A TIME 100 Symposium

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KEARNS-GOODWIN: [unintelligible].

CUOMO: No, no, no, I'm still John the 23rd.

[Laughter.]

RATHER: When I mentioned Churchill you said we were going to discuss foreign leaders later on. As far as I know [unintelligible].

[Simultaneous conversation.]

ROSE: We are also going to discuss religion later. Let me just come to a Republican, two Republicans but first one that that you have occasionally spoken well of and just put it in the context even though he might not be your choice for number one, Richard Nixon, for greatness.

ROSE: And wait, wait, in pursuit of my question, Lincoln is not a candidate because he was not of this century.

CUOMO: I'll, I'll, I'll settle for John the 23rd, not Paul the II, Pope John the 23rd, who introduced Tiard to the world, Tiard de Chardin, who allowed him to publish and who created a whole new theology that said, in effect, this whole world is good. God didn't make it as a cruel joke. And if you want t make the most of it then you have to get everybody participating, the poor, the rich and the one in between. And if you leave anybody out of your universal plan then you fail and you cannot claim greatness.

ROSE: All right, let me, let me urge —

CUOMO: —John the 23rd —

ROSE: Okay, John the 23rd —

CUOMO: —who altered, who fired the Vatican Council, yes. And then Roosevelt a distant second.

[Laughter]

ROSE: Condoleezza?

RICE: Well, I think there may be a reason that the American money says, In God We Trust. I'm not certain, governor, that one looks to political leaders for questions of why am I here? I really do think that there may be a reason that political leaders tend to draw on theological strengths or even linkages to theology when they seek to, to answer great moral questions. If I look at someone like Martin Luther King, going back, I was recently at a Martin Luther King celebration and someone made the point that we've tried very hard to divorce King from his religious roots to make him a secular leader when, in fact, he was someone who was very, very grounded in his religious roots. So, I'm not certain that political leaders provide the answers to the kinds of big questions that you're putting on the table.

ROSE: Let me, let me —

RICE: They're most often people of modest means in that way.

CUOMO: Well, you see it as a theological question or a religious one, I don't. The first question is, why do we have a national government? What is it's role? Simply to save us in a war? Or to take land from other nations? Or is it to secure a better future? What does promote the common welfare mean in our Constitution? When do you have a perfect union in the language of the Constitution? Should our national obligation to be to empower as many people as possible or simply to let the strongest of us go as far as we can? That is the essential political issue. Now, forget about God. Assume atheism, ethical humanism, secularism, forget about religion, that's why I never talk about it or morality in a political context because it's too easy to escape the ultimate political question which is, what are we doing under the government? What is the government's obligation? Should it help poor people? Should it help disabled people who cannot give you anything back? That's not a religious question, that's the ultimate political question.

KEARNS-GOODWIN: But once you put that question on the table I cannot understand why you don't feel more enthusiastic about Franklin Roosevelt. Look, here's a man —

CUOMO: I made him second to John the 23rd, that's pretty good.

KEARNS-GOODWIN: No, no, he's got to come up that distance. I want to, I want to help bring him up [unintelligible].

CUOMO: Doris, I'm thinking about futures. In the future, I'm going to need John the XXIII more than Roosevelt.

[Laughter]

KEARNS-GOODWIN: I've always had that problem, you're probably right. But, look, Roosevelt —

ROSE: You want everybody on your side, don't you?

[Laughter]

KEARNS-GOODWIN: When Roosevelt comes in we have a pyramidal society. Most of the people are poor, there's a few people at the top that are rich. Through a series of his policies he puts government on the side of the ordinary citizen, a middle class is formed at the end of that war. And he somehow regulated capitalism. He gets that stock market regulated. He's the first person really that helps to put government, Lincoln does in the 19th century but in a very different way. And the only thing I'd add to Roosevelt that might help bring him along for you is that you can't talk about Franklin without talking about Eleanor. Here's Eleanor, the first First Lady who is a voice for people without access to power, the first person to have a syndicated column, the first person to have weekly press conferences, where only women reporters could come. So, a whole generation of newspapers had to hire their first woman reporter so somebody could come to Eleanor's conferences. She concerned herself with what should be done, he was what could be done but together they made a team that changed the face of America and forever altered the debate about what government could or could not do. No matter what's been tried in these last couple of decades, some of the fundamental foundations that Roosevelt's New Deal provided for government are still standing.

ROSE: Did that relationship become what it was after she in a sense made some judgments about the nature of the marriage so that she became more of a partner than a wife?

KEARNS-GOODWIN: Well, the irony is there's no question that their partnership, their political partnership was born in many ways of the pain of her discovery when they were married 12 years that he was having a relationship with another woman named Lucy Mercer. She said the bottom dropped out of her world when she read a series of love letters from Lucy to her husband but once they agreed to stay together in marriage she then went outside the marriage to find fulfillment and she found out that she had a whole series of talents she never knew before for public speaking, for articulating. She became Eleanor Roosevelt and no question she affected his presidency in a positive way. Without him she wouldn't have had the platform, without her he wouldn't have had the idealism he did.