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MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Let me ask you this, Cokie. In your book on the Revolutionary War era, you point out that you are descended from somebody who was the first governor of the Louisiana Territory, appointed by Thomas Jefferson. Your mother was a member of Congress. Your father was a member of Congress. Your sister was mayor of Princeton, New Jersey. Your brother ran for Congress. Why did you decide not to pursue politics as a career yourself?

MS. COKIE ROBERTS (CR): I have an answer to that that should please you, which is that I feel very guilty not having done that. I have to tell you, there’s been many a time when I’ve been covering Congress when I would like to get down on the floor and just slap you all. It’s the mother thing: “I don’t care who started it, I’m stopping it.”

But I met my husband when I was eighteen years old, and he was always going to be a journalist. He knew that from the time he was nine or ten, and it would have been very hard on him for me to go into politics. So I didn’t.

I would like to say—and I could not mean this more strongly—I am such an admirer of people in public service of all kinds, but particularly people in elected office. It is hard work. You are constantly called upon to respond to the needs and desires, crazy as they can be sometimes, of your bosses, the voters. And I believe that all of you are serving the country by your lights as well as you can, and I admire you.

I do have to tell a story, though, because it does give some perspective on all of this. The ancestor you’re talking about, the guy named William Claiborne, he was interested in politics as a young man. He worked as an enrolling clerk in the first Congress. [Enrolling clerks keep track of passed legislation and handle related correspondence with the Senate.]

And he said he wanted to run for office. He was from Virginia, and the Clerk [the top person in charge of record-keeping for the U.S. House of Representatives], who was a very powerful person named John Beckley, said to him, “Well, hello, Virginia has Madison and Monroe. You’re not going to win.”

Tennessee became a state very fast. The Clerk said, “Go to Tennessee, there’s nobody there.” So William Claiborne went to Tennessee. Andrew Jackson had been in the House, then took a Senate seat that came open. So there’s an open House seat. There’s nobody in Tennessee.

This kid was twenty-three years old. As you might know, the constitutional age for running for Congress is twenty-five. He ran for the House and was elected, because there wasn’t anybody else. He comes to Congress and they seat him—it’s still in the National Archives—they seat him in contravention of the Constitution, because he was only twenty-three. That was 1797.

Then the election of 1800 happens. He’s the sole representative from Tennessee. His one vote is the equal of everybody from Massachusetts, everybody from Virginia, all of that. He’s got incredible power. And the view among Alexander Hamilton’s people was that his head could be turned because he was young and vain. [Hamilton eventually supported Jefferson for president after trying to negotiate on some issues in exchange for Federalist support. Jefferson in the end did all of the things Hamilton asked for.] He stayed with Jefferson through thirty-six ballots. One month later, he was made governor of the Mississippi Territory.

So there you go. Political payoffs have always been with us.

DR: We have a lot of histories of the Revolutionary War period and the post–Revolutionary War period, and the world doesn’t lack for Civil War books. What made you think you needed to write a book about each of these periods, and what made you focus on women?

CR: Well, I am a woman. You might have noticed that. But the truth is—this crowd will understand the answer to this question better than most—my mother is the real answer.

My mother was not only a remarkable woman, but I grew up with Betty Ford and Lady Bird Johnson and Pauline Gore. I grew up with all these remarkable women who were incredibly powerful. They had no titles, but they were very, very influential. I saw them running the political conventions, voter registration drives, their husbands’ campaigns, and raising all of us kids.

They also worked with African American women in Washington and ran all of the social-service agencies in the city, because it was before Home Rule. [The Home Rule act of 1973 gave the residents of Washington, D.C., the ability to elect their own mayor and city council.] And I knew how important and influential they were.

I spend a huge amount of time with the Founding Fathers, whether I like it or not, because if you cover Congress and politics as long as I have, you have to get to know them.

I shouldn’t say this in this audience—I hear the Founders quoted on the floor of Congress all the time, and almost 100 percent wrong. I have to go back and read what they actually did say. So I got to know them, and then I realized how incredibly crucial this period is in our history, and I wanted to know what the women were doing.

DR: How long did it take you to research and write Founding Mothers?

CR: It’s really hard for me to know the answer to that, because I have a day job. I was working very, very hard daily. The book came out in 2004, and I had already had a book come out in 1998 and a book come out in 2000.

DR: One of the things I was struck by in Founding Mothers is how every woman you write about wrote long letters to her spouse or boyfriend or relatives. For those of you who are not familiar with letters, a letter is something that you actually have a pen and you put it on paper and you write and you mail it. Were you struck by how long and detailed and perceptive these letters were?

CR: They were extraordinary. By the way, I have had wonderful help from the Manuscript Division here at the Library of Congress. But, you know, even when I was growing up, David, we wrote long letters. This is not something that is foreign to me as a human.

The wonderful thing about the letters we have—and that’s a whole nother question, because there are many, many letters we don’t have—but here’s the thing to know about women’s letters: women’s letters are really so much better than men’s letters.

The Founders knew that what they were doing was extraordinary. They were self-aware men, and they knew that if they failed, they’d be hanged, but if they succeeded, they would be held in acclaim, that their writings would be published, and they wrote with that in mind.

I always joke that we see our Founders as bronze and marble statues, and their letters read like they were written by the bronze and marble statues. They are edited, and they are considered, and they are in some cases pompous.

Whereas the letters they write to the women, which they don’t expect to be saved, are much more human. We get to know them as flesh-and-blood people with all the flaws and feelings that a husband, a lover, a son, a brother have.

And the letters that the women write, where they have absolutely no expectation that we’re going to be reading them two hundred years later, are just completely unvarnished, frank, and real. You get a much more complete view of the society as a whole. So in the same sentence you might hear about how we really have to declare war against France, and so-and-so’s pregnant again and it’s so scary because her last baby just died, and by the way I need that bonnet I left at home.

So you get a much fuller picture of society, and also you get a much truer sense of the men. I actually think that we can admire the Founders more as flesh-and-blood people. Because it’s easy for a deity to do something extraordinary, but for just a guy to do something extraordinary is hard. And that’s what they were. They were guys.

DR: Let me ask you about one of the most extraordinary series of letters I’ve ever read—the John Adams / Abigail Adams letters, about a thousand letters. They didn’t see each other for eight years or so, but she writes to him saying things like, “Maybe you could say you love me.”

CR: “You’re a cold Laplander.”

DR: He seems to write letters just ignoring everything she asks for.

CR: Well, he had had his letters intercepted. And he had written some unpolitic things, you know—the era of e-mail’s not the first time when people have written unpolitic things—about his fellow members of Congress. He did talk endlessly about how they’re all great men here and they talk on and on. This is the Continental Congress he’s talking about.

His letters had been intercepted, and he had been embarrassed. He was very concerned that his letters would be intercepted again, and that not only would he be embarrassed by talking about his colleagues but that what she wanted was what he called “sentiments of effusion,” and if he revealed such sentiments, he’d be humiliated.

But he did do really stupid things. Think about this. So he’s in France, right? She’s in Braintree, Massachusetts, trying desperately to keep body and soul together. She’s suffering tremendously. There’s want, and she’s got these four little kids. She’s taking care of the parents, and there are periods when there really isn’t enough to eat and all that.

And he writes to her about how wonderful the women in France are. I mean, this is death time. But she never misses a beat. She writes right back—of course, the letter takes a while to get there—and says, “Well, if the women of America were able to have the same kind of education as the women of France, we’d be so fabulous too.”

DR: How long did it actually take to get a letter?

CR: It could take six weeks. It could take a long time. But everybody got used to that.

DR: What I’m also struck by in that period is that the women got married very, very young—the men were often older—and then they seemed to have children every year. And the children, as you point out, died a lot. Can you talk about that experience?

CR: It’s really striking how much death you were dealing with all of this time. The book I’ve just finished, the Civil War book, of course it’s death everywhere. Think of it—six hundred thousand–plus Americans killed in that war.

Just a normal week could take your six-year-old and your ten-year-old, because typhoid fever would come through. Living in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was tough. Just getting through the day was tough. Even if you were elite, it was a very difficult life.

That’s one of the reasons I admire these women so much. You’re right—the men would come home just long enough for the women to get pregnant. They were having babies, losing babies, raising babies, taking care of the old people, all of that.

But still they were such devoted patriots. It’s just incredible. Abigail Adams would sit at night in this teeny house—if you’ve ever been to the Adams homestead in Quincy, Massachusetts, the original house that they lived in is half the size of this room—no, a quarter the size of this room, this gorgeous room—and there she was with four little children and dogs, and American soldiers would come stay because the British were occupying Boston, and still she would sit up at night by candlelight and write these letters that were so filled with patriotism and enthusiasm about the cause. You’d think she’d just want to go to bed.

DR: The most famous letter of the thousand that she wrote is the one she writes to her husband when he’s at the Second Continental Congress. Why is the letter so famous, and what was his response to it?

CR: The letter is so famous because it says, “Remember the ladies.” She had been militating, Abigail had, for independence for a full year.

Now, keep in mind that the British were in Boston. The Battles of Lexington and Concord were in April 1775. It takes until July 1776 for the men to have the courage to declare independence. And the women are writing these letters—she and Mercy Otis Warren and then later Esther de Berdt Reed—writing these letters saying, “For God’s sake, what’s wrong with you guys? Do this. You know, the British are here.”

And John Adams writes to Abigail and says, “If it gets really dangerous, take our children and fly to the woods.” Thank you, John. Hope you’re having a nice dinner in Philadelphia.

John Quincy Adams did write later, “My mother for the space of twelve months, with her infant children, was in danger of being killed or taken hostage into Boston by the British.” Because patriot women were taken hostage, and some were killed.

She is realizing that, finally, they’re going to declare independence. And so she writes to John and says, “If we’re going to become a country, we’re going to have to have a code of laws. And in your new code of laws I want you to remember the ladies because all men would be tyrants if they could.”

And he laughed at her. He just laughed at her.

DR: He didn’t take seriously the idea of women being educated or having any political rights?

CR: No. In terms of education, it was very interesting that she did make sure that their only daughter learned Greek and Latin. And he said, “It’s fine as long as you don’t tell anybody.”

DR: Let’s talk about another woman who was very famous at the time, Martha Washington. The image people have of her is that she was hanging out at Mount Vernon. George Washington spends eight years running the war. But it turns out in your book that she was actually with him much of the time.

During the fight for women’s suffrage in the early twentieth century, the Equal Franchise Society saluted Abigail Adams’s famous “Remember the ladies” letter to John Adams.

CR: All the time. I think Martha Washington has done herself a disservice by wearing that cap in the famous Rembrandt Peale portrait of her. We see her as elderly. Of course, “elderly” then was a lot younger than I am. That’s one of the reasons when you talk about getting married young, you died young, and some of these men did have several wives.

But Martha was called upon by her husband, the general, to come to camp every winter of the war. When I was growing up—actually, when I started writing this book—the only things I knew were Martha Washington at Valley Forge, Dolley Madison saving George Washington’s portrait [when the British burned Washington during the War of 1812], and then, as a grown-up, I learned about “Remember the ladies” during the resurgence of feminism in the 1970s.

Valley Forge was one winter of the eight long winters of the Revolution—eight years. And she went to camp every winter.

The reason she went—she hated going—first of all, she was leaving behind what she considered duty at Mount Vernon. Second, she was having to go over terrifying roads. She was very much a prime target for hostage-taking. There had already been threats that she would be kidnapped and taken. And camp wasn’t so pleasant once you got there. But the general would call and she would answer.

“Lady Washington is here!” Martha Washington boosted the morale of her husband’s troops, bringing them clothes and food in camp and organizing other officers’ wives to help cook for and nurse soldiers.

Over the summer, the enslaved people at Mount Vernon would work with her, making cloth and preserving foodstuffs and all that. She would then come to camp, and she was cheered. The troops adored her. She was cheered into camp—“Lady Washington is here!”—and bring all of these things from Mount Vernon, one of the many contributions of African Americans to the Revolutionary cause.

She would then organize the other officers’ wives to cook for the soldiers, sew for the soldiers, nurse the soldiers, pray with the soldiers. That was key, because they were threatening to desert by regiment at various times since they were unpaid, unhoused, all that.

