applause. thank you. [ applause ] coming up next on american history tv, a discussion about roosevelt's mother, sarah, and her relationship with members of the family and followed by two historians of the biographies. we'll look at the book collective and rent by george washington throughout his life. ♪ one hundred years ago, president woodrow wilson signed the bill.

we look back at the natural and historic measures. we take you to national park service across the country as recorded by c-span. at 7:00 p.m. eastern, we are live at the national parks services most visited home at arlington memorial cemetery. join us with your phone calls as we talk to robert stanson. thursday, the 100th anniversary of the national park service, live from arlington house at 7:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span 3. this week on the presidency, a conversation with author geoffrey ward of the documentary

of roosevelts. he spoke with our correspondence lesley stall and her relationship with her son and her many grandchildren. the new york historical society hosted this hour long event. >> today's program, grandmother, the roosevelts is apart of the bernard and irish distinguished series and i would like to thank there shorts for his support and near historical, lets give mr. shorts a hand. [ applause ] the program this morning will last an hour in collicluding qus and answers.

lesley you will be staying for the book signing. this is a great mother's day gift everyone. i have signed three books. she's going to sign and get your books and it will be on sale in our museum store kiosk which is near the author book signing. i am going to hand the book off now. and, also, geoffery ward, will have his books signed. we are glad to welcome back geoffrey ward here. winner of the national book critic circle award and the department of the society of americans and a long time collaboration and won seven emmys and written 32 historical

documentary for pbs and he's 33 earlier. either on his own in collaboration of others including the roosevelts and intimate history which is why he's here today. we are always so thrilled to welcome lesley. she's been with us so many times. she lives close by so we call her up and say come on over. she's 21, miss stall. she was the cbs's news white house correspondence during the carter and reagan and george bush's agency. she is also faces on the news public affairs and where she interviewed margaret thatcher.

she has a collection of her interviews including a lifetime achievement emmy. her new book as i show you, "becoming grandma, a" and the n signs of becoming grandparents. as i said, it will make a great mother's day gift. i don't know if you have been watching tv or listening to the radio but every time i turn it on, lesley is on. she's on shark web? >> you are selling. >> and talking up great stuff. this book is amazing. she's been on charlie rose and pbs news hour and i heard that is a funny show where you scared bill mars. before we begin, i just ask

again, all cell phones or beeper device that you please turn it off. now, joining me and welcoming my would feel guest, thank you. [ applause ] >> well, i have been asked to speak briefly about the book before we turn to q&a about the roosevelts. the roosevelts are in the book which is why this pair made sense. let me tell you first about this book. i had a friend telling me about writing a book about being a grandmother was nuts. she said "you are going to tell everyone that you are that old"? i started writing and i did so. the more i got into it, the more courage i had especially when i found out that mitch jagger is a great grandfather. thank you, sir. eventually, i came to see that when you become a grandparent, you do not become older. you become younger.

as many of you i can tell by looking around know what i am talking about. when we take care of our grandchildren, and studies ba backed us up. we get healthier and we have less depression and we are happier. now the baby boomers are becoming grandparents. there are 30,000 new grandparents in the united states every week. that i could not believe it. but, it is true. as baby boomers, this giant bulge becomes grandparents. think of the cohorse that marched through our lives and changing our entire culture. our morals and taste and music and clothes and everything.

now, they are inventing a whole new way of grandparents. boomers have more energy than grandparents have. we certainly looked younger. no more tightly termed gray hair. we are all blond, a given. we have more money and we are spending it our grandchildren. listen to this thing i found out. grandparents today spend seven times more money on their grandchildren than they did ten years ago. we are, for example, paying for their medical bills, paying for daycare, straightening their teeth, and we are buying stuff and i am not talking about toys. i am talking about big ticket items. the cribs, the baby car seats, and i know one grandparent who bought them a piano.

my daughter would not practice so i am determined to get my little one. someone said to me, there are three phases in life. in the first phase, we believe in santa claus, the second, we don't believe in santa claus and in the third phase, we are santa claus. the reason i wanted to write this book because the first time, i have my first grandchild, i had a thunder jolt of elation, it was so powerful that it affects my entire body from my brain to my toes and it was so enormous that i kind of felt like one of those big trucks with those giant wheels, this surge of loving and rumbled through my body. it is a new kind of loving and it is pure and in its depths. grandparents' love is unfe

unconditional. someone wise told me that if god turned to abraham and told him to sacrifice his son, he would have said and becoming a grandparent metaphorsizes us. the minute that grandchild is born, boom, we are indulgent. we are softties. our ability to say the word no is completely disabled. we are completely changed in every single way. i also found out a lot of grandparents today walk on eggshells. we're terrified of antagonizing the parents of those grandchildren. our sons and daughters. we're afraid because we

understand that they hold the keys to our access to those children. the most dreaded words to us are, no, we don't want you to come over today. whoa, that hurts, because all we want are those babies. we are the baby-sitters who beg to come over and we don't charge a dime. we learn pretty quickly that the balance of power in the family shifts because our children now hold the key to the most important thing in life, which is those babies. so what we do now as grandparents is we bite our tongues. we do not -- we try very hard not to say, look, we didn't raise you that way and you turned out okay. we don't say that. we ingratiate ourselves and we suck up to the daughter-in-law. which is a perfect segue to geoffrey ward to talk about the

roosevelts. i'm getting tacky. i want to show you geoffrey ward's new book that he did with ken burns which is, if you didn't see the roosevelt documentary, you have to go find it. it's on a dvd. oh, yeah. it's extraordinary. and you'll learn all kinds of new things and you can see i've gone through it and i have my stickies out here. let's first, geoffrey, talk about the relationship speaking of mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. between eleanor and franklin's mother, sara. is it as bad as the impression we have in our head? >> i have a terrible problem

with this. i'm going to call eleanor roosevelt mrs. roosevelt because you get confused in these things. our version of sara roosevelt is mrs. roosevelt's version. it's a version she came to very late in life. she -- her upbringing was so awful, so emotionally arid, so devoid of real parenting, she had not only a drunken father but a demented father who was there and not there and seeing visions and telling her he loved her and he was going to come and sweep her off and they were going to live in europe and be happy ever after and then disappearing and finally dying. and her mother was distracted and disappointed in her so she had no model parent. so when she became first a wife and then a parent, she relied enormously on franklin's mother. >> wait. she relied on her or sara took over?

go ahead. >> we have -- many people write about the roosevelts with different views. this is my view. sara delano roosevelt was happy to fill the vacuum. god knows. she was the most devoted mother that there ever was. but eleanor was terribly grateful at the time that she took over hiring nannies, that she gave her child-raising advice. later in her life, some of that stuff became, i think, became sort of distorted and she began to see it as somebody taking over her life. when it was happening, she was grateful for it. she developed and she was -- since we're talking about grandmothers, grandparents, let me just go on to that.

>> please, please. >> i knew three of the roosevelt children. all of them believed that their grandmother had really been their mother. that she had provided them -- whatever you think of her, she had provided them with the unconditional love that you mentioned. she just adored them. they could go no wrong. she spoiled them dreadfully. >> that's a grandmother. >> exactly. they couldn't wait to get to hyde park and be with her. they all told me that was their real home. part of that was because their father had fallen ill with polio and when they were in very formative ages as children, he really wasn't home. he was in florida or he was in warm springs trying to get back on his feet and that left them with their mother who did not

believe in unconditional love. she, in a passage -- i won't be able to quote it exactly, but in one of her things she wrote, she said, i have always believed that one must earn the love of people around you. and that s-- she learned that i her childhood. that's how she had been raised. she really believed it. she carried it on with her own children. she did not, you know, do the opposite thing that you would sort of hope she would have done. she was an extremely stern mother. you were got not to tell -- if you felt ill, you were not to tell her so roosevelts didn't get sick. she was not a comforting mother. and then the rest of her life she spent being haunted by having not been a good mother. >> yeah. >> and she reached a point late

in life when she considered killing herself because of that. >> really? that i had not known. >> yeah. >> i want to ask you -- i'm going to pull out some anecdotes that i read in your book and some of which i wrote about in mine. first off, to back up what you're saying, curtis roosevelt, one of sara delano's grandchildren -- great-grandsons. >> no. >> grandson. wrote a book. and in it he kind of said what you're saying that this portrait of sara that we've all heard about as a monster was grossly unfair and suggests that eleanor got to write the history. i mean, it whoever gets the last word when it comes to history. who writes it. who talks about it. and that eleanor had the last word and she's the one who painted this portrait. so it's exactly what you're saying. curtis complained about it in his book.

and again said that sara was the most loving, most fun, most indulgent, delicious and you quote anna as saying she wanted to be with her grandmother. >> jaerks yeah. i mean, they all did. you were free to do -- i mean, you weren't free. you talked about getting that piano. >> she gave them everything. >> she gave him everything. she also had very strict views. if they'd been riding, for example, she had a stable of horses. if they came to lunch without changing their clothes, she would say you reek of the stables. and they would run up and get dressed. it was a formal household. if you followed the rules, you had a wonderful time there. >> according to eleanor, sara could be very cruel to her. >> sure. >> you write about an incident at the dinner table about hair. tell that one. >> they all sat down to dinner

and she said something like, you'd look so much better, dear, if you ran a comb through your hair before we ate. >> this was in front of everybody. >> yes. >> and other things like that. >> yeah. i think -- that's true and awful, but it's also part of the same thing i was talking about. she -- eleanor felt she needed help with all those things initially. later, of course, she didn't, and she became first lady of the world and was still being treated that way and, of course, she resented it. >> you touched a little bit on how eleanor's mother had treated her. she made her feel unlovable. and this is interesting to me. her mother called her granny. >> because she very rarely laughed and she was very prim and proper and she tried to be the -- i think, as a little girl, the only person in the family who was -- who did all the right things.

>> and the mother -- >> the mother was a beautiful socialite. the most pathetic thing, to me, i think, is mrs. roosevelt in her autobiography says that her mother often had migraines and would be in a darkened room and lie there having a headache. this little girl would go in and rub her forehead and it made her feel better. and she said, that's when i learned that to be loved is to be useful. now, she was 5 years old. think how sad that is. >> it's so sad. >> it really is. >> alice roosevelt longworth who famously said if you have anything nice to say -- no, if you have -- >> if you have nothing nice to say. >> if you have nothing nice to say, come sit by me.

she was put off by eleanor, too, because eleanor did not have a very strong sense of humor and was dure and alice was fun loving. here's what i find so ironic in a way because alice had sort of this flighty image around the country. while eleanor became a cold and distant grandmother, alice was doting and indulgent and like the rest of us. she became kind of sara in a way to her own grandchildren and eleanor went the other way. >> yeah. >> well -- >> i guess i don't quite think she was cold and distant but i think she was proper and she wanted her grandchildren to do, again, do the right thing. we were talking about this before. fdr's children called their grandmother granny. eleanor roosevelt's grandchildren called her

grandme are r ee, french. i never talked to any of them that weren't fond of her but it was an event to go see her. but it was an event to go see her. she was mrs. roosevelt. >> even to her own grandchildren. wow. wow. we're going to get to fdr as a grandfather in one minute. but first, geoff, when you and i spoke on the phone the other day mapping out the areas of subjects here, you said, i want to talk about your book and i said, why? >> it's, well -- >> no, you said it's because i'm a grandfather. >> yeah. i'm a grandfather. right. >> i write about grandfathers. >> yeah. and i'm not sure i'm supposed to say this, but this is a fascinating book. it's a treekly, could be a treacly subject, and it's not.

it's really smart. i liked reading it a lot. i'm a grand father, of course. it's a unique role. what it does do is make you think about your own grandparents. mine, this is a diversion from the roosevelts, but my great-grandfather was the bernie madoff of the 1880s. he was a big-time swindler. >> really? >> he brought on a crash on wall street. and he kidnapped his son, who was my grandson, and he did not know his father. >> are you serious? >> no, i'm making this up. no, i'm dead serious. my grandfather was the best grandfather -- i'm sure everyone thinks their grandfather was the best. mine was the best. when we were there, he was riveted with attention. i remember i was interested in knights one year when i was very small. when i arrived he had made a complete wooden helmet, shield

and sword all painted beautifully. he was a professor of medieval art so he knew how to do that. he had german stone bricks which nobody makes anymore but they were spectacular. i don't mean bricks. blocks, i mean. he would build for christmas every year a different cathedral that were this high and as long as a ping-pong table with stain glass windows that lit up and all that. that's sort of what i think of when i think of grandfather. if you have a grandfather like that, it makes you feel terribly inadequate. i cannot build a castle for my grandchildren. >> what i found out in my research is that exactly what your grandfather did is what grandfathers are supposed to do. they're supposed to give their

grandchildren skills and talk about the family, the family history, and tell their grandchildren stories that give the kids a sense that they are connected to something wider and important and of course love them and play with them. >> yep. >> that's a good segue to franklin roosevelt as a grandfather. because i was so intrigued, i couldn't stop writing about this in here. >> well, he -- he didn't have much time to be a grandfather. he read a christmas, you know, the dickens thing at christmas every year to his children. they all sat around him. the saddest thing is it was recorded and they lost the recording. one of the kids lost it. can you imagine, fdr reading dickens? it's too good. >> i have to tell you what i

found out. >> yeah, good. >> why this is so devastating. i was only looking for him as a grandfather so i concentrated like a laser beam. i discovered that he had two grandchildren who lived in the white house. i was looking for grandchildren who lived in the white house. that was my first line of attack. i found out that when anna got divorced, his daughter, she moved into the white house with her two little kids. >> curtis is one of them. >> curtis. curt curtis. and the whole country was in love with these little children who were running around the white house for a while. and franklin had his morning staff meeting in his bedroom. he would have his breakfast tray brought in, put up on the bed, and then his staff would come in and sometimes members of the cabinet would come to this meeting. >> right. >> and at some point invariably, these two little kids would burst into the bedroom because they had free reign to franklin

delano roosevelt. he couldn't get enough of these little kids in the white house. they would jump in. he would say, come on, get up on the bed. there's the tray, the secretary of the treasury and all the staff then he would have one kid on the left and one kid on the right and he would pull out the funnies. in those days the funnies in the future, we all remember this. were everything. he would read the funnies which i'm sure was the way he read dickens. >> sure. >> he played every character. >> sure. >> he played, you know, in the dialect and so forth. and these children just giggled with laughter and all these men are standing around virtually every day and had to put up with this through the crises and whatever else was going on in the world including the depression. so he was -- when he did have his grandchildren around him, like your grandfather, attentive

and adorable and everything, you know, we thought of roosevelt in terms of his intelligence and wonderful manner. so he was a great grandfather when he had the kids around. >> you know, when, in 1944 when he'd been elected, he knew he was very ill. that christmas, he asked that all of the grandchildren come, and there are pictures of them. obviously, he was saying good-bye to them i think. >> wow. >> there's a picture of them all sitting on the floor around him, a lot of them. many, many marriages and many, many grandchildren. and he looks awful in the picture but also pleased to be there. >> yeah. he put swings and slides on the white house lawn which i guess had never been done before because he was trying to lure the grandchildren to come and visit. >> let me just say that that's another example of the whole premise of the roosevelt show

was that theodore and franklin, you wouldn't have had franklin without theodore. and theodore's family, not his grandchildren but his children, were all over the white house. they were trying, i think -- the fact that the press got so interested in those kids was sort of because that had sold so many newspapers during theodore's time. >> so it was deliberate. i see. >> no, no. i didn't mean that. i didn't mean that. >> no, you didn't? >> you've been at the white house. you know these things. it's complicated. >> a lot of times these children are used to soften the image. >> yeah. i don't think it was anything cynical. no, no, no, i didn't mean it that way. >> okay. i'm going to get back to the book. i want to know about your relationship with ken burns. because you have done several documentaries for television with him. >> 20. >> 20. you were telling me before about

the relationship between the fdr documentary and the one that ken did on baseball that you did with him as well. >> sure. i may have told this story here before, i can't remember, but when ken wanted to do baseball, that is not a subject i know anything about at all. and it was going to be nine, i can't remember whether they are two-hour episodes or one-hour episodes but i think it's 18 hours on history of baseball about which i know nothing and care less. my sort of deal with ken was at some point we would do the roosevelts if i did his great enthusiasm, he would do mine. so we did that. >> and next you're doing another one with him? >> yeah, vietnam, which will be out in the fall of 2017. >> you're working on it right now? >> yeah. i'm writing a book. the show is done or mostly done. >> so are we going to get a book like this?

>> i'm afraid so. >> the reason i'm walking around with this, it's fabulous. honestly, it's fabulous. filled with pictures. >> we're going to publish it with a suitcase. >> make it a rollie. all right. before we take questions from the audience, i have to ask you, the documentary and the book are really about relationships. the relationships that theodore roosevelt had with his family and other people and the same with franklin. and i became very interested reading this book in their extracurricular or other relationships. so let's ask for your take first on franklin's relationships with other women, lucy mercer and daisy sutley. so tell us about those two. >> well, he had an affair with lucy mercer. she was the secretary. she was absolutely beautiful and

worshipful and he fell in love with her and they may or may not have discussed marriage. nobody knows for sure. that's the story in the family. and mrs. roosevelt said she would agree and mamma said you will be cut off from the family money and louie said you'll never be elected president of the united states if you're divorced, so he allegedly for those reasons, who knows what the reasons were, did not marry her. later in life she came back to see him at the white house when he was ill, and she was much older. and i don't think that was anything more than a friendship that he needed during the war when his wife was away and was not -- he was a person who needed -- because of his mother, he needed -- he liked women. and he needed them to be around

