Eleanor Read online

  I would like to see all progressive groups work together. But since some of us prefer to have our staffs and policy-making groups completely free of any American Communist infiltration if we can possibly prevent it, while others have not quite as strong a feeling on this subject, it is natural that there should be two set-ups.19

  Former New York mayor, Fiorello H. La Guardia, expostulated with her:

  The technique and even the nomenclature of selfish, conservative, money-minded groups seem to have been adopted recently by your group. The brand of Communism is hurled indiscriminately. Do you think that is fair? What is the test of excluding any one from a progressive group? How is a sympathizer or fellow traveler of Fascists or Communists to be identified?. . .It has gotten so now that any one who has a difference of opinion or is not in agreement is charged with being a Communist or a friend of a Communist. My dear Mrs. Roosevelt, where will all this end?

  She had been through all this before at the end of the thirties, when the Popular Front disintegrated and the efforts of liberals to distinguish their objectives from those of the Communists and to free their organization from Communist control were met with the cry of “red-baiter.”

  Of course, I do not believe in having everyone who is a liberal called a communist, or everyone who is a conservative called fascist, but I think it is possible to determine whether one is one or the other and it does not take too long to do so.

  She wanted to see all liberals work together,

  and if PCA could remove from its leadership the communist element, I do not see any reason why ADA and PCA should not work together.20

  She wrote even more sharply to Max Lerner (at the time, the editorial director of PM), who had criticized the ADA for being anti-Communist rather than non-Communist.

  The American Communists seem to have succeeded very well in jeopardizing whatever the liberals work for. Therefore, to keep them out of policy-making and staff positions seems to be very essential even at the price of being called red-baiters, which I hope no member of this new group will really be.21

  Wallace showed a further lack of sound political judgment in Mrs. Roosevelt’s eyes when he undertook to barnstorm western Europe, making speeches critical of American foreign policy. Calvin B. Baldwin, the director of the PCA and a close associate of Wallace, asked her to cosign a cable to French political leaders that said, “We the undersigned Americans wish to convey our wholehearted support for the sentiments for peace expressed by Mr. Wallace. Mr. Wallace’s trip to Europe is a continuation of his vigilance and constant fight for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s concept of one world.” She refused:

  I do not believe that it is wise for Mr. Wallace to be making the kind of speeches he is making at the present time in foreign countries.

  Naturally I have no idea what my husband’s attitude would be if he were alive today, and though I am convinced he would have wanted to strengthen the UN, I doubt if he would want to do it in just the way that Mr. Wallace has found necessary. I have such complete confidence in Mr. Wallace’s integrity, I am sure he has taken this course because he felt he had to, but with all my heart I wish for his own sake that he had not done so.22

  What sent Wallace abroad was President Truman’s enunciation of the Truman Doctrine, a proposal to take over from Britain responsibility for giving economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey as part of a new policy of supporting “free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Wallace charged, in a series of speeches in Europe, that the Truman Doctrine meant shoring up reactionary governments. It would require the United States to “police Russia’s every border.” It committed the country to a policy of “ruthless imperialism” and in the end would bring the United States to war with the Soviet Union.

  Although Mrs. Roosevelt was shocked that Wallace should make this kind of an attack abroad, she, too, had serious reservations about the doctrine. She demanded further information. “For instance, why must this country accept Great Britain’s military responsibilities?” She doubted that a government

  could be completely stable, and representative of 85 per cent of the will of the people, and still require military bolstering from the outside.

  I do not question the absolute need to help both Greece and Turkey with relief and rehabilitation. They certainly are unable to cope with their economic problems alone. Without help, chaos would ensue. I think the part of the President’s speech which states that Communism follows economic chaos is entirely correct. The economy of Communism is an economy which grows in an atmosphere of misery and want.

  Feeling as I do that our hope for peace lies in the United Nations, I naturally grieve to see this country do anything which harms the strength of the UN. If we could have given help for relief and rehabilitation on a purely non-political basis, and then have insisted that the UN join us in deciding what should be done on any political or policing basis to keep Greece and Turkey free from all outside interference, and to allow her to settle her own difficulties in the way the majority of her people desired to have them settled, I would have felt far happier than I do now. . . .

  I realize that the lack of a military set-up within the United Nations makes it very difficult to use the UN in a situation requiring force.

  But if force was deemed necessary, “it might better be brought in from the individual nations at the behest of the UN until we have collective force to use.”23

  Her criticism was read with anxiety at the State Department. Dean Acheson, the acting secretary of state, promptly dispatched a top aide to New York City to explain the policy to her. She was not won over. She was troubled by the go-it-alone implications of the Truman Doctrine. What if the Russians were to follow U.S. precedent and say, “since you have acted alone without consulting the United Nations, we are free to do the same,” and send their army into Greece? Russia could “go into Greece, claiming she is doing exactly what we are doing and we have given her an excuse.” She was indignant over the failure of the administration to give advance notification to the United Nations and to the U.S. delegates at the UN.

  I hope never again that this type of action will be taken without at least consulting with the Secretary-General and with our permanent member on the Security Council beforehand. It all seems to me a most unfortunate way to do things.24

  Senator Vandenberg felt the same way. “The Administration made a colossal blunder in ignoring the UN,” he wrote. He submitted an amendment to the aid bill which acknowledged the authority of the United Nations to modify or halt U.S. aid to Greece and Turkey at any stage. She congratulated the senator:

  I am very grateful for your amendment to the Administration Bill on Greece and Turkey. I still feel that our attitude toward Russia should be less negative and more a comprehensive democratic plan for the revival of the world, since it always seems to me that a positive program has more strength than a negative one.25

  Acheson sought to reassure her on other points that she had raised. He did not think Russia could view American aid to Greece and Turkey as a threat to her security, he wrote, nor that the USSR was “apt to send an army into Greece as a consequence of such aid from us.” The United Nations, he agreed with her, had to be “the cornerstone of our foreign policy,” but in the absence of a unity of purpose which would enable it to act, we should not

  bind ourselves unalterably and unilaterally. The Soviet Union has made loans, has given military assistance and has delivered foodstuffs to a number of countries, including Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. They have not reported these matters to the UN and they would certainly refuse to permit UN supervision of them.26

  But neither Acheson nor his representative nor Averell Harriman, with whom she also spoke, fully allayed her doubts, she wrote the president. She did not believe “that taking over Mr. Churchill’s policies in the Near East, in the name of democracy, is the way to really create a barrier to communism or promote democracy.” She wondered about the president�
��s advisers:

  Admiral [William D.] Leahy as always will think of this country as moving on its own power. . . .Mr. Acheson is rather more sympathetic to the British point of view than I would be and what with Mr. Lewis Douglas,† who will certainly be sympathetic to Mr. Churchill’s point of view, I am afraid we are apt to lose sight of the fact that if we do not wish to fight Russia, we must be both honest and firm with her. She must understand us, but she must also trust us.27

  The United States had to bring its economic power to bear at points that might not be exemplary as democracies, Truman said in reply, if they were of strategic importance, as the Greek-Turkish land bridge between continents was. He was not insensitive to the problems she raised. The U.S. mission to carry out the aid program would be instructed to strengthen the democratic forces in Greece, he assured her, and he agreed emphatically that the overall American approach had to be affirmative and democratic, adding, however, that this had been his approach.28

  While differing with the administration over the Truman Doctrine, Mrs. Roosevelt was also remonstrating with Acheson about emergency food aid to Yugoslavia. The United States should help, she argued, despite political differences. “Starving people are not friendly to us and will not become less communistic. . . .” On the basis of departmental studies, he replied, Yugoslavia no longer had a need for free relief. “It is clear that in any case our assistance must go where the needs are most urgent.” She did not dispute this. “However, I am told that U.S. will not sell to Yugoslavia and that our attitude is part of our ‘Stop Russia’ policy.” Not so, replied Acheson. “I assure you that immediacy of need is the primary consideration in matters of this kind. This country will never sacrifice humanity in order to carry out any policy.” The American Committee for Yugoslav Relief, of which she was honorary chairman, asked her to join other notables in an appeal to President Truman to use part of the unearmarked funds in the relief appropriation to alleviate the emergency in Yugoslavia. She refused to do so, but wrote Truman privately:

  In spite of anything that may have occurred, I feel very strongly that it is important that the Yugoslav people should have relief in the way of food. They did hold the Nazis at bay at a time which was crucial in the war.29

  She was never wholly won over to the Truman Doctrine.‡ When General Marshall, at the end of April, returned from another fruitless session of the Council of Foreign Ministers, this one in Moscow, she wrote pointedly in her column that she awaited his report to the nation anxiously: “Has he come to a conclusion as to what a comprehensive plan for world recovery must contain or is he still groping?”31

  There were many who were asking the same question, and a day after this column appeared General Marshall issued written instructions to George F. Kennan, who was on the newly created policy planning staff of the State Department, to consider what could be done to aid European reconstruction. Kennan had never shared the hopes of friendly and intimate postwar collaboration among the Big Three. Nor had he thought that the United Nations could take the place of “a well-conceived and realistic foreign policy.” Nonetheless, he was a critic of the Greek-Turkish aid bill. Although fated to go down in history as the father of “containment,” he disapproved the sweeping nature of the bill’s commitment to aid all nations threatened by Communism. The Soviet challenge to the West, he felt, was essentially political and economic, not military.§ “I suspected that what was intended primarily was military aid, and that what had really happened was that the Pentagon had exploited a favorable set of circumstances in order to infiltrate a military aid program for Turkey into what was supposed to be primarily a political and economic program for Greece.” The policy planning staff’s recommendations to General Marshall represented a studied effort to correct the impression created by the Truman Doctrine that the American approach to world problems was a defensive reaction to Communist pressure. The American aid effort in Europe, its report stated, “should be directed not to the combating of communism as such but to restoration of the economic health and vigor of European society.” This key concept emerged still further sharpened in General Marshall’s speech at Harvard on June 5, broaching the Marshall Plan:

  Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist. Such assistance, I am convinced, must not be on a piecemeal basis as various crises develop.33

  The general invited Europe to take the initiative and draft a program of its requirements. In London, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin read and reread the speech with growing excitement and, in his own words, “seized the offer with both hands” and took the initiative in organizing Europe’s response.34

  She liked the general’s approach, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote, especially the invitation to Europe to come “to an over-all economic agreement in which we would try to aid. It was a very constructive suggestion. . . .” To a correspondent who feared that the aid-to-Greece-and-Turkey program had been undertaken in order to bring about war with Russia, she wrote that the administration’s purpose was to prevent war with Russia, which “has inaugurated an expansionist program and somewhere it had to be stopped. I do not think it had to be stopped in just that way, and I am very much happier about Secretary Marshall’s over-all plan.”35

  But Russia, she went on to point out, was “nearly always obstructionist” and was making it difficult to bring the Marshall Plan into being. “The Marshall Plan is a bona fide offer to help Europe to get back on its feet. Mr. Molotov, in refusing to join the rest of Europe, is creating the very thing he says he fears, which is division instead of cooperation.” She had to say, she added a few days later, “I do not in the least understand some of the actions taken by the Russian Government.” Russia’s refusal to join with the rest of Europe in the Marshall Plan opened that country “to the accusation that she does not really care so much about European recovery as she does about her power to make the Europeans feel that they have to turn to her for help.”36

  Mrs. Roosevelt was concerned about the relationship of the United Nations to the program that was taking shape. The European nations were meeting in Paris to draft their reply to the Marshall initiative. “I understand that the United Nations has not been invited to the Paris Economic Conference. I should think it should be,” she wrote Marshall from Campobello, where she had gone in order to work on her autobiography. It was his understanding that the participating countries were keeping the Economic Commission for Europe, a UN body, “fully informed” of the Paris proceedings, he assured her. “I would imagine that it will be through this body that the United Nations will be brought into relation with the results of the Paris Talks.” But the hostility of Russia made it impossible to give the ECE any operational relationship to the developing recovery program. Watching Soviet policy from afar, it seemed to her that

  The Soviets have decided that if things can be made disagreeable enough for the United States in Europe, and if complications in the Security Council can be made to seem insoluble, then perhaps they can succeed in creating a home situation in this country which will force our government to abandon all interest in Europe. Once this has been accomplished, it is easy to see that they feel sure they can, in one way or another, control the whole of Europe.

  The only obstacle to that desired objective which they can see today is the interest of the United States. They count on the people of this country finally saying: “The situation over there is a headache. Let them get out of it as best they can. . . .”

  Because of the things which have been said in our papers and in our Congress, the Soviets undoubtedly believe that the Marshall Plan will never get from our people the support which would be required to make it work.37

  His opposition to the Marshall Plan was another count in her growing disenchantment with Wallace:

  I think Mr. Henry Wallace is a fin
e person but I do not think he is very wise as a politician. He has succeeded in misleading the Russians into believing that the majority of the people of the U.S. agree with them and that, of course, leads them to do things which they would never otherwise do.38

  The United Nations General Assembly, which opened on September 18, 1947, was the first at which the delegation was headed by General Marshall. She had never been happy about Byrnes’s leadership in foreign affairs. When Truman appointed him secretary of state in June, 1945, she wrote her son James,

  I hate Jimmy Byrnes going in because with all of his ability, I think he is primarily interested in Jimmy Byrnes, but after all, Father used him and I imagine that President Truman will feel that his past association will make working together easier. . . .

  She felt very different about Marshall. “My dear General,” she had written him after Franklin’s burial:

  I want to tell you to-night how deeply I appreciate your kindness & thoughtfulness in all the arrangements made. My husband would have been grateful & I know it was all as he would have wished it. He always spoke of his trust in you & of his affection for you.39

  In turn, that austere, incorruptible soldier warmed toward Mrs. Roosevelt, and occasionally even permitted a personal note to intrude into his correspondence with her: “I signed this morning a rather formal letter to you expressing appreciation for your splendid work during the last meeting of the Assembly of the United Nations,” he wrote her in July, 1947. “In this note I merely wish to tell you that I am much relieved to know that you are willing to participate as a delegate at the coming meeting of the Assembly in September.” He believed in delegation team-work and he sent her a draft of the speech he intended to deliver in the Assembly, asking for her comments. It seemed to her “excellent in tone and admirably frank. I wish if it were possible somewhere at the start the United States might emphasize the value of the UN bringing all nations together for cooperative action.” Marshall sent her comment to Charles E. (“Chip”) Bohlen, who was working on the general’s speech, and Eleanor was delighted with the final product: