by Anne Edwards
After her testimony, Representative Dante Fascell, a member of the subcommittee and of the UN delegation, announced, “I want to say something now to your face that I have been saying behind your back, so that the record will be clear that it was not only just a pleasure to work with you [at the UN] but you certainly carried your share of the burden and made our work immeasurably better and easier, as an entire delegation. . . . You presented [before this subcommittee] a very forthright statement as you always do. It is on one hand ideological and on the other hand very practical, which I learned in three months is the kind of person you really are, and I commend you for that.”
Fascell then turned to Congressman Abraham Kazen, Jr., of Texas, who had been less than agreeable in his questions earlier to Shirley, and said pointedly, “Mr. Kazen, you will be happy to know that one of the real benefits that—despite some critics and some skeptics, who thought it was useless to appoint Mrs. Black to a position of that importance—that she not only served ably, and made preparations of substance in behalf of the U.S. position, but . . . she was able to get coverage when the rest of us couldn’t find our way out of the dark. [Laughter.] You know the men with the cameras didn’t even know where I was unless I happened to be standing next to Mrs. Black.”
“Mr. Chairman,” Shirley interjected, “if I could respectfully suggest that Congressman Fascell might, if he goes back [to the UN] wear a red suit. [Laughter.] A bright red suit.”
Footnotes
*The Barclay became the Hotel Inter-Continental in 1978 and was “lavishly restored.”
*The UN post paid thirty-eight thousand dollars per year, plus a living allowance for out-of-city delegates.
*Loy did not serve with the United Nations the year of Black’s appointment, but she maintained her interest and relationships in the organization.
*The United Nations Ball in 1969 was attended by 950 guests representing 102 countries. Tickets were one hundred dollars per person. The proceeds went to the United Nations Association, an educational organization that sponsored foreign student exchange.
16 A FEW WEEKS LATER, she was appointed to serve as deputy to Christian Herter, Jr., head of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Committee on the Environment. Shirley was propelled into the complex preparations for an international conference on world environment problems to be held in Stockholm two years down the line, in June 1972. The assignment had come in response to personal letters she had written to President Nixon and Secretary of State William P. Rogers, asking to be given a further appointment.
“I don’t think there is any question now that people are finally taking me seriously. Those who have always been close to me, those who know me well, have never doubted that I was a hard worker. [The others] didn’t know me at all, or were thinking of Shirley Temple, the movie star,” she reflected.
The first meeting on environment was held in April 1970 in New York, and lasted ten days. Periodic sessions were conducted after that. “It’s very lonely to have a nice big family and a nice home in California and not be there,” she said wistfully. “But [the work I do is] most important, we all agreed. They’ve always supported me and urged me to be productive.”
The children were grown: Susan was twenty-two and had recently graduated from Stanford with an A. B. in art, Charlie was eighteen and Lori was sixteen. Charles remained close at hand, and Gertrude and George were always available. Her family understood that not only were Shirley’s abilities being channeled into serious commitments, but that she was driven by her need to free herself from her screen image. Her work on behalf of the Republican party, the United Nations and multiple sclerosis were all regarded with respect. However, the press still referred to her as “the former Shirley Temple,” or worse yet, “the one-time child star,” or even more contemptibly as “the once fabled curly topped dimpled moppet of yesteryear.” Her press interviews were more likely to appear in the women’s sections of newspapers than on the political pages.
Ronald Reagan had not had Shirley’s problems in ridding himself of his Hollywood past, but he had not been a star of Shirley’s magnitude. Perhaps downright snobbishness, prejudice or envy caused members of the press to regard her as “an overqualified board member and professional volunteer . . . searching for some larger purpose for her instantly identifiable name.” She could, of course, have deleted the Temple, or reduced it to a slim and dotted initial. She did not, a fact that could well indicate her awareness that, like it or not, “little Shirley Temple” could play an important role in the selling of her causes, whatever the political or committee post.
To her great disappointment, she was not returned as a UN delegate in 1970, although she remained a productive member of the environmental committee. In October, Governor Reagan asked her to serve as chairman of the state’s community meetings, called to “implement national reassessment of environmental goals.” According to Shirley, the purpose of the California program was also “to increase the knowledge of all Californians in respect to the United Nations and to peacekeeping . . . and to present dramatic evidence of informal California concern and opinion to those who represent us in Washington.” A series of one-day sessions in various sections of the state were held with Shirley as moderator; the transcripts were then sent to President Nixon and to the United Nations. But her activities were not limited to the United Nations.
“Shirley Temple Black, one-time child movie-star . . . arrived [in Bucharest] last night to meet men of art and culture and see cultural objects and establishments in the Romanian capitol,” The New York Times reported on November 15. For the next two days, she toured the country as a guest of the Communist government. She had become America’s goodwill ambassador. The charm, the smile were always in evidence when she traveled—and she seemed to be everywhere during 1970 and 1971: Japan, Iran, Yugoslavia, Greece, Egypt—almost always on behalf of environmental programs. She had become one of her country’s leading environmentalists. Wherever she went, she won not only converts to her views on ecology, but friends for Richard Nixon.
