The question between Palestine and the Arabs, of course, has always been complicated by the oil deposits, and I suppose it always will. . . .
Lastly, I am deeply troubled about China. Unless we can stop the civil war there by moral pressure and not by the use of military force, and insist that Generalissimo Chiang give wider representation to all Chinese groups . . . I am very much afraid that continued war there may lead us to general war again.
Being a strong nation and having the greatest physical, mental and spiritual strength today, gives us a tremendous responsibility. We cannot use our strength to coerce, but if we are big enough, I think we can lead.
Their robust correspondence forged an alliance. Truman said he trusted her judgment and relied on her advice. He was so pleased by some of her columns he had them entered in the Congressional Record. Nevertheless she was amazed when Truman called her Washington Square apartment to appoint her to the U.S. delegation for the first session of the United Nations General Assembly in London.
Initially, she hesitated and demurred, saying she knew nothing about international affairs or parliamentary procedure. Her friends and family reminded her of all her previous contributions, and although she still felt “very inadequate,” she accepted Truman’s offer. Only Senator Theodore Bilbo (D-MS) voted against her confirmation.
She would lend considerable dash to the bipartisan and rather conservative first UN team. Former secretary of state Edward Stettinius was designated principal representative to the Security Council. The other members were Senator Tom Connally (D-TX), chair of the Foreign Relations Committee; Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI); and Secretary of State James Byrnes, whom she had distrusted and disliked for many years. In addition there were five alternates: John Foster Dulles, a Wall Street lawyer and veteran Republican diplomat who had been at Versailles with Wilson and served as an adviser to the drafting conference for the UN Charter at San Francisco in April 1945; Representative Sol Bloom (D-NY), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Representative Charles Eaton (R-NJ); former postmaster general Frank Walker; and former senator John Townsend, now chair of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee.
By appointing ER to the U.S. delegation to the UN, President Truman gave her the chance to fight for her vision of the future from an official position of leadership for over six years. She considered her appointment a great victory for women and a great opportunity. She would lobby and cajole, compromise and go to battle. She would be an earnest diplomat who frequently succeeded. When she lost, she would return fighting. Convinced that pessimism was politically incorrect, she would never give up.
ER sailed on the Queen Elizabeth on 30 December 1945.
• • •
Before she left for London, ER requested that the friends and allies she had depended upon for information and advice for decades send her suggestions. As she sailed across the ocean, she studied their reports.
Carrie Chapman Catt wrote that as far as she was concerned, women wanted peace: “War must be abolished. During the last two thousand years nearly every war has developed new and more destructive weapons. . . . The cost of the war just closed, for the first time, will be counted in trillions. Since wars have thus increased their wickedness and destruction . . . no nation which calls itself civilized should consider [this] question . . . debatable.”
Walter White, Mary McCleod Bethune, and Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois sent her the “desires of American Negroes,” which included the abolition of the entire colonial system, citing it as one of the chief causes of war, poverty, and disease; a world campaign of education for the uneducated colonial and other peoples; a world campaign to utilize all the resources of science, government, and philanthropy to abolish poverty for all people in our time; freedom for the native people of South Africa; democracy for China; withdrawal of recognition of Franco’s Spain.
Esther Lape sent ER a list of very practical concerns. “The important thing about the UNO will be who makes the agenda. . . . An international debating society is some good; but not much. It won’t avert wars.
Many international questions require domestic legislation. For example: How could we be a parry to international agreements regarding refugees so long as we keep our immigration quota system . . . which is really an incorporation of racial discrimination. How could we be a party to international agreements designed to make the raw materials of the earth more equitably available (and this is one of the promises of the Atlantic Charter) unless we are prepared to transfer to an international economic and scientific and allocating body the resources we now hold under strong national possessive control.
Lape was convinced that national legislation would be forthcoming if and when international agreements required it, especially laws concerning “raw materials, trade routes and policies, citizenship, immigration (which can no longer be a purely national question).” Moreover, economic issues were key, and the problem was less “what authority is to handle the atomic bomb” than how we “handle the economic questions that produce the wars of which the atomic bomb is a final form. . . . I hope all of your magnificent courage will be expended in this direction.”
Much alone aboard the Queen Elizabeth, she was surprised during one afternoon walk to be stopped by Senator Vandenberg, who “said in his rather deep voice, ‘we would like to know if you would serve on Committee 3,’” the social, humanitarian, and cultural committee. ER wondered why that decision was made without her but assumed that the men, who clearly resented her presence, had decided it was an appropriate place for a woman, and not especially important. But on the voyage out she remembered that she enjoyed a good fight, and that she was prepared to compete.
Once they were all in London, her competitive instincts would serve her well regarding the men of her delegation. Unused to a woman participating in decision making on important international issues, her colleagues met without her and awarded the tougher tasks to themselves. John Foster Dulles, for one, sat on the Trusteeship Committee, which negotiated the future of League of Nations–mandated territories and the controversial new U.S. trust territories in the Pacific—the Caroline and Marshall islands, which the United States had taken over as military bases and subsequently used as atomic test sites.
ER was puzzled by Dulles’s apparent unconcern regarding South Africa’s refusal to discuss conditions in its territories. She protested his calm and pointed out that the Union of South Africa clearly “believed a government had the right to discriminate in any way against any part of its population.” She thought the United States should support changes to “improve the colonies,” whether South African or British. Indeed, she noted, conditions in “places where the UK had been for a hundred years” were dreadful, and she “could not help wondering what the UK had been doing there for a hundred years.” ER sought a full discussion, but Dulles disagreed.
In London at meetings of the U.S. delegation, her convictions frequently got nowhere. Her male colleagues regarded her as an interloper and treated her with crude misogyny. They tried to use the old boys’ ploy of listening politely to the lone woman in the room, then moving on—never addressing her words, however apt or significant. Even in the official publication of State Department papers, Foreign Relations of the United States, references to ER bear a tone of lofty condescension within otherwise colorless reports. Her voice is reported to have been shrill; she was called strident and schoolmarmish.
But she was insistent and would not be ignored. She banged the table and repeated her words, patiently and frequently, until they were acknowledged. Undoubtedly it drove her colleagues, especially John Foster Dulles, wild. And when the delegation failed to listen, she could take her perceptions to the public. The world’s press was more interested in her views than in theirs. Day after day her words were quoted in newspaper articles, while she expressed her views directly in her daily column, her own radio program and those of others, and the Voice of America. She was a pol
itical pro, agile at the political game as well as the game of nations.
ER was happy to hear the news that Norway’s Trygve Lie was elected secretary general. He was a compromise candidate whom the United States and the USSR could agree upon. But she was critical of her fellow delegates as self-involved, legalistic, and wordy beyond belief. They strutted and preened, generally careless about the sensibilities of other countries—she was frankly surprised at how undiplomatic some diplomats could be. They seemed to her without serious convictions and in many ways thoughtless: “I like the Vandenbergs more than I do the Connallys but I don’t like any of them much.” She was somewhat appalled at Senator Connally’s initial response to England during the drive to London: He “kept repeating: ‘Where is all this destruction I’ve heard so much about, things look all right to me.’ I started to point out bombed spots but soon found he just wasn’t interested.”
ER appraised her colleagues most explicitly in a letter to Elinor Morgenthau: Senator Arthur Vandenberg “is smart & hard to get along with and does not say what he feels. Byrnes is much too small for the job & . . . can never give any inspiration. . . . Tom Connally is nicer than I thought but he has no real sensitivity. . . . J. Foster Dulles I like not at all.”
ER was more impressed with the State Department staff—Alger Hiss, Dr. Ralph Bunche, Adlai Stevenson, Ben Cohen, and Durward Sandifer. They had influence and a sense of responsibility, and she regularly spoke with them at length: “I said many things which I hope go back to the Secretary and the President.” But she was critical of James Byrnes, whom she had disliked for years.*
She reported in her London Diary, “The papers should not be pessimistic, progress is being made here. Vandenberg and Dulles are largely responsible for pessimism, I think. These representatives of ours do not build friendships for us. . . . They have no confidence so they are rude and arrogant and create suspicion. Honesty with friendliness [is needed,] but they haven’t the technique.” By contrast, ER had faith in the importance of personal diplomacy. Face-to-face contacts mattered:
At the Assembly sessions, our delegation is seated next to the Russians. On the first day I was delighted to find that next to me was V. V. Kuznetsov, president of the All Union Council of Trade Unions of the USSR. He greeted me in a most friendly fashion, and I remembered that he had come to my apartment in NY one afternoon to interpret for a group of Russian women, part of a workers’ delegation. . . . It’s funny how a little opportunity like this of seeing someone in your own home, even for a little while, makes you feel much more friendly.
ER worked long and exhausting days, as she wrote on 31 January:
Yesterday was the usual pattern. 9:30 delegates meeting; at office, 10:30 committee meeting. Ate and dictated column, saw a doctor on national health organization, went to BBC and did two recordings, one for Infantile [Paralysis] and one for American Broadcasting program. Had tea for a Swedish woman and a Jewish refugee; went to Port of London Authority tea and Turkish Embassy. Frieda Miller dined with me and I had all the women delegates here in my room.
She was pleased that eighteen women, including the Soviet delegate, accepted this first of her many invitations.
Other days were packed with social events about which ER wrote very little. Her London diary for 23 January, for example, included these tantalizing details: “The afternoon session was cancelled,” so she saw many people, including her young friend Louise Morley and the suffragist and peace activist Lady Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence (“nice old lady”), who arrived with her houseguest, the U.S. feminist Betty Gram Swing (“very high powered”). They arrived to try “to persuade me” to support the establishment of the Commission on the Status of Women at the UN. Although “non-committal,” ER promised to “look into it.”*
That evening ER dined at the home of Vera Brittain and her husband, George Catlin: “A pleasant dinner, usual three courses and a very cold house. Lots of people in afterwards.” One can only wonder about ER’s conversation with Brittain, the most severe critic of mass bombings and atomic weapons, whose pacifist-feminist-socialist books and articles had generated vigorous opposition. ER considered her first international assignment a remarkable learning experience. “It is a liberal education in background and personalities” to meet people with vast differences in vision and goals.
