Eleanor Read online

  The actions of the American Communists, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote in a column datelined Washington,

  have added fire to the general fear of Communism as an international force. Earl Browder has been reprimanded for an attitude which many of us believed had represented the attitude of the Soviet government. . . .The American Communists had been cooperative where they could be, but now, as we understand it, they are out to force communism on our democracy. That we will not tolerate. . . .The sooner we clear up authoritatively the whole situation of Communists outside of the Soviet Union, the better chance we will have for peace in the future. The Russian people should know this, and so should the people of the United States.33

  In July, Sidney Hillman invited her to head the National Citizens Political Action Committee, the mainstay of which was the CIO. Organized nationally, as it was, it could sway political parties—“and they need to be swayed,” she conceded. But she also knew that NCPAC was infiltrated with left-wingers. “The meeting with NCPAC last night left me torn in my mind. I don’t know how useful I will be to them. I have an aversion to take on responsibility except individually and this is a big one. . . .” A week later she turned Hillman down:

  I have decided that if I became chairman instead of being helpful with the Democratic Party it would alienate the Democratic Party and I think it important to keep the Democratic Party close to both the CIO-PAC and the NCPAC.

  For the present she intended to confine herself to writing and radio work. Also, she might be doing “a considerable amount of traveling,” which was an added reason, she told Hillman, why she did not want to be tied down by administrative responsibilities.34

  The traveling related to the long-hoped-for trip to the Soviet Union. After Franklin’s death, as Big Three unity began to founder, she became more eager than ever to see this vast, mysterious, troublesome country with her own eyes. Ed Flynn brought back word from Russia, which he had visited after Yalta on assignment from Roosevelt, of how much the Russians had hoped she and the president would visit their country. He felt she should go on her own. He also reported that he had “told His Holiness the Church should change their tactics and stop attacking the Soviets.” George Carlin, the head of United Features Syndicate, suggested that she go as a correspondent. She liked that idea and thought she would go in March, 1946. But Flynn urged her to go immediately as did Harry Hopkins, who had returned from his mission to Moscow for Truman deeply troubled by the growing division between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Russians would let her see “everything you wanted to see everywhere in the country,” Hopkins assured her. She wanted to go “purely as a correspondent” for the syndicate “and not as Franklin’s widow,” she wrote back a little unrealistically, and she “would not want to do a lot of parties, etc. except of course, for calling on Marshal Stalin.” She should go as a correspondent, Harry Hopkins agreed, “although, of course, the Russian Government and the Russian people would receive you as the widow of the President and there is just no way out of that one.”35

  She consulted Mr. Truman:

  I haven’t spoken to the Syndicate about going at any immediate time because I wanted first to make sure that it would meet with your approval to have me go to Russia, either now or in the spring.

  I would not want in any way to complicate anything that you may be doing. . . .36

  It is not clear when Truman, who was about to leave for Potsdam, replied to her, but judging by subsequent letters, when he did, he counseled her to postpone her visit until the spring of 1946.

  She still was looking for a job to do, groping for the assignment that would bring all her interests into a single focus. She had been deeply conscious during her White House years of how her energies had been scattered among a thousand enterprises. After Franklin’s fourth-term election, Esther Lape had implored her to think over carefully the best ways to make use of the powers and opportunities that were so peculiarly hers. That involved a “selection and decision,” Esther had cautioned her.37

  Now she was determined to do just that, and she was going to do the selecting. When two longtime friends, Maj. Henry S. Hooker and John Golden, the theatrical producer, proposed to appoint themselves a committee to pass on the jobs suitable for her, she interrupted them, Tommy looking aghast, and, scarcely able to suppress her laughter, said, “I love both of you dearly. But you can’t run my life.”38

  She agreed, at the request of Mrs. David M. Levy, with whom she had worked closely in the International Student Service, to join the board of the newly formed Citizens Committee for Children. In addition, she spent more time helping the Wiltwyck School for delinquent children. When the Union for Democratic Action, spearheading the campaign for the full employment bill, asked her to write Truman, she did so.‡ She became the honorary president of committees for Yugoslavian and Greek relief. She continued her work with Walter White and the NAACP. “When I warn my friends,” she wrote on her sixty-first birthday,

  that I am going to sit by the fire with a little lace cap on my head and a shawl about my shoulders and knit baby things for the newest generation, they look at me with some incredulity. The day will come, however, and when it does I think it will be rather pleasant.

  She was more realistic when S. J. Woolf, who had interviewed and sketched her regularly since the twenties, came to see her. He recalled that ex-President Theodore Roosevelt had once said to him that many people did not have to worry about him in retirement. “I can always find something to keep me busy.” Mrs. Roosevelt laughed and answered, “I suppose that is true of all the Roosevelts. They can always keep busy.”40 What she really wanted to do was to make some contribution to what had been Franklin’s main wartime objective—the establishment of machinery that would help ensure a lasting peace. As long ago as 1939 she had read Clarence Streit’s Union Now and had had the author dine at the White House in order to explain his plan to Franklin. She had kept Franklin informed of the work of Clark Eichelberger’s Commission to Study the Organization of Peace. All through the war she had argued for a “United Nations” rather than an Anglo-American approach to peacekeeping. In July, when the UN Charter was before the Senate, she had pleaded for immediate ratification, saying her husband thought it most important to write the Charter and have it accepted while the exigencies of winning the war still kept the Allies together.41

  The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August and the revelation of the awesome force that had been let loose in the world underscored the indispensability of the United Nations. That had been her reaction when, in July, 1943, she had fortuitously learned one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war from a young nuclear physicist working on the project. “He was convincing and rather frightening and we must have peace in the future.”42

  Although Mrs. Roosevelt did not question the decision to drop the bomb—indeed, welcomed the news of the first bomb as meaning the war must come to an end more speedily and bring the men in the services home sooner—she immediately lent her support to the remarkable movement that developed among the atomic scientists to educate the public so they might see that there could be no national monopoly of the bomb and that U.S. security, therefore, would require international control under adequate safeguards. She saw two of their representatives, Harrison Brown and Eugene Wigner, and, according to them, was “very nice” and offered to help them with introductions in Washington. Their visit was reflected in her column. She was disturbed, she wrote, by the talk in the press about keeping the secret of the bomb. The sovereignty the United States would have to renounce to achieve international control would be a small price to pay for the avoidance of a nuclear arms race. In a transatlantic interview with Dr. Lise Meitner, the shy German refugee who had first grasped the significance of nuclear fission, both women said that the bomb posed a challenge to mankind to ensure that this awesome force was used in the future “for the good of all mankind and not for destructive purposes,” and that this would require international control.4
3

  The United Nations, regardless of its imperfections, now seemed more important than ever. Mrs. Roosevelt considered it her husband’s most significant legacy to the world and wanted his name to be associated with it. She enlisted the help of Truman and Hopkins to get the United Nations to consider the possibility of using Hyde Park as the permanent site of the new organization. She even thought that she, too, might be of help in carrying forward her husband’s work.44

  Truman yielded to no one in his admiration of Mrs. Roosevelt, whom he still addressed as “First Lady,” just as he still thought of Roosevelt as “the President.” There were two people, Truman had told James Byrnes sometime in November, that he had to have on his political team—Henry Wallace, because of his influence with labor, and Mrs. Roosevelt, because of her influence with the Negro voter. He could “take care of Henry” but wanted Byrnes to find an appointment for Mrs. Roosevelt in the field of foreign affairs. “The following week,” Byrnes said, “in recommending a list of delegates for the first meeting of the United Nations Assembly in London, I placed Mrs. Roosevelt’s name at the top of the list, expressing the belief that because of her husband’s deep interest in the success of the UN she might accept. Truman telephoned to her immediately, while I was still in his office, and she did agree to serve.”

  Franklin Jr. was at her Washington Square apartment when the president telephoned her in early December. He heard his mother protest she had no experience in foreign affairs; she did not know parliamentary procedure; she could not possibly do it. Truman refused to be put off, she told Franklin Jr. when she came back to the luncheon table.45

  “You have to do it,” her son urged. Tommy agreed, as did her other children and the close friends to whom she mentioned the president’s call. She decided finally that she had a duty to accept. Mr. Truman was wise, she said, in thinking that her presence in London, because of her connection with FDR, would remind delegates of his hopes for the new organization and would help to keep the Assembly’s sights high.

  Truman asked Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley to sound out his colleagues for their reaction to the appointment. A few days later, her nomination was approved with only one dissenting vote cast by Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi, who noted that he had been severely critical of her statements on the American Negro.

  “She has convictions and does not hesitate to fight for them,” wrote Scripps-Howard columnist Thomas L. Stokes. “The New Deal era was richer for her influence in it. That influence was far greater than appeared publicly.” Other women could represent American women, but this was a good appointment because “she, better than perhaps any other person, can represent the little people of this country, indeed of the world.”46

  In her own response to the appointment she spoke of it as an honor and responsibility that had come to her “largely because my husband laid the foundations for the organization through which we all hope to build world peace.” The novel note here was the word “largely” with its implication that her own merit and point of view had played a part in her selection.

  Some things I can take to the first meeting: A sincere desire to understand the problems of the rest of the world and our relationship to them; a real goodwill for people throughout the world; a hope that I shall be able to build a sense of personal trust and friendship with my co-workers, for without that understanding our work would be doubly difficult.47

  * “Father said several times,” Anna Halsted recalled, “that once he stopped being president he would no longer be afforded privacy through the Secret Service. It would be quite natural for people to come up the driveway to look at the house of an ex-president. He wanted privacy—to be able to go out driving without braces or being watched. He wanted to live in a house of his own, close to Mother’s cottage and really in the woods. It had to be away from any kind of main road and small enough so that a small staff could manage it. So he designed the Top Cottage, probably with the help of Henry Toombs. He also had it in the back of his mind that if he could persuade the family, the Big House would be turned over to the government even before his death. He must have realized that Mother would never be happy living in the Big House.”

