China considered herself a full member of the United Nations, Mme. Chiang began. Global strategy could only be made by all of the United Nations, or at least the four main ones, never by two only, and then imposed on the rest or simply communicated to them. That was not a democratic way of working together, and if nations did not cooperate as equals during the war, no good peace was possible. China subscribed to the Atlantic Charter and was fighting for the Four Freedoms, not for herself alone, but for all peoples. She and the generalissimo were telling the Chinese people that while they had had a raw deal in the past, in the future it was to be different, that they were to be an equal member of the family of nations. If that was not to be the case, why should China fight on?21
It was an outburst that Eleanor, sensitive to the global nature of the “white supremacy” issue, listened to with sympathy. Would the generalissimo be willing to meet the president at some spot close to China? That would make two, Mme. Chiang answered, and there are four of us. Russia might be worried about Japan, Eleanor pointed out. Mme. Chiang acknowledged that this was a difficulty, but it did not preclude a meeting of Great Britain, the United States, and China.
When Eleanor spoke with the president the next night at dinner, he insisted that the Casablanca discussions had centered on military problems alone, “and they were not China’s except where they concerned getting military supplies to China”—mostly planes, and General H. H. Arnold was on the way to Chungking to discuss the airplane situation. But there were other obstacles to the treatment of China as one of the Big Four. Churchill resisted it, because a strong China might threaten Britain’s imperial position in the Far East. Roosevelt anticipated less trouble between the United States, Russia, and China, he told his wife, “than between any of us and Great Britain.”22
Several times during Eleanor’s visits to the hospital, Mme. Chiang had urged her to come to China, and Eleanor brought the matter up with Harry Hopkins, who had asked to talk to her about the need to set up some UN postwar planning machinery in such fields as food and education. That was all well and good, she wrote, but what was needed at the moment was
more confidence in Russia & China that as a people we want to understand them & their problems & work with them. I asked Harry if he thought my going there now during the war would help here & there. He said if I thought so I should make Franklin let me go but to wait until Mme. Chiang came. She will be here next Wednesday & she is now at the Big House in Hyde Park. I think she is going to surprise Franklin a good deal but she will charm him. She won’t lean like Martha of Norway though! She can’t be fooled either, somehow it seems to me that she compels honesty.23
Her tartness about Princess Martha was less an expression of irritation with the president for his flirtatiousness—for there was always a Martha for relaxation, she explained to a friend—than it was exasperation over the weakness of the feminine sex. The princess said little, but coquetted like a young girl, making sheep’s eyes at the president’s sallies and giving her protector, whom she addressed at his request as “dear godfather,” the adoration in which he luxuriated. What man doesn’t?24
Mme. Chiang arrived in Washington on February 17, and for almost two weeks Princess Martha was eclipsed. The president and Mrs. Roosevelt met her at Union Station. “My husband has a wonderful way of making people feel that he has known them for a long time,” she wrote in an article for Colliers which she decided not to submit. “He calls it his fatherly attitude and I think he used it that day.” At dinner that night there were only the president and Eleanor, Harry Hopkins and his wife, the former Louise Macy whom he had married in July, 1942, and Helen Gahagan Douglas. Eleanor must have advised Mme. Chiang that the president liked ladies to constitute an admiring audience. “She is wise. She listened at dinner & in her half-hour later with F.D.R. she listened but she will talk & she has already asked F.D.R. if I can go back with her!”25
Talk Mme. Chiang did, and most effectively for China’s cause. “Mme. Chiang & Franklin had a wonderful press conference this morning. She is very quick.” Eleanor sat with the president and Mme. Chiang, with her left hand resting reassuringly on the right arm of Mme. Chiang’s chair. Occasionally during the conference they exchanged quick understanding smiles. Mme. Chiang played to the president, Raymond Clapper observed, “as the big strong man who could work miracles.” The previous day, Eleanor had accompanied her to Capitol Hill for her speeches to Senate and House. Her appearance, Eleanor wrote, “marked the recognition of a woman who, through her own personality and her own service, has achieved a place in the world, not merely as the wife of the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, but as a representative of her people.” It was a revealing observation. She was still unwilling to admit that the place she herself had achieved in American life was due to her own efforts and personality, but her admiration went to the women who did succeed on their own. As she watched the slim figure in a long black Oriental dress, slit at the sides, come down the aisle escorted by senators who towered over her, Eleanor “could not help a great feeling of pride in her as a woman but when she spoke it was no longer as a woman that one thought of her.”
