How Eleanor Roosevelt And JFK Turned Conflict Into Partnership

Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy don’t sound like a natural pairing and that’s exactly why we wanted to sit with this story. We talk with presidential historian Barbara Perry of UVA’s Miller Center about her forthcoming book, Reconcilable Differences: The Unlikely Political Alliance of John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt, and what it reveals about political courage when your toughest critic is inside your own party. 

We start at Hyde Park and Val-Kill, where a single photo of Eleanor walking with JFK opens up years of tension: generational divides, party faction fights, and a clash over what leadership should look like in public. We dig into the hard stuff Eleanor wouldn’t let go, from civil rights and anti-lynching efforts to McCarthyism and the cost of staying silent. Barbara shares the moments that surprised her most, including Eleanor’s sharp telegrams and JFK’s steady, almost stubborn respect for her voice. 

Then we follow what happens when disagreement turns into partnership. Eleanor pushes from the outside with unmatched influence as a media figure and power broker, while Kennedy navigates Congress, the New Frontier agenda, and the slow build toward a meaningful civil rights stance. We also explore Eleanor’s impact at the United Nations through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, plus the overlooked Kennedy era work on women’s equality, including the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and the path to the Equal Pay Act. 

If political division feels permanent, this conversation offers a different model: principled pressure, reluctant compromise, and real civic responsibility. Subscribe for more, share this with a friend who loves American history, and leave a review with the biggest lesson you’re taking from Eleanor and JFK.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome back to Civics in a Year. Today I'm thrilled to welcome back Barbara Perry, presidential historian at UVA's Miller Center and one of the country's leading scholars on the presidency. First ladies and the Kennedy family. If you missed our episode, the previous episode, we talked about Jacqueline Kennedy as the first lady of the New Frontier. I so enjoyed that conversation. And I'm so excited that Barbara is back with us to talk about an upcoming book that comes out in September of 2026 called Unreconcilable Differences: The Political Partnership of Eleanor Roosevelt. Nope. Did I say it right?

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Yeah. And occasionally I accidentally say that that's what it is, but it's

Why Pair Eleanor Roosevelt With JFK

SPEAKER_00 0:48

reconcilable differences. Reconcilable differences. Yeah, remove the un.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

The political partnership of Eleanor Roosevelt and the Kennedy President.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Actually, it's it's reconciled. It's had many, so don't worry about this. It's had many different iterations as it was being written in title. So reconcilable differences. The subtitle is The Unlikely Political Alliance of John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt. That'll be the official title. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

I'm gonna start that again then. Okay.

unknown 1:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Welcome back to Civics in a year. I am thrilled to welcome back Barbara Perry, presidential historian at UVA's Miller Center and one of the country's leading scholars on the presidency, First Ladies and the Kennedy family. If you have not listened to our episode on Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy, I highly suggest it was such a delightful conversation to talk about a first lady and learn so much about her. So today we're talking about Barbara's upcoming book, Reconcilable Differences: The Unlikely Political Alliance of John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt, which is exploring the fascinating and complicated relationship between former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. And today we're going to really kind of dive into political disagreement, leadership, and what these two iconic figures can teach us about American democracy. Dr. Barry, welcome back to the podcast. I'm so happy that we get to talk about these two amazing figures. Well, I'm so grateful to be back with you, Liz. Thank you so much. So, and I would have never in a million years thought Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. So we're talking about this, and your book is coming out in a moment when Americans are thinking a lot about political division and disagreement. What really drew you to this relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy specifically.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

And I read his books and memoirs, and I was so excited. And some friends of mine said, Well, we're headed up to upstate New York to Poughkeepsie, or nearby, which is the home of the Culinary Institute of America. And my friend Rose and the couple were going to take a weeklong course in cooking. And her husband Rob and I were going to sightsee around Poughkeepsie. And I said, Oh, we can go to Hyde Park and see the Roosevelt home. And I, and then they said, and then you can jump on the train and go along the Hudson River down to Manhattan, have your interview with Ted Sorensen. So I was at Hyde Park with my friend Rob, and we were taking the tour of what is called Springwood, which is the mansion of the Roosevelt