Then they’d put on great entertainments, all to keep up troop morale. Washington thought she was absolutely essential. It’s also good that she was there because he could be a little indiscreet, and there was the one time that he danced for three hours straight with the very pretty and flirty Catharine Littlefield Greene, the wife of Nathanael Greene. So it was good that Martha was on hand to keep an eye on the situation.

DR: She was watching him as well as helping him.

CR: Watching him. She also had a sense of humor. She named her tomcat Hamilton—

DR: Because Alexander Hamilton was such a—

CR: Tomcat.

DR: We have a thousand letters from John Adams and Abigail Adams. We have no letters between George Washington and Martha Washington. Why is that?

CR: Well, we have two that George wrote to Martha, which were found stuffed in a desk drawer of a house of a descendant. We believe that she burned all their correspondence. And that did happen then.

In her case, I think it’s for two reasons. One, she was embarrassed that her punctuation and grammar were not perfect. But also the letters were personal, and she didn’t much want them published.

The other two Founding Mothers whose letters we don’t have are Martha Jefferson and Elizabeth Monroe. In each of those cases, their husbands burned their letters.

In the case of Martha Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson said that he was burning her letters because he was heartbroken. Now, that’s his story and he’s sticking to it, but I don’t think that’s what you do when you’re heartbroken.

DR: So let’s talk about Martha Washington as the first lady. We have no tradition of first ladies, so are you supposed to be a queen? Are you supposed to be something else? How did she figure out how a first lady was supposed to act?

CR: She had to do it on the job. She was in a good position to do it. Abigail Adams would have been a terrible first first lady. She would have been telling everybody what she thought all the time. Martha Washington was a well-bred southern lady and understood indirection. But she was very political. She understood politics quite well.

When George Washington goes to New York to become president, he arrives on a barge—this big, elaborate barge from New Jersey. So then she goes up. They’ve got two little children—their grandchildren, who lived with them, had just turned eight and just turned ten when she occupies the equivalent of the executive mansion in New York. And she’s got these little kids.

She has sort of a grand procession up from Mount Vernon to New York and is called upon to stop in places and make speeches and all that. When she gets on the barge to come across from New Jersey, she wears homespun [meaning cloth made from homespun yarn]. Now, this is a woman who loved her silks. But she had a PR sense that’s the equivalent of Pat Nixon’s good cloth coat. [During his famous Checkers speech in 1952, made while he was running for vice president, Richard M. Nixon celebrated his wife, Pat’s, “respectable” cloth coat.]

Martha wore homespun to come across the river. But the minute they get across the river, the little boy, George Washington Parke Custis, gets lost in the crowd and she’s got to find him, get them in school, and, within something like two days, do the first levee, as the formal reception ceremonies were called, where she has to be courtly enough and formal enough to satisfy the courts of Europe.

Think of it. This is this little tiny upstart country along the Atlantic coast of America, and you’re talking about France and England and Prussia and all of that. You have to create some sort of sense that we’re regal enough that they will pay attention. But we’ve also just fought a war knocking off a monarch. So you have to be republican enough to satisfy the voters. It was a very tough balancing act.

She did write at one point that people called her the “First Lady of the Land,” which was surprising to see because the term first lady was not officially applied until the Buchanan administration. But she said, “I really think of myself as the chief state prisoner.” I think a lot of first ladies have felt that way since.

DR: So she came up with a tradition of entertaining. They entertained a lot, but they would not go visit anybody else, because they didn’t want to pick and choose.

CR: Also—you all can relate to this—if you went to somebody’s house to dinner, were you beholden to them? So George and Martha Washington had everybody in. The dinners sound just grim.

DR: The capital was initially in New York, then they moved it to Philadelphia, so she had to move from New York to Philadelphia. Then they moved back to Mount Vernon after eight years. How long does it actually take to go from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon by carriage or whatever they used?

CR: A lot of the travel was by boat. We used the ocean and the rivers to get everywhere. But it would take about a week.

DR: A week. You mention in one of your books how long it took to go from Georgetown to Capitol Hill in those days.

CR: It was a mess. It was all muddy and horrible. And when they started building Washington, they just willy-nilly chopped down trees, so there were tree stumps everywhere. That made it very hard to get around.

DR: Like a pothole.

CR: But a pothole you could trip over. So the trip took a couple of hours.

Let’s talk about Mount Vernon for a second. Between the Revolutionary War and the Constitutional Convention, they’re at Mount Vernon. This is between 1783 and 1787. Everybody comes to Mount Vernon. The whole world comes to Mount Vernon.

On Monday I gave the first Martha Washington Lecture at Mount Vernon. I have been bugging them for years, because everything there says “George Washington’s Mount Vernon.” And I keep saying, “Really? He did this all by himself?”

First of all, it was all her money. But secondly, she had to do all of this.

The one person he didn’t want to come to Mount Vernon was his mother. He was terrified that his mother was going to move in.

He had worked it out that she was going to move in with a brother, and then the brother had the bad grace to die, and so he writes his mother this letter that’s just a riot where he says, “You know, this is like a well-resorted tavern—everyone going from north to south or from south to north stops here. And if you came, you would have three choices. You would either have to get up every day and get dressed for all the visitors, which you wouldn’t like, or you would be around in dishabille, which I wouldn’t like, or you would be confined to your room, which neither one of us would like.”

Isn’t this a nice letter? And so she didn’t come. But Martha is having to do this entertaining.

Then he leaves the presidency after two terms—which is an interesting story all in itself—in 1797. They get back to Mount Vernon. He dies at the end of 1799, and she still has all these people coming through.

Any politician who wanted to prove his bona fides, you know, to show what a great patriot he was—things have not changed—goes to visit Mount Vernon to represent himself to Mrs. Washington. She would take them all in, even though she thought Thomas Jefferson was “the most despicable of all mankind.” That was a quotation.

DR: In your book you point out how many guests they had one year—four or five hundred guests who came for dinner or wanted to stay over.

CR: And you don’t think George was doing that, do you?

DR: George Washington never lived in the White House. It’s finally built at the time that John Adams is the president, and he and Abigail move down here from Philadelphia. They’re here for about a year or so.

CR: It’s really kind of November till March.

DR: Did Abigail Adams come down and serve as first lady?

CR: Yes. The White House famously was unfinished, and Mrs. Adams was hanging the laundry and all that. But she did write a letter to her daughter saying that Georgetown is a filthy hole. But still the ladies all expected her to entertain and came by. She said to her daughter, “Tell people that I say it has a very nice view, because that’s true.”

DR: They leave, and the next president is Thomas Jefferson, but he’s not married. His wife had died. What did he do for entertaining? Did he have a hostess?

CR: He had various ways of entertaining. You all will respond to this. He had the Democratic-Republicans over one night and the Federalists another night. He did not have them together to dinner. It was really dangerous for him to do that because the country was not in a position where it could survive the kind of partisanship and regionalism that was fierce at the time. It was way too young and fragile a country.

But fortunately, Dolley Madison was on the scene. And she did do some hostessing at the White House, but what she mainly did was set up a completely separate power center at the secretary of state’s house on F Street. She had Federalists and Republicans come together and break bread together, have some wine together and behave.

Every so often—and this continued when she went to the White House—the Federalists would say, “We’re going to boycott it.” Then they’d discover they couldn’t because those evenings were where all the trading, all the deals got made, all the information got exchanged.

A power player in Washington even before she became first lady, Dolley Madison hosted must-attend parties for politicians in search of the latest inside information.

DR: What about the famous story that while the War of 1812 is happening, and we’re being invaded by the British, Dolley Madison is getting ready to cook a dinner, and all of a sudden, she decides she should leave. She writes a letter while she’s getting ready to leave and then takes the painting of George Washington down. Is that all true?

CR: It’s sort of true. It’s true enough. She is in the White House by herself—well, not by herself. She’s got servants and her wonderful enslaved man Paul Jennings. Madison has gone out to Bladensburg, where the war is being fought, and she expects him to come back to the White House with the generals and the cabinet and have dinner.

She’s not cooking, but she’s planning it. And she goes up to the roof and she starts to see the British are coming. People start saying to her, “You’ve got to go. It’s getting dangerous.”

She’s hoping that Madison will get home before she goes, but finally she is convinced that she has to go. She packed up not just the portrait but government papers and whatever she could get out that she wanted to get out.

But she did insist that the portrait be secured. She didn’t roll it up and take it out, but she insisted that it be secured. It was cut out of the frame, and a gentleman traveling to New York took it with him on his carriage.

DR: And that’s the Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington that’s now back in the White House.

CR: That’s right. What was significant about that when you think, well, it was a painting? Think of all the images we’ve seen of Saddam Hussein’s statue coming down or Lenin’s statue coming down.

If Washington’s portrait had been in the hands of the British, they could have desecrated it, which would have been very demoralizing. What Dolley did was make sure that that did not happen. What they did instead was desecrate her portrait, and then they sat down and ate her meal. It’s like Goldilocks. One of the soldiers actually wrote about it—about eating her meal and feeling a little bit guilty but liking it.

DR: In those days, how big was Washington? How many people lived in Washington in the Revolutionary War period?

CR: Oh, in the Revolutionary War period, nobody was here. The government was “removed” to Washington in 1800. Georgetown was a town. Alexandria was a town. But there was no Washington. There were some farms. And when they bought the property here where we are and started building a capital, a few little boardinghouses and liquor stores opened up around here.

DR: And the members of Congress tended to live in—

CR: Boardinghouses. They tended to live in boardinghouses with people either from their delegations or like-minded people.

In fact, Albert Gallatin wrote to his wife—he was later secretary of the treasury, that was his most famous role—but he was a congressman from New York at the time. He wrote to his wife and said, “You know, we all think alike. We don’t talk about anything but politics.” It’s not exactly likely to bring about moderation.

DR: Did they bring their wives down here?

CR: No. Very few wives were here. There was no place for them to stay. But some of the cabinet brought their wives, and the wives played a very key role, because they were the people that brought everybody together.

Dolley Madison, by the way, was not here just in that period. Dolley Madison reigned over this city basically from 1801 to 1848–49. She had a brief period where she went back to Montpelier with James during which she would write these letters saying, “What’s going on?”

But she then came back as a widow. Every head of state from all over the world would come to call on her, every president relied on her. She was absolutely the unifying force. Daniel Webster once said, “There’s no permanent power in Washington but Dolley Madison.”

DR: She was succeeded as first lady by Liza Monroe and then later Louisa Adams. Did they change very much what the first lady did?

CR: Liza Monroe was nowhere near as warm and loving as Dolley. Dolley Madison was just this unbelievably effusive person. Everybody loved her. Henry Clay said to her once, “Everybody loves Mrs. Madison,” and she said, “That’s because Mrs. Madison loves everybody.”

Now, I have read her mail. It’s not true, but that was how she portrayed herself. In his inaugural address Jefferson had said, “We’re all Federalists, we’re all Republicans,” which he didn’t mean for a minute. When Dolley left, the newspapers wrote that she gave meaning to that statement because no one could tell how she felt about things, she was so welcoming and so generous. But she was all the time working for her husband and for his reelection.

And if you think things are bad now in terms of press, when Jefferson was running for reelection, the newspapers wrote that he had pimped Dolley Madison and her sisters in exchange for votes in Congress. It was nasty stuff. And they wrote that she had unsexed Madison because she was so sexy. John Randolph, who was crazy as a coot, kept threatening to “reveal the men in her life” on the floor of the Senate, things like that.

DR: Moving forward to the Civil War period, what did James Buchanan, the only never-married president, do for a hostess? Did he have one?

CR: He actually had a very good hostess.

We had this period before Buchanan where we had a new president every few years. We had Zachary Taylor die after a year in office, and Millard Fillmore come in. Then Franklin Pierce comes into office, and his wife, Jane Pierce, was devastated because they had three children, two of whom had already died. Then, as they were coming to Washington for her to become first lady, their only surviving child was killed by a train, which she witnessed. And she understandably never got over it.

One of her husband’s best friends, Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote about “that death’s head in the White House,” so she didn’t get much sympathy. And so she didn’t preside over White House social events.