She would remember “for a long time,” she added, “the applause which both sides of the House gave her when she made a plea that we look upon Japan as our major enemy.” So effective was Mme. Chiang in her advocacy that for a time the Combined Chiefs of Staff feared she might unhinge the “Germany First” strategy of fighting the war. She sometimes held long discussions with the president that went on so late into the evening that Eleanor would have to rescue her and send her to bed, a salvage operation that sometimes ended with Eleanor wading into the discussion herself.26
Mme. Chiang had scarcely left the White House when Prince Olaf and Princess Martha arrived for tea, giving at least one other guest at that tea party the feeling that the handsome princess did not wish to allow even a day to elapse without moving to wipe out the impression Mme. Chiang had made on the president. She was outrageously flirtatious, this guest thought, adding, “Mrs. Roosevelt seems to grow in situations like that and become even more a queen.”27
Some of Eleanor’s friends did not share her view that Mme. Chiang was a slit-skirt version of Eleanor Roosevelt. Tommy thought China’s First Lady snobbish and spoiled. Harry Hooker, though something of a society gallant himself, was amused to hear Mme. Chiang’s niece, Miss Kung, underscore that she was the seventy-sixth generation directly descended from Confucius. He had not known, Harry later confided to Eleanor, that China had its Newport Set.28
Pearl Buck came to dine with Eleanor shortly after Mme. Chiang’s stay at the White House. It was a small party and Miss Buck, who, having experienced the generalissimo’s rule in Nanking, was evading a public appearance with Mme. Chiang, felt free to speak critically. She questioned Mme. Chiang’s use of the word “democracy.” China’s First Lady was beautiful but also imperious and expensive, Miss Buck said, and the generalissimo was a great man, but uncouth and, of course, a warlord. China would not develop democratically, she cautioned, unless the United States gave it a strong lead in that direction. Eleanor indicated that she understood; it had been “very interesting to have Madame Chiang Kai-shek at the White House.”
The novelist was upset that publisher Henry Luce and his group had had so much to do with the arrangements for Mme. Chiang’s tour of the United States. Here, too, Eleanor was sympathetic. Although she appreciated Mme. Chiang’s desire to have Republican support for China, she had been a little taken aback at her lack of interest in a proposal Eleanor had conveyed from Walter White that Mme. Chiang address a mass meeting under NAACP auspices. Even though Eleanor had indicated her readiness to join Mme. Chiang on the NAACP platform, the Chinese First Lady had decided that she would appear only “under the auspices of her Chinese and American friends.” Nor was she willing even to see White.29
Princess Martha need not have worried that Mme. Chiang might displace her. Eleanor, with a smile that suggested that behind the innocence there was
great sophistication, told Pearl Buck that one day she had informed the president he would have the pleasure of dining alone with Mme. Chiang that evening as she (Eleanor) had to be elsewhere, and he had replied firmly, “Indeed I shan’t! I am going to bed early!”