him and to admire him. >> he needed adulation. >> he did. >> his mother -- >> he did. she adored him. that's correct. that's right. and mrs. roosevelt could do many things but she couldn't do that. she was a very critical person. and he was not always admirable. lucy thought he was just wonderful. >> you know, we do think of mrs. roosevelt as being just the most wonderful, heartfelt, almost delicious person because she took up so many causes. but, you know, she was cold. and she was cold to him. >> she was -- yeah. i'm a great admirer of hers. she was a very damaged person. she's a miracle, i think, of the human spirit not to have collapsed under the weight of all of the things she had to endure when she was young. but it scarred her. and it was very hard for her to

have a good time. it was very hard for her to get a joke. and -- >> the opposite of him. >> the opposite, exactly. the opposite of him. he loved a good time. he was a good time. you know -- >> yeah. >> daisy suckley, he was a distant cousin. despite the god awful movie someone did with bill murray. i can't remember the name of it. i wouldn't tell you it if i knew it. he did not have an affair with daisy -- she was his distant cousin. she got to know him well when he was recovering from polio -- not recovering but trying to build himself up after polio. and again was worshipful and became his -- as book i did, his closest companion.

she really was that and she was the great secret of his life. she kept a diary which i was privileged -- sorry -- which i was privileged to be the first person to see and i got to edit it and it was a great -- it's one of the joys of my life. there's nothing for a historian like being handed a journal of somebody that everybody thinks they know and discover there's this very intelligent woman writing about this man in an intimate way that no one else ever did. >> but you don't think they had an affair? >> no. >> weren't they going to live together? >> yeah, but that doesn't mean they were going to have an affair. >> okay. that's another -- we'll come back and talk about that. >> she thought that they were going to live together. he had told several other women that they might be there to be helpful to him. they were all disappointed. >> let's talk about eleanor and her other friends. there was the bodyguard, earl

miller. >> yep. >> and there's a picture in this book of her and him and she's got her hand on his thigh so that suggests something. then later with the newswoman, lerena hickok. tell us. >> there are several people with whom she had -- i'm not of the eleanor roosevelt is a lesbian school. first of all, i don't think anybody ought to be putting categories like that. secondly, i don't think she had a physical relationship, if that's what we mean, with any of those people. she dearly loved all of them. she was in some ways like a teenager who gets -- again, i think it's part of that childhood. -- who gets crushes on people. and they became absolutely wonderful in her mind and they could do no wrong and were enormously helpful and more importantly she could help them do something. then she would become

disillusioned with them the way she thought her father was the most wonderful person that ever lived and then realized on some level though never entirely that he was not anything like that. so she had this sort of -- if you graphed it, this enormous enthusiasm then after a while, if people didn't need her anymore, they couldn't love her and, therefore, she would move on to another one. at the end of her life she had a whole lot of them all sort of clustered around her mutually antagonistic i'm sorry so say. so it was sort of a strange circle and all of whom adored her and felt that they had not gotten enough of her somehow. does that make sense? >> yeah. she couldn't crosses a line. maybe -- was that because -- >> i mean, i can't, you know, i can't prove she didn't cross the line. i just don't think so.

>> do you think that's because franklin hurt her or because of her childhood? >> i think it's because of her childhood. >> but she was really devastated -- >> yes, she was. >> -- by the lucy mercer discovery. >> but it was the same, i think the same kind of confirmation about her father that here's this golden person and then they turn out not to be golden. most of us deal with that better -- >> they reject her. >> they reject her and of course they reject her because she's rejectable. >> you know, there are pictures of her in this book when she was young, when she was seeing franklin in the beginning. she's beautiful. >> she was. >> yeah. she was beautiful. >> she was. >> she didn't know it. she didn't think she was. of course, the pictures we see of her, she's not, but she was. and that's something that surprised me. we're going to invite you all to come up to the microphones in the aisles and ask questions and while we're setting up for that, let me ask you one final from

me. and that is as you delved into the personal relationships of the franklin delano roosevelt wing, what was the biggest surprise for you given what you've learned in your other books and what the general impressions of these people -- >> you mean when we did that? >> whatever, what's the newest, the latest surprise you came upon in the relationships? >> i guess my theory was that theodore roosevelt was terribly important in the lives of both eleanor, who was his niece, and franklin. and that was just strengthened. the more, when i thought about it, just the sheer number of times that you could see the connection, you could see fdr trying to be like t.r., rejecting t.r. you know, he was a huge figure to both of them.

>> yeah. and you -- >> and she saw herself all her life as a member of that family. she, you know, when she was very old, she said somebody told her to sit down and relax. she said, you know, i don't think i really can. i can't sit and knit in the corner, i'm too much of theodore roosevelt's niece. >> well, he did love her. he was one of the few, right? am i wrong about that? >> he loved her when he saw her, but he didn't see her very often. and his wife actually didn't want her to come to the theodore roosevelt home because they problems would be visited on her. there's an awful letter in which she said i don't encourage -- >> elliott being her father. >> yeah. i don't encourage alice to see eleanor because we don't feel that's a good idea. >> oh. >> so pretty grim. >> she did have --

>> so that's why she's a wonder. >> yeah. you called her a wounded person. yeah. okay. please. >> good morning. first of all, the book sounds fascinating. i'm going to get copies not only for me but the other grandmothers. i share a set of grandchildren with two other grandmothers. so, thank withdryou. >> that's something i write about. these children who go to grandparent day and brings eight people with them. >> we have a handoff system and everything. we yes. i was intrigued by what you said about eleanor roosevelt looking back and regretting the way she raised her children to the point where she considered killing herself. i never heard that. so i was hoping you could talk about that a little more. >> when she was an elderly lady living alone in new york, she had a very dear friend who was her doctor. sort of the last person to whom -- >> foreign i believe. >> yeah.

absolutely wonderful doctor and a wonderful friend to her. and they used to take walks at night. she couldn't sleep. they used to take walks at night and he told her -- i'm sorry, she told him that she just didn't think she could go on. that something -- there'd been yet another divorce or yet another something in the newspapers about her children and every time that happened, she felt that it was because she hadn't done the job. >> okay. thank you. >> but none -- am i correct in this that none of her children could sustain a relationship? is that correct? >> they -- >> am i going too far? >> no. i think the number is 19 marriages. i think that's right. >> among her children? >> yeah. >> okay. >> that's a perfect lead-in to my question. i think you mentioned this

before, mr. ward, when you were here, they had something like 18 divorces or something. is that a result of eleanor being not the ideal mother? >> oh, i don't know. i don't know how you -- it must have been part of it, but i -- >> is there anything about president's childrens -- >> oh, it's awful. >> -- that suggests -- there's something about the children of presidents, yes. >> fdr said it's a god-awful thing to be the child of a president. i think that's true. i think -- i mean, you know better than i but it really is, especially now, but even before. everything they do is news. i think that has a lot to do with it. also there's the business of you never know whether people are interested in you because you're you or because your last name is roosevelt. that's very tough. and that goes on through the generations. it's very tough. >> you know, you're bringing to

mind in my mind because i covered jimmy carter's white house, amy carter who they put into public school and it was sort of a spectacle when she started at that school. the press and everything followed her day in and day out. and she became kind of a solemn kid in the white house. they'd make her two to these dinner parties and she'd read her book through the dinner parties. i wondered how she would turn out. i met her a couple years ago. she is healthy. she is raising a couple of kids. she's got a strong marriage. she's lovely. so it's not 100% by any stretch. but, yeah, there's a history. >> yeah. >> i'd like to ask you about fdr's father. i believe he was 52 when he remarried and sara i think was 25. i've seen pictures of her. she was gorgeous. >> she was indeed. >> spoke several languages.

she had grown up in hong kong with her father. what was their marriage like and what kind of father was james roosevelt to -- >> as far as i can see, he was a terrific father. he adored this kid who i think was a surprise and a delight. he already had -- he'd married a member of the -- a rich family. i can't remember their names. i apologize. and had one son who was a sort of showy dilataunt who married into the aster family and retired. i saw some form he filled out. i think he was 23. said retired capitalist. which is not a bad thing to be at 23. but james roosevelt, mr. james as everybody called him, was a lovely man with a very good sense of humor and enormously fond of his son.

>> franklin's strength of personality came from two loving parents. >> yeah. >> thank you very much for this wonderful discussion. what kind of a grandmother was eleanor? because i remember when i was a teenager a couple of things about her, one, that she took a european tour after the war? and she took one of her grandchildren with her on the plane as i recall? is there anything about eleanor as grandmother considering her background and her rejection? >> i am constrained by talking about her as a grandmother because i don't know very much about her, but there are those -- i think there are people in the audience who do, so -- they're not going to speak. >> they seem to have a close relationship. i mean, it was a girl. it was a girl that she took.

i don't remember who. >> yes. she had -- curtis was with her in the united nations. i really don't know very much about her as a grandmother. >> okay. >> that was not a period i was writing about. >> i write a little bit about it and everything that i came upon was always describing her in relation to sara. so sara was doting, loving, generous, and eleanor was distant. now that -- it one that she was distant, but it was in relation to sara, and the kids talk and have written and have been quoted as saying sara was the one they wanted to go to and they called her granny. and they called eleanor grandmere as jeff said. that kind of describes the comparison. obviously, she loved her grandchildren. you can't not love your grandchildren. >> you know, something you said about her being beautiful when she was younger. i'll just be very brief. i went to hunter college.

i was about 17. and they had, every christmas, some famous person would come to speak. and that christmas it was eleanor roosevelt. she came down the aisle just like this. she was very tall. she was older. she had white hair. and she was beautiful. she had a beautiful profile. and all this talk about her not being so, and i was a kid, i'm looking up at her, i was like what is all this stuff they're saying? she's beautiful. and she was marvelous on stage. >> she didn't photograph well. >> in person she was beautiful. >> lovely. >> part of the problem was that she did have very prominent teeth, which the theodore roosevelt family wrote letters about but never did anything about. they could perfectly easily have fixed that. >> there was orthodontia back then? >> yeah. and other members of the family had had it.

they would all say, she has unfortunate teeth. >> and leave it at that. >> and do nothing about it. yeah. sorry. >> hi, i'm a big fdr fan, number one, read many books. and i wasn't going to ask any questions today but what came to me while you were speaking about the sons of fdr, they were really used by other people -- >> you bet. >> -- for business purposes. they were exploited for their name. but i remember reading that some of his sons would go to him and they would basically talk about business deals kind of, and he was, seemed to be okay with that and would use his power of the presidency to help them along in some of these exploitative business relationships. and i was just wondering, didn't he see the moral difficulty with that? have you dealt with that? >> i think he was very sympathetic to his sons. i think he thought on some level

that he had -- he had caused them trouble by becoming president. i think if they could succeed at something, i mean, i don't think he used the power of the presidency in any nefarious way at all. but, you know, they were roosevelts, and i do think he felt for them. i think he felt that he hadn't been home enough, unavoidably, and that they had a tough road to hoe. i had lunch with james roosevelt very, an a year before he died, maybe a year and a half before he died, and we had lunch on the upper west side. he couldn't have been nicer and more helpful. at the end of the lunch he had tears in his eyes. and he said, mr. ward, i hope you will be able to tell me why

my father didn't come to my graduation. i don't know how many years after that that was, but it shows you the price families pay for their people going into politics. >> you're suggesting that both eleanor and franklin felt guilty about not being more attentive. >> i think so, yeah. >> hi. on the day that the president died in warm springs, lucy mercer was visiting him. do you know if the president requested her to be there or did he have some idea that he might be in his last days? >> i don't think he knew it was his last days. he did ask her to come. yeah. she came quite often when he was in warm springs and daisy was there and another cousin was there. all of whom adored him. and all of whom sat around and listened to the stories they'd heard before. the account of those last days

is, to me, incredibly moving. at the very end, they were feeding him some kind of -- daisy calls it gruel. i think it was porridge or something. he would get in bed and she would come in and feed him, and he would pretend to be a baby. now this is a president of the united states fighting the greatest war in human history. >> wow. >> and he needed that maternal unqualified adoration. >> worship. >> and he deserved it at that time. >> he did. but, you know, you read through this book, and i was really struck by how indulgent sara was with him. how he could do no wrong. he suffered as a kid because other kids didn't like him very much. she kept him on that pedestal.

and reading through, i said, oh my goodness, he came to need it so desperately. he came to need what his mother had done. >> yep. >> which was just tell him he was perfect and fabulous and make him the center. >> that's why -- i think that's why he ran four times. i think he thought the natural order of the world was with franklin roosevelt in the white house. he'd been raised to believe that. >> yeah. >> and his father doted, too. >> and it happened so there you are. >> let me look for this because i pulled out a quote which i've always loved which i put down here because i wanted to tell you. it's a quote from churchill who we all know kind of moved into the white house for a while to convince the united states to come into the war. and he said -- winston churchill says, "franklin roosevelt with his iridescent personality

meeting him was like opening your first bottle of champagne, knowing him was like drinking it." so, i mean, he even strove to get other people to consider him the sun, meaning the sun in the sky, to come around and worship. >> he did. >> i forget what side i'm on. two ahead. >> i'm one of those silent grandchildren that you were kind of looking at over here. my name originally was sara delano roosevelt so i carried that name for quite a while. and i wanted just to say it was moving to hear about our father that you had spoken with him. we didn't see a whole lot of him when we were children because he did go on and marry other people. >> right. >> but i was thinking from the perspective of a grandchild,

which you've described, you know, fully and well, that one incident sticks out in my mind very clearly. i was a student at milton academy in the girl's boarding school, and mrs. roosevelt was coming to give the graduation address to the then-graduating seniors and i was a sophomore. she came to our house, the boarding house, and sat in a chair and i had been pulled aside for a moment by the headmistress to say hello to her in a private room. which is basically a kiss on the cheek. and so i came back and i sat on the very outskirts of this group of adoring girls. and kate and i had another grandmother, a maternal grandmother with whom we spent an awful lot of time. we really didn't know eleanor.

i think i could say that. she probably knew her better than i did. in any case, in this situation, i'm sitting and i suddenly have this revelation. i said, oh, i understand, she's everybody's grandmother, but she's not my grand mother. >> oh, boy. >> whoa. >> that's perfect. >> did you call her grandmere? >> oh. no. no. kate and i called her grandma. i think we were the only grandchildren who called her grandma. >> lovely. thank you so much. >> that's a great story. >> that was wonderful. very exciting to hear. >> yeah. >> thank you. >> so a question that is not totally unrelated to what was said. i was struck by your story on fdr's grandparenting style and then lesley, you were citing

that grandparents are spending so much more or supporting grandchildren nowadays. i wonder how social privilege and financial privilege shape grandparenting or is there some inherent biological -- because as now, you know, income inequality increases significantly and grandparents serve such more of an active role in sustenance in the family, how does that shape the styling of grandparenting? >> let me first say that i found that this deep loving, this unconditional love for a grandchild is universal. it has nothing to do with income, education. it has nothing to do with what country you live in. it's not 100%. i've been criticized because somebody called in a radio show and said, i'm not like that.

but it's pretty much the norm that people fall in love with their grandchildren. going back to caveman times, grandmothers raised the gra grandchildren so there's something inherent in our bones, in our dna that grandmotherses need those grandchildren, we're supposed to be in their lives. we crave them when we're not. both grandfathers and grandmothers love them -- it turns us silly, really all of us. in terms of our contributions to their lives, obviously if are still suffering because of the recession, you can't send money because you don't have it. but the baby boomers and generations older, the pre-boomers, as we're called, are the generations with the money in the country. it's inverted right now. all of time, it was that the senior citizens -- i hate that,

senior citizen, were the poorer ones and our children helped support us in old age. it's inverted. we're the ones with the money. we're the ones who still have pensions and social security and savings accounts and all of that, and the younger generations need our help to probably -- young parents both working, not earning what one bread earner earned in our generation. and so we are, a great many of us, sending money if we have it. and we're forgoing a lot to be able to send the money. where there have been sort of surveys taken where grandparents put their grandchildren ahead of everything. ahead of their own financial wellbeing, put the grandchildren ahead of traveling and seeing the world and even change their idea of retirement if they realize that their kids in some way need help. so i hope that answered your

question. >> yes. thank you. >> my question is about the roosevelts in new york city. i work on east 65th street and i always stop to look at those two townhouses where sara had one and eleanor and franklin had another. i always try to imagine what it must have been like when they were there. i was wondering if you could just share a little bit about what their life was like when they were there in new york. >> sure. when mrs. roosevelt wrote her autobiography, she gives a pretty grim picture of that, of their two houses next to each other, doors open in between, and you never knew when your mother-in-law would suddenly appear. checking on things. and it's usually made to sound very uncommon. it was not uncommon. there were lots of houses like that in new york. in fact, the roosevelts -- yes,

the roosevelts were married in one, in one of the parlors of a two-part house. i think it was -- you know, it was a very complicated place. it's where -- it's a wonderful site and they've now -- they haven't exactly restored it, but you can see it, you can go through it which you couldn't do in the past. and i find it very moving. one of the roosevelt children died there. he was brought back there after how had polio and there's a wonderful picture, it's one of my favorite pictures of him leaving the front steps of that house to go become president of the united states. and there are railings so that he can go down. and he's just about to sort of vault down and his son, james, is patiently holding his cane at

the end so that you can't quite see it, but it's going to be handed to him, but it's a -- to me, it's a very emotional picture. it's a terrific, terrific place. >> you know, for all of time, until the mid 20th century, families lived in multigenerational houses or compounds and, again, this goes back to caveman times when families were structured -- >> sure. >> -- so that grandmothers were an integral -- and grandfathers -- were an integral part of families and definitely lived together and it's only in recent times with mobility and the urbanization really that we have broken that up. one of the things i say in the book is that it's unnatural. and there is a huge trend today -- enormous trend of grandparents when they retire selling the house they've lived in for 50 years and moving n