Constrained by State Department protocol and advice, ER was far less free than she had hoped to be. Nevertheless, she had much to contribute since her committee was concerned with all issues relating to human rights, fundamental freedoms, social progress, and world development. It was the committee that witnessed the first substantial confrontation between the United States and the USSR relating to refugees. Thirteen million displaced persons remained in temporary German domiciles and camps after V-E Day—“Ukrainians, Belorussians, Poles, Czechoslovaks, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and others . . . because they did not want to return to live under Communist rule. . . . There also were the pitiful Jewish survivors of the German death camps,” unwanted everywhere, with no haven in sight.
ER’s opponent on the issue was the formidable Andrei Vishinsky, Stalin’s chief prosecutor in the Moscow purge trials. The Russians accused Western propagandists of fomenting fear and hatred of the Soviet Union in the DP camps, discouraging Central European refugees from returning to their homelands now under Soviet rule. The Russians claimed that those who refused to return were quislings, traitors, and fascists.
ER, outraged by that accusation, called for universal recognition of the right of political asylum and freedom of movement. In a momentous speech to the General Assembly, she asked if the Soviets would really prefer to see “political refugees forcibly repatriated to Franco’s Spain?” Eager to achieve the support of “our South American colleagues,” she spoke about the great liberator Simón Bolívar “and his stand for the freedom of the people of Latin America.” It worked, and the General Assembly voted for the right of refugees to choose their destinations. The victory was, however, a hollow one: no Western European country, nor Canada or the United States, welcomed the refugees, and Britain prohibited additional Jews from going to Palestine. The fight at the UN continued for years, while the refugees languished in camps.
ER’s capacity to debate and best the Soviets pleased her State Department advisers and impressed even her Republican colleagues. At one in the morning, after exhausting meetings, she encountered Vandenberg and Dulles on the steps of the Claridge’s Hotel. They told her frankly that they had been appalled by her appointment and had done “all we could to keep you off the United States delegation.” They wanted now to acknowledge that they “found [her] good to work with. And we will be happy to do so again.” ER noted in her diary, “So—against odds, the women move forward, but I’m rather old to be carrying on this fight!”
Despite her debates with Vishinsky, she made every effort to remain cordial with him and with the increasingly combative Soviet delegation. ER had met Ambassador Andrei Gromyko in Washington. Now during these meetings she “had the pleasure of sitting next to him at lunch. All these little contacts do develop better understanding,” she concluded.
Personal diplomacy and institutional processes were needed to secure the future peace. She was gratified that fifteen “well distributed” judges were elected to the International Court of Justice, representing the United States, the UK, Russia, France, China, Belgium, Norway, Yugoslavia, Poland, Egypt, Canada, Mexico, Chile, and El Salvador. Since her post–World War I efforts to secure U.S. adherence to the World Court had failed, she was particularly pleased with the willingness of these nations to deal seriously with the hardest political questions. She hoped that spirit of cooperation could be maintained.
As the UN’s first session came to an end, ER was optimistic. The greatest accomplishment, she wrote, was that “at the end we still are a group of 58 nations working together.” The United States had not been in the League of Nations, but it was in the UN, and from the begi
nning Republicans and Democrats actively participated. She was also pleased that the UN decided to locate its permanent headquarters in the United States. As international host, the American public, ER believed, would be more responsive to it and actively support this “last and best hope for our civilization.”
• • •
After the first session ended, ER toured the devastated European continent. She wrote in My Day that she dreaded the journey, knowing that the tragic sights would “fill our souls.” In Germany, she visited two camps for displaced persons. At Zeilsheim, a camp for Jewish DPs, she answered their greetings “from an aching heart” and wondered, “When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?” One man told her that his entire family had been “made into soap.” She met a boy of ten who looked six, who “had wandered into camp one day with his brother, so he was the head of his family” and “the camp singer.”
He sang for me—a song of his people—a song of freedom. Your heart cried out that there was no freedom—and where was hope, without which human beings cannot live? There is a feeling of desperation and sorrow in this camp which seems beyond expression. An old woman knelt on the ground grasping my knees. I lifted her up, but could not speak. What could one say in the end of a life which had brought her such complete despair?
“Israel,” she murmured, over and over. “Israel! Israel!”
As I looked at her weather beaten face . . . I knew for the first time what that small land meant to so many.
From Zeilsheim, ER went to Wiesbaden and visited a camp of “Poles and Balts,” refugees from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. “These are refugees who, because of political differences with their present governments, cannot see their way to return to their own countries, and yet they fought against the Nazis, and many of them spent long years in concentration or forced labor camps.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3 Page 68