Eleanor

by Joseph P. Lash

  There was one dissenting note in the chorus of praise that greeted This I Remember. “Pegler is just writing as much nastiness as he can on it,” she informed the Grays, “& is now trying to dig up the Lucy Mercer story & chides me for not telling it.” She should not allow Pegler to bother her, David Gray replied. “It would probably have been better for you to have mentioned Mrs. Rutherfurd as being at Warm Springs but it is not very important one way or another. I certainly wouldn’t let it worry me.”42

  But she did worry over what her obligations as a writer were as was clear from a letter to John Gunther, whose Roosevelt in Retrospect appeared in 1950. She thought it “extraordinary” that he had achieved so much understanding of FDR with so little personal knowledge of him:

  I know you wrote with admiration and a desire to be completely fair. There are certain things you did not entirely understand and of course, certain things that neither you nor anyone else knows anything about outside of the few people concerned. Whether it is essential they should ever know is something on which I have not made up my mind since they are personal and they do not touch on public service.43

  But the Lucy Mercer affair had affected the public as well as private lives of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. As Elizabeth Janeway perceptively noted in her review of This I Remember: “Unable to dedicate herself to her husband—why, we shall never be sure—she ended by dedicating herself to his work. . . .On the basis of an unusual if not unsatisfactory marriage was built an edifice of cooperation, of mutual aid and respect which was of immeasurable influence.”

  Her book was her final service of love to her husband’s work. By the time it appeared, however, it was becoming increasingly clear that her own greatness had not depended on his. Readers read This I Remember as much for the light that it shed on her as on him. Her standing as the woman most admired by Americans, columnist Elmo Roper noted, had survived her husband’s death and now seemed to be based upon her activities as an individual.

  “Only a great woman could have written it,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote of This I Remember. “Mrs. Roosevelt has long since tired of hearing herself described as ‘the first lady of the world.’ This I Remember establishes her all the more firmly in that place.”44

  She was “an American phenomenon comparable to the Niagara Falls,” said Sir Benegal Rau, the representative of India at the United Nations.45

  * When Mrs. Roosevelt was hurt or disappointed by someone she loved, she withdrew into heavy silence, like Patient Griselda in Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale.”

  9. AMERICA’S BEST AMBASSADOR

  IT WAS GENERAL MARSHALL WHO FIRST RECOGNIZED THAT in Mrs. Roosevelt the United States had a remarkable national asset in its relations with the rest of the world. She was truly an ambassador-extraordinary. “Everywhere she went large crowds greeted her enthusiastically,” Ambassador Lewis Douglas reported from London, where she had gone for the unveiling of the statue of FDR. “I think that her visit to England improved greatly the relations between the American people and the people of this island.” At the 1948 General Assembly, when Russia’s blockade of Berlin made Europeans jittery, her presence in Paris reassured people and helped to counteract the systematic Communist effort to portray the United States as a money-grubbing, atom-bomb-brandishing, imperialistic nation bent on preventive war. Large crowds followed wherever she went. When the delegates to the General Assembly traveled on a Sunday to Amiens to a celebration in honor of the United Nations, it was Mrs. Roosevelt whom the crowds that lined the roads wanted to see.*

  In 1950 the Norwegian government invited her to come to Oslo for the unveiling of a statue of Franklin. “Having gone to England, I think it would look unappreciative on my part if I did not accept their invitation,” she wrote Elliott’s former wife, Mrs. H. Eidson, asking that Elliott’s children Chandler and Tony be permitted to accompany their father and her. The State Department persuaded her to extend her trip to include all the Scandinavian and Benelux countries. “We are all delighted that you are going to Europe this year because we consider you our finest ambassador abroad,” Dean Rusk wrote her. The leader of the labor movement in Norway felt that Mrs. Roosevelt’s visit would help expose “the phoniness of the Communist ‘Peace’ Congresses and would help recapture the peace slogan and to identify the Western powers with the positive concept of peace rather than the negative one of containment.”2 Other labor and socialistic parties that were in power in northern Europe felt the same way.

  She was received at royal palaces and trade-union headquarters. She visited industrial and agricultural cooperatives as well as housing and health projects, addressed large meetings of women, held press conferences, and spoke over national radios. “Eleanor Roosevelt has come to Stockholm,” wrote the conservative Svenska Dagbladet. “She came and lived up to every expectation. . . .Her great warm smile filled the door of the plane when it opened at Broome, it shone over the entire illustrious assembly at the airfield, and it was still just as alive when she later talked seriously to the press, met the King and spoke at the City Hall banquet.” “She did not try to impress us,” commented the liberal Dagens Nyheter, “she did impress us.”3

  “All goes well & the Embassy too seems happy about the visit,” Mrs. Roosevelt reported from Stockholm.

  The one unanimous feeling is fear & small wonder. . . .Finnland [sic] is most ticklish so pray for me—From Holland on I’ll relax.4

  The Finns, sitting up against the Soviet border and balanced precariously between their western sympathies and rude Soviet pressures, seemed to her

  very gallant. I went to two resettled farm families this p.m. & wondered at their courage. . .to-morrow I speak to audiences which won’t understand me! I dread it & yet so far it has gone well everywhere.5

  In Copenhagen she found the same mood of apprehension:

  My feeling everywhere so far that people were valiantly living with fear is keener here but they have talked more openly here to me in high places. . . .Of course there is no complete unanimity here on what course should be followed any more than at home but fear is unanimous! I have to spend my time explaining that I hold no position in our government & have no influence!6

  In Holland people seemed less afraid. There, in talks with Princess Wilhelmina, the title the old queen had assumed after turning over the throne to her daughter, and with Queen Juliana, she learned that

  at least in high places they seem less worried here & very pleased over the progress of integrating European interests.7

  The fear in northern Europe was primarily of the Russians; but it was fed also by uncertainty about the United States. Could the United States be counted on in a showdown with Russia? At the same time there was anxiety as to whether or not the United States might not be preparing for a preventive war. “Now I must report something that troubles me,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Acheson in the course of her journey, sending a copy to Truman:

  namely, some of our industrialists and some of the members of Congress seem to have left the impression that we are not averse to going to war on the theory that we will have to go to war in the end and we might as well do it while the balance of power is on our side. I do not know that they have actually said it but that is the impression they left and it frightens most of the people very much indeed.8

  When she reached Brussels, she talked to Ambassador Robert Murphy about the need to counteract this feeling. He misunderstood her, and wrote afterward that he was disturbed that at the end of her stay she had spoken of the urgent necessity for the United States to make an early effort to arrive at an understanding with Russia and that if Russia evaded or refused the offer this would then be the United States’ ace in the hole with world opinion. “I indicated scepticism but the time was brief,” he wrote her.

  I wanted you to know that after four years of dealing with the Russians in Berlin plus conferences during the war and since, I am convinced that your thought, unless I misunderstand it, is not adapted to the type of mentality or the aims of
the group dictating Soviet policy. There is so much evidence that these men do not want agreement with us except on their terms. They are avowed enemies, determined on the liquidation of the social order for which our Government and people stand.

  Any offer by the United States will be seen by “the hard men who direct matters for the USSR. . .as evidence of weakness and fear.”

  She had not made herself clear, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Murphy in July after the North Korean attack on South Korea.

  I was not thinking of any gesture that would impress Russia because I long since decided that nothing but force would impress that particular country. What I had on my mind after visiting the Scandinavian countries was the fact most of them required at that time some gesture from us, some gesture that would make them feel that we were counteracting the Russian words constantly repeated in favor of peace, by something more tangible and which stood out to them as a real gesture.

  Since the Korean episode the whole picture has changed. . . .9

  Just as she was a reassuring symbol to the labor and social-democratic movements of western Europe of the basic sanity, decency, and idealism of the United States, so also was she the country’s most effective ambassador to the emerging Third World. The Voice of America asked the Indonesian embassy who would be the best person to comment on the prospective signing of a Point Four agreement with that country. “The answer was Mrs. Roosevelt.”10

  The 1950 General Assembly was a grueling affair, its major preoccupation being Korea, since it was during that Assembly that General MacArthur advanced to the Yalu River and the Chinese intervened to send MacArthur’s forces reeling back. But that essentially was the business of Secretary Acheson, Ambassador Austin, and their advisers in the Assembly’s First (political) Committee. Her responsibility was Committee III, and there were momentous developments there:

  I have never seen such bitterness as I have in Committee #3 this year on the race problem and on the “haves” against the “have nots,” and small nations against big nations.11

  That was the burden of her report to the president at the end of the Assembly.

  My own feeling is that the Near East, India and many of the Asiatic people have a profound distrust of white people. This is understandable since the white people they have known intimately in the past, have been the colonial nations and in the case of the United States, our businessmen. . . .

  The result is that in Committee #3 at least, there has been a constant attitude among a great block of these countries to oppose everything the United States has suggested. The mere fact that we spoke for something would be enough to make them suspicious. I have completely changed my way of presentation and made it as conciliatory and reasonable as I could, but even then I know they are not believing me, they are thinking (if they are kindly disposed toward me personally) that I am duped or else they feel I am changing my point of view on humanity. They are joined by the whole Soviet block and while I am not always sure they are fooled by the Soviets, they are very glad to have their votes. They feel the Soviet attitude on race, at least, is better than ours and that is point one in the Soviets’ favor. They also feel that the Soviet economy may be the only possible economy for them, and that is point two in the Soviets’ favor. . . .

  They are dissatisfied with the amount of help that we give them. They feel we have overemphasized help to Europe as against help in either Latin America or Asia. In fact, Mr. Bokhari of India told me we were willing to try to save the children of Europe but we did not care whether the children of India died or lived.

  She was so troubled by the antagonism she had encountered that she suggested to President Truman that it might be better if the United States were represented on these questions

  by Mrs. Sampson, or some other person chosen because he or she could not be accused of siding with the white race against the colored races of the world.

  Another suggestion she made to Truman was that he send Dr. Frank Graham, at the time UN commissioner for India and Pakistan, as a “roving ambassador” to the Near East and Asia “to talk philosophy and get a line on attitudes and reasons for those attitudes that we really do not understand too well. . . .”12

  Truman did not send Graham, but Eleanor Roosevelt. The administration encouraged her to accept the invitation to visit India that Nehru had extended to her during his stay in the United States in 1949. She arranged to visit India and the Middle East in early 1952, flying directly to Beirut from Paris after the adjournment of the sixth General Assembly, which was held there. She thought she might do some articles, perhaps even a book, based on the trip and her experiences in the United Nations. “The State Department asked me to make this trip,” she wrote Ambassador Avra M. Warren in Karachi,

  but I am entirely unofficial and on my own and coming as a writer and I need no extra protection and no particular attention. I would be grateful if you would make whatever hotel reservations you think I need. I do not want to be extravagant. I will have one secretary with me.13

  She left Paris with a sense of achievement. Ambassador Austin had fallen ill, and in the final weeks of the Assembly she served as the delegation’s chairman as well as its representative in Committee III. She had provided “wise and tactful” leadership, Acheson thanked her. Her speeches and appearances outside the Assembly in which she had presented “the American viewpoint most successfully to the European people, were a major contribution to our general effort,” he added. At the request of the “Voice of America” she had done a weekly fifteen-minute broadcast in French all during the Assembly. “I am speaking to you today from the Palais de Chaillot where the sixth session of the United Nations General Assembly is taking place,” she began her first broadcast.

  I have been asked to tell you, from time to time, what I think of the work we are doing here and why we, of the United States delegation, believe that these meetings are so very important. . . .

  I think that what you want to know—especially you the women of post-war Europe—is whether you shall be able, tomorrow, to tell your children that peace is, at long last, a reality. For it isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.14

  Her talks were carried over the French, Belgian, and Swiss networks at the peak listening hour, right after the main news program. She talked simply as a woman to women, but the men listened, too, for she was “Madame Roosevelt,” a beloved name in Europe, with a reputation in her own right as a fighter for social justice. And like her husband, she had a gift for stating problems simply and concretely. She even managed to state the differences with Russia over disarmament in a way that was easy to grasp, wrote Richard N. Gardner in an admiring article in the New York Times. By the time the Assembly was over the Communist press was attacking her savagely, and she had added talks in German, Spanish, and Italian to her regular French broadcast.

  “I am sure,” Acheson’s note to her at the end of the Assembly added, “that your present trip will be a means of bringing the American views effectively to some of the Far Eastern peoples.”15

  It was a journey filled with many hazards. She canceled a stopover in Cairo. “I think it will relieve your mind and my family’s,” she advised Ambassador Jefferson Caffery, “to hear that we have thought it best not to stop in Cairo,” but fly directly to Beirut.

  Even western-minded Beirut presented problems. David Gurewitsch and Maureen Corr were to accompany her:

  I hope David enjoys his trip; being with me won’t add to his joys but it may give him opportunities to see some of the things he wants to see. I rather imagine I’ll have to do some women’s affairs & speeches & I’m sure they will plan for him to see medical things for I wrote that was his interest.

  But David was Jewish. “As Mr. Malik (Lebanese Ambassador in Washington and a colleague on the Human Rights Commission) has doubtless intimated to you,” Harold B. Minor, the American ambassador in Lebanon, advised her, “in case [the] physician [is] Jewish it would
be politically most unwise if not impossible for him to enter Lebanon or other Arab countries.” So David arranged to join them in Israel. The American ambassador in Pakistan, Avra Warren, invited Mrs. Roosevelt and Maureen to stay with him. “We will make suitable arrangements for Dr. Gurewitsch to stay elsewhere.” It would be better if the “three of us stayed at a hotel,” she replied. The governor general and the begum “are most anxious that you and your party should find it convenient to stay at the Governor-General’s residence,” the ambassador’s next message read. “We will be delighted to accept for us all but do not want anyone to put themselves out,” she wrote back.16

  From the moment that she arrived in Beirut she sensed that behind the official courtesy and kindness there was hostility. She was guarded at the beginning by a carload of soldiers and security officers. She finally got rid of this escort and was able to go among the people. She was determined to get the Arab point of view, and drinking endless tiny cups of black and bitter coffee, heard many presentations of it—from Americans stationed in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, from educated Arabs who had managed to build new lives for themselves but still hoped to return to their former homes, and from the refugees in the camps. She came away saddened that the Arabs still talked hopefully of wiping out the people of Israel. “I have a feeling that this would not be easy.”17