E-mail a friendCokie Roberts
airdate April 30, 2008
As the daughter of two former members of Congress, Emmy-winning journalist Cokie Roberts has an insider's insight. She covers Congress, politics and public policy for ABC News and NPR. She's also been a contributor to PBS' The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and a CBS News reporter. Roberts is the author of several best sellers, including Founding Mothers, which chronicles women in American history, and, the new companion volume, Ladies of Liberty. With her husband, Roberts also writes a syndicated weekly column.
Cokie Roberts
Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome Cokie Roberts back to this program and back to PBS, where she once served as a contributor for the "News Hour." She is now, of course, a commentator at "ABC News" and a bestselling author - no surprise here. Her latest book debuted last Sunday at number four on the "Times'" bestseller list.
The book is called "Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped our Nation." Cokie Roberts, nice to have you back on the program.
Cokie Roberts: Great to be with you, Tavis.
Tavis: You've done it again.
Roberts: Well, those are great ladies. They do it for me.
Tavis: We'll talk about these great ladies in just a moment. One person who'd like to be profiled in this book, I suspect, a few years from now is named Hillary Clinton.
Roberts: I think that's probably right. (Laughter)
Tavis: You might be writing about her one day.
Roberts: We'll see.
Tavis: Speaking of "We'll see," what do you make of where this thing is right about now?
Roberts: It's a mess right about now. But the one thing I don't think is that these people - the notion that they're tearing each other apart and it's the filthiest game - it's baloney. Read what happened in these campaigns. And these are two good candidates who basically agree on the issues, and the voters are excited, they're excited that these campaigns are coming to North Carolina and Indiana.
A million people have registered since Ohio and Texas for the Democratic Party. So I think that you've got a lot of real interest and civic engagement here. I think that's a good thing.
Tavis: Before I go to Barack Obama, the other candidate, of course, in this fight to the finish, how does Hillary - I want to phrase it the right way - how does she stack up, how does she line up against some of the women you've profiled in this book, specifically around the issue of politics?
Roberts: Well, this book is the early 19th century. This ends in 1825. But these women were very, very political and very influential in politics when they had no political rights whatsoever. So I think that she is out of that tradition, as are most first ladies, and the fact that they now have the ability to run for office and serve themselves is a very big deal compared to what these women were (inaudible).
Tavis: What do you make of the fact that she is doing this, having been a former first lady?
Roberts: Well, I think that if you read about what life is like in the White House, even in the early 19th century, that you see that there really is an involvement in everything the president is doing.
Tavis: Barack Obama. Historic candidacy, along with hers.
Roberts: Absolutely.
Tavis: What do you make of where he is at this moment?
Roberts: Well, he's done a great job - a fabulous job. Obviously this Reverend Wright business has been a big glitch for him, and I noticed today when he was in Indiana that he started getting questions about "Well, why have you abandoned him?" So he can't win. But I think that he was very forceful yesterday in his press conference, and as he said, we'll just have to see how it all comes out.
Tavis: But you don't buy this argument that they're tearing the Democratic Party apart?
Roberts: I don't.
Tavis: And the longer they go, the worse it is for -
Roberts: I don't buy that. I don't buy that. It's not an ideological fight. In 1980, it was an ideological fight. In 1968, of course, it was horrendous. But this is just a question of two - which one do you like better, which one do you think would be a better leader? It's not a question of is the country going to go in a totally different direction if one of them's elected versus the other.
Tavis: I don't want to ask the typical version of this question. Let me try to reverse it. What happens if one does not pick the other as a running mate, given the way this thing is coming down to the wire?
Roberts: I don't think they are going to pick each other as a running mate, and I think the main reason for that is that it's not a very good ticket for the Democratic Party. They're both very attractive people, but they are both senators, they're both from states that the Democrats are going to carry anyway. You need to branch out for your running mate.
You need a governor or you need somebody who's in a state, and you need a swing state.
Tavis: To the book now. Thank you for indulging me on those questions. I couldn't have Cokie Roberts in the studio and not ask some political questions.
Roberts: Well, I should hope not. (Laughter)
Tavis: So thank you for indulging me on that. To the book, beyond the obvious, what is it that so excites you about writing books about women in history? Because you've done this more than once now.
Roberts: Yeah. Well, this is a continuation of my last one, "The Founding Mothers," because I think that other - we've left hem out, and that we leave out half of the humankind by doing that. And also I think that particularly for girls to understand that there were these women who contributed to our history from the very beginning, were essential to our history, and who were especially essential to the shaping of the great social movements - abolition, suffrage - that made our country a better place.
Tavis: You've done this twice now, as I said when you first came on. And when I saw it on the list last week, I said I wanted to ask you who you think the audience is for these books? Who's buying these books? Who's fascinated by this stuff in the way that you are?
Roberts: Well, there are a lot of people who just love history and we've seen that recently with the John Adams series, but there are also a lot - more women buy books than men, and so I assume that a lot of these buyers are women.
But as I say, I write them specifically with girls in mind, so I'm hoping that maybe some teachers are buying them for their classrooms and that girls are reading them, and then there's always Mother's Day, Tavis.
Tavis: Yeah, well, that's why we have you on the program, Cokie. (Laughter) Because Mother's Day is just around the corner. Tell me - and I want you to choose, because I suspect - I know how this works on a book tour, I've done this a few times myself. On a book tour, people tend to ask the same question about the same women. Talk to me, then, about two or three women in the book who you put in because there have been overlooks.
I don't want to go right to Abigail Adams, because I know you're going to get asked about that a thousand times.
Roberts: Right, you're right.
Tavis: I'll let you pick some people that you want to share with me about that you find fascinating.
Roberts: Well, a person that we all have heard of and seen on a coin - she's now Sacagawea - everything I have about her in here is from Lewis and Clark's journals. So seeing them start to value her more and more as they travel and eventually say, "We can't do this without her," and the evolution of their appreciation is wonderful. And of course that was a nation-shaping expedition, literally, and so that was a nice find.
Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American Catholic saint. But she started off as a wealthy protestant woman in New York, ended up converting to Catholicism and then established the parochial school system in this country. And I love the way history books say things like that - "And then she established the parochial school system." (Laughter) Like it didn't take anything.
And then there are groups like the Daughters of Africa in Philadelphia, a great self-help organization for free Black women that they established early, early on to take care of each other. And then as the century progressed, it turns into a literary society as people become literate.
And so you see, as I say, the seeds of all the great social movements in this time period, and women being the planters of those seeds.
Tavis: To your latter point here now, I certainly understand that being underappreciated, being undervalued is a part of sexism, beyond the obvious, again, is it because they've been undervalued, underappreciated in history beyond just being women, for why they've not been profiled heretofore in this way?
Roberts: I think it's mainly that our history has often been written about the great documents or the battles or something that is very large, and so the women didn't do that. They didn't write the Declaration or the Constitution, they didn't fight - or most of them didn't - in the Revolutionary War or the War of 1812. So that's part of it.
But the other part is that people really didn't value their letters and journals and preserve them in the ways that they have the men's. Fortunately, they did enough so that I was able to get to enough of them so that these women are literally speaking to you - well, not literally. They're writing to you over the 200 years. It's their voices you're hearing.
Tavis: I'm curious as to what your experience is. I'm working on an art exhibit that we'll be talking about here later. There's a huge art exhibit that we're working on that tells the story of African Americans and our imprint on this country for the last 400 years that we'll be kicking off later this fall and traveling the country for the next five years, and I'm involved in putting that project together.
And I'm on a committee with a number of other great Black -
Roberts: How much fun? That's terrific.
Tavis: A lot of fun. I'm on a committee with a lot of great Black intellectuals, Black scholars and curators who are pulling this exhibit together. And when I have these various meetings, and I've been in meetings with people, trying to get them to donate their items to the exhibition, so I'm getting closer and closer on a daily basis to touching and looking at documents that really, really -
Roberts: Isn't that - it's so exciting.
Tavis: Yeah, I was going to ask you, I know you'd seen some of their letters. How do you feel connected when you -
Roberts: Oh, it's very exciting, and it's also a little terrifying. When I was holding Abigail Adams' "Remember the Ladies" letter, I was afraid I'd sneeze on it. But here at the Huntingdon Library in Pasadena I was going through the letters of a woman named Ruth Barlow, and they were the invitations, the actual invitations from the court of Napoleon to them. And it's just - there they are. And it is exciting.
There's a woman in here for your exhibit, Lucy Terry Prince, the first African American poet. And her poem might have never been written down - she might have just spoken it - but it is now written. At some point in the 19th century, it was written down, and it's the "Bars Fight" and it's in there, it's terrific.
Tavis: We have on this program the professor from Dartmouth who just wrote a book about - it's called "Mr. and Mrs. Prince." And so that story of her - I just learned that, talking to the author from Dartmouth about how this -
Roberts: She's in here, and -
Tavis: Professor Gerzina is her name, I recall, yeah. So she's in here, too.
Roberts: She's in there.
Tavis: That's amazing. Before I let you get out of here, what does doing this research, being exposed to this, do for you? How does it advance you, how does it aid you, how does it (inaudible) -
Roberts: It ages me.
Tavis: It ages you. (Laughter)
Roberts: It ages me because it's hard work. (Laughs)
Tavis: How does it challenge you? Do you ever look at this stuff and say, "Man, we really have it easy today compared to what -
Roberts: Absolutely, are you kidding? These women were pregnant all the time, their children were dying all the time, disease was everywhere, and they had no rights. They had no political or legal rights. Married women could not own the jewelry on their bodies. And still they did so many things. So yes, we are sissies compared to them.
But it also teaches me, and a lot of people who have read it have sort of said this to me, every time you get into this hand-wringing of woe are we, is this country going to hell in a hand basket and all this stuff, baloney. A lot of the things that we worry about were happening then, and you recognize them. And we live through these times - these are just the kind of detritus of democracy.
Tavis: I wonder how much of that, though, has to do with the fact that we live now in a post-9/11 world, and that fear brings all that to the fore?
Roberts: Well that's true, but they lived in a post-Revolutionary current War of 1812 world, and they knew what it was like to have a big fight. The Revolutionary War took eight years, fought on their soil.
Tavis: That's perspective for you. And the book would do just that - give you some new perspective. It's called "Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped our Nation," written by "ABC News" political correspondent and political analyst and perennial "New York Times" bestseller, Cokie Roberts. Cokie, nice to see you.
Roberts: It's always good to be with you, Tavis.
Tavis: Out here on the west coast for a chance, no less.
Roberts: Nice to be with you here.
Tavis: Nice to see you.
Back to April 30, 2008