With the Cold War in full stride, the Soviets’ role was increasingly crass and expedient, tiresomely expressed but often effectively influencing the delegations of third-world countries. At every point, reported Eleanor, the Soviets wanted to water down or eliminate particular human rights, or put a twist on the meaning of some phrase that might embarrass Western countries, particularly the United States. With its very visible race problems—lynching, Jim Crow laws, cross burnings by the Ku Klux Klan, and job discrimination (“No Coloreds Need Apply” read the announcements)—we were easy targets, seemingly hypocritical when pushing for human rights. Eleanor Roosevelt, as the U.S. delegate, had a lot of explaining to do.
The Soviet government’s seeming intention, Eleanor noted, was to see emerge from the United Nations a human rights declaration so innocuous and banal it could be ignored as useless, of no influence. To accomplish this aim they had now asked the General Assembly to review again every point in the draft declaration. They had already done this every step of the way—from the drafting committee to the Committee on Human Rights to the Economic and Social Council and now to the Third Committee. This made for an endless process bound to rekindle differences, a procedure that would lead to the General Assembly sending the document back to be studied and discussed again. Eleanor had taken the floor in the Third Committee to oppose the Soviets’ motion, her voice quivering with rage and contempt. She won her point.
After two years of wrangling and hammering out the compromises that would constitute the declaration, its drafting committee had sent their agreed text to the Economic and Social Council. They, after reviewing it, passed it on to the Third Committee, who, after themselves reviewing the most difficult parts of the draft again, finally agreed to recommend it to the UN General Assembly. This had been, thus, a process of review by no less than three bodies, on which the same representatives often sat.
At each stage and after provoking endless discussion, the USSR had agreed to the draft. Moving on in the laborious process, their delegates, however, acted as if they were ignorant of what they had already agreed to and now requested that every article be reviewed again. When they asked once more to do this, again in the General Assembly, Eleanor lost her normal “cool.” She scolded the Soviet delegation as if they were recalcitrant children. The other delegates then not only voted the Soviets down, but were, many of them, amused and delighted at this display of Mrs. Roosevelt’s anger. Undiplomatic it was, but certainly effective.
My grandmother hadn’t been putting on an act. When she reviewed this with me over breakfast her voice was cold, with just an edge of harshness. She pronounced herself fed up with the Soviets’ tactics of duplicity, particularly their playing on the prejudices built upon time-honored discriminations that were accepted practices in other parts of the world. They knew exactly what they were doing, she concluded. She was fed up with the Soviet Union’s obstructionism. In the drafting committee and then later in the Economic and Social Council and finally in the Third Committee, she had worked for compromises, putting up with their negative attitudes. Finally she realized that it was a calculated effort on the part of the Soviets to destroy the Universal Declaration by not letting it be brought to a vote in the UN General Assembly. They would move to have it again reviewed, a slow process that could prevent the declaration from ever seeing the light of day.
Deeply disappointing to Eleanor (and to her advisers), indeed irritating, was the attitude of the State Department senior personnel such as Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett. They would soft-pedal the importance of the declaration as being of little importance compared to the economic and political issues on the UN’s agenda. The Soviets, seeing division in the ranks of the Americans, would take advantage of it, she realized.
It was touch and go if a UDHR were to be passed at this General Assembly. Some at the U.S. Mission were optimistic; others gave it no more than a fifty-fifty chance. My grandmother was in a state of anxiety. I had never before seen her so driven in her efforts. To obtain the vote, an overwhelming majority would be needed if the declaration were to be taken seriously by world governments. A close vote of approval would doom it to being ignored, she explained.
How much of this I was able to grasp—along with deciding whether I wanted honey or marmalade on my breakfast toast—I don’t know. A lot of it stuck, mostly an appreciation of my grandmother’s attitude, her passion coupled with her political savvy, and both blended with her will to achieve. Probably what made it a unique learning situation were the regular mealtime conversations, her own careful explanations, and the accompanying revelatory expressions of the faces of her dinner guests. Attitudes seemed to me to be much more important than “positions.”
Whether at tea or over a meal, what was most remarkable to observe was just how little my grandmother paraded her knowledge and sensitive intuitions. She waited and allowed herself to be informed by those with a differing view. She then offered a complementary observation, perhaps thinking aloud—“I wonder if . . .” This would be followed by her floating the idea of a compromise that might accommodate opposing views—all the while serving a bit more chicken. Often observers might recognize what she was up to, but the most interesting reaction would be that of the delegate being asked to look critically at an ingrained social custom of his country. As ambassadors they might have the discretion to accept the suggestion, yet they needed to consider carefully the possibility of having their heads handed to them by their own government if they went too far. There was certainly good reason to be cautious.
She was not unmindful of how a delegate’s government or foreign office might object to compromising the wording of an article, one that perhaps ran against their country’s long-held traditions. She would even raise this point directly. It took guts for delegates to lobby their own foreign office for approval. But as the State Department advisers pointed out to me, we might yet have a declaration to present to the General Assembly and if we did, a huge credit was due to the gentle pushes from Mrs. Roosevelt. She made it happen.
With her guests, delegates from other countries, Eleanor Roosevelt often shared her own concerns and past experiences in the United States, frequently using discrimination problems as a reference point. It was telling. She was much more than an American emissary representing a position of the State Department. She was a citizen concerned for people everywhere, whose dedication to bettering conditions of life was well known. When she spoke, people listened. Her single-minded devotion to passing an effective Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and having it emerge from the 1948 session, was clearly recognized. Her exceptional integrity was unchallenged by all. Hence she played a unique role in the UN’s complicated “circus.” And she seemed quite at home with the divisive forces in play, far more so than other of the American delegates.
There were diplomatic professionals on the UN scene who weren’t at all sure such a strong identity was proper for a delegate, an official government representative. Given the traditional approach of their kind, this assessment was to be expected. It seems inevitable that my grandmother’s special influence within the UN caused disquiet within the State Department. However, without question, she always followed the instructions of her government, as was expected of all its representatives. And yet she was adept at lobbying the State Department to adopt her views. Also, she had access to President Truman that other U.S. delegates did not.
The other UN delegates usually knew when Mrs. Roosevelt was presenting a U.S. position with which she was uncomfortable. Still, their extraordinary respect for her integrity remained intact. Particularly with the representatives of smaller countries, Eleanor was both a delegate under instructions as well as an independent person with a keen sense of right and wrong, views that were not parochial. “Your grandmother listens and is open to our views,” I was often told.
I didn’t get to see the final act of this drama. The USS America left Le Havre for New York on December 10, and on board were most of the U.S. Mission staf
f, including Tommy and me. But later I had a firsthand report of the drama that took place in Paris in those last days.
After we had all returned home, just before Christmas, my grandmother had a conversation with Richard Winslow, the secretary general of the U.S. delegation to the UN and my cabinmate on the return voyage from Paris. As a result he kindly invited me to lunch the day before I departed New York to return home to Los Angeles.
At a restaurant near the UN, Dick regaled me with the firsthand report he’d received of the final vote that brought into being the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The vote had been taken at the final session of the UN General Assembly, very late in the evening and early-morning hours. Dick certainly beamed as he watched the delegates rising to their feet after the final vote to honor Mrs. Roosevelt, recognizing how she had shepherded the declaration through the UN’s subcommittees and committees for over two years. Such recognition had never before been accorded to an individual delegate, he told me. (And it would never be repeated, as far as I know.) Dick concluded his account by saying: “The kind of recognition received by your grandmother from the other delegates really shakes them up at State. It actually makes many of my colleagues uncomfortable.” he owned.
Apparently the last session of the General Assembly was a fixture, traditions well in place, with everyone expecting the night to be long, the clock to be stopped at midnight and last-minute speeches varying from vacuous to vicious. Bickering had typically delayed a lot of the General Assembly’s business, and so it did in 1948, right up to the last minute.3
Following correct protocol, the committees were taken in order for voting in the General Assembly, first the political, then the special political, and only then did the Third Committee’s Economic and Social Council get a hearing. Its new chairman, Jacob Malik, a Lebanese Christian, “[then] one of the most respected figures in the General Assembly . . . [a] tall striking Arab,” strode to the podium to place the Universal Declaration before the United Nation’s membership.
Of Malik’s address, Chile’s Hernan Santa Cruz wrote: “He gave a detailed account of the whole long process of elaboration of the instrument that was being discussed. No one was able to do it with such authority, not only because of the responsibilities he had assumed in the process, but also by virtue of his lucid intelligence and his extraordinary talent for explanation.”
Toward the end of his presentation, he emphasized that the declaration had the “common aspirations summed up so well in Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms.” He stressed that it “represented delivery on the promise of the UN Charter, which had mentioned human rights seven times but had not specified what they were or how they were to be protected.”
Other speeches followed: the French delegate (René Cassin, who was to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968) rebuking “the Soviets for their criticism of the Declaration as an incursion on national sovereignty.” As reported by Mary Ann Glendon, in her book on Eleanor Roosevelt and the UDHR, the Chinese delegate, P. C. Chang, said the declaration was drafted in “a spirit of sincere tolerance of the different views and beliefs . . . [but] blamed ‘uncompromising dogmatism’ for accentuating disputes, saying there was at the present time ‘a tendency to impose a standardized way of thinking and a single way of life.’”
The Soviet delegates looked on stonily expressionless. Then Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky blasted back at the French, making “one last effort to have the matter put over to the next General Assembly on the grounds that the Declaration was still seriously defective.”
Eleanor Roosevelt was in her seat, behind the sign reading “United States,” the senior U.S. delegate left in Paris. Following the USSR, she rose to speak in favor of passing the declaration. Her words were measured, an obvious effort not to ruffle any of the feathers she had carefully arranged through various compromises. “It was not one of [her] best speeches,” Santa Cruz records.
Rallying the Muslim states was Muhammad Zafrullah Kahn, representing Pakistan, at the time the member nation with the largest Muslim population. Again, according to Glendon, “he told the delegates that the article on religious freedom would have the full support of Pakistan.” The struggles Eleanor had had with the Pakistan foreign office over the past two years were finally settled, and largely due to the influence of their ambassador. Kahn took great risks to state that “the freedom to change beliefs . . . was consistent with the Islamic religion.”4 Due to Kahn and Eleanor working together, I feel, all Muslim countries except Saudi Arabia voted yes on the declaration.
Then the delegates were polled. “The final tally was forty-eight in favor, eight abstentions, and none opposed [my italics].” The abstentions were the Soviet bloc plus the Saudis. It was a triumph, reported a jubilant Dick Winslow!
Although it is often quoted, pride makes me record again the tribute to my grandmother immediately made by the president of the General Assembly, Australia’s H. V. Evatt: “It is particularly fitting that there should be present on this occasion the person who, with the assistance of many others, has played a leading role in the work, a person who has raised to greater heights even so great a name—Mrs. Roosevelt, the representative of the United States of America.”
And then, by Glendon’s report, “as the General Assembly rose to give her a standing ovation, a radiant smile illuminated her weary face.” To my knowledge no one to this day has ever been so recognized in the United Nations’ arena.
I believe that it was not just my grandmother being the driving force behind the UDHR—although I feel strongly that the people of the world would not have such a declaration if she had not been there to lead the effort. I observed enough of Eleanor Roosevelt working with the diverse delegates to know that she held a special place with them. Without question, everyone knew that while of course she represented the United States, her responses, her integrity, and her values represented an America that people believed in.
I have never been able to put my finger on the extraordinary influence my grandmother wielded within the UN sphere—nor has anyone else described it well. I saw it, as I closely watched her with the other delegates in 1948, but I could never explain it. After I went to work, myself, in the United Nations Secretariat in 1966, several delegates and staff members—old-timers—repeatedly told me of the unique role Mrs. Roosevelt had played at the UN. Their comments came from their personal experience; their impressions were always the same. There is no rational explanation for the phenomenon of “Mrs. R.” One had had to see it to believe it.
Through the rest of that lunch, Richard Winslow and I went on trying to pin down Eleanor’s unique influence within the United Nations. I’m sure we came up with the usual words of praise, the typical accolades my grandmother grew so tired of hearing when she was being introduced as a speaker—once humorously commenting to me that she felt they must be referring to someone else!
Before parting Dick asked me what it was like to be regularly in my grandmother’s company. I blinked. I hadn’t thought about that; I’d been in her company all of my life. It was an education, I said, or something like that. A rather limp reply.
When Eleanor resigned from her position as a U.S. delegate, at the end of 1952, Winslow wrote to her: “From top to bottom in the Mission you will stand as the finest symbol of all that is best in the United Nations and, in a personal way to each of us, as the finest type of civic leader, public servant, and working colleague.”
14
Roosevelt as Commander in Chief
Under the Constitution of the United States, the president, among his many other duties, is commander in chief of the armed forces. Our Founding Fathers wanted civilian control over our generals and admirals. In wartime it becomes the primary occupation for the president. (The present situation is an anomaly—for many years now our American forces have been involved all over the world and yet we have not declared war, or at least not one sanctioned by the Senate, as the Constitution requires.)
In 1939, although only nine yea
rs old, I read all I could about the run-up to World War II, and redoubled my interest when the war formally began in September of 1939. The United States wouldn’t be engaged until December 7, 1941, but the newspapers and magazines were full of Britain and France’s declaration of war against Germany in response to the invasion of Poland. The following Christmas my family journeyed across the country from Washington State to Washington DC and the White House. There I heard much speculation about what Hitler might have up his sleeve—further invasions and conquests.
This period was already being referred to as “the phony war.” Throughout that fall and winter of 1940 nothing warlike was yet happening. All was quiet on the western front—Europe was waiting for Hitler to move. Then, in April, the German Panzer divisions struck quickly, subduing the Low Countries in a matter of days. Back in Seattle I had a hard time keeping up with the daily advances—Denmark, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg—all now were occupied. Within a few weeks the headlines featured Dunkirk and the impending disaster of the British Expeditionary Force positioned there on the French coast. It was expected that the German army would simply push them into the English Channel. The extraordinary evacuation of the British troops from Dunkirk was riveting. Then France surrendered. The British were left alone to fight the Nazi regime. These events happened very quickly.
During this critical period my grandfather had made it plain to family and friends that what was happening across the Atlantic might soon become our war. He and my mother were frequently on the telephone, she getting the news from him just a bit ahead of the newspapers. From her I learned about the isolationists in Congress and the reluctance of most Americans to again engage in a war overseas, even though there was great sympathy for the British people.
Upstairs at the Roosevelts' Page 16