Hyde Park Tears And A Surprise Photo

SPEAKER_00 4:03

clan. This is the Hyde Park clan. The Teddy Roosevelt clan is from Oyster Bay on Long Island, but that that was developed through two different Roosevelt brothers from Holland in the 1600s. So here we are in Hyde Park, and this is where not only was Theater Roosevelt, sorry, let me back up and restate that. Hyde Park is where FDR was born. And in fact, when we were taking the tour of Springwood, the mansion, the National Park ranger turned a corner and he said, and now, ladies and gentlemen, this is where FDR was born. He was born in this very room. And involuntarily I burst into tears. And it took me back to my parents saying how much they admired him during the Great Depression and World War II. And I guess it was just thinking about how he had saved our country during the Great Depression and World War II. And then my friend Rob and I said, Oh, let's go see where Eleanor Roosevelt had a special cottage built for her by her husband FDR, about a mile away, to get away from the mansion and her mother-in-law, Sarah Delano Roosevelt. And there's actually been some revisionist history done that the two of them, Eleanor and her mother-in-law, actually did get along, but that there is still part of history that says that Eleanor wanted to get away from some of the more, I would say, you know, pushiness perhaps of her of her mother-in-law. So she gets this cottage built called Valkill, and we take a tour of it, and there's this picture of Eleanor Roosevelt in 1960 walking out of her cottage with John Kennedy. And I just wondered what was the backstory on that? And my colleague Alita Black, who is the expert on Eleanor Roosevelt, I knew had written a lot about Eleanor Roosevelt and had written several pages on that very topic. But I thought there might be a book there. And I just started digging into what turned out to be seemingly unreconcilable differences, even though Kennedy and Mrs. Roosevelt were in the same party, the Democrats, she was much more liberal than he was. He was pretty moderate for Democrats in the 50s and 1960s. And one of the reasons is he had to be on the ballot. He had to run for the House of Representatives and then the Senate and then get the nomination of his party in 1960 and then run against Nixon in 1960 for the presidency. She, however, never ran for office. And so she could take slightly more extreme views or what were perceived as more extreme views, but oftentimes the right views, for example, on civil rights. And so what happened was she tended to side with Adelaide Stevenson when he ran. She supported him in 52. She supported him when he ran for president in 56, losing both times in landslides to Dwight Eisenhower. She wanted Stevenson to run again in 60. And all through the mid-50s and into the later 50s, Kennedy was very respectful towards her. And he kept reaching out to her, but he just couldn't close the deal. And so my book opens with a luncheon between the two of them in August of 60. He's just gotten the nomination. He goes to have lunch with Mrs. Roosevelt at Valkill. And one of the saddest moments in this story is that she had just lost her 13-year-old granddaughter, who lived at the farm next door to her with her son. And Sally was her name, Sally Roosevelt, actually named for Sarah Delena Roosevelt. And she was only 13. She was at a summer camp in upstate New York that very summer. And she had a fall from a horse. And within a day or so, she died of a brain injury, they think at the time. And Kennedy, who was no, you know, was not unfamiliar with family tragedies. He had lost his brother in World War II. He had lost his sister four years later. He had lost his brother-in-law in World War II. He had almost died in the war. And so he wrote very sweetly and graciously to Mrs. Roosevelt to say, I don't want to bother you at this terrible time for your family. And she said, No, I I planned this lunch. I know you're going to be at Hyde Park anyway for a ceremony about the Social Security Act of my husband. And I want you to come for lunch because I know how busy presidential candidates are. So then this is the beginning of their rapprochement. I should also add that part of the history of this was that Mrs. Roosevelt really despised President Kennedy's father, Joseph Kennedy Sr. He tended towards anti-Semitism. She was very supportive of Jewish people in this country and during World War II, wanted more to be more Jewish people to be taken in from Europe. She was thwarted in that, sadly. But she also was not an appeaser of Hitler. And Joseph Kennedy Sr., while he was the ambassador to the Court of St. James from the United States, tended to do that because he wanted to avoid World War II. Well, that policy didn't work. So Mrs. Roosevelt really despised John Kennedy's father, and she kind of visited the sins of the father upon the son.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

So Mrs. Roosevelt and JFK represented really different generations. And in some ways, like you said, different versions of the Democratic Party. Where did their biggest disagreements come from?

SPEAKER_00 9:45

If you stop and think about them and put them side by side in 1960, you're absolutely right, Liz, that Mrs. Roosevelt was the previous generation. She was as old, actually just a tad older than President Kennedy's mother. So she could have been his mother. He was about the age of her youngest of five children. So he could have been her son. And he always was very respectful and called her Mrs. Roosevelt. Even when he was president, he called her Mrs. Roosevelt.

Civil Rights And McCarthyism Fault Lines

SPEAKER_00 10:17

He never called her Eleanor. And so they represented different generations. They had been through very different backgrounds. She was to the manor born because of the money and the businesses that had so helped the Roosevelt clan become very wealthy from the 1600s onward in New York City and New York State. He was only two generations removed from Irish immigrants who had fled the potato famine in the 1850s and arrived in Boston. So his family gained money from his dad in his businesses and work in Hollywood and on Wall Street, but they weren't born into wealth. And he was Roman Catholic and would become the first Catholic to take the White House, and only the second is Joe Biden. She was Episcopalian, kind of Northeastern Episcopalian. But where they really differed and where she was able to take more liberal positions, particularly on race, she was in favor of what would seem like an obvious thing to support in her husband's administration, and that was an anti-lynching law that was in Congress in the 1930s, and it did not pass. And she had been pushing her husband, FDR, to support it. He didn't because a good portion of his majority that he had won in the South and that he had in the Congress were white segregationists, anti-civil rights Democrats at the time. And so he said to her, I can't support this or I'll lose support for the New Deal among those Southern conservative Democrats. So she and then Kennedy coming along in the 50s, he was trying to find some moderate approaches to civil rights so he wouldn't lose the then Southern Democrats who were still segregationists, still very conservative. And the other thing that she really disagreed with him on in the 1950s was McCarthyism. So the so-called red scare where the senator Joseph McCarthy went after somewhat, sometimes genuine communists in our country, and sometimes those he claimed were communists but weren't, or might have been and had the right to be. And so Kennedy was torn on McCarthy. McCarthy was a fellow Catholic, for example. The Catholic Church was very anti-communist. Kennedy didn't want to step out and be against McCarthy, who was also a friend of the Kennedy family, and even dated two of Jack Kennedy's sisters in the 1950s. So there was a personal tie. Kennedy had a lot of illnesses in his life and a lot of injuries to his back, particularly in World War II when he was a PT boat commander. His PT boat was sliced in two by a Japanese destroyer. He was slammed against the bulkhead of his cockpit and re-injured his back. And he never really recovered from that. So he had to have a lot of back surgeries in the 50s, and he missed a lot of time in the Senate. And so he was actually absent the day that the Senate censured Joe McCarthy. And not too long after that, Joe McCarthy died prematurely of alcoholism, which pretty much removed him from the scene. But Mrs. Roosevelt never really, I don't think, forgave Senator Kennedy for not speaking out. And in 1956, she was a pro a power broker. Her husband had died in 45 while president, but she was still a power broker in the Democratic Party for that group of more liberal Democrats from the Northeast and the Midwest. And Kennedy made a kind of a last-second decision to try to get the vice presidential nomination in Chicago at the Democratic Convention and go on to be on the uh ticket from Adelaide Stevenson's perspective. And Stevenson said, I'll leave it up to the convention. And so young Jack Kennedy, a young senator, goes to Mrs. Roosevelt, who had supported him, by the way, for Senate in 52. So here he is four years later. He goes to her hotel room and it's very chaotic. There, she's got lots of people around her, grandchildren. People are typing on their typewriters, phones are ringing, and she doesn't really have a lot of time for him. And he says, Will you support me for the vice presidential nomination? And she says, No, I just I still don't agree with you on civil rights and the red scare and McCarthyism. And so, not too long after that, before they came to agreement in 1960, finally in August of that year, he was in New York and he ran into a man he knew was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. And kind of like a child in a way, he said, Why doesn't Mrs. Roosevelt like me? Well, I think he knew why he was the bright man and won the Pulitzer Prize and had a Harvard degree. I think it was just hard for him, somebody who was very charismatic to think that here was somebody he had met as match and he couldn't persuade to like him personally. But thank goodness for his sake, they came together politically.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

That is, I mean, I can just see that, like asking that question. So despite these tensions, right, there is also this mutual respect between them. And you talk a lot about Jack Kennedy's respect for Eleanor Roosevelt. Were there moments in your research that surprised you or changed how you understood their relationship?

SPEAKER_00 15:57

It shouldn't have surprised me once I really delved into the depth of Eleanor Roosevelt's dislike of him, again, going back to his dad and then Kennedy, Jack Kennedy's own views. But I was still a little stunned by the sharp elbows of her and the sharp tongue and the sharp

Telegram Jabs And A 1960 Truce

SPEAKER_00 16:20

pen of hers. Because even in the late 50s in 58 and 59, when she was a media star, if she were living now, she'd have a podcast and it would be like yours, one of the top in the country. Instead, she had written from the time she was first lady a daily newspaper column that got picked up by hundreds of newspapers. And she started in the 30s doing radio programs, which was before TV, that was the main medium and like the internet now. And then she started doing television programs on public television in the later years. And then she would be interviewed on interview programs on TV in the 50s. So in the 50s, she was writing and speaking and saying that Kennedy's father was buying, trying to buy the presidency for him. And at one point, she sent a telegram to Kennedy because he was saying, Well, that's not true. You know, my father may have said that, but he's not buying the election for me. And again, he would say, Dear Mrs. Dear Mrs. Roosevelt, and he'd write these very respectful letters. And back would come telegrams in those days, almost like we would think of a text now, but they'd come, you'd get a phone call that would read it to you, and then you'd get the somebody coming to your front door. Not a letter through the Postal Service, but a piece of paper, and they'd hand you the paper and say, You've got a telegram. And so she would send telegrams to Jack Kennedy, a U.S. senator, and and call him my dear boy. And she would say, as a play on his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which was called Profiles and Courage, about people in usually men in Congress throughout history, House of Representatives and Senators, who would vote their conscience thinking it was the right thing to do, but knowing it would lose their office, they would be voted out. And so she said to Kennedy, you need to show less profile and more courage. And we today we would go, boom, boom, that is so harsh. And nevertheless, he would write back in a respectful way and say, you know, maybe I won't be able to convince you, but I'm I would still love to have your support and I'd love to see you when I'm next in New York. And so finally in 1960, at their lunch, this begins to go away. Mrs. Roosevelt realizes he is the nominee of her party. She hated Nixon and thought he was corrupt. And so she's and she said, I'm now I'm supporting Kennedy. She campaigned for him throughout the fall of 60. And she either, if not forgave, she overcame their differences from the 1950s. And then they had a very productive relationship during the presidency until her death in November of 1962, about a year before the president's own assassination.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

So while he was in the presidency, you know, I know that Mrs. Roosevelt often pushed presidents publicly if she felt like they weren't doing enough, especially on things that you've talked about, civil rights and human rights. How did Kennedy respond to that pressure when he was in the presidency?

SPEAKER_00 19:49

Mrs. Roosevelt did what she always did, which was continue to reach out to people. As you say, she had her public megaphone, but she also had a private megaphone. Is that who wouldn't take? I'm not sure she was making lots of phone calls, but she certainly, and these are all in the Kennedy papers in the Kennedy Library. And my colleague Alita Black also led the digitization of Eleanor Roosevelt's papers. And

Private Pressure On A New President

SPEAKER_00 20:17

so they are all online. So through the Kennedy Library and through the Eleanor Roosevelt papers that Alita took to and digitized at George Washington University. So if you Google at either of those, you can find the actual letters back and forth. So Mrs. Roosevelt would, I want to say constantly but routinely, would write to President Kennedy about any matter that she thought he could handle. Might be somebody who was in jail for having been accused of being a communist. Could he help with that? Could he help veterans that she had visited in a hospital that she thought needed more attention? She didn't keep pressing as much on civil rights, I think in part because the president was being pushed, for example, by Martin Luther King and Jr., that is, and knew that he needed to do something. But like her husband, he was worried that he'd lose the Southern Democrats in the Congress, who were, and he was trying to get their votes for the new frontier. So uh it took him until actually after she had died, it took him till the summer of 1963 to go on television, on television in prime time and speak about the need for a civil rights act, which he and his brother, the attorney general Robert Kennedy, were producing and were sending up to Congress that would ban segregation in any kind of public facility that dealt with interstate commerce. So, aside from things like public schools, what about movie theaters? What about restaurants? What about department stores? What about hotels and motels? Particularly in the South, those were all banned. Either banned to blacks or blacks were made to sit, for example, in a theater in the balcony, not down on the main floor. They weren't allowed to come into a restaurant. They could go around the back and maybe get a sandwich. They couldn't use public restrooms. So the 64 Act after Kennedy's death did pass under Lyndon Johnson through Congress. So Kennedy finally took what Mrs. Roosevelt wanted him to do, took the action that in the mid-50s she would want him to do. He finally took his leadership role as president and decided no matter what it would cost him, he became a profile and courage, as he wrote about in his own book.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

What do you hope that readers take away from this story about political disagreement, leadership, and working across differences within the same party, but also in separate parties? You know, we before we started recording, we were talking about, you know, Senator John McCain, who is the senator from Arizona, and you know, the way that him and President Obama ran their campaigns and how respectful they were of each other, and just a lot of this kind of working across the aisle. So, what do you hope readers take away from this?

SPEAKER_00 23:21

The book ends with the lesson of the book that I do hope readers take away. And not to say, well, I guess people could work across

A Playbook For Working Across Divides

SPEAKER_00 23:31

differences in 1960, but they can't now. I just refuse to believe that. I think that if we have the will, we can find a way. And if we decide that the approach that many people are taking to uh partisan politics right now is not only within parties not to come together, but certainly between parties not to come together, or have the parties become so monolithic. We only have two, and we used to call them big tents because we only have two major parties, uh, because our system promotes that, unlike parliamentary systems in Europe, for example, which have minor parties and major parties. We just have these two major parties, and occasionally a third party will crop up, but really the one of the two major parties only has the chance of winning in Congress and for the presidency. So they need to be as broad as possible and take in as many people as possible. And then once that happens, people within parties need to find common ground, and obviously between the two parties for the common good and for the good of the country. And that's what Jack Kennedy as president and Mrs. Roosevelt as a power broker and a civic leader, but one who never held public office. And I think that's also a part of the lesson as well. You don't have to serve in public office. In fact, uh Kennedy once said every citizen holds public office, and that that's the most important office in the land is that of being a citizen and participating in our civic life. And so we have some work to do on that. But we've also been divided in our history and fought a civil war over divisions that were so serious that we disunited. And so if we could overcome that, let's hope not with a shooting war. But I think that that I have such belief in the American system and in our constitutional structure that I hope that this lesson will not be lost on people currently.

SPEAKER_01 25:35

And again, I love that we're talking about Mrs. Roosevelt, not as the first lady, but in her post first lady job. And I I love that you use the word power broker because she uh did so much for our country, for the Democratic Party, just in general. And, you know, I know entirely.

SPEAKER_00 25:57

And I should add Liz for the United Nations. You know, she that she had a she did have a formal office. She did not have to run for it. She was appointed by her husband's successor, Harry Truman. And the UN was brand new. It was her husband with Winston Churchill, you know, talk about allies getting together and fighting a common cause for Republican, I'd say with a small R, Republican