So Buchanan really was the first in a while to have a White House that had entertainment and brought the city in. His niece Harriet Lane was his hostess. She was the first person to be called, in the press, “First Lady.”

And she managed the first Prince of Wales visit. He went to Mount Vernon with her. Think of it—it was just his great-grandfather who had been defeated by George Washington, so it was very close in time to the Revolution.

The newspapers at the time are such fun to read. The Library of Congress has them online. Go to the Chronicling America website [URL: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/] and you can read all these newspapers from the time. It’s just wonderful.

The Prince of Wales goes to Mount Vernon, and the story says—it was ridiculously formal—“and they showed him the key to the Bastille, but he seemed much more interested in Miss Lane.”

DR: For those who have ever been to Johns Hopkins, you will know that the Children’s Center there is named the Harriet Lane Clinic in part because of the work she did at Johns Hopkins. Going forward to the next first lady, that was a woman named Mary Todd Lincoln. She was an easygoing person. Is that right?

CR: [Laughs.]

DR: Very easy to get along with?

Mary Todd Lincoln did not hide her political views or her likes and dislikes, a trait that likely contributed to her reputation as a “complicated” personality.

CR: Complicated lady.

DR: How did she change the first lady’s role?

CR: I don’t think she necessarily changed the role. She was more out-front than her predecessors about her political views and who she liked and didn’t like. I think a lot of the others had had the same kind of role, but she just made it known to everybody, and therefore made people unhappy.

DR: Including her husband at times.

CR: It was a true love match, but they were both difficult people.

You know, in doing these books, frankly, I really get to the point where I lose all patience with the men. Benjamin Franklin and his wife, Alexander Hamilton and his wife, and all that.

Abraham Lincoln I really like. I didn’t really know him until—well, of course I knew him, but I didn’t know know him until I wrote this last book, and I’ve come out of it liking him.

Part of the reason I like him is that he put up with her even as 100 percent crazy as she was. When she died, the obituaries of her said she was a wacko. Not good.

DR: Franklin went to London and Europe and in ten years didn’t come back and visit his wife. He was told his wife was going to die and he still didn’t come back.

CR: Think about it. What do we learn about Benjamin Franklin as children, other than the kite? We learn that he was postmaster general of the United States.

But he was not in the United States. He was in England. His wife, Deborah Franklin, ran the postal system and their businesses, which were basically franchise printing offices that went out to the frontier, which was Pittsburgh—which was far at the time. And he’s off in England having a wonderful time.

He’s the lobbyist for the Pennsylvania Colony in London, and his friends and neighbors feel that he does not sufficiently oppose the Stamp Act. They’re furious, and they come to burn down his house.

Everybody tells Deborah, “Get out! Get out! They’re about to burn down your house!” And she says, “I have not given anybody any offense.” She gets a gun and she gets some relatives, and they stave off the neighbors.

Ben writes to her and says, “Well done, Deborah. Thanks for saving the house.” But he still wouldn’t come home, although she’s begging him to.

Their only daughter gets married. He says, “Keep the wedding cheap.” He still doesn’t come home.

Finally, she dies, and he writes to friends and says, “My wife, in whose hands I have left the care of my affairs, has died, and so I have to go home.” Poor Ben.

Now, when he got home, I have to admit, he signed the Declaration of Independence and then he went back to France and forged the alliance that saved the war, so I can’t be totally mad at him. But he did not treat his family well.

DR: Of all the women you wrote about in your three books, which one would you say is the most impressive to you? Which one would you like to have met, and what would you ask that person if you could meet her?

CR: I’m not good at “most impressive” in the same way in modern times people always ask me, “Who’s your best interview?” I’m never able to answer that because people are so different from each other, and you learn different things from different people.

Some of these women are impressive in their ability to bring people together. Some of these women are impressive like Mercy Otis Warren with her propaganda and her ability to sway opinion. Some are impressive like Abigail Adams with their clear thinking. Different people do different things.

Deborah Franklin kept the family printing empire going while her husband pursued diplomatic (and romantic) affairs in Europe.

The one woman of the founding period that I’d like to just sit down to dinner with would be Sarah Livingston Jay, John Jay’s wife, who was just delightful. Her letters are funny and fun, and we have her menus, and they were good.