Eleanor Read online

  Truman finally settled the debate over the Bernadotte plan. In an election-eve speech in Madison Square Garden he came out flatly against it. “Israel,” he said, “must be large enough and strong enough to make its people self-supporting and secure.”59

  “I have a feeling,” Mrs. Roosevelt advised the president when she reported to him at the end of the 1948 General Assembly,

  that your attitude on Palestine did a great deal to strengthen our own delegation and help the situation from the world point of view. The Arabs have to be handled with strength. One of the troubles has been that we have been so impressed that we must have a united front in Europe that it has affected our stand in the Near East. I personally feel that it is more important for the French and for the British to be united with us than for us to be united with them, and therefore when we make up our minds that something has to be done, we should be the ones to do what we think is right and we should not go through so many anxieties on the subject.60

  She hoped that the truce negotiations being conducted by Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, who had succeeded Bernadotte, would lead to a final settlement,

  since there is no question that they [the Israelis] have full control in the areas which the United Nations considered a fair partition in November, 1947. The Arabs may not like the idea of having the Jews in the Negev, for instance, but I imagine the Jews are the only people who would be energetic enough to develop it.61

  In May, 1949, Israel was voted a member of the United Nations. The day the flag of Israel was added to all the other flags outside of the UN area at Lake Success was a memorable one:

  There was a lump in almost everybody’s throat, I think, at the thought of a new nation being born and one whose people had suffered greatly. . . .62

  Ralph Bunche later said that one of the difficulties in discussing the Palestine problem with Mrs. Roosevelt was her almost “primitive” conception of the Arabs. She still saw them in the terms her husband had used when he described his encounter with Ibn Saud—as desert-dwelling sheiks who pitched their tents on the decks of cruisers and were interested neither in irrigation nor trees. If that was the case, a visit to several Arab countries and Israel in February, 1952, did not change her point of view:

  The Arab countries are awakening but oh! so slowly & painfully! The refugees were a horror & it is the Arab governments who keep them stirred up to go home with a little help from the communists! It is like being in another world even in Lebanon & that is the most progressive. . . .

  Israel is like a breath of fresh air after the Arab countries.

  Horrible problems but wonderful leaders & such able assistants. . . .I felt at home with the people of Israel.

  “Israel was one of the most exciting experiences I have ever had,” she wrote her aunt, Maude Gray. “The Jews in their own country are doing marvels & should, once the refugee problem is settled, help all the Arab countries.”63‡

  * Secretary James Forrestal, former president of the Wall Street firm of Dillon, Read & Company, was himself not oblivious to the Near East’s oil reserves. Saudi Arabia was one of “the three great [oil] puddles left in the world,” he told Secretary of State Byrnes in July, 1945, and although the United States was spending millions there, “the British and not ourselves were getting the benefit of it.”34

  † In 1956 the United States reversed itself on this, Benjamin V. Cohen has noted, when it vigorously supported the creation of a United Nations Emergency Force to supervise and police the Suez cease-fire and the withdrawal of British-French-Israeli forces, and, in connection with the Congo operation in 1960, supported Dag Hammarskjöld’s concept of the United Nations as an executive agency as well as a conference one.

  ‡ See Appendix B: “Mrs. Roosevelt and the Sultan of Morocco.”

  6. THE 1948 CAMPAIGN: A NEW PARTY—NOT A THIRD PARTY

  IN ALBANY AT THE BEGINNING OF SEPTEMBER, 1946, IN A smoke-filled room, the county leaders of the Democratic party had gathered for their preconvention caucus when there was a sudden hush as Mrs. Roosevelt entered. She tried to put everyone at ease but it was a little as if Saint Theresa had walked into a meeting of the Mafia and had said, “Carry on, Signori.” Everyone was on his best behavior.

  The state chairman, Paul Fitzpatrick of Buffalo, began his canvass of the leaders’ views on a slate for the election to run against the incumbent Republicans headed by Gov. Thomas E. Dewey. Mrs. Roosevelt said little. She would have her say the next day as temporary chairman of the convention, in which capacity she was to deliver the keynote address. But when the county leader of Westchester observed that the Democrats did not need to worry about having a veteran on the ticket because the Republicans did not have one on theirs, she bristled. “We want a veteran on the ticket,” she protested, “because of what the country owes the veteran.” Moreover, “we want these younger men and women to come into the leadership of the Party.” A little later when the leader of Rochester minimized the importance to the Democrats of the rural vote and said it would be the cities that carried the ticket, she again gestured to Fitzpatrick that she wished to speak. It was a weakness of the Democrats, she said, and of the party’s program, that agricultural interests in the state were not better represented.1

  The convention nominated a ticket headed by Sen. James M. Mead—a move that had evidently been discussed with FDR:

  I remember very well talking with my husband about his hopes for the candidate, and at that time he told me that he felt if General O’Dwyer could be run for Mayor of New York City, Mr. LaGuardia could be induced to run for the Senate, as running mate for Senator Mead as Governor and that this ticket would be a winning ticket.2

  But the top Democratic leaders did not want La Guardia and chose former Gov. Herbert H. Lehman to run for the Senate. Lehman had come to see her at Hyde Park just before the convention. She had suggested mildly that La Guardia, a political maverick, might do better in what looked like a Republican year. She was pessimistic about the ticket’s chances and preferred to see La Guardia lose rather than him, she told Lehman. But the ex-governor had replied that the party wanted him to run and he could not let the party down.3

  So many of the men who had once held public office found themselves lost when out of it, she observed. Public office as such held little attraction for her. She had firmly stopped a movement to draft her for the state ticket, partly because she preferred her work at the United Nations but also because she thought that “no woman has, as yet, been able to build up and hold sufficient leadership to carry through a program.” And if you could not put through a program what was the point in holding office? She wanted to be free to speak out, a freedom that she would have to surrender in taking party office. “If I do not run for office, I am not beholden to my Party. What I give, I give freely and I am too old to want to be curtailed in any way in the expression of my own thinking.”4

  She was sixty-two. She felt a responsibility for helping young people move into the management of the world in which they lived. If she ran for public office, it would make it difficult for her sons. They all had political ambitions—James in California, Elliott and Franklin Jr. in New York. They all had lived in the shadow of their father. She did not wish to place them under a similar disability.5

  The Republicans swept the 1946 elections, gaining control of both the House and the Senate. “The Party and the nation have been without leadership,” Charl Williams, who traveled the country for the National Education Association, wrote her, “this includes the President of the United States, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and party leaders in Congress. Loyal rock-ribbed Democrat as I am, I could feel no sense of enthusiasm as in former days.”

  Mrs. Roosevelt agreed that the country lacked leadership, “but perhaps we will pull ourselves together and keep going.” What she meant by leadership, she indicated a few months later when a reporter for PM came to talk with her on the second anniversary of Franklin’s death. She met people often, she told the reporter, who said to her:


  “We miss hearing his voice in our living room.” You know I think he gave people a sense of security. They felt he had a pretty complete understanding of their own problems and the problems they must face in the rest of the world. Hearing his voice, they were inclined to feel they were part of what was going on.

  Now, they feel left out.

  Franklin had a good way of simplifying things. He made people feel that he had a real understanding of things and they felt they had about the same understanding.6

  There was not too much that Truman at sixty-two could do about his dry, rasping voice or how he related to people. Nor did Mrs. Roosevelt look at him and think, “Franklin wouldn’t do it that way,” as Harry Hopkins had warned that the Roosevelt people would. She understood Truman’s problems with Congress and thought he might be better off with straight-out Republican control, since the Republicans then would have to take the responsibility.* Yet his difficulties with Congress did not explain or justify his neglect of important elements of the Roosevelt coalition—the women, the cities, the liberals. That, she feared, reflected his middle-American conservatism, and many of the new men he brought in with him, including the so-called “Missouri Gang,” were similarly oriented.

  She was determined to do what she could to press Truman in the other direction. “I used to have to remind the gentlemen of the Party rather frequently,” she had written him in mid-1946,

  that we Democrats did not win unless we had the liberals, labor and women largely with us. Among our best workers in all campaigns are the women. They will do the dull detail work and fill the uninteresting speaking engagements which none of the men are willing to undertake. I hope you will impress this fact on those who are now organizing for the Congressional campaigns and in preparation for 1948.8

  By the end of 1946 some of her liberal friends were gloomily speaking of a “reversion to type” by the Democratic party now that the strong hand of FDR was removed. “That is the real meaning of the New Deal exodus from Washington. The turnover in administration personnel is fast approaching the proportions that usually accompany a change in parties,” a friend wrote her. He cited the premature, pell-mell abandonment of wartime economic controls, the inept handling of labor crises, the replacement of able and talented men by political hacks, wondering whether it was not time for progressives again to think of going the road of a third party.

  “I would still be opposed to a third party,” she advised him, “but in the end you are right & I think we must have a new party, not necessarily a 3rd party.” She wrote along similar lines to La Guardia:

  It takes so long before a third party wields any power, I can not see much point in trying to build one up at the present time when things need to be done quickly.

  She saw a role for independents, she went on, “to make the two major parties uncomfortable when they stand for something which is really wrong.” She was not saying that the Democrats should be supported no matter what sort of candidates they nominated, “but I think it is the party to belong to, and we can try to improve the candidates. If we do not succeed, we do not have to vote for them.”9

  She considered Edwin W. Pauley one of the people responsible for the conservative shift of the administration and Democratic party, and politely told him so after she spoke at the California Jackson Day dinner in Los Angeles, which as Democratic National committeeman he organized in June, 1947. Irate over a statement critical of the Truman Doctrine issued by liberal Democrats with James Roosevelt in the lead, Pauley publicly rebuked the liberals, and the press interpreted his censure to include Mrs. Roosevelt, whose questions about the Truman Doctrine were on the public record. He had meant no disrespect, he hastened to assure her, but a Jackson Day dinner was not an appropriate forum for the criticism of the administration’s policies or the president.

  He might be right on the issue of propriety and protocol, she replied, but the questions asked about the administration’s policies in the statement of the progressives were being asked everywhere, and the mistake at the dinner was in not having an administration speaker there to answer those questions.

  I was not bothered by any suggestion of disrespect. Things like that have never bothered me, but I was troubled by what I thought was stupid politically. 1948 is no walk-over for the Democratic Party or for President Truman, and he needs some really astute and liberal politicians around him.10

  When Mrs. Roosevelt heard from Ed Flynn that Secretary of Agriculture Clinton P. Anderson would replace Robert Hannegan as national chairman, she saw it as confirmation that the party was being turned over to its most conservative elements. “I thought it only fair to tell you,” she wrote Truman,

  that I could never support Mr. Anderson. I consider him a conservative and I consider that the only chance the Democratic Party has for election in 1948, [is] to be the liberal party. We cannot be more conservative than the Republicans so we cannot succeed as conservatives. If the country is going conservative, it is not going to vote for any Democratic candidate.11

  The real reason for Flynn’s pique, Truman said, was a quarrel over patronage. But her protest against Anderson must have had some effect, for Sen. J. Howard McGrath of Rhode Island, a politician oriented toward urban rather than “middle” America, was appointed national chairman.

  As 1948 approached, the politicians understood her political importance. There were renewed pressures in New York to have her run for senator. “Dear Mr. Mayor,” she wrote William O’Dwyer:

  . . .I want to tell you again that under no circumstances would I run for any office.

  I am interested in the United Nations work and feel that even at sixty-three, which I will shortly be, I can do something there, but it is no time at sixty-three to start running for elective office and nothing would induce me to do it.

  What she said to O’Dwyer privately, she reiterated publicly in her column to make doubly sure that the party’s leaders knew she meant it.12

  Her popularity astonished the politicians and infuriated anti-Roosevelt columnists, especially Westbrook Pegler, who had embarked on a systematic campaign to try to destroy her influence. In a popularity poll conducted by the Woman’s Home Companion at the beginning of 1948, Mrs. Roosevelt was placed first among the nation’s ten outstanding personalities, including Truman, Marshall, Dewey, Hoover, Eisenhower, and MacArthur.13 The Gallup poll taken every year on the most admired woman in the United States regularly showed her at the head of the list.

  She knew she had political influence. She knew that Truman needed her. He needed her the more because of the Wallace third-party candidacy. Wallace had announced his candidacy for president in December, declaring that a vote for him would be a vote against war with Russia. Her first comment had been a terse, motherly “Oh dear, oh dear.” Then in three columns running she assailed him, her final sally being the flat declaration, “he has never been a good politician, he has never been able to gauge public opinion, and he has never picked his advisers wisely.”14

  Yet it was by no means certain at the turn of the year that Wallace’s assessment of the public mood was wrong. She hoped that Truman was “going to make a real fight,” she wrote him after his State of the Union message, “for every one of the social things in your message. . . .The great trouble is that Mr. Wallace will cut in on us because he can say that we have given lip service to these things by having produced very little in the last few years.”

  Nettled, Truman replied that he had been making a real fight and if he had not come to Wallace’s support during the confirmation struggle in 1945 when Roosevelt was in Yalta, Wallace never would have been approved as secretary of commerce in the Senate. Truman felt that his problem with Congress was the same one FDR had had—the coalition between the southern Democrats and the Republicans.15

  The answer was time-honored and hackneyed. It had never wholly satisfied her when offered by Franklin; it did not satisfy her now. Upset over the administration’s vacillations on Palestine, worried over the increasing
influence of the military, she decided she had to express her anxieties more bluntly. “Because this letter is not too pleasant, I have been putting it off,” she wrote Truman. She knew how difficult it was for the people around a president “to tell him that they are troubled and of course, there are many people who tell him only what they think will serve their own interests in what they think he will want to hear.” She detailed her foreign-policy worries and went on:

  There is also a fear of the conservative influence that is being exerted on the economic side and I am afraid that this deposition of Mr. Eccles [Marriner S. Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board] which the New York Times takes as a triumph of “orthodoxy and conservatism in fiscal policy as represented by John W. Snyder, Secretary of the Treasury” is going to emphasize this feeling considerably.

  Believe me, Sir, it is going to be impossible to elect a Democrat if it is done by appealing to the conservatives. The Republicans are better conservatives than we are. If the people are going to vote conservative, it is going to be Taft or Dewey and we might just as well make up our minds to it.16

  Another portent of the inroads Wallace was making into Truman’s strength came like a thunderclap out of the Bronx. In a special congressional election in mid-February, the Wallace candidate handed Ed Flynn’s nominee a stunning defeat, almost reversing the landslide percentages by which the Democrats traditionally held the district.

  What did she think of her Ed Flynn now, the president inquired with some trenchancy, knowing the great confidence she had placed in Flynn’s political judgment. She thought the Bronx vote had proved the point Flynn had been trying to make to the president: