreign policy because past scholars were not always thinking of foreign policy, i could allow interesting material that had been overlooked. i will give you one example. mary lincoln. we have a certain image of her as a difficult person who had a difficult life, three of her children died in her lifetime and she saw her husband assassinated before her eyes. wasn't easy being mary lincoln but in many ways she was more cosmopolitan than lincoln. she had grown up in lexington,

athens of the west and went to a school where students spoke french and her family lorded this over lincoln which he didn't appreciate. he liked to say one the was good enough for god but not the todds. when i get into the research i found she played a role in diplomatic importance, including lincoln's diplomacy. the papers of past historians of mary lincoln i found contemporary newspaper clippings i had not seen anywhere else that they hadn't used the talked about her interference in diplomatic matters trying to get candidates appointed to various posts. sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. that was interesting to me and relevant so i included it. one of the things that threw me to this period were similarities between the nineteenth century and our own time. i don't want to overdo this because there's no comparison with the u.s. is an emerging markets, the india or china of its day during this period. britain was the world's economic superpower but there were a

number of other powerful players on the world stage at this time. france was a major player even after the napoleonic wars, russia was a rising power, spain was becoming less important but still a player. on the one hand, this age of nationalism, all these competing powers that pursued their national interests and end up with some great powerful self-interest and statesman. otto von bismarck became prime minister, so the age of blood and iron is coming. in britain, austin is famous for saying britain had no internal friends, only national interests. in france you had napoleon iii and victor hugo's description, i will read his fantastic description of napoleon iii, napoleon is a man of middle height, cold, pale, slow, looks like he is not quite the way, esteemed by women who want to become prostitutes and men who want to become prefects. that is what we are dealing with in this era, that is the cast of

characters. many self-described realist foreign policy thinkers like henry kissinger think we are headed in that direction again, the emerging markets rise and the u.s. has its own problems at home. instead of acting like the world's will superpower the u.s. will pursue selfish interests competing on world stage like any other nation and in many ways we see that happening already. the other interesting thing about the times is it was an information age. the world was shrinking, this was a period the thought the advent of the telegraph, steamship, huge boom in newspaper publishing and at the same time these national conflict taking place other forces are bringing nations closer together and as obvious similarities to our own times. in the diplomatic world meant nothing was private any more. the french empress eugene e. complain diplomacy has few secrets these days, 150 years ago. karl marx was a contemporary of lincoln and wrongly predicted globalization would lead

national differences to disappear but was right about some of the basic forces, and the new york tribune in this period of time, circulation of 200,000 in the united states, and in the 1850s stopped writing in the civil war. with all its did bandages this globalizing world advantages and drawbacks, he had a capability to speak directly to ordinary european newspaper readers and he did. he reviewed the emancipation proclamation as a tool of international relations. he thought ordinary europeans might put pressure on their aristocratic statesman to keep from intervening in the war. they fought the war was about slavery and not union. he was partly right about that. lincoln also had to deal with the downside, the lack of diplomatic privacy, leaks, that sort of thing. lincoln had him and 42 ago there was this guy in washington who had to be fired from his work on

the national security staff. they called him the twitter mold. he was saying he was tweet mr. king things about president obama and john kerry and they uncovered this guy and fired him and lincoln had his own version of a twitter mole, a guy who reminds me of joseph, a -- working in the state department and published his diary at the height of the civil war and called lincoln pig had lincoln, his job was to keep steward from making a fool of himself, this guy had to be fired like joseph was. in the end lincoln did a pretty good job keeping his head amid these competing currents of nineteenth century life. lincoln's background was provincial. in never traveled abroad, spoke no foreign languagess, taught himself little german to help win votes in illinois, lincoln ended up being a good foreign policy president for a few

reasons. lincoln was naturally diplomatic in the broader sense. we know that about him. it was part of his character. a british journalist visited the executive mansion in nearly days of the war. european diplomats, professional diplomats would shrug their shoulders or tell a little white lie to get out of a difficult situation lincoln would tell the story or joe, crack everybody up and move off to the next thing in the middle of it. francis carpenter said his laugh was like the name of a wild horse. really useful tool in the diplomatic world. second, when you look at the raw material lincoln had to deal with, that was impressive. at the beginning of lincoln's first term in new york newspaper wrote there's hardly a court in europe which has not had some specimen of the american character in its core store, a rake or swim there. politicians at this time treated the diplomatic corps mostly as a dumping ground, a place to send

