Eleanor

by Joseph P. Lash

  I was deeply proud of our Secretary of State today as he welcomed the delegates to the UN General Assembly. His speech was temperate in tone, honest and forthright. No one could be with Secretary Marshall and not recognize the integrity of the man and his deep convictions. He is a good democrat in the best sense of the word, and he wants to get on with the business of creating a peaceful world in which you and I and all the people can have a chance for a better life.40

  The next day Andrei Vishinsky mounted the high podium in Flushing Meadow to present Russia’s position. The first part of his speech she considered a clever bit of obfuscation on the disarmament issue; but that was overshadowed by the second part, which was “unbelievable.” Dulles was so outraged by Vishinsky’s attacks that he began to splutter audibly and General Marshall had asked her to please calm him down. The general did not mind the invective because it would solidify the public behind him, which might otherwise have been confused by the sophistries on disarmament. Afterward, members of the delegation speculated about the meaning of Vishinsky’s approach. Adlai Stevenson, an alternate delegate, thought it might be a prelude to a Soviet withdrawal from the UN. Chip Bohlen did not. It was obvious, as she spoke of these matters to friends, that she was pleased to be included in the discussions of high policy.41

  “At the Cabinet luncheon today,” Robert Hannegan wrote her when the 1947 Assembly was at midpoint, “General Marshall was emphatic in his praise of you—he was almost dramatic in recounting his experience in New York; he said that while his duties in New York were difficult, the most intelligent, cooperative and effective assistance came from Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.”42

  She found working with Marshall “a very rewarding experience.” For the first time she was getting a real knowledge of the inner workings of the State Department, and of the various cliques in it. Byrnes had kept her on the periphery, but Marshall consulted her regularly and had her present at the small meetings. One of the first problems the delegation faced was which Slav nation to support to succeed Poland on the Security Council. The USSR had proposed the Ukrainian SSR to which the United States refused to agree. Vishinsky had then proposed Czechoslovakia, but her representatives had come privately to beg the United States not to support her, since as a member of the Council, she would have to line up with the Soviets. Mrs. Roosevelt felt, as did Marshall, that Czechoslovakia’s wishes should be respected; but advisers like Chip Bohlen were all for forcing Czechoslovakia to get off the fence. Mrs. Roosevelt considered this attitude a blunder, but all of Marshall’s top advisers supported the Bohlen position. And even if the secretary agreed with her, she pointed out, could he go against their recommendation?43

  The 1947 General Assembly session did much to persuade her that Russia interpreted efforts to take account of her anxieties as weakness rather than as a desire for friendly relations. In October the Cominform, successor to the Comintern, was established. She had never believed that the Comintern had ceased to function. “There were too many signs throughout the world of activity that was well directed and unified.” She thought the Cominform manifesto a warmongering document because it arbitrarily divided the world into two camps and denounced “concessions to the United States of America and the imperialist camp” as a form of Munich-like appeasement. She found it “strange” that the Wallace liberals and the Cominform parties “are condemning with one voice the Marshall proposals!”44

  The 1947 Assembly brought a return engagement with Vishinsky, who pictured American defense of freedom of the press as a defense of warmongering. “I found myself in the absurd position of defending the Chicago Tribune,” she wrote afterward:

  I defended that paper, certainly not because I either agree with or believe most of the things which it stands for, but because I think we should defend the right of all individuals to their freedom of thought and speech.45

  In her rebuttal of Vishinsky in Committee III she noted that the author of the pamphlet cited by the Russians in their attack upon the “monopolistic” American press was “one of our American Communists.” The fact that “we allow American Communists freedom to print what they want to say in criticism of this country” demonstrated that the United States had freedom of the press. She was still reluctant to end on a polemical note. Despite a basic difference in philosophies, “we must work together; growing apart is not going to help us.”46

  She had not wholly abandoned the idea of a trip to Russia. Her Ladies’ Home Journal publishers, Beatrice and Bruce Gould, reported to her that when they had applied for a visa at the Soviet consulate, they were told, “Now if you would get Mrs. Roosevelt to go over with you, there would be no trouble at all about visas or interviewing Stalin.” The Czechs were also anxious for her to visit them, she informed Marshall. A visit to Czechoslovakia would be worthwhile, he replied, but it might acquire a different significance if she only visited Prague, and he feared that a visit to Moscow might be subject to exploitation both by Soviet and Republican propagandists. In view of his doubts, she decided not to make the trip. “In fact, I am relieved at not having to go, but I felt it my duty to make the inquiry if I could in any way be helpful.”47

  Nine days later, February 24, 1948, an armed Communist coup ended Czech democracy and independence and led to the death, either by murder or suicide, of her old friend Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk. On top of these sinister events came the chilling top-secret telegram from Gen. Luicius Clay, chief of U.S. occupation forces in Germany, in which he stated that he was no longer able to advise Washington “that war was unlikely for at least ten years. Within the last few weeks, I have felt a subtle change in Soviet attitudes which I cannot define but which now gives me a feeling that it may come with dramatic suddenness.” The shock waves of the ensuing war scare in Washington reached Mrs. Roosevelt. On March 13, she wrote Marshall an alarmed letter. She was becoming “more and more worried.” She urged a peace mission of a “picked group” that would sit down with Great Britain and Russia “around a table before we actually get to a point where we are in a war.”

  You say the situation is serious and any one can see that we can not let the USSR go on pulling coups in one country after another. It looks as though Sweden and Norway were pretty worried as to whether they will not be treated to the same kind of “invitation” that Finland has had, and certainly it will not be very difficult to pull a coup off in Italy. . . .

  I am sure that we have not been blameless and probably the Russians think we have done some things against them. I am sure they believe we are trying to build up Germany again into an industrial state. I some times wonder if behind our backs, that isn’t one of the things that our big business people would like to see happen in spite of two World Wars started by Germany.

  If war comes and this final effort has not been made, I am afraid the people of this country are not going to feel that we have done all that we should have done to try to find a solution to the deteriorating situation between ourselves and the USSR.48

  She sent to President Truman a copy of her letter to Marshall, saying,

  I do not think I have been as alarmed before but I have become very worried and since we always have to sit down together when war comes to an end, I think before we have a third World War, we should sit down together.

  You and the Secretary must feel the rest of us are a nuisance. Nevertheless, as a citizen I would not have a clear conscience if I did not tell you how I feel at the present time.49

  Truman replied on the sixteenth, Marshall a day later. The president reviewed the record of agreements broken by the Russians. He thought Soviet aggressiveness was fed by a belief that Wallace would win the presidency in 1948 and if that did not end the U.S. policy of firmness, a depression would. The only hopes for peace rested in the European Recovery Program and in U.S. military build-up. “I am as much concerned as you are,” Marshall wrote Mrs. Roosevelt, “as much troubled, and I am seeking in every way to find a solution which will avoid the great catastrophe of war. It is evident that we canno
t sit quiet in this situation and also that mere words get us nowhere at this time.” He was “terribly disturbed over the rapid growth of a highly emotional feeling in this country which runs to extremes, yet at the same time something must be done.” He was sending Bohlen to talk with her about her suggestion of a “picked group” to sit down with the Russians. Evidently the suggestion interested the administration. It surfaced in abortive form in the 1948 election when Truman announced that he was sending Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson to Moscow, a suggestion that was dropped when Secretary Marshall opposed it and it was widely criticized as a campaign gesture. “Truman’s last move on Vinson and the resulting publicity have been very bad,” she wrote. Bernard Baruch, an old friend, informed her that he had known about her proposal to send a peace mission to Moscow as early as last spring. It

  made good sense then. When I was told about it this time (and it was even suggested that I be on it) I said it was impossible in the present circumstances, and as far as I was concerned, I would not go for it would be by-passing and destroying the usefulness of the UN. The proper person to make the statement, or undertake any discussion now, is either the President or General Marshall.50

  Mrs. Roosevelt received this letter in Paris, where she was attending the General Assembly. There was nothing like daily contact with the Russians to quench hopes of an easing of tension. “The Russians attack verbally in every committee,” she wrote.

  They seem to want to see nothing accomplished until one wonders whether they should be banned from contacts until they want them enough to try to cooperate.51

  She took General and Mrs. Marshall to Les Porque-rolles, a little restaurant she had discovered on the Left Bank:

  I like him so much & he is a strong person, but I fear very tired.

  Russia’s attitude is discouraging & Marshall I think believes it is a case of outstaying & outbluffing your adversary but the stake of war is such a high one that this game cannot be played lightheartedly.52

  “It is sad, dear,” she wrote a friend a few weeks later,

  but I think it will take a long time to get real understanding with the USSR government. It will be the result of long & patient work. Their government & its representatives think differently. They will have to reach a higher standard of living & not be afraid to let others in & their own out before we can hope for a change.53

  She had begun her career at the United Nations bending over backward to show the Russians she was ready to meet them halfway. By 1949 she was stating publicly she would “never again” compromise, “even on words. The Soviets look on this as evidence of weakness rather than as a gesture of good will.” When State Department counselor Ben Cohen expressed misgivings about statements that implied it was impossible to get along with the Russians, she replied, “But we have to win the cold war.” “The only way to win the cold war,” he counseled her, “is to end it.” And, of course, basically she agreed with him, even though the Russians, who had begun by courting her as FDR’s widow, now denounced her as a “hypocritical servant of capitalism. . .a fly darkening the Soviet sun.” Vishinsky was even heard, in the heat of the 1948 debate, to characterize her as a meddling old woman, which reminded one observer of Stalin’s reported threat to appoint someone else Lenin’s widow “if that old woman doesn’t shut up.” “There is no doubt,” commented author-reporter Elizabeth Janeway, after observing Mrs. Roosevelt at the United Nations, “he would like to have the power to appoint someone else Franklin D. Roosevelt’s widow.”54

  In September, 1949, President Truman disclosed that “within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.” There was little danger of war, Mrs. Roosevelt reassured friends. She did not believe Russia had a stockpile of bombs, certainly not one as large as that of the United States. But then she added, and it was a measure of how completely Russia had alienated this woman of good will, that it would do well to be more on the alert than ever in order to avoid another Pearl Harbor, this time with atom bombs.55

  * Wallace released this letter to the press on September 17, 1946.