“I don’t think that Franklin likes women who think they are as good as he is,” Eleanor added wickedly.30
Although the president had enjoyed Mme. Chiang’s company, he had few illusions about the hardness behind those calculating eyes. John L. Lewis was threatening a coal strike during the time of Mme. Chiang’s White House stay, and the president asked her one evening at dinner how China would deal with such a labor leader. Swiftly and expressively she drew her small ivory hand across her throat. The president looked at his wife and later teased her, “Well, how about your gentle and sweet character?” And in later years Eleanor herself would say softly, “Those delicate little petal-like fingers—you could see some poor wretch’s neck being wrung,” and at that point she would make a twisting motion of her own fingers, which were as expressive as Mme. Chiang’s.31
When Eleanor had first broached the idea of visiting China to her husband he seemed quite eager to have her go, but she thought it would be a mistake to visit China and not also go to Russia. During his White House visit in May, 1942, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had asked to see her, and they had talked about women in Russia. Eleanor had said she was greatly interested and would like to visit Russia and see for herself. Molotov said he would remember that, and during Eleanor’s visit to England the Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky had made the invitation specific. But the president was reluctant to have her go to Russia: “F.D.R. feels the moment for that hasn’t come.” Admiral Standley, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, was threatening to resign if any more dignitaries were sent to him; Willkie’s visit had been quite enough for the duration.32
A few weeks later the president ruled out the trip to China, too. “I think he hopes to meet Stalin & Chiang this spring or summer & wants to wait on that,” she wrote a friend. Perhaps he also feared that his wife’s visit to China might strengthen the pressures on him to give the Chinese front a higher priority in Allied war plans. Representative Walter Judd, a former missionary in the Far East and a strong advocate of such higher priorities, lunched at the White House and afterward urged Eleanor to visit China, “perhaps going with Madame Chiang when she returns.” Eleanor’s cousin, columnist Joseph Alsop, who was with General Claire L. Chennault as a volunteer, was warning of a Chinese collapse “if there is not some sort of immediate, fairly spectacular action to revive the spirit of the Chinese people and troops.” Perhaps the president feared his wife would join this “China lobby.”33
She accepted his decision uncomplainingly. He must, however, have sensed her disappointment, for a few days later he told her he would like her to go to New Zealand and Australia. “I’m glad of course,” she wrote, “as I may see James & I’ll see many of our soldiers but it won’t be as interesting as China or Russia!” But that suggestion, too, was subject to the vagaries of politics as well as of war: “FDR told me tonight after the Congressional party that the gentlemen were clamoring to go to the front & he thought it might be impossible to send them & in that case I would also be barred. I told him anything he decided was all right with me. I wanted to be a help & not a bother.” However, C. R. Smith, who was at Air Transport Command, was asked to begin to plan her itinerary. “It would mean stopping everywhere. . . . Incidentally Australian and New Zealand officials have both asked but Franklin is still doubtful because of Congressional desires to visit in large numbers every front.”34
Mme. Chiang came back to Washington after a triumphal tour of the country and again urged the president to permit Eleanor to visit her in Chungking, but the president would only vouchsafe a vague “sometime in the future” reply. Yet the increasingly clamorous “third world” could not be ignored. She wrote a friend that, “Next week the Liberian President comes, & won’t that be a funny dinner? I really wish it wasn’t a stag party for I’d like to observe Senators Connally & Barkley & one or two others!” She accompanied the president to a meeting with the president of Mexico on the U.S.-Mexican border and then went on to visit Japanese-American relocation camps in Arizona. “I just asked F.D.R. if I could take on an American-Japanese family but he says the Secret Service wouldn’t allow it.”35
With the conquest of North Africa completed, Churchill arrived in the United States to plan the next blows against Fortress Europe. “Mr. Churchill arrived at seven last night and Franklin says it is going to be the toughest of all the conferences.” Command decisions were at the forefront, but India and the priority to be given to the Chinese theater were also high on the agenda, with Generals Stilwell and Chennault present to argue the case for more aggressive operations in the China-Burma theater. When Anthony Eden had been in Washington in March to discuss postwar plans, Roosevelt and Hull had tried to soften British resistance to acceptance of China as one of the Big Four. But Eden was dubious about China’s stability, and he “did not much like the idea of the Chinese running up and down the Pacific.” Mme. Chiang was still in the country, in New York City, when Churchill arrived, and Roosevelt thought she should meet Churchill. He asked Eleanor to invite her back to Washington. But, as Eleanor wrote a friend, Mme. Chiang balked:
A curious little drama has been going on. The Chinese gentleman sent his lady advice she didn’t like so when I phoned to ask if she’d come down & lunch with these two gentlemen now here she said “No” the one she had not met could come to her! He wouldn’t go & I could see Franklin thought they might fight if left alone so the brother was sent for & wires buzzed & now I believe she is coming but it may be Friday or Monday!36
The meeting did not take place, and Mme. Chiang in June returned to Chungking. “I still like Mme. very much & Franklin said today that she had a brilliant mind,” Eleanor wrote. From Chungking Mme. Chiang sent Eleanor some Before the Rain and Orange Blossom tea “which you like so much, and also two pieces of silk for the President for shirts. . . . Please do not forget that you are coming to visit me as soon as the cool weather sets in.” Eleanor was leaving the middle of August, she replied, but for a short visit to the Southwest Pacific: “I talked to the President about getting out to you and he said just what he always says about so many other things—that I must not interfere with war plans. However, he said he would try to arrange it as soon as it seems practical.”37
In the end she was not allowed to go to China, and she was also advised to stay away from Detroit, the scene of the racial riots. It was dangerous to permit a woman who refused to suppress the promptings of her conscience and imagination to visit the areas where the most searching test of the Christian ethic was taking shape.
