Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  After lunch their conversation turned to oil and investment plans for the postwar world. In March 1938 the Standard Oil Company of California (renamed Aramco in 1944) had discovered vast oil deposits in Saudi Arabia. Thereafter competition among oil interests had intensified, and Britain had achieved a regnant position, with dominant interests in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Bahrain. At the 1944 meeting Ibn Saud seemed to have bluntly asked FDR, “What am I to believe when the British tell me that my future is with them and not with America?” FDR replied that he envisioned the end of traditional colonialism and the creation of “spheres of influence in favor of the Open Door.” He hoped “the door of Saudi Arabia will be open . . . with no monopoly by anyone; for only by free exchange of goods, services and opportunities can prosperity circulate to the advantage of free peoples.” Ibn Saud agreed and hoped the United States would consider providing “material substance . . . for long range economic and political accords with Saudi Arabia to open up the Open Door.”

  The next day Ibn Saud met with Churchill. Where FDR had honored the king’s Wahhabi religious beliefs and neither smoked nor drank alcohol in his presence, Churchill puffed in Ibn Saud’s face and generally insulted him. “I have never met the equal of the President in character, wisdom and gentility,” the king subsequently confided to Colonel William Eddy. “. . . The contrast between the President and Mr. Churchill is very great. Churchill speaks deviously, evades understanding, changes the subject to avoid commitment. . . . The President seeks understanding . . . ; his effort is to make two minds meet; to dispel darkness and shed light.” Ibn Saud told many that his meeting with FDR was “the high point of my entire life.”

  Within months of FDR’s five-hour meeting with Ibn Saud, the United States replaced Britain as Saudi Arabia’s favored trading partner. The king affirmed the United States’ exclusive oil production rights and authorized Aramco to build a pipeline from Dhahran to the Mediterranean coast; he agreed to permit the U.S. Air Force to operate the air base it had built at Dhahran; and in 1946 he even accepted a U.S. Geological Survey team to search the desert for water and minerals.

  Churchill was furious that Britain’s oil arena no longer included Saudi Arabia. In his report to ER, FDR discussed his sense of victory over the prime minister. But he told her that “his one complete failure” concerned Palestine—which had been, ER believed, the initial reason for their visit. FDR imagined it would be easier to deal with the son, who succeeded him. But among his many wives were at least forty-nine sons. In the meantime, to avoid bloodshed, FDR decided to rethink U.S. policy concerning Palestine. His agreements with Ibn Saud regarding oil, military bases, pipelines, and Palestine were long-lasting and remained mostly unknown for decades.

  After FDR’s meetings with Ibn Saud, ER’s columns included many more references to B’nai B’rith, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and Hadassah. On 26 February she eulogized Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, who had died in Palestine on 13 February. ER, who had met with her several times, wrote: “Many people in this country loved and admired her, and through her leadership . . . 12,000 Jewish children have been rescued in Europe and given asylum in Palestine.” Her contributions would “live long into the future.”

  On 20 February, FDR’s journey home was rendered tragic when, Pa Watson died at sea of a cerebral hemorrhage. General Edwin Watson had been FDR’s closest military aide and companion. ER felt a great “personal loss” but also “a great anxiety about the effect [his death] would have on Franklin.” Daisy noted that “Franklin feels his death very much & will miss him dreadfully. He always leaned on him, both figuratively and physically. ‘Pa’ was a Rock, the only one of his aides who gave a feeling of security to FDR. . . . Always cheerful, ready with a joke, and completely and unselfishly devoted to FDR.” Everybody grieved for his widow, Frances Watson—“they were a very happy couple.” Pa’s death, followed by Harry Hopkins’s sudden departure from Algiers by plane due to his own illness, affected FDR badly, and put him in a somber mood.

