Preserving Social Security, the Legacy of Frances Perkins- Kirstin Downey and Dr. Chris Breiseth
On Wednesday, July 20, 2011 at 12:00 Noon, I will be hosting my show The Advocates on WVOX- 1460 AM, my guests are Dr. Chris Breiseth and journalist, author and historian Kirstin Downey.
Dr. Christopher N. Breiseth is the immediate past president and CEO of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, which is located at the FDR Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York. He served in that position from 2001 to 2008. He was president of Deep Springs College in California from 1980 to 1983 and of Wilkes University from 1984 to 2001. He earned his B.A. in history at UCLA, a Masters of Literature in Modern British History from Oxford and a Ph.D. in European History from Cornell. While at Cornell, he lived at the Telluride House, where Frances Perkins was a guest, for the last five years of her life, while she was teaching at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Together, Breiseth and Miss Perkins organized two seminars for house members, one with Henry A. Wallace, the other with James Farley. Following Miss Perkins's death in 1965, Breiseth wrote an article, "The Frances Perkins I Knew," which provides some of the material on Frances Perkins's life at Telluride House for Kirstin Downey's book, "The Woman Behind the New Deal." The article is available on line. He also served for a year and a half in 1967 and 1968 as Chief of Policy Guidance for the Community Action Program which was part of the Office of Economic Opportunity, President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. He is married to Jane Morhouse Breiseth and they have three daughters and two grandchildren.
Kirstin Downey recently completed a stint as the lead writer of the report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a New York Times bestseller. She wrote the book's first chapter, which detailed the many warnings that were issued to business executives and government officials about the looming problems in the mortgage market, but which were ignored. Ms. Downey is the author of "The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins," which was published in 2009, and was named one of the best biographies of the year by the American Library Association, Library of Congress and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. She is currently at work on a biography of Queen Isabella, which will by published by Random House in 2013. Ms. Downey was a reporter for The Washington Post from 1988 to 2008, winning press association awards for her business and economic reporting. She shared in the 2008 Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Post staff for its coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. In 2000, she was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia with her husband Neil Warner Averitt and their five children.
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