  † Franklin’s will provided that the income from his estate, which was valued at roughly $1,200,000 at his death, went to Eleanor during her lifetime. At her death the estate was to be divided into five equal parts. Each of his children was to get half of his or her one-fifth share as well as the income from the other half of the one-fifth share, which was to be held in trust during their lives and to go per stirpes to the children of each of the five.

  ‡ This was an old and overriding objective with her. A few months before Franklin’s death Chester Bowles, administrator of the Office of Price Administration, had come to see her on a Sunday afternoon while Franklin was in Warm Springs. Bowles had helped FDR draft his “economic bill of rights” and was unhappy about Roosevelt’s failure to make plans to fulfill the pledges contained in the bill, including the commitment to “60 million jobs.” He confided his anxieties to Eleanor, who had spoken “of her own frustrations.” Franklin’s mind was focused on the war, and almost all of his visitors were diplomats, generals, and admirals. She considered it her responsibility to bring another point of view to Franklin’s attention and told Bowles that she called the president on the telephone every morning to urge an immediate beginning to postwar planning. “I have learned by experience,” she explained to Bowles, “to recognize the point at which the President’s patience is about to give out and he will begin to scold me. At that moment I hurriedly say, ‘Franklin, my car is waiting. I must be on my way. I shall call you again tomorrow.’”39

  2. THE HARDEST-WORKING DELEGATE

  A FEW DAYS OUT AT SEA ON THE LINER QUEEN ELIZABETH, which was carrying the United States delegation to the first session of the United Nations General Assembly in London, Mrs. Roosevelt was persuaded to hold her first formal press conference since she left the White House. The United Nations might not be “final and perfect,” she told the reporters, but

  I think that if the atomic bomb did nothing more, it scared the people to the point where they realized that either they must do something about preventing war or there is a chance that there might be a morning when we would not wake up.

  One comment she put off the record, “For the first time in my life I can say just what I want. For your information it is wonderful to feel free.”1

  It was a sign that she was emerging from the shock of April 12. So much had happened since then—the atom bomb, the growing split with Russia, civil war in China, the Pearl Harbor inquiry, the renewal of domestic bickering. “We have all been plunged into a new world.” She would have liked to have drawn upon Franklin’s thinking, but she also valued the feeling that she was on her own now, able to speak her own mind in meeting the problems of this new world. And she had an astute appreciation of just how much influence she might be able to wield. “The delegation won’t follow me, dear,” she wrote an overenthusiastic friend, “but I think they won’t like to propose anything they think I would not approve of!”2

  The delegation was a prestigious one. It consisted of five representatives—Secretary of State James F. Byrnes; Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., who was the U.S. representative on the Security Council; Sen. Tom Connally (D-Texas), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg (R-Michigan), ranking Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Mrs. Roosevelt. In addition there were five alternates—Rep. Sol Bloom (D-New York), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; the committee’s ranking Republican member, Charles A. Eaton of New Jersey; Frank Walker, former postmaster general and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee; the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, John G. Townsend, Jr., who also was an ex-senator from Delaware. The fifth alternate was John Foster Dulles, chief foreign affairs adviser to Gov. Thomas E. Dewey in the 1944 presidential campaign.

  Mrs. Roosevelt ha
d boarded the war-gray giant troopship (for the Queen Elizabeth was still unreconverted) at 7:30 the night before it sailed, a lonely figure in black who stepped out of a small car, waved the reporters aside, and began to come up the gangplank by herself until someone on board spotted her. Most of her colleagues had boarded several hours earlier, having come from Washington on a special train and having been driven to the pier in a dozen Army limousines and buses preceded by motorcycle outriders, their sirens moaning and red lights blinking.

  “I breakfast alone at the Captain’s table each morning,” she noted on New Year’s Day, the second day out, in the diary which she sent back to Tommy to circulate among her children and a few friends, “as the senatorial families do not arise and shine early.” She had decided not to take Tommy. She had thought the mail would drop off after she left the White House “but I have never had less than 100 a day and frequently 300 and 400 a day,” and if Tommy had come along, they would never catch up.

  “A curious New Year’s Eve!” she had recorded in her diary. “I went to bed at 8:30 and was glad to be oblivious to the ship’s roll at midnight. I did think of you all at home before I went to sleep and wished for each one individually a happier New Year than the last.” John Golden, the producer, sensing how lonely she might feel, had sent a collection of gifts with a card that read:

  Here’s a little game to play

  Just because you go away