54.GI’S FRIEND, II: THE FIRST LADY AND THE ADMIRAL
ELEANOR PREPARED FOR HER JOURNEY TO THE SOUTHWEST Pacific with considerable trepidation because there were many “Eleanor stories” circulating among GIs in the South Pacific. A sergeant in New Guinea, she was informed, had written that they had heard that “dear Mrs. Roosevelt thinks it would be nice to keep us malaria-ridden forgotten men overseas until six months after the war.” Of course she had never made such a remark, and she suspected it was enemy propaganda playing on the homesickness of the boys in the Pacific; but if such stories were believed, GIs might not be pleased to see her.
This trip will be attacked as a political gesture, & I am so uncertain whether or not I am doing the right thing that I will start with a heavy heart. Well, enough of my doubts. I’ll go because other people think I should, & if I see you that will be a joy, & if I don’t I’ll try to do a good job on seeing the women’s work & where I do see our soldiers I’ll try to make them feel that Franklin really wants to know about them.1
The four-engined Army Liberator in which she flew to the South Pacific carried a ton of mail and some military personnel as well as its distinguished passenger. It was not heated, so she slept “in that much scorned red flannel lini
ng to my Red Cross coat as it grew fairly cold.” Norman Davis had been delighted with her offer to visit the South Pacific in the uniform of the Red Cross as its “Special Delegate,” and the uniform solved a wardrobe problem that was compounded by the necessity of taking a typewriter and yet staying within the 44-pound baggage limitation. She had decided not to take Tommy—“we will go together to China!”—and had learned to type again in order to be able to do her daily column.2
In Honolulu she showered at General William O. Ryan’s house, did her exercises “to get the kinks out,” breakfasted in a green bower alive with brilliantly plumaged birds, and then was off to Christmas Island, a coral atoll that they reached at dusk. She was worried about snakes, associating their presence with tropical climates, and was relieved to learn from the commanding officer that there were none on the atolls. But when she stopped by her quarters before going to the movie that was a standard item on the daily schedules of these isolated Pacific outposts, she was horrified to find the floor crawling with large bugs. “I might have screamed if I had not been the only woman on the Island and I knew a feminine scream would attract a good deal of attention.” She stamped hard instead, and the bugs quickly vanished through the cracks in the floor.
Soon after reveille the next day she was ready to go, with—at her request—two enlisted men as her escorts. She toured the hospital, visited military installations, took the names of the boys who wanted to have her write their home folks that she had seen them, and drove forty miles in a jeep to visit the island rest camp. Afterward she wrote her husband that older men did not stand up to the debilitating heat as well as the younger ones, and that if possible no one should be stationed in such a climate for more than two years. “I think the men here have been glad to have me come,” she wrote Tommy. That was a relief to her, for she had feared that the officers and men might find her visit a bore and an imposition. She reminded them more “of some boy’s mother back home, than the wife of the President of the United States—and we all loved it,” the correspondent for the Pacific Times wrote.3
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