Eleanor Read online

  Now we are in Paris, having a busy but, on the whole, pleasant time. I think the boys are enjoying it much more since Grania Gurewitsch joined us. . . .I will be (D.V.) at home in New York on September 9th and I hope to go to Hyde Park from the 10th to the 12th. I think I saw you were going to be in New York about that time to speak. If you let me know, I would love to have a chance to talk with you and hear something of your plans and campaign preparations.

  Tell Mr. [James A.] Finnegan [Stevenson’s campaign manager] I will be glad if he will send me any dates he has lined up that he wants me to fill and also any suggestions of what he would particularly like me to cover in speaking. Since the Republican convention I feel more certain than ever that you can win. They seem to me empty and void of imagination or content. . . .38

  The campaign was in high gear when she returned. “I think Adlai has begun to rise,” she wrote David Gray, but she was frightened at the way the Stevenson people seemed to be counting on her to perform miracles and the impossible schedules they handed her. “You have to be in Harlem with Adlai on the 4th,” they told her, and she agreed even though it meant flying back from Michigan in the afternoon and out to Wisconsin the next morning. The pressures were remorseless but she loved it all, and for a time it looked as if she might perform the miracle that the Stevenson workers were expecting of her. She appeared on “Meet the Press” on September 16, and her answers to questions about Nixon and Eisenhower showed again her deadly capacity for setting off dynamite charges while looking and sounding her most grandmotherly.

  QUESTION: Mrs. Roosevelt, the Democrats have said that “A vote for Eisenhower is a vote for Nixon.” Do you think this should be made an issue with the American people?

  MRS. R.: I think it is an issue you have to face because at no time do any of us know what may happen to us, therefore when we elect a president and a vice-president, we must be prepared to face the facts that the vice-president may become president. That may happen to anybody at any time, and I think all of us should face that issue and know whether we are prepared to elect on that basis.

  QUESTION: We have heard some criticism from both Democratic candidates about Mr. Nixon. Could you tell us how you feel about Mr. Nixon running for vice-president?

  MRS. R.: Yes, I know how I feel personally but I know that what I feel personally is probably a feeling that might not be shared by other people. I am told that Mr. Nixon is a very fine young man by many Republican people whom I know, particularly young people, and that he has matured and grown in many ways. I happen to remember very clearly his campaign for the Senatorship. I have no respect for the way in which he accused Helen Gahagan Douglas of being a Communist because he knew that was how he would be elected, and I have no respect for the kind of character that takes advantage and does something they know is not true. He knew that she might be a Liberal but he knew quite well, having known her and worked with her, that she was not a Communist. I have always felt that anyone who wanted an election so much that they would use those means did not have the character that I really admired in public life.

  QUESTION: Mrs. Roosevelt, do you really think the present administration, and particularly President Eisenhower himself, wants prosperity only for big business and that he doesn’t care about the little guy?

  MRS. R.: Oh, no! The President is a good man and he would want always to do the right thing as he saw it, but he has a great admiration for the achievement of the successful business man because he has never been a successful business man and you always admire what you really don’t understand.

  “That was the wisest, most gracious and convincing performance in my recollection,” Stevenson wired her. “I thank you, I congratulate you and I bless you.” The professional politicians were equally pleased. “I have been watching this program for many years,” Paul Butler wrote her. “Never has a person done a more magnificent job than you did.” Katie S. Louchheim, director of women’s activities for the Democratic National Committee, said that Mrs. Roosevelt had been “an inspiration. . . .My husband and I spent the entire half hour assuring each other you are the very ablest spokesman the Democratic party has.” “I think you are Adlai’s one greatest asset,” wrote author-journalist Agnes Meyer.39

  Mrs. Roosevelt was brimful of ideas on campaign policy and strategy. She sent on to Stevenson Esther Lape’s proposal on medical care:

  I will try this out in speeches and if I find it is not well received you can stay clear of it. But I think something constructive as a Democratic program of action has to come before the people. Criticism is not enough.40

  “From Bernard M. Baruch via Eleanor Roosevelt” another memorandum to Stevenson began:

  Just at present the South is so annoyed with Mr. Eisenhower that they are all for Mr. Stevenson. It would seem to be wiser not to go there and to let them pull against Mr. Eisenhower and not run the danger of antagonizing any of them. If you have to go, be very careful what you say.

  But when, at Stevenson headquarters, the state treasurer of New York, Archibald Alexander, asked her to talk to the old gentleman about coming out for Stevenson, she advised against it. It was not the way he did things. Baruch had told her he was indebted to Eisenhower, and she did not think he would want to jeopardize this relationship. A few weeks later even his private help was imperiled because of Stevenson’s brave advocacy of an end of H-bomb tests. He was “completely in disagreement,” Baruch informed her. “My dear Friend,” she replied,

  I was very sorry to get your letter and also sorry to see your statement in the paper. I feel it was a mistake for Mr. Stevenson or Mr. Finletter not to have explained to you long ago what they were actually proposing, as you have evidently accepted the Republican interpretation of Mr. Stevenson’s suggestion. I grant you his first speech was not sufficiently explanatory but since then he has made very clear what he is trying to do and more than 270 scientists have agreed with his position. . . .41

  She favored ending nuclear tests and replacing the draft with a voluntary system of better-paid, better-trained technicians. Audiences responded well to her discussion of these ideas, she reported:

  I find that an explanation of what Mr. Stevenson meant in reference to the draft and H-bomb can all be pulled together into a pretty appealing topic which the women find of real interest. . . .I think if Mr. Stevenson can speak directly to women in this way, giving them a feeling that he really cares of about what they feel and about the problems of their young people, it will make a difference in the women’s vote.42

  She was deeply troubled over Stevenson’s inability to get across to his audiences:

  I am not hearing any objection any more to your humor, so don’t worry about that! Just let it come naturally.

  If you can speak to the mass of people as though you were talking to any one individual in your living room at Libertyville, you will reach their hearts and that is all that you have to bother about.43

  Once she went in with Anna Rosenberg and Tom Finletter to counsel him about his speeches. They had learned that he was staying up until the early hours of the morning worrying over the turn of a phrase. “Not every speech has to be a Gettysburg address,” she admonished him gently. There were other kinds of promptings. Take a rest whenever you can, she begged him, as the campaign began to exact a physical toll from all of them. She had some very remarkable cold tablets given to her by David Gurewitsch. Stevenson should take them the minute he felt “achey,” and they would head off the cold. She made a contribution of $1,000. She accompanied him to a rally in Harlem. “Mrs. Roosevelt, what shall I say?” he asked her in the car on the way uptown. “Adlai, you know what to say.”44

  “I have never worked as hard as I have this autumn in our national campaign,” she wrote her old school friend “Bennett” (Mrs. Philip Vaughn) at the end of October, “but I have enjoyed it very much.”45

  When the defeat came, she was sad. “Wasn’t it a strange election?” she wrote David Gray. “To carry the House and Senate in spite of Ike’s treme
ndous vote seemed unbelievable.” But she knew how hurt Stevenson was by the vote. “As for me, let there be no tears,” Stevenson’s concession statement gallantly ended. “I lost an election but won a grandchild.”

  “No one could have done more,” she wrote the defeated candidate,

  but the love affair between President Eisenhower and the American people is too acute at present for any changes evidently to occur. I think in spite of the responsibility you felt, it is probably a relief to be relieved of it. Now you can enjoy your grandson and the boys and devote yourself to your own interests and feel at least that the weight of the world is not exclusively on your shoulders. None of us can, I fear, escape some sense of responsibility but we will all of us be able to do less. . . .If you are in these parts, please come and see your very devoted friend and admirer.46

  For herself, she would go back to her column, to her lectures, and to her work for the American Association for the United Nations, hoping, she told her friends, she would not again have a candidate she wanted so badly to win that she felt she had to campaign for him day and night.*

  Her husband’s achievement seemed greater than ever now that she had had to face the problem of tempering principle to the need to be elected. “I never was ahead of Franklin in social reform or any of those things,” Mrs. Roosevelt insisted to reporter Carl Rowan. “I wanted things to happen faster, but Franklin always knew what he wanted.” She had often found his pragmatism, his concern with timing, his skill—almost pleasure—in manipulation and maneuver exasperating, she told Lorena Hickok in 1954, when they collaborated on Ladies of Courage; but those techniques were necessary in politics, she acknowledged, and in the 1956 campaign she demonstrated an astute mastery of the tools of the trade. Yet there was a price. “If your husband had believed you advocated ‘moderation,’” Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, a supporter of the Harriman candidacy, had reproached her, “we’d have little on the statute books.”47 And, indeed, because she had been so heavily committed to the success of the Stevenson candidacy, she had failed to do justice to the urgency of the civil rights issue.

  * Stevenson’s 89 electoral votes came from the South, but Eisenhower carried Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. At the same time, in most Negro precincts, there was a perceptible increase over 1952 in the Eisenhower vote.

  13. TWO BOSSES—KHRUSHCHEV AND DE SAPIO

  MRS. ROOSEVELT PAID FOR HER INTENSE INVOLVEMENT IN the Stevenson campaign. The number of newspapers subscribing to her column was cut almost in half—from eighty to about forty.

  The Scripps-Howard people have cancelled my column since the election in all of their papers, which leaves me with a reduced number of papers. Perhaps, if you and others who really miss the column would write in, individual papers might take it again but they will not do so without pressure. This is the result of my political activity but I am glad I did it just the same.1

  The cancellation meant a substantial diminution in income from the column—from $28,000 in 1956 to $9,630 in 1957. For a moment she thought that perhaps the time had come to give it up, but United Features Syndicate asked her not to, saying it would make an effort to pick up other papers. Although she was seventy-two, she was willing to cooperate. She liked the platform the column gave her. When Paul Butler, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, asked her to join the advisory committee of party notables that he was establishing, she declined formal membership:

  They [the United Features Syndicate] fear that the feeling would spread that whatever I said on political subjects would not represent my own thinking but the thinking of a political party group. . . .I think the column people are right in feeling that my influence will be greater, as I write a daily column, if I am not a full-fledged member of the Committee.2

  In New York City the loss of the Scripps-Howard paper there, the New York World-Telegram, was more than offset by the acquisition of the New York Post. The latter’s liberal publisher, Dorothy Schiff, had tried, since 1939 when she acquired the paper, to persuade Mrs. Roosevelt to come over to it, and she quickly renewed the invitation when the World-Telegram dropped the column. It was a more satisfactory arrangement for Mrs. Roosevelt. The World-Telegram had taken to editing her copy mercilessly, shifting it from page to page, sometimes omitting it altogether. The Post was honored to have her as one of its columnists, published all that she wrote, gave it prominent display in the paper, and suggested assignments that would take her into newsworthy situations. “How would you like to go to Red China for us?” Mrs. Schiff inquired not long after Mrs. Roosevelt had joined the paper. She was ready, but the State Department was not. It declined to modify its embargo on travel to Red China even—or, perhaps, especially—for her, maintaining that it had no way to protect U.S. travelers in that sealed-off country. Mrs. Schiff wanted to test the travel ban in the courts, but Mrs. Roosevelt did not wish to make herself a cause célèbre. It might be wiser to have the case brought to court by someone more exclusively the representative of the newspaper fraternity. Would she go to Russia instead? Mrs. Schiff asked.3

  That was a journey she had been wanting to make since wartime. She had been all set to go in 1954 for Look magazine—indeed, had had her bags packed—but had reluctantly abandoned her plans when the Russians declined to issue a visa to a Russian-speaking reporter whom she had wanted to accompany her.

  No visa came through for [William] Atwood or the other man Look offered tho’ I warned twice, so this morning at 10 I had a press conference in Look’s office & explained why reluctantly I had to give up the trip. At 3:25 the Soviet Embassy phoned the second man could have a visa & if he could not get it in Washington he could in Paris! Everything was cancelled & we decided not to go later.4

  In 1957 she still feared that the Russians might not want to have her accompanied by someone who spoke the language (i.e., David Gurewitsch, who, in addition to being her doctor, was an accomplished amateur photographer and spoke Russian fluently). But this was the Khrushchev era, and in time the visas came through.

  On her arrival in Moscow she learned that Mrs. Anna Lavrova, who had helped interpret for FDR at Yalta, had been assigned to her as an interpreter. She realized that a special effort was being made for her, and even though she did not receive red-carpet treatment, she found “the welcome in spots almost embarrassing.” But she had come as a correspondent, and the Russians evidently were happy to respect her wish that she be treated as such. She had the foreigner’s usual difficulties in making appointments with top officials, and discovered that in order to get the interviews she wanted she had to insist and in the end go to the “head man” at Intourist.

  Getting appointments to see “services” and not just museums is very difficult. No one does anything till you arrive & then Intourist is a reluctant agent.

  On her arrival she immediately asked to meet with Nikita Khrushchev, who had survived the brutal succession struggle after Stalin’s death to emerge as premier and party leader. She was requested to submit the questions she intended to ask and then was informed that in time she would learn their decision. “They love to keep you waiting,” she wrote friends, “but they hate you to deviate from a plan you once make!”5

  So she began her tour of inspection, not knowing whether she would see Khrushchev or any other important Soviet leader. After a few days in Moscow, attending the ballet and the circus, touring the museums, and negotiating with Intourist, she was taken to a state farm twenty miles outside of the city. Despite her long training at breaking away from the officially guided tour in order to see the things she wanted to see, Soviet bureaucracy bested her. At the state farm she asked to see a worker’s home. They would arrange it, she was told, and later was escorted down a village street to a house that looked to her like the newest in the group. Spotting some older ones on the other side of the street, she asked whether she could not look into one of them. Her guide would not hear of it and firmly steered her into the demonstration house. Even that, she noted, lacked running water and inside toilet, al
though it did have a television set.6

  At the suggestion of Justice William O. Douglas, she had asked to visit Tashkent and Samarkand in central Asia. Tamerlane became “quite real” to her in Samarkand, but the hospital and health institutions that she visited there, although primitive in facilities by U.S. standards, provided modern treatment with good results. She traveled to Zagorsk, where there were

  really lovely 15th Century Churches & a most amusing midday meal at the Greek Orthodox divinity school! They are stout these gentlemen & eat & drink well. We were plied with champagne & I was glad of my agreement to drink only water. Maureen found her limitation of one glass looked upon with incredulity & not accepted!

  There were jaunts to Sochi and Leningrad. “What a lovely city this is!” she wrote of the latter:

  Far lovelier than Moscow but they tell me cheerfully that it rains every day except in summer & summer is over & even then it rains now & then! They were badly bombed by the Germans but rebuilding has gone on fast & the scars are almost hidden but 900 days of siege are still much on the minds of the people.

  Everywhere she tried to get figures, and though “reliable statistics are hard to get at,” it seemed to her that

  security exists materially. The lower paid workers find life hard but shelter & food are available. Clothes are poor. Glamorous women, well dressed & groomed, do not exist & yet the older women dye their hair!7