“Once,” she recalled, “at a White House dinner commemorating the U.N.’s 25th Anniversary [December 1970] Henry Kissinger requested that I sit next to him. . . . I tried to persuade him to bring the Vietnam War before the Security Council by having him read the worn miniature U.N. Charter that I carry every place I go, [and that night] had in my evening purse. He had to stop eating to look over the marked pages. ‘If we paid attention to these articles we could avoid wars,’ [she told him] ‘or get out of those we are in.’ Henry obliged, jesting, ‘here I wanted to sit next to the youngest woman invited [she was forty-two] and what does she have me do, read a book!’ ”
Charles added, “If Shirley Temple Black can persuade a man like Henry Kissinger to read a book at a White House dinner, who can tell what her future in politics will hold.” One cannot tell from this remark if Charles was joking, or if he had more ambitious hopes for his wife’s political future. Meanwhile, Shirley concentrated on the task at hand.
“All of us who have in one way or another, helped to begin to shape this vast mound of environmental dough into something more manageable . . . have reason to hope that the pudding to be served up in Stockholm next June may truly be worth eating,” she metaphorically told the UN General Assembly on September 20, 1971. “But I confess to a creeping apprehension that if the priceless ingredient of public understanding and public commitment is slighted, that wonderful pudding may end up tasting like glue.”
Taking up residence again at the Barclay, she spent the autumn at the United Nations preparing for the two-week Stockholm Conference the following June. “Imagine, only two weeks?” she said to Washington Post reporter Richard Coe, the same writer with whom she had once done battle over Susan’s stage debut at age four. “That’s a job people could spend months just talking about. Some things have got to be realized by nations who aren’t joining the Stockholm meeting. No country can be aloof from pollution. The air just sweeps everything around th
e world with no attention whatever to boundaries.”
With President Nixon’s planned trip to China the big news at this time, Coe asked her if she would also like to go. “Of course,” she replied. “A fourth of the world’s people live in Communist China. Detente with the Soviets would mean nothing if China was not brought into the international community.” Then she wondered aloud, “Would someone tell Dr. Kissinger that I learned to speak Chinese at the age of eight? It was for a movie called Stowaway, and for it the studio gave me lessons for six months.”
The dates for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment were set for June 5 through June 16. Including Shirley, who was the only woman, there would be thirty-five members of the United States delegation. The scenario for Stockholm had been laid out eighteen months earlier by the conference’s designated secretary-general, Maurice Strong, a dapper Canadian tycoon “wise in the ways of industry.” Twelve thousand representatives of the world’s people were to attend the conference. Yet the Soviet Union and most of the other European Communist countries would not be present. The Russians, active in the early preparations, were staying away in protest against the exclusion of East Germany, not a member of the United Nations and so ineligible to take part in the conference.
June is the best of all times to visit Stockholm. The weather is mild, and the brilliant midday sunlight casts a golden warmth. Most representatives arrived on Monday, June 5. The first full assembly was to be held the next day, which was also “Swedish National Day,” with parades and exuberant celebrations throughout the city. Shirley’s hotel, the elegant Grand, faced the waterfront and the royal palace, where at 12:10 every afternoon, the colorful changing of the guard took place. Located just across the bridge from the royal palace was the royal opera house, where the delegates gathered for a welcoming ceremony.
King Gustav VI Adolph, attired in a plain dark blue business suit, appeared with aides in the royal box, and Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim of the United Nations, Maurice Strong, and other conference dignitaries sat in an opposite box. Sweden’s Premier Olof Palme (long a critic of the United States policy in Vietnam) set the tone of the conference in his opening speech. Without mentioning the United States by name, he condemned “the indiscriminate bombing by large-scale use of bulldozers and herbicides,” as an outrage “which required immediate international attention.” Mr. Palme asked that the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment “unequivocally proclaim” that the presently enormous channeling of resources into armaments should be stopped. The American delegation was deeply disturbed. Its members exchanged muffled comments, and their body postures grew considerably stiffer.*
Following Premier Palme, Kurt Waldheim left his box and mounted the stage to describe armaments as the “ugliest of all pollution.” The subject was not on the agenda, but he called on the world to reduce “and ultimately suppress” armaments. After several more speeches, the delegates broke for lunch, and then reconvened in the auditorium of the Folkets Hus, a modern trade-union building in the heart of Stockholm. During the intercession, there was great speculation as to whether the United States would walk out to protest Mr. Palme’s statement. Reporters rushed around the delegation as it entered the auditorium for the afternoon session. Speaking on behalf of his colleagues, Russell Train made it very-clear the United States had no such intention, and expected “to work within the conference and make it a success.”
Subjects tackled during the eleven days of actual talks ranged from the “cry of the vanishing whale” to atmospheric monitoring to ecocide (ecologically destructive acts such as the use of defoliants in the Vietnam War). Four days into the discussions, China denounced the United States and other “imperialistic superpowers” as being “primarily responsible for global environmental problems.”
