Eleanor Read online

  was on Senator McCarthy. He has certainly made an impression. The question was phrased like this. “What about Senator McCarthy? Are the American people losing their freedom?”

  She was unable to understand why Eisenhower was not firmer with the Wisconsin senator. “I hope you are right that Ike has things in hand and that his technique will win out,” she wrote David Gray. Mischievously she had disclosed in her column before her departure that she had been visited by the FBI, whose agents with solemn faces were checking on the loyalty and competence of John Foster Dulles.22

  The spread of fear in the United States dismayed her. She was appalled that young people were frightened to attend a meeting because it might have unforeseen consequences. It would never have occurred to her in her youth that she should not go to a meeting if it interested her. “We must preserve our right to think and differ,” she found it necessary to say in a speech to the ADA. Americans should be able to disagree and to consider new ideas.

  The day I’m afraid to sit down with people I do not know because five years from now someone will say five of those people were Communists and therefore you are a Communist—that will be a bad day.

  I want to be able to sit down with anyone who may have a new idea and not be afraid of contamination by association. In a democracy you must be able to meet with people and argue your point of view—people whom you have not screened beforehand. That must be part of the freedom of people in the United States.23

  There was a problem of Communist espionage and penetration of U.S. government agencies, she acknowledged. But it should be handled by the FBI. She knew from firsthand experience how the Communists operated as “secret battalions” within trade unions and progressive organizations. That was why she supported the ADA and such non-Communist trade-union leaders as Reuther, Carey, and Dubinsky. But the right wing of the Republican and Democratic parties, in exploiting the public’s fear of Communism, were after larger game. They wanted to impose thought control, rendering the discussion of certain subjects—such as recognition of Red China—taboo. They wanted to demoralize and divide the New Deal wing of the Democratic party. In that connection she knew they would have dearly loved to bring her down.

  “The time has come,” wrote Pegler of Mrs. Roosevelt at the height of McCarthy’s power, “to snatch this wily old conspirator before Joe McCarthy’s committee and chew her out. . . .Joe McCarthy or Bill Jenner could tear her to tatters if either of them should ever drag her to the stand. She deserves far less respect than any conventional woman.” She was quite prepared for such a call.

  Actually some of the gentlemen in the Committee are a little annoyed with me because I have expressed my disapproval of some of Mr. McCarthy’s methods, but they have never asked me to appear before the Committee. I would be very glad to do so. . . .24

  The committees gave her a wide berth. Even Senator McCarthy realized this was a battle he might not win. And she, far from being intimidated, went out of her way to defend the victims of the McCarthyite madness. Mary McLeod Bethune and Dr. Channing Tobias, the head of the NAACP, came to tell her that the next target of the witch hunters was to be the Negro leaders. “I said we must fight back, not in an organization, but by standing together wherever we are sure of anyone.” When the Nation came under attack, she changed her mind about not attending its dinner:

  I thought that I could not be with you tonight because I had so many things that I had set out to do today. But I decided that it would be wise to come since I understood that there had been some attacks made. I believe that it is a great mistake not to stand up for people, even when you differ with them, if you feel that they are trying to do things that will help in our country.25

  “I hear Jimmy Wechsler & Joe [Joseph Lash] are to be dissected by the Journal-American in Sept. or Oct.,” she alerted this author and his wife. “I’m a bit suspicious that it is aimed at me too & if so I will be glad to take any part possible, short of answering Pegler!” Eugene Lyons, author of The Red Decade, challenged her assertion that many persons “label anything they don’t like as Communist” and her implication that this was happening on an alarming scale. The cry of “hysteria,” Lyons insisted, “is largely bogus. I find that the American people have remained remarkably calm and sensible, considering what they have learned recently about the Soviet conspiracy in our midst. . . .” He thought that liberals in shouting “hysteria” were “attributing to the public their own inflamed and guilt-ridden state of mind, which is of course a familiar psychotic type of behavior.” She dictated a brief answer to Lyons:

  I have plenty of material to back up what I said but I think your letter is sufficient proof that hysteria exists.

  Lyons sent her a long list of quotations that he said supported his contention that the hysteria was self-generated “among self-styled liberals, native and imported.” But to this letter she made no reply.26

  On the eve of her trip to Japan she had met with some troubled ADA leaders. McCarthyism was a national peril, and the ADA was looking for someone who was not afraid to take him on. She would be the ideal chairman, they said. She could not do it, she told them. She had committed herself to the AAUN. Grave as the danger of McCarthyism was, America’s relationship to the United Nations also was in jeopardy because of right-wing attacks. But she was moved by the plea of James A. Wechsler, having great admiration for the way he had stood up to the Wisconsin senator. Until he had done so, “nobody else dared to challenge McCarthy before his own Committee,” she said. “People were inclined to be intimidated.” She agreed to serve as the ADA’s honorary chairman.27

  She had faith in the “common sense” of the American people, she had said in Hong Kong, when asked about McCarthyism. The senator would “cease to be a headline when the people realize their safety lies in knowledge and not in fear.” Until that time arrived, there was nothing to do but stand together and fight back. “Go down and answer up if you can,” she advised the Volunteers in Politics, a Stevensonian organization, but added, “it’s not easy.”28

  “I am appalled to see that the Un-American Activities Committee is going to investigate Ralph Bunche,” she wrote Clark Eichelberger. “Will you tell him if there is anything whatever I can do, I will gladly do it.” When the Americanism Commission of the American Legion attacked the Encampment for Citizenship, sponsored by the Ethical Culture Societies, citing the appearance of Roger Baldwin as one of the encampment’s speakers and the showing of a film of Julien Bryan (a producer of film documentaries with a social theme), she commiserated with the encampment’s chief patron, Alice (“Nanny”) Pollitzer, eighty-four years old and still battling for good causes. “I am so very sorry, but all are suspect today and I think we must fight.” A few months later she accepted the honorary chairmanship of the encampment’s tenth-anniversary celebration.29

  In October, 1954, Mrs. Roosevelt celebrated her seventieth birthday. Her hair had grayed and her tall figure thickened. She no longer rode horseback, although she still walked a great deal in the Hyde Park woods accompanied by her two Scottish terriers, Tamas, the grandson of Fala, and Duffy, a puppy given to her after Fala’s death. The range of her interests was reflected in her taxable income from professional activities, which, in 1954, was almost $90,000: $36,000 from McCall’s, $28,000 from her column, and $25,000 from Colston Leigh for lectures.

  “No, I have not slackened my pace,” she told Emma Bugbee. “At least, not yet. I probably shall. Everybody does.” Old friends were vanishing. In 1949, Elinor Morgenthau had died, and at the service she had moved Elinor’s family to tears with her remarks about how greatly she had admired Elinor’s devotion to her family, a devotion that she always managed to render while sustaining an active interest in what was happening in the world. Cousin Susie, in whose house Mrs. Roosevelt had been married, died in 1950, and two years later Aunt Maude, a last link with her childhood. And then in 1953, Tommy, who had served her for nearly thirty years, who not only made her life easier “but gave me a reason for living,”
died. “My boss is a very big person,” Tommy once told Lorena Hickok, “just about the biggest person in the world. Anything I can do to help her—no matter what—justifies my existence. It’s enough for me.” In her column, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote, “her standards were high for me, as well as for herself, and she could be a real critic.” When Tommy died, “I learned for the first time what being alone was like.” In her bedroom desk at Val-Kill she kept two letters, one from Tommy on her birthday renewing her “yearly pledge of my devotion to you & all that you do,” on the back of which Mrs. Roosevelt wrote, “a pledge always kept.” It was clipped to a Christmas letter from George Marvin, the Groton tutor whom she had often gotten out of scrapes, promising better behavior, on which she had written, “a pledge broken within a month.”30

  Summing up her general attitude toward life at seventy, she declared, “Life has got to be lived—that’s all there is to it. At 70, I would say the advantage is that you take life more calmly. You know that ‘this, too, shall pass!’”

  There were, however, joys—among them nineteen grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. In 1952, Anna had remarried. Mrs. Roosevelt and Tommy flew out to Los Angeles for the ceremony. She liked Dr. James A. Halsted:

  I am very happy about Anna’s marriage because I feel that she will be happy. He is a fine person. . .on the staff of the Veterans Hospital and also a teaching professor at the University of Southern California. Her life will be simple.31

  In June, 1954, she went to Cambridge to attend the fiftieth reunion of the Harvard Class of 1904—her husband’s. Once again her husband’s stand-in, she marched with the class and even attended the Harvard-Yale baseball game. She enjoyed seeing her husband’s classmates relive their college years and, in doing so, become young again. “Father would have loved it,” she told her family afterward.32

  What achievements had given her the greatest satisfaction, the press wanted to know on her seventieth birthday?

  As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along. I got the most satisfaction from my work in the UN. There I was part of the second great experiment to bring countries together and to get them to work for a peaceful atmosphere in the world, and I still feel it important to strengthen this organization in every way.33

  She did not like to have people make a fuss over her birthday. This time she made an exception. “You are a dear to want to do something for my birthday,” she wrote Edith Helm, who had served as her social secretary during the White House years:

  The American Association for the UN is really commercializing it and I have permitted them to do so because I would like to see them clear themselves of debt. Until they can do that the work will not really be well done because they will always be living from hand to mouth. So, if you want to do something, will you send a check to the AAUN?34

  Not a single member of the Eisenhower-appointed American delegation attended the AAUN’s birthday party for her, Doris Fleeson noted. But Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche came, as did an unexpected guest—Andrei Vishinsky—who had wanted, in this way, to apologize for his rudeness in 1948. He understood, he told the AAUN, that he would not be seated with Mrs. Roosevelt’s friends on the dais. He would be “very glad to sit anywhere.”35

  “I would like,” she said in her remarks which closed the party, “to see us take hold of ourselves, look at ourselves and cease being afraid.” Her final words were for her family. More than achievement, “I treasure the love of my children, the respect of my children, and I would never want my children or my grandchildren to feel that I had failed them.”36

  12. “MADLY FOR ADLAI”

  AT DINNER IN MRS. ROOSEVELT’S EAST SIXTY-SECOND STREET apartment in late 1953, after the folding tables had been put away and the party had reassembled around the fireplace in the living room, the hostess brought up the subject of the mediocrity of leadership in the present time. Where were the statesmen of the caliber of FDR, Churchill, and Stalin? Mrs. Roosevelt asked. Perhaps Marshal Tito, she went on. Perhaps Adlai Stevenson. At this, Judge Samuel Rosenman demurred. Stevenson lacked political instinct, FDR’s old counselor insisted. To prove his point, he told a story involving Cardinal Spellman. The cardinal had asked him to urge Stevenson to speak at the annual Alfred E. Smith dinner. It was a forum coveted by most politicians, since it indicated their acceptability to the cardinal, yet Stevenson the year before had turned it down. To the renewed invitation conveyed by Judge Rosenman, Stevenson replied that he had two invitations for the evening in question—one to address the Smith dinner, the other the Woodrow Wilson Foundation—and he was not sure which he should accept. Stevenson had to make up his mind, commented the judge, as to whether he wanted to be a statesman or a politician.

  Mrs. Roosevelt defended Stevenson. She thought he was a world statesman with the potentiality of the wartime leaders—if only he would develop greater self-confidence.1

  The Democratic defeat in 1952 had one compensation—her discovery of Adlai. Exhilarated by his wit, eloquence, and integrity, held by the grace and glow with which he illuminated a problem, she came out of the campaign believing he should have another chance:

  I am really worried about this new administration, but I hope Governor Stevenson will really take the leadership of the Democratic party and keep doing a constructive job of criticism.2

  The more widely she traveled abroad after leaving the United Nations and sensed the extent to which the United States of the McCarthy period was on trial before the world, the more strongly she felt that it was Stevenson who most clearly understood the dimensions of the problem and, being held in the highest esteem in foreign capitals, was best equipped to deal with it. Somehow he always had an apt word to meet every situation, she reported while trailing him around Europe in 1953 and hearing of the enthusiasm he had aroused.

  Stevenson was reluctant to criticize American policy while abroad, and she agreed with him on that. Henry Wallace’s willingness to do so had shocked her. But she also felt Stevenson had to speak up—forcefully—at home.

  I think Stevenson has a difficult position. He must not give the impression that we are a divided country on most issues but he must disagree enough with the Administration to have some points of difference in the campaign. I don’t think he is in full swing as the leader of the party and I hope he gets there soon.3

  She encouraged him to accept speaking engagements. He was a great orator, but she felt he did not know how to communicate with the man in the street. She had hinted at this in her column during the 1952 campaign. At the time she thought it was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who was giving Stevenson’s speeches “too much of the academic touch.” She felt they were “not simple enough.” She came to realize later that this was Stevenson’s, not Schlesinger’s, doing. She thought he fussed too much over his speeches, wanting to make each a polished gem. “I wish I had mastered the speech preparation problem like you have,” he once remarked to her, confessing that he was already quaking with anxiety at the prospect of having to address the Columbia Bicentennial Conference. It was, at that time, more than six months away.4

  Stevenson came to ask Mrs. Roosevelt for advice on whether to run again. Did she not feel there were others better able to lead the party? She did not. There was something else on his mind, she learned. He came from a patrician background very much like hers and President Roosevelt’s, he said, yet they both were always “much more at home in talking with people” than he was. She liked his modesty and his ability to view himself with critical detachment. She explained some of the circumstances that had given FDR his ability to “feel” his way into how people felt and thought, an explanation that, of course, said little about her own contribution to her husband’s education.

  She urged Stevenson to don an old suit, get into a jalopy, and travel about the country talking to farmers, gas station attendants, housewives, and not leave an area “until you can ‘feel’ what they are feeling.” Stevenson did not take her advice, and this troubled her. But whatever he
r reservations, she considered him the ablest man in Democratic ranks. “I don’t agree with you that Averell [Harriman] is going to be our next President,” she cautioned David Gray, “because I believe Stevenson is by far best equipped and so far ahead in the nation.” “You might like to know,” she informed Al Lowenstein, who was with the Second Armored Division in Europe, “that I saw Adlai Stevenson recently. He is announcing his candidacy and he is prepared to fight.”5

  Her relationship to the 1952 campaign had been peripheral; in 1956 it was central. Stevenson consulted her on the setting up of his Stevenson for President Committee. She helped raise funds for his preconvention drive. As she traveled about the country on paid lecture trips, she sent back the names of contacts and political intelligence to Barry Bingham and Thomas K. Finletter, heads, respectively, of the national and New York Stevenson committees. At Hobcaw, she spent a night with Baruch, who seemed more interested in Stevenson than he had been before.

  In devious ways Mr. Baruch will give you money when you want it in cash for specific things. If you sigh a little and say you haven’t enough to meet a specific need, I think you will find it forthcoming.

  “Among these women,” she reported from Dallas, after having addressed a Democratic women’s group,

  were at least two who were admirers of Kefauver but who would be satisfied with Kefauver as Vice President and were somewhat impressed with my reasons for Stevenson’s being President.6

  To her old friend Lord Elibank, who kept her advised on British politics, Mrs. Roosevelt confided:

  I don’t know what is going to happen in the next nine months but I am doing what I can to get Mr. Stevenson the nomination. Many of my friends tell me there is no question but that Eisenhower will be nominated and Nixon will be Vice-President. If that is the case the Democrats will have to work harder than ever because I doubt if Eisenhower can stand a second term and I doubt if the country can stand Nixon as President.7