  Upon his return to Washington on 28 February, FDR said he wanted to move on to big issues. He invited ER to join him in April in San Francisco to open the UN conference, which reflected her vision for world democracy. In his 1 March 1945 address to Congress, he affirmed:

  I come from the Crimean Conference with a firm belief that we have made a good start on the road to a world of peace. . . . The Conference . . . was a turning point in our history. . . . We shall have to take the responsibility for world collaboration, or we shall have to bear the responsibility for another world conflict. . . . [But] the three leading nations [at Yalta found] a common ground for peace. It spells the end of the system of unilateral action and exclusive alliances and spheres of influence and balances of power and all the other expedients which have been tried for centuries—and have always failed. We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join . . . [to discuss, debate and build a] better world.*

  ER was persuaded of FDR’s vision by the power of his rhetoric—and she was persuaded of his continuing good health by the power of denial. Almost everyone around FDR except ER worried about his health. Her husband seemed rested, she wrote to Joe, and looked ruddy. “He says he felt well all the time & he feels evidently that all went well” at Yalta. At the White House, ER’s friend Margaret Fayerweather asked ER about his “thin and worn and gray” appearance and his uncontrollably shaking hands. ER acknowledged that he wanted her to drive at Hyde Park, “which he never did before,” and that he “let her mix cocktails” when John Boettiger was out. But while she contemplated retirement, he said:

  “You know, Eleanor, I’ve seen so much now of the Near East and Ibn Saud and all of them, when we get through here . . . I’d like to go and live there. I feel quite an expert, I believe [with various irrigation and forestation projects] I could help to straighten out the Near East.” “Can’t you think of something harder to do?” I asked. “Well yes . . . it is going to be awfully hard to straighten out Asia, what with India and China and Thailand and Indo-China. I’d like to get into that.” Does that sound tired to you, Margaret?

  Slowly, reluctantly, ER faced the truth—he was exhausted and spent. “I found him less and less willing to see people,” and he had no patience for argument or debate: “For the first time I was beginning to realize that he could no longer bear to have a real discussion, such as we had always had.” One afternoon, during an argument with Harry Hooker, ER suddenly realized her husband was “upset” and “stopped at once.” It was a defining moment: FDR “was no longer the calm and imperturbable person who . . . had always goaded me on to vehement arguments” over policy and politics. She at last understood she had to face “the change which we were all so unwilling to acknowledge.”

  She was glad when he decided to spend April in Warm Springs, the place he always went to heal, with Polly Delano and Daisy Suckley, since “they would not bother him as I should have by discussing questions of state.” On 1 April, when she telephoned her husband, FDR seemed “settled in Warm Springs & the rest will do him good,” she told her aunt Maude Gray. “He should gain weight but he hates his food. I say a prayer daily that he may be able to carry on till we have peace and our feet are set in the right direction.” From Europe, Elliott cabled that Germany’s end seemed imminent, but her three boys in the Pacific were “not so optimistic.” ER worried about them all.

  She put her faith in the 25 April San Francisco meeting, which FDR had done so much to prepare for. At her press conference on 2 April, she confided that she was more excited and enthusiastic about the “great meeting at San Francisco to draft the UN Charter” than by “anything since early New Deal days.” Even Republican members of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, including Senator Arthur Vandenberg, known to hate FDR, were supportive. Of course, ER asserted, there are many differences around the world, which is why there are confe
rences and negotiations. “We are now talking about the world. Why should we all agree?” She wanted to see unions and corporations consider “world use, not world markets.” She wanted the needs of all people served, rather than limiting consideration to profits. The push to remove women from the workplace after the war outraged ER. Women were not only needed; they had rights. While they also required protection, she was now “in perfect sympathy” with the National Woman’s Party demand for equality and the Equal Rights Amendment.

  To promote the UN conference, ER traveled widely and spoke frequently. From Vermont and New Hampshire to North Carolina, on high school and college campuses, in community centers and before women’s groups, she championed the idea of world citizenship. She was particularly pleased to participate at a forum at New York’s Henry Street Settlement with Paul Kellogg and other veteran peace activists—where, she noted, the spirit of Lillian Wald continued. She held weekly meetings, dinners, and teas with wounded veterans from military posts like Forest Glen, Washington’s Rehabilitation Center, and she continued to protest discrimination in the military. She worked ever more intensely with Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Council of Negro Women, with Walter White and the NAACP.

  At Warm Springs, FDR decided to push for the end of colonialism, despite Churchill’s certain objection. He decided to liberate the Philippines. On 4 April, ER learned that her husband would meet the next day with Philippine president Sergio Osmeña to embark upon the path of immediate independence. She worried, since that was the one subject FDR had so often insisted she avoid, given the depths of Churchill’s wrath.

  Madame Pandit, Nehru’s sister, was increasingly popular with ER as well as her closest allies in the NAACP and among political women. Her brave and bold words were generating a movement to support independence and freedom for India. ER admired and agreed with her. They had first lunched together on 27 January, while FDR was en route to Yalta: ER wrote her husband that Madame Pandit was wise and did not agree with Churchill. All of Madame Pandit’s subsequent speeches and public events were stirring and important.

  On 1 March America’s Town Meeting of the Air hosted a nationally broadcast debate on “whether colonial empires were a threat to world peace.” Madame Pandit was allied with Owen Lattimore against the eminent British imperialists Robert Boothby and John W. Vandercook. Town Hall was packed, and millions of Americans listened by radio as Madame Pandit affirmed, “The postwar world cannot be built on old and rotten foundations. There must be a new concept in which all people can share.” A new world of peace would require the end of empire and a new world order to ensure “the progress of humanity.” The event stimulated anti-imperialist and antiracist meetings throughout the United States—Madame Pandit in specific partnership with the NAACP.

  Freedom for India had long been on ER’s agenda, and she supported the new alliance, but on 4 April she wrote Stettinius that she feared that Madame Pandit’s plans for San Francisco might enrage Churchill enough to endanger the UN conference. To protect and support her husband’s vision, she wondered if Madame Pandit and her delegation might somehow be stopped “so as not to stir up feelings against Great Britain.”

  Surely ER was relieved when on 7 April Stettinius rejected her idea, since the United States believed in freedom of speech, and his colleagues in the British Foreign Office were less disturbed. But her letter is a measure of how far she might juggle to support her husband’s priorities if the master juggler was unwell and unavailable.*

  While FDR was in Warm Springs, Elinor Morgenthau had a serious heart attack; ER’s three sons at sea in the Pacific had not written; and plans for San Francisco were still unfolding. On 8 April, after a pleasant late-night conversation, she wrote FDR, “Dearest Franklin, I was so weary last night . . . when you got me it was 10 our time & I was half asleep!” She and Tommy had spent two days at Hyde Park—repacking barrels of SDR’s crystal, china, silver, and family treasures to distribute to the children. “We ache from our unwonted exercise but we’ve had fun too! . . . Give my love to Laura & Margaret & I’m glad they will be along on the trip to San Francisco. Much love to you dear. . . . You sounded cheerful for the first time last night & I hope you’ll weigh 170 pounds when you return.” She did not know that those would be her last words to him.

  Comforted by Stettinius’s note, and eager to advance FDR’s commitment to colonial liberation and Philippine independence, ER wrote a vivid column to honor General Carlos Romulo. The International Board of the YMCA invited her to New York’s Cosmopolitan Club to hear General Romulo, resident commissioner of the Philippines, who had just returned from Manila and presented “perhaps one of the most interesting speeches on race relations that I have ever heard.” On this Bataan Day, 9 April, he praised American teachers as unique and “beloved.” U.S. policies enabled “75,000 Filipino soldiers [to fight] side by side with 9,000 American soldiers, and 18 million Filipino civilians were able to withstand Japanese propaganda and remain loyal to the United States and to their own freedom.” For three years, his wife and three sons had fled the Japanese invaders, moving around over miles of mountains and shoreline almost every day. He spoke of “a blond boy from Texas, fighting in the same foxhole with a dark-haired, brown-skinned Filipino. Both were killed by [a] Japanese bomb, and their life blood mingled together as it ebbed away.”

  On 11 April FDR worked on his Jefferson Day speech; it is unclear whether he read ER’s column, or whether ER knew that Henry Morgenthau visited Warm Springs that night. Morgenthau was “terribly shocked” by FDR’s “haggard” appearance but evidently was not surprised by Lucy Mercer’s presence at dinner, with her Russian artists friend Elizabeth Shoumatoff, who was there to do a second portrait of FDR. Dinner with the four ladies was pleasant, although Morgenthau was bothered by FDR’s memory loss, “and he was constantly confusing names.” They discussed Morgenthau’s plans to write a book about Germany after V-E Day, which FDR considered “a grand idea,” and he promised to contribute to it. Morgenthau argued that postwar Germany should be weak and pastoral. FDR was initially evasive but ultimately said, “Henry, I am with you 100 percent.” Polly Delano ordered them to desist their meeting in five minutes, whereupon “the four ladies” entered. When Morgenthau said good-bye, “they were sitting around laughing and chatting, and I must say the President seemed to be happy and enjoying himself.”

  Curiously, FDR and Morgenthau did not discuss the WRB’s rescue efforts. On 8 December, Soviet troops had entered Budapest, and they finally took the city on 13 February 1945. Thereafter Raoul Wallenberg, having heroically saved the lives of more than 100,000 Budapest Jews with the WRB, disappeared into the Soviet gulag, mysteriously taken prisoner by Soviet authorities. The Swedish legation in Budapest investigated his abduction, and Morgenthau joined the WRB/State Department effort. FDR was not involved or perhaps not even informed.*

  On the morning of 12 April ER’s press conference focused on plans for the UN and her thoughts about the controversies regarding Germany and V-E Day, since victory in Europe seemed imminent. She explained that once “real knowledge” of conditions in Germany was obtained, and a United Nations Organization was formed, all forty-four nations would participate in decisions: “We have to get over [our] habit to consider only what we will do. . . . We will have the United Nations Organization so all the world’s opinion” would be considered.

  Not for some time would ER learn the conditions that U.S. troops discovered when they liberated the death camps at Nordhausen, Ohrdruf, and Buchenwald. On the same day as ER’s press conference, General Eisenhower toured Ohrdruf and Buchenwald with Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton. On 15 April, the British reached Bergen-Belsen, and within days the United States entered Dachau, ten miles from Munich. Never again, ER wrote, could the world live on an island of contentment “in a sea of misery.” Our consciences against moral wrongs would have to be aroused to activism before it was too late. In this case, we did not stand up “against somethin
g we knew was wrong. We have [to] avenge it—but we did nothing to prevent it.”

  After her press conference, ER met briefly at the White House with Charles Taussig, a State Department adviser to the San Francisco delegation, whom both FDR and ER trusted. He wanted her advice on FDR’s trusteeship policy. Their conversation was interrupted by an urgent call from Warm Springs: FDR had “fainted,” Polly Delano said. ER called Dr. McIntire, who was not alarmed and suggested she go to her scheduled address at the Sulgrave Club and leave with him later. There Steve Early called and asked her to return immediately. “I did not even ask why. . . . In my heart I knew what had happened, but one does not actually formulate these terrible thoughts until they are spoken.” In ER’s sitting room, with Anna and John Boettiger, Early said that “the President had slipped away.” She cabled her sons: HE DID HIS JOB TO THE END AS HE WOULD WANT YOU TO DO! Harry Truman was summoned to the White House, and ER told him, “Harry, the President is dead.” There was a moment of silence, and then Harry asked ER: “Is there anything I can do for you?” She replied: “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.”

  Shortly after Harry S. Truman took the oath of office, ER, Early, and Dr. McIntire flew to Warm Springs. They arrived before midnight and made funeral arrangements with Grace Tully, Polly Delano, and Daisy Suckley. ER, Hassett, Steve Early, and others “decided what to do,” said Daisy. “The undertakers waited. We leave at ten tomorrow morning. ER sent us off to bed . . . even if we don’t sleep.”