inconvenient radicals, were considered extended vacations. there is a great scene of herman melville coming to the white house to convince clinton to appoint him in you don't get the sense it is to hone his diplomatic skills but a vacation one group tries to get the candidate appointed on modern day hawaiian they make their case but then they say our guy is really sick and the climate of the isla house and trying to and how lincoln says gentlemen, unfortunately i have eight other applicants for this job and a are all sicker than your man. the irony is lincoln's friends

tried this in the 1841. you was going through depression and his friends rode to daniel webster, secretary of state at the time and said you should send a lincoln to columbia. he is depressed and not doing well. this will be really good for him and daniel webster not entirely surprisingly -- by the time we get to the civil war lincoln put competent diplomat in place, steward, his secretary of state could be a vain and volatile person. he would sometimes tipped his hat to people he thought might recognize him. says something about steward. he was also competent and worldly. lincoln's minister to britain charles francis adams was a skilled diplomat but lincoln had to overcome his share of turkeys also. his minister in paris ended up dying in a hotel room with a woman not his wife and his body had to be smuggled back to the

embassy. john a. observed nobody in the french negation could speak french. it is impressive that lincoln was able to do what he did with the raw material that he had. what lincoln did have was a broad picture, ideal vision of the nature of american power. lincoln for the most part felt foreign wars would diminish american strength. he believed this before the civil war. opposed the origins of the mexican war when he was a young congressman and cultivating economic growth was a better path to power in many cases than wars of conquest. a pretty common whig position. lincoln was a week before he was a republican. lincoln once explained that the whig party did not believe in enlarging our fields but keeping our offenses where they are and cultivating present positions, making it a garden if you would. isolation wasn't a term that was used in the nineteenth century and lincoln was a vigorous

proponent of economic growth at home and abroad. looking at asian exports before our pivot to asia in recent years. and the nature of american power was sound. ultimately when you look at this, lincoln was successful at the risk european powers would intervene on the side of the confederacy was a very real possibility and lincoln avoided this. the risk that a diplomatic flak with france or spain or britain would erupt into a war was a real possibility and a lincoln avoided that. the unification of the nation lincoln presided over set the stage for the united states's emergence as a world power later in the nineteenth century. europeans realize to some extent as early as the last days of the civil war if you look at cartoons in punch magazine the british magazine at the beginning of the war the sponge cartoon depicted lincoln as a kind of goofball. by the end of the war they had changed and show its first, a powerful figure.

it was clear from the imagery that lincoln had passed a certain kind of test even as the war was going on. and in terms of handling international relations, when you look at today's headlined it feels tokyo was right, and on the way here i was reading a book guy george kennan, the father of containment and even him, even he described democracy as an international affairs as he described it as a monster the size of this room with the brain the size of up in. that is what he said. this is an american saying this. this is out there among experts in international affairs both domestic and foreign, why is men, e. lee why is men better at handling foreign affairs than ordinary people. lincoln's experience proved it is possible for a democracy to thrive in the international

arena even amid acute crises at home. i don't want to go through every foreign policy crisis in the book. i want you to read it and buy it and i want to talk about one in particular which is a good representative. toward the beginning of the war, france invaded mexico and by 1863 french troops conquered mexico city. by the following year napoleon iii had installed his, but on the mexican thrown. in the middle of this domestic crisis lincoln had a major challenge to the monroe doctrine south of the rio grande. you might say what could lincoln do? he didn't have a choice. there was a war raging at home, can't do anything about mexico but he did have a choice and many americans, some his allies and some enemies were urging him to take action specifically to invade mexico. there were people who thought the union and confederate armies reconcile, invade and drive napoleon's troops out and get a peace conference late in the war

the compared vice president made this case as did some hawkish members of congress, some of lincoln's advisers. at times lincoln seems to share that view. a visitor recalled him saying that one point if napoleon interfered in the war i will be damned if i don't get a million men margin to mexico. he liked to talk tough sometimes but he did margin to mexico. resisted that impulse, talked to troops north of the rio grande and let napoleon and do himself. lincoln realized napoleon would have to retreat on his own because he was overextended and had problems closer to home and europe. this says something important about lincoln. john hague later wrote patience was one of the cardinal elements of lincoln's character. lincoln had an impeccable sense of patience and timing and compared decisionmaking to watching a pair right and on the 3. he would wait and he would collect the parrot, make his decision and that is a really

important skill in international relations in my view because exploitable changes in the international power grid happen glacially. they don't happen all the time. one lincoln biographer compared lincoln's approach to the serenity prayer they teach in 12 step programs, granted the serenity to accept things i can change, the courage to change things i can and the wisdom to know the difference. knowing the difference between think you can change in international affairs and the things you can't is important, lincoln was a master at that. this is worth looking at in my opinion because there are so many dilemmas and the international stage that are not really solve all. look at a conflict like syria or egypt and there are things you can do and things you should do but really no solutions just a series of lousy trade offs. lincoln had a favorite story to tell when it came to know win situations. told the story of a man who goes to see his preacher for advice and the preacher says to him by

sun, there are two roads before you. one goes right to hell and the other goes straight to damnation. the guy looks at the preacher and says if those are my two choices i will go through the woods. lincoln told the story a number of stories specifically when he was asked to intervene in foreign conflicts which he was a couple times with the beginning of the war was asked to intervene in a dispute in the caribbean and later in the war in mexico which we already talked about and the choice lead right to hell and what choice lead right to help, the other went right to damnation lincoln insisted he would take the woods and just stay out of it and the comparisons are not exact because the united states is in a much better position today to act in the world as we were in the nineteenth century but most of the time lincoln displayed pretty good judgment about these kinds of things. i don't want to leave you with

the impression that i think lincoln was perfect in international relations. wasn't. made his share of mistakes and to give one example, lincoln was a longtime advocate of colonization, sending black americans to africa or central america, some research suggests he favored colonization until the end of his life. if you want to start an argument talk to some lincoln scholars about this question because it is a hotly debated one. it is obvious in hindsight there are serious moral and practical implications, problems with that and even some of lincoln's contemporaries called him on it. seward said i am in favor bringing men into this country, never sending them out. so seward was against it. that was an error in judgment on lincoln's part when it came to foreign affairs lead also risks antagonizing the colonial powers in europe which was the last thing lincoln wanted to do in the middle of the war. my point is not that lincoln did

everything right in international affairs. didn't and lincoln would have acknowledged as much. he was a humble person but when it comes to foreign affairs that in itself is an important -- walt whitman, the great observer of international affairs in the mid 20th century like to say our greatest error in international relations is the error of forgetting we're men and thinking we are god's. we are not gods. lincoln wasn't either and he knew that in his bones. he could not forget it during conflicts like the civil war and so now 150 years later, when our ability to act in the international arena seems almost limitless i hope we don't forget it either. thank you very much. [applause]

>> i will be happy to take any questions. >> what precautions did lincoln actually do? can you look at some examples of keeping power is out of the embargo? other diplomatic things he might have done? >> the most important thing he did was recognizing the true interests of the european powers really were. the statement in places like britain and france, there's a kind of gleeful us about watching the united states go to pieces. they would grow about it. palmer and talked about the disunited states of america after bull run, called the yankees run. there is a sort of visceral excitement at seeing the united states go to pieces.

it wasn't really in britain's interest to intervene in the war. they had problems at home and there were strong commercial and financial ties between the united states and britain. britain was the u.s.'s largest creditor at the time. france is even more interesting because france, britain had been the historical enemy of france. the napoleonic wars were not that much earlier and so france saw united united states as a potential counterweight to britain. it was not necessarily in france's interests in seeing the united states go to pieces even though napoleon iii talked-about all-time. what i think lincoln was good at was recognizing what these interests really were and not doing something to mess it up. in crisis after crisis we see it during the most dangerous moment of the war with the british, we see it in his response to the mexican crisis at the beginning

of the war, caribbean policy, that was the biggest thing. >> other countries? >> right. this hopes of the south rested on king cotton. after lincoln blockaded the coast the manufacturing districts in britain and france were hurting. they were getting caught in from other sources but were not getting the cotton that the raw material that they were once getting from the south and so the hope of southern statesmen is the power of king cotton would cause the european tour is to intervene on the side of the confederacy. it didn't happen for a variety of reasons. for one, they did manage to get cotton, the british and french managed to get caught in from other sources. that was one reason and another

reason was ordinary european workers tended to kind of moral appeals sometimes appealed to them and lincoln you'd the emancipation proclamation as a tool of international relations where he could speak directly across the atlantic to the european workers and try to get them, and appealed to their sense of justice and get them to apply pressure on their aristocratic statement. he wasn't totally right about this. that is a limited power. we call it soft power today and soft power has its role but not always as powerful as we would like to think it is. it did work in the long run and there were enormous monster meetings in britain in the first half of 1863 where workers rallied to the union cause. in the short term what is really interesting is the latest

scholarship shows in the short term, the emancipation proclamation almost spurred intervention on behalf of the british because the british statesman viewed the disorder of a slave revolt. they had lived through revolts in india in the late 1850s of one of the most dangerous moments of the war and lincoln was wrong about that. he thought the emancipation proclamation would immediately lead to universal support among in europe. wasn't exactly right but in the long run he was right about that. >> if you would address the trends in europe -- if you would address the trends specifically in the interplay

between lincoln and seward and lord palmerson, i would like to hear you address that issue a little more directly. >> as i mentioned, probably the most dangerous crisis of the war with britton, came in late 1861, a union naval captain intercepted the british mail package in the caribbean, took a couple confederate diplomats off the ship, sent them to a prison on the east coast, sent the ship on its way and his creative indignation in britain who threatened to war if the diplomats were not released and the ultimate resolution of this, don't want to spoil it, it is a chapter in the book about lincoln backed down, released

the diplomats. and war was avoided. one of the interesting things about this affair is the length of time it took for news to cross the atlantic. we take it for granted today that we instantly know what is going on in tehran or moscow or whatever but that wasn't the case in the mid-19th century and there was an interesting dynamic going on, the telegraph in north america, you could flash bulletins from place to place in north america and get your news instantaneously. that is relatively new. the trans-atlantic telegraph was still not yet working so it took a week, ten days or longer to get news across the atlantic. this had a couple of upsides and downsides. the downside was a week or ten days in a diplomatic crisis is a lot of time for misunderstanding, lot of time for trouble to happen, the upside is a week or ten days is

a lot of time for passions to cool and that is what happened in the trenton crisis. one of the big scholarly debate about the trend in crisis is a who was right? was lincoln right? it is parlor game among historians. seward was advocating, most of the evidence indicates steward was advocating pretty hard to release the men relatively early on. there is conflicting evidence and most of the evidence says lincoln was kind of making a show toward keeping the diplomats until the end when steward convinced him to release them. that version of the story misses the point all little bit. there is some evidence that lincoln was talking tough but actually preparing the ground to release the diplomats.

there is a reminiscence from a newspaper man in washington at the time who remembers lincoln coming to him saying i want you to start preparing your readers, we will have to release these guys but i can't too far ahead of public opinion so start writing articles to let people know and this guy did and the other thing it kind of misses the point of how presidential decisionmaking is made. it is not a static thing. knew -- one person says don't release them, the other person says release them. opinions change as new pieces of information coming as we see this in presidential decisionmaking, the cuban missile crisis, in the early days kennedy says let's bomb cuba and later on he says cooler heads, the blockade is the better solution so presidential decisionmaking involves, what is important in the situation is lincoln in the end made the right decision. he listened to the voice of reason and made the right decision and war was ultimately

avoided. >> argue aware of any circumstances in which advances in naval technology and strategy had a big impact on the world of international diplomacy, specifically naval aspect of the war? >> i don't get into it. there are some great monographs about this issue but i don't get into it in great detail in the book because-lincoln says i don't know much about the navy which he says about everything, don't know much about money, don't know much about diplomacy, he knew an awful lot about the navy.

he had are patent on a device for raising naval vessels, he saw her the designs of the ironclads and this sort of thing so he did have his hand in this. is not something i go into in great detail in the book aside from the trenton chapter. >> tell us about your next book. >> no. not yet. >> i interrupted somebody through the microphone. >> i was going to ask during the course of the war the confederacy was seeking weapons from abroad, private peering vessels being built abroad and also these vessels in foreign

ports and how did lincoln and his administration react to put pressure on these countries to not aid the confederacy? >> this was another topic i don't get into in great detail, it is a really important topic in the diplomacy of the civil war. the issue of private hearing, the treaty of paris, all kinds of back and forth. a really important kyushu in the first yearissue in the first year of the civil war. it was something seward was involved in. mind will was to look at those things that lincoln was involved in. there are definitely books to be written and maybe your next book about the spy wars going on because there was an awful lot of this. spying and counterspying,

confederate shipbuilding programs in europe and trying to prevent ships that were being built in britain and leaving britton and escaping and being outfitted elsewhere for war, a refuge spying operation on the union partner to locate these and prevent this from happening and some of these things were not resolved until long after the civil war. the alabama claims if you are familiar with that, lasting and important issue. tells us about sewers and diplomacy at the time but not sure about lincoln. >> you mentioned steward on several occasions helping out tremendously in foreign policy.

what made him unique for the job at this time? >> on a very basic level he was better at travel than lincoln was. he had been to europe a couple times. he had gone as a young man in 1833 and again unjust before the civil war in eighteen fifty-nine and was more cosmopolitan. he was better read in international law and diplomacy but seward had his flaws. he was vain and hot tempered and hot headed. at the beginning of the war the episode that people talk about most often is the april fool's memo if you are familiar with it. april 1st, 1861, seward wrote clinton a memo, the backdrop to this is the french have reenact

santa domingo, we should demand the withdrawal or declare war on spain and maybe france and by the way, if somebody needs to take over this job i can do when and lincoln rights back to him and accepted some of seward's recommendation but not the foreign war recommendation, and made clear that if anybody was going to take charge of that he would. so that was a moment where lincoln kind of dialed seward back a little bit but by the end of the war they walk in lockstep on a lot of important issues, the mexican issue, they were essentially in lockstep on that and one biographer described lincoln and seward as each other's sober second thought like a husband and wife relationship where sometimes lincoln was right and sometimes seward was right and they would

argue with each other and together make the decisions and get them going in the right direction. >> thank you for addressing the issue with mexico because that was my question and i think you answered that. can you -- can you talk more -- >> we can hear you. >> i was just saying at the forefront, thanks for talking about mexico and the issue with mexico. but i wanted him to also address if you do in your book dealing with canada and the african-americans that were there and what was the diplomatic partner or the diplomacy going on with lincoln? any and point to what he did

with the emancipation? >> i don't go into great detail but it was an important factor and plays into what we were talking about a little bit before some of the reasons why the united states and britain specifically did not go to war because aside from the financial and commercial and trade ties canada was right there on the northern border. it was vulnerable to attack so it was one of those reasons why -- one of those multitudes of factors, not necessarily in british or american interests to get into a conflict. there are other books that treat this, the canadian issue specifically, in greater detail mostly just because you don't have a whole lot of scenes or moments of lincoln saying here's what i want to do about canada.

it was part of the backdrop. i touched on it as a backdrop. it wasn't one of the central pivotal moments in my view in foreign policy thinking. >> by the end of the war the united states was borrowing heavily to cover the costs of the war and running the new country. i really -- heavily. did lincoln -- did he consider that to be a foreign relations issue? or did he leave that all too trade, the secretary of the treasury? >> he left a lot of it could chase. thereto chase. there was a lot of hope, a lot

of complaints how difficult it had become at the beginning of 1862. a bigger financial economic factor worth looking at is, during this period, some of the innovations that not just lincoln but the congress at this time made in financing. those are more important in terms of the united states's emergence as a world power, things like the issuance of greenbacks which took place for the first time in 1862 that began to knit the united states together in a monetary union, things like the first national income tax which allowed the government to extract a measure of resources from the country at

large. domestic financial innovations when not all on lincoln. he advocated some of them. they mostly came from congress and passed in congress but those things are more useful things to look at in terms of the united states's emergence as a world power than borrowing but the united states borrow heavily throughout the period leading up to the civil war and this was one of the kinds of the whig conundrum of the party at the time, on the one hand there was a historical animosity with britain after the revolution, but war of 1812. on the other hand we depended heavily on european money and whigs in particular depended on it to finance internal improvements to build roads and canals and all these things that were important in my view in creating the nation's that would later become a world power. it was always what people were thinking about and talking about

even before the civil war. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> you are watching c-span2 with politics and public affairs weekdays featuring live coverage of the u.s. senate, weeknights watch keep public policy events and every weekend the leaders nonfiction authors and books on booktv, you can see past programs and get our schedules on our web site and join the conversation on social media sites. >> david roll is talking about "the hopkins touch". who was harry hopkins? >> he was a central figure in the administration of franklin roosevelt, president franklin roosevelt. he went to the white house for 3-1/2 years. he was the president's closest