Human Rights And Equal Pay Origins

SPEAKER_00 26:22

democracy, which is what we have in this country. We don't have a pure democracy or direct democracy, but a republic where we elect our representatives. But FDR and Winston Churchill during World War II said, is there a way that we can avoid another world war in the 20th century and beyond? So they developed the plan for the United Nations. And then Mrs. Roosevelt, as a former first lady, Harry Truman, knowing what a power broker she was and what a voice of reason and how people responded to her. Now, not to say that people didn't dislike her. She was disliked by many people, as was her husband. Even though he got two-thirds of the popular vote in his first re-election, 1936, a third of Americans did not vote for him and called him that man. They couldn't say his name. They said he's that man. They hated his economic regulation, if particularly if they were business people. So many people disliked and even hated Eleanor Roosevelt, thought she had gone too far as first lady. But as her role of as a U.S. delegate to the UN, she was instrumental in helping to create and get past the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So she took her understanding of civil rights in this country for minorities and for women, and she applied that in the international realm. And that was no easy matter to try to get along with the Soviet Union in the Cold War. So again, free world versus the communist world in the Cold War period, which sometimes broke into hot wars in Korea and Vietnam, et cetera. And one last thing about human rights, you know, Hillary Clinton was famous for saying in Beijing in 1995 at a UN's conference that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights. And Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, and a lot of people, I will just say, when they think of Jack Kennedy and women, might not think about this approach because he was unfaithful in his marriage. But he founded, along with Eleanor Roosevelt and a woman called Esther Peterson, who was the highest-ranking official in the Kennedy administration. She worked in the Department of Labor. And she had this idea that then he supported and his advisors supported, and certainly Mrs. Roosevelt did, to have a president's commission on the status of women because they could see that women were not given the kinds of equity that men were in our system, particularly in the employment realm. And it was that commission founded by Kennedy, executive director Eleanor Roosevelt, and then Esther Peterson pushing the policies along with this commission. They produced the first Equal Pay Act to give women or push women towards equality in the workplace with men. And unfortunately, Mrs. Roosevelt passed before the president had gotten that through Congress, but he signed that in the last year of his life in 1963. Women still do not get equal pay with men for equal jobs typically, but we've gotten closer than we were in the 1960s, and we had to start somewhere. And so I think both President Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt get uh credit for that. And last point about power brokers, I looked that up as a definition. When did that word develop? It actually came into being in the 1960s, in the early 1960s, about the time that Eleanor Roosevelt was at the height of her power in the Democratic Party.

SPEAKER_01 29:55

You know that somebody somewhere was like, this word is just perfect for Mrs. Roosevelt. There's no other way. And I appreciate you talking about, you know, these commissions. I think that, you know, with presidents and first ladies and people that we study, it can be a both and, right? Kennedy, we know was unfaithful in his marriage. However, he still did, you know, this commission on standards, like both of these things can exist together. Um, and it is interesting to think about Eleanor Roosevelt, again, in her post White House years doing all of this stuff because, like we said in our podcast on Mrs. Kennedy, there's no playbook for first lady. And so every first lady, especially in the 20th century, really kind of made it their own. And I just so appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 30:53

And there's no there's no playbook for a post-first ladyship, nor had there been for a post-presidency. I mean, all the way back to uh John Quincy Adams went back into the Congress after his presidency and served in the House of Representatives. Uh, Kennedy would have been so young when he came out of the presidency if he had gotten a second term and and lived through that. So, no telling what he would have done. And the and thank goodness that Mrs. Roosevelt did, you know, for a woman of her generation, probably surpassed the possibility of living well into her 70s because she was born in the 1880s. So life expectancy might have been in the 50s or 60s for her generation. So thank goodness she kept going until she was 76, 77 years old. And she had said when she left the White House, and it even though she could see that her husband was terribly ill, it still was a shock to her when she got the word to come back to the White House. He was in Warm Springs, Georgia. He had had a stroke and would die very quickly. She said to the press, my story is over. She must have been thinking, well, I've served 12 years. You know, what more do you want from me as first lady? Now I've no longer I'll be a private citizen. And she could have put her feet up at Hyde Park at Valk Hill or in her townhouse in Manhattan. And she had plenty of money from the Roosevelt family. And she was represented both sides. She came through the Teddy Roosevelt side of Oyster Bay. So she could have put her feet up and lived the life of a wealthy woman, but she just continued until the very end, and until she just for the last few weeks of her life was too ill to work. So that shows you how much she thought of this country and our system and our civic life.

SPEAKER_01 32:46

Dr. Perry, thank you so much. I am so looking forward to this book coming out. Again, it is coming out in September 2026. Thank you again for your expertise and for introducing us to this very unlikely but incredible relationship between former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and President Kennedy.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

Well, thank you, Liz. I just wish we could talk every day because your questions are so brilliant. And I just love chatting with you. So thank you. And not only that, but I think living out the creed of a President Kennedy and an Eleanor Roosevelt and a Jaclyn Kennedy, and that is giving back to your country by helping people to understand it and

Why This Alliance Still Matters

SPEAKER_00 33:32

inspiring them.