  † Douglas, who had resigned from the Roosevelt administration in 1934 in protest against its spending policies, had been named ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s.

  ‡ John Foster Dulles, who had accompanied Gen. George C. Marshall to Moscow and with whom she corresponded about the inclusion of Soviet Russia in an over-all economic aid program, shared her uneasiness about the negative stress of U.S. policy. He sent her an advance copy of an address that he was to deliver at Northwestern University, “which seeks to clarify our national attitude in certain respects where it seems to be unduly aggressive and imperialistic.” She was interested. “It makes me want to talk to you more than ever on certain things,” she wrote back.30

  §This emerged more clearly in Kennan’s later writings. The famous Kennan dispatch, published in Foreign Affairs in 1947 under the pseudonym “Mr. X,” was a penetrating analysis of the springs of Soviet conduct, but it left open the question of how American power might be mobilized to cope with Soviet pressures and probings. “I read the article (I imagine somewhat abbreviated) in Life which was published by Foreign Affairs. It was interesting but not very illuminating and I don’t really know just what our policy is going to be, do you?”32

  5. THE UNITED NATIONS AND A JEWISH HOMELAND

  AMONG THE WAR’S VICTIMS, THOSE WHO SEEMED TO ELEANOR Roosevelt to have the strongest claim on humanity’s compassion and charity were the pitiful survivors of the death trains and gas chambers.

  They had been a weight upon her heart for a long time. In 1943 word had filtered out of Fortress Europe that Hitler had given orders for the extermination of all Jews. She took part in a memorial service of protest and had written afterward: “One could not help having a great pride in the achievements of the Jewish people; they are the great names in so many nations, and yet rage and pity filled one’s heart for they have suffered in this war in so many nations.” Louis Bromfield, author and the head of the Emergency Conference to Save the Jews of Europe, wired her: “The Nazis are rapidly carrying out the threat to annihilate the Jewish people of Europe as reprisal against approaching doom. . . .” Would she serve as a committee sponsor? “I have your telegram and cannot see what can be done until we win the war,” she replied. And to another, she wrote:

  [I do] not see beyond the statement which the President has made, what more emphatically could be said. I will be glad to say anything or help in any way but I do not think it wise for me to formally go on any committee.1

  Behind the scenes she did what she could to squeeze visas out of the balky State Department for the refugees who managed to get to Spain and Portugal. She worked with the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children to get the State Department to stretch its interpretation of the laws in the issuance of visas to children. Louis Weiss, a distinguished and selfless attorney who was working with the committee, inquired of Tommy as to whether Mrs. Roosevelt wanted to go back to the State Department—“. . .the matter may have been pushed as far as she wishes to push it at this time.”2

  In January, 1944, a group of Treasury Department officials headed by the secretary, outraged over State Department apathy and stalling in regard to helping Jews to escape extermination, confronted President Roosevelt with a carefully documented “Report on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.” Roosevelt heard the group sympathetically, accepted its suggestion that he establish a war refugee board to direct rescue operations, and placed at its head a young Treasury Department official, John W. Pehle, who had helped draft the report and whose energy and clarity had impressed him. Pehle soon was soliciting Mrs. Roosevelt’s help.

  He’s worried over the war closing the Balkan & Turkey routes through which they’ve been getting out some people & then there will only be Spain left & our Ambassador [Carlton] Hayes is not cooperative. I spoke to Franklin & asked if perhaps a change might be advisable & Franklin said wearily “well the complaints are mounting.
”3

  She was not successful. Hayes remained at his post.

  She did what she could to open America’s doors to the survivors of the holocaust, having little sympathy with the extreme Zionist position that Palestine was the only place where Jews might live in safety and without apology. “I fear Palestine could never support all the Jews, and the Arabs would start a constant war if all of them came,” she replied to a physician who protested what he called her “assimilationist” approach. “Why can’t Jews be members of a religious body but natives of the land in which they live?” she asked.4

  But she was not assimilationist in the sense of believing that Jews should deny their identity as Jews. She once asked Judge Justine Polier, daughter of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, why, when she sought help for people—whether unemployed miners in West Virginia, sharecroppers, or Negroes in the South—Jews were always among the first to come forward to offer aid. Yet when Jews were mistreated, she found they were most hesitant to ask her help, and when they did, seemed embarrassed in doing so. Judge Polier tried to explain to her the background of oppression and exclusion that led some Jews to believe that safety and acceptance lay in escaping their Jewishness.5

  Having conquered the conventional attitude toward Jews instilled by the world in which she had grown up, Mrs. Roosevelt rejected the Zionist view that the Jew must always feel himself an outsider in a gentile culture because gentiles would always regard him as an alien. Author Ben Hecht sent her his Guide for the Bedevilled, in which he flailed away at anti-Semites and anti-Semitism with wisecrack and vitriol. “I read it half through today & find his style trying,” she wrote to a young Jewish friend: