u.s seeger being attentive to eleanor roosevelt. there is no question they were close an important allies to each other. a feminist historian and i'm not sure who she was, someone mentioned it to me and stuck in my mind. where to beget the idea they could only be one important women at a time? [laughter] >> the past year has driven the press crazy because hillary clinton, sarah palin, michelle obama. do you think of tear should have done more to defend her during the harry bridges raucus? i was always disappointed he let her get beaten up. >> that is true. there is no question that he did let her be used as a punching bag. he deflected the things we consider the new deal, that fdr did it. he let her be the one that got criticized for it and then he would sort of hold back during the satel strikes that were so controversial. you would see him and his press conferences when reporters when asked, wasn't he going to drag those workers out of there? he would say what and you asked ms. perkins about it? so, she did play the role for him.

. >> i believe eleanor roosevelt was very sympathetic to the jews and even tried to influence franklin roosevelt. did she have any role in this era of with truman? >> she was a u.n. delegate and one of two or three delegates who were against what was going on in the u.n. is was described with the state department. i would say she did play a very important role and also was close to truman. he really did listen to her and was influenced by her. her position is if you want a new u.n. to succeed how can you turn against partition when that was what the world voted for? that was our position. >> on the other hand publicly she was supposed to be chairman, during this period that the state department is engineering a big conspiracy to destroy partition, freda put together a huge dinner, rally with prominent speakers to protest the efforts of the state department to turn back partition and eleanor roosevelt was to be chairman of the meeting. and she put out the ad stop the state department conspiracy against jewish palestine. eleanor roosevelt said this is a grave embarrassment to the when th

and eleanor roosevelt was supposed to be chairman of the meeting.and they put out the ads stop the state department conspiracy against jewish palestine. and eleanor roosevelt said this is a grave embarrassment to me. i'm a delegate to the u.n. the president has appointed me. i cannot be at this dinner where you're slandering the president and making this public protest. privately she was tough with truman but she didn't want to go on record at the same time do something like appear at this mass-pressure dinner. >> what you're saying reminds me of my mother many decades ago went to a meeting where an american communist spoke and said the state department will always remain the same. presidents come and go. >> there you go. >> as i'm reading your book and as i'm watching also pbs behind closed doors, i'm impressed with roosevelt's thought that he could charm the people like stalin. and we now has a president who feels likewise. i don't know if there's a question in there. your book is terrific. >> everybody can buy it. we're going to sign copies. don'

eleanor roosevelt also got involved in conservation. leopold as well. and doing another volume. i'm planning on going from this book beginning in 1958, the birth in new york of roosevelt. then to end with global warming that we have now and march through the multiple volume history. >> thank you, professor brinkley. >> brian, thank you. host[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2008] >> , history standpoint, where did you find a different artifacts and materials, did you bring them some morals? >> good question. most of the materials we have came from fish hatcheries from the field, everything in our archive is donated by former employees or steal the officers. these historic things that doug brinkley has written about, they were in garages, basements, attics, suffering from all sorts of environmental deterioration. once the open and archived, we filled up the archive in 10 years of historic artifacts so the public could see them and we could teach from them. >> the thing that motivated us is rachel carson is ou

and eleanor roosevelt got very involved. so i'm doing another volume. i'm planning on going from -- this book begins in 1858, t.r.'s birth in new york, and i'm going to wednesday the era of global warming, the time we have right now. march us through in a multiple volume history. >> thank you, professor brinkley. >> brian, thank you. >> from a hustry standpoint, where did you find the different art facts that you have and the materials you had? did you bring them somewhere else? >> that's a really good question. most of the materials we have have come off refuges or fish hatcheries. actually, from the field. almost everything in our archive is donated by former employees or by field office. so these historic things that douglas brinkley has written about, they were at garages, basements, attics. they were suffering from all sorts of environmental deterioration. once we filled up an archive, we did it in about 10 years. researchers could use them so we could teach with them. >> rachel carson is our most famous employee. when rachel carson retired from th

i remember when she was in the white house, you know, eleanor roosevelt had press conferences so whenrry became president they said is police say truman going to have press conferences and i think his answer was, i need to get back to you, which is smart. he wasn't going to answer for bess. they had to run this by bess first. she didn't want to have press conferences. she finally submitted to written questions and all the answers were yes or no. [laughter] >> she just didn't -- she just didn't take -- just didn't take to the -- you know, being in public the way harry did. so, yeah, but she loved her hats. >> when president truman left office, he was not the most popular of presidents. my question is, on this trip did he run into any animosity or any people shaking fists or anything of that nature? >> honestly i did not find -- i can't believe it didn't happen but i didn't find a recorded incident of that. and you're absolutely right. his approval rating was about 22% when he left office in early 1953. which is just about where george w. bush's was when he left office in january of 200