I was the adoring son of a Welsh-Irish father, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a Catholic Knight of Columbus who was a blue-collar, trade union organizer and, not surprisingly, a fervid Nixon-hater.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I come from a blue-collar, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats.
It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution.
My own special relationship with America began at an early age. My father, a fellow journalist, named me after Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
There might well have been an Irish great-great-grandfather of mine back then in the 1800s.
My mother was a Northern woman, daughter of Hon. John Sergeant, a distinguished lawyer, and for many years representative in Congress from Philadelphia.
My father was a statesman, I am a political woman. My father was a saint. I am not.
I was raised in a very blue-collar family.
And my father, after all, was a nationalist.
From the year of his birth in 1914 until the outbreak of war in 1941, my father lived in a mostly white, mostly working-class, mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.
My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.