“Our conference should strongly condemn the United States for their wanton bombings and shellings, use of chemical weapons, massacre of the people, destruction of human lives, annihilation of plants and animals, and pollution of the environment,” Tang Ka, chairman of the Chinese delegation, told the 114-nation assemblage. The vehemence of the Chinese attack coming so soon after President Nixon’s visit to China again took the U.S. delegation by surprise. That day, Russell Train asked for rebuttal time. Five hours later, the hefty Christian A. Herter “puffed to the platform to report that the rebuttal was not yet ready.” It was deferred for three days, giving the State Department time to assist with a reply.
An observer at the conference said longingly “that it needed a Thomas Jefferson—someone who could lift the delegates above their parochial concerns and rally them behind a contemporary call for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The reply given him was that “even a Jefferson would find it hard to make ennobling history with delegates from 114 countries.” Nonetheless, the conference did weather “the political squalls that repeatedly threatened to swamp it,” and the U.S. delegation came through intact.
Walter Sullivan, covering the Stockholm meeting for The New York Times, deemed the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment a success, for “beneath the polemics ran a groundswell of unanimity. Most of the final decisions were made without a dissenting vote.* It was as though the nations comprising the family of man had become aware, as never before, of the vulnerability of their planet and how essential it is that they work in concert to preserve it. [And perhaps] the conference was more important for the change in national attitudes that it symbolized than for what it did.”
Shirley sat silent and attentive through all the plenary sessions, but spoke up strongly in her delegation’s private meetings. Not until June 16, the last day of the conference, was she asked to address the assembly. Given only ninety minutes to prepare her speech, she quickly scanned the continuing notes she had made throughout the conference and wrote a short address, which she read, urging “the acknowledgment of our kinship as human beings working together for the rational management of our common resources.” Her words were well received.
The day she flew back to the States, June 17, a task force known as the “the plumbers” broke into Democratic Party Headquarters in the Watergate Building in Washington and was arrested. At the time, no one perceived what this might lead to. The presidential election was five months away, and Shirley continued to work on behalf of Richard Nixon’s campaign.
“Some presidential aspirants seem to be pandering to our frustrations, mouthing vague programs which suggest a withdrawn, isolationist fortress America,” she told the United Nations Association of San Mateo County upon her return. The statement was a pointed jab at the Democratic presidential candidate, George McGovern.
“America’s Little Sweetheart,” the San Mateo Times reported, “warned against the stirring winds of isolationism blowing across this country.” The paper quoted her as saying, “Has twenty-five years of history since the isolationist days of Senator Robert Taft taught us so little? Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows.”
A few weeks later, she was in Geneva to attend a United Nations meeting concerned with “the law of the sea, debating such remote matters as ocean-dumping, territorial seas, continental shelves and marine pollution.”
In late August, President Nixon appointed Shirley special assistant to the chairman [Russell Train] of the American Council on Environmental Quality. The council had been organized by Nixon following an agreement he had made with Soviet leaders to cooperate in fighting pollution. She was sworn into her new post on Friday, September 1, at the Executive Office Building in Washington. Her first assignment would take her to Russia for U.S.–U.S.S.R. meetings for the Joint Committee on Cooperation in the Field of Environmental Protection. As she dressed in her Jefferson Hotel suite for the swearing-in ceremony, she routinely examined her breast, a daily task her gynecologist had recommended after the birth of her first child and which she had religiously maintained. To her chilling incredulity, she found a lump at the position of twelve o’clock on her left breast.
Direct
ly after the ceremony, she made arrangements to fly home to Woodside, where Charles had remained, to see her doctor. A mammogram was done. Her doctor assessed the chances at sixty to forty that the detected tumor would be benign, and he urged that she make an appointment at Stanford Medical Center for a biopsy. Shirley, latching on to the optimistic 60 percent odds, assumed there was no immediate danger and set the date for November 2, allowing her time to make the Russian trip and to participate in an environmental symposium in Cincinnati, Ohio, directly thereafter.
She was the only woman on the twenty-six-person Council on Environmental Quality. The group was met in Moscow by Soviet Culture Minister Eketerina Furtseva. Shirley’s previous trip to Russia and her close work with the Soviet delegation at the United Nations served her well. As always before attending a convention abroad, she mastered words and phrases of the host country, extremely helpful preparation in terms of diplomacy. Her excellent phonetic ability gave authenticity to her pronunciation and made an added impression. On the second day of the conference, she sat in the distinguished guests’ gallery of the Supreme Soviet Parliament while Vladimir Kirillin, chairman of the State Committee on Science and Technology, described capitalists as the world’s major polluters.
The next morning, speaking to the American press in Moscow, Shirley rebutted with, “There is no difference. Pollution can be accrued just as easily whether [the polluters] are Communists, Socialists or Capitalists or whatever.” She became the spokesman for the American delegation, and the talks went well enough for her to conclude later that “[b]oth countries will cooperate in matters concerning water pollution, air pollution, agricultural waste, misuses of agricultural land, Arctic and sub-Arctic ecological systems, genetic and biological problems resulting from pollution. They also will cooperate in studying earthquake prediction and a team of Soviet scientists will be coming to about ten minutes from where I live in California to investigate the San Andreas fault.”