Eleanor Read online

One to open every day

  Keep or give or throw away.3

  She worked hard on shipboard. Even on the “mammoth” walks, as Dr. Ralph Bunche described them, that she determinedly took around the deck in fog or sunshine, she was usually accompanied by a fellow delegate or adviser. “That was the best way to talk to her,” Bunche said. “Mr. Dulles and Mr. [Abe] Fortas joined me, and continued a discussion on trusteeship. Mr. Fortas wants us to make the proposal that all territories shall have the right of appeal to the Assembly when difficulties arise.” After her breakfast and luncheon walks she settled down to study the massive briefing materials that the State Department had prepared for the members of the delegation. “I read till I had to get ready to go to a party Mr. Stettinius gave for the whole delegation at five o’clock. More reading, dinner, more reading and ten-thirty bed.” There were briefing papers and briefing sessions. Alger Hiss, “Principal Adviser,” went over the conference agenda with the whole delegation. Dr. Bunche “went over questions of trusteeship with me,” and later that day “the State Department boys” discussed questions connected with the United Nations’ specialized agencies. Then back to reading “and fell asleep occasionally.” She decided that she liked the Vandenbergs better than she did the Connallys, “but I don’t like any of them much.” She had another session with Hiss, this time together with Leo Pasvolsky, who had been Cordell Hull’s principal deputy in the drafting of the UN Charter. Pasvolsky was “a smooth article, but Hiss I am inclined to like.”4

  So the days on shipboard passed. The night before they disembarked she talked with Stettinius, whom Truman had replaced as secretary of state with Byrnes. “The tears came to his eyes when he spoke of Franklin and the ideas which he had talked over with him. I believe it is a sense of loyalty to F.D.R. which keeps him on the job.”5

  As the delegation disembarked at Southampton, James Reston cabled the New York Times that Mrs. Roosevelt had impressed her colleagues “by her industry in studying the technical details” of the approaching Assembly. The reporters had noted that not only had she attended all delegation briefings but she had sat in with the reporters during their interviews with State Department officials.6

  Westbrook Pegler did not think the country was getting its money’s worth. Back home he attacked her appointment, calling it “a political job paying $12,000 a year, which is $2,000 more than the salary of a Senator or Representative, plus expenses at the rate of $25 a day and other perquisites.” Actually the government only paid for the days she worked. Congress had authorized her to send out her mail under government frank and this she accepted, but she had refused the lifetime pension of $5,000 a year that it had wanted to vote her as it had done with other widows of presidents. “I won’t need any money from home,” she informed Tommy, “as I find I have some in my account here with Barings. I must have left it since the trip I made with the boys. I can’t take it out of the country so I might as well use it.”7

  They disembarked on a Saturday. On the way to London Senator Connally kept repeating to her, “Where is all this destruction I’ve heard so much about? Things look all right to me.” She started to point out the telltale signs “but soon found he just wasn’t interested.” “Cliveden,” she added, referring to an invitation from Lady Astor that she had declined but most of the others had accepted, “probably did nothing to change their point of view.” The delegation was lodged at Claridge’s. She had scarcely removed her coat when an old friend, Lady Stella Reading, head of the Women’s Voluntary Services, knocked on her door. Then the Noel Bakers came in. As minister of state in the British Labor government, Baker headed the British delegation to the Assembly when Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, could not be present. His chief concern was to impress upon Mrs. Roosevelt his belief that the League of Nations had not failed since it had laid the groundwork for all that was being done today. “He was a great League man and they tell me feels called upon to defend it at every turn.” American Ambassador John Gilbert Winant was another visitor. “The tears came to his eyes in talking of Franklin.” Dorsey Fisher, a member of the embassy staff who had traveled with her during her wartime trip to Great Britain, arrived, as did her young friend Louise Morley Cochrane, whom the embassy had sent to show her how to get to the necessary places in London. The three of them went for supper to the embassy canteen, “which is a godsend since we get army foodstuff which is really good.”

  There were scores of “welcome” letters—from the queen, from the Winston Churchills, from Allenswood classmates, from old family friends such as Hector Ferguson and Sir Arthur Murray, from Lady Pethick-Lawrence of Peaslake, who was president of the World Women’s Party for Equal Rights, and from Lady Eva Reading, who wanted a little of her “precious time” to talk to her about the problems of world Jewry. All the world sent flowers, including the Emir Faisal Alsaud. Sunday night she dined with Adlai Stevenson. “He has headed our work on the temporary [preparatory] commission. . .so I hope to learn something about the people on the other delegations who are still not even names with which I am familiar.” Stevenson had been to Cliveden with the senators, who, he told her, had made much the same remarks there about the lack of signs of destruction that they had made to her. She and Stevenson got along well.8

  By Sunday, too, she had visited her office and established a morning routine. From nine to ten she intended to do all the personal work—“columns, notes, telephones”—but when the delegation meetings began she would have to move “the personal stuff” to eight to nine. Although it was a five-minute walk from hotel to delegation offices, she would have to leave at nine sharp to make the 9:15 delegation meetings because “we meet on the seventh floor and the lift runs more slowly and far less reliably than the one in our old apartment house here.”

  The first delegation meeting confirmed her view that senators were an egotistical breed. The issue was whether the delegation should speak with a single voice to the press. Vandenberg especially did not take easily to such discipline. Before leaving for London he had “very nearly resigned” from the delegation because he thought the wording of the Moscow Communiqué of the Foreign Ministers agreeing to the establishment of a United Nations Atomic Energy Control Commission could be interpreted to mean that the United States might be obliged to disclose its atomic secrets before there was agreement on adequate inspection and controls. He had sailed with the delegation after receiving assurances from Truman on the matter, but on the boat he slipped several of the newspapermen a memorandum stating his objections to the Moscow wording. “He gave it to the press, in confidence,” Mrs. Roosevelt scornfully noted. “Tonight it is on the front pages of the New York and London papers.”9

  Since the press was full of stories about division in the American delegation, Stettinius scheduled a meeting of the delegation with reporters to show this was not the case. But ten minutes before the conference began, Dulles informed Stettinius that he and Vandenberg would not attend. Not having much of a choice, Mrs. Roosevelt and Stettinius went into the meeting alone where “all went well,” she later recorded, “till the inevitable question came: ‘Where are the two Republican members of the delegation? Does their absence indicate a split in the delegation?’ Mr. Stettinius said: ‘Certainly not, you men who were on the boat know that is not so. I think Senator Vandenberg is probably at a committee meeting.’ Then we left quickly.” A few moments later Vandenberg walked in and “took some of the remaining press people up to his room. It seemed to me pretty shoddy behavior, though I was in sympathy with parts of his memo. I think he is right that language should be clear.” The U.S. delegation met the press today, Reston cabled his paper, and appealed for unity and peace, “but two members of the delegation were absent from the conference.”

  The next day Byrnes arrived and saw the senators, “and all seems serene on the atomic bomb statement which stirred up such a rumpus with Senator Vandenberg,” she noted. “I am not sure the gentleman does not like a little newspaper publicity.”10

  She was told a
t the delegation meeting that she had been assigned to Committee III, which—scheduled to deal with humanitarian, social, and cultural matters—was supposed to be a relatively uncontroversial and, therefore, it was thought, safe berth for her. Durward Sandifer was her chief adviser. Short, sandy-haired, dryly spoken, he had been an assistant on legal matters in Pasvolsky’s office. She quickly came to depend on him. “I went with her to all the sessions,” he recalled. “I started carrying her brief case as well as my own—over her protests.” She invited him to Claridge’s to dinner. She had half a dozen people there, including a cousin. “I rushed home to write a long account of this dinner to Irene [Sandifer].” By the end of the Assembly they were good friends. He should come to lunch at Washington Square once they were back in New York, she urged. He did. “I was so nervous at having lunch with Mrs. Roosevelt,” he confided to Tommy afterward, “that I put salt in my coffee.” Mrs. Roosevelt overheard him. “You—nervous at having lunch with me? I am the one who should be nervous at having lunch with you. You will never know how frightened I was getting on that boat. I knew what the British thought of Franklin and what they expected of me. You don’t know what a help you were to me.”11

  The General Assembly opened. She drove to Westminster with Stettinius—“How your husband planned for this day,” he said to her—and in Westminster’s Central Hall as the delegations filed in, most of them led by their foreign ministers, and the temporary president mounted to the high podium which was framed from behind by a huge map of the world on a blue and gold background with two great olive branches below it, she felt that FDR’s spirit “must be with us.” She noted the flowing robes of the Arab representatives and also that there were “very few women on the delegations.” She was seated at the end of the U.S. delegation, next to the Soviet group. By mistake she took the seat of V. V. Kuznetzov, who gallantly invited her to join the Soviet delegation, and relations between them got off to a good start.

  The business of the first meeting was to choose a president of the Assembly, and Paul Henri Spaak, Socialist and foreign minister of Belgium, was elected over Trygve Lie, Socialist and foreign minister of Norway.* Spaak won by a vote of 28 to 23, and Lie, who had originally been urged to run for the position by the United States, was angry with the American delegation for its failure to support him openly. “If the United States had spoken out in the Assembly in support of my candidacy as it had spoken out to me in August, in December, and that very day, if Mr. Byrnes had not sat there tight-lipped, then, the result might well have been otherwise,” Lie wrote. “We were very stupid over the election of President of the Assembly,” Mrs. Roosevelt felt, but in her column describing the impressive opening of the Assembly she struck a more edifying note. The job before the United Nations was too serious to feel exhilaration over victory or disappointment over defeat. As she left Westminster Hall, she overheard a woman, standing in the rain, say, “They must succeed, the future of the world depends on it.”12

  On the carbon of the column that she sent in about the Assembly’s opening, Mrs. Roosevelt noted, “For this column the United Press men here have given me great praise.” Her account had omitted one of the Assembly’s most solemn moments when Spaak, in his speech of acceptance, taking note of the large number of delegates “who have done much more for peace than I have,” went on to speak of Mrs. Roosevelt:

  Among them there is one delegate to whom I wish to extend particular sympathy and tribute. I refer to her who bears the most illustrious and respected of all names. I do not think it would be possible to begin at this Assembly without mentioning her and the name of the late President Roosevelt and expressing our conviction that his disappearance was a great grief to us all and an irreparable loss.13

  There was one tribute to FDR about which she could say nothing—that dealing with whether or not to locate UN headquarters at Hyde Park. “I have been particularly careful to express no preference on the subject whatsoever,” she advised her Hyde Park neighbor Gerald Morgan, “and to stress that the Government is the owner not the family.” She doubted the choice of Hyde Park, she wrote her aunt, Maude Gray, “because the Republicans are so opposed. They are afraid it might perpetuate FDR’s name.” In the end the site committee recommended selection of a location as close to New York City as possible and the establishment of temporary headquarters at Lake Success.14

  “You know I don’t like sitting and doing nothing,” she noted in her diary as business sessions began and there was an endless number of speeches on rules of procedure all of which had to be translated from English into French or vice versa. “I notice that men always feel passionately about these rules, and on our own delegation Congressman Bloom keeps impressing upon us how very important it is to get these rules just as you want them.” She agreed it was wise to have the rules of procedure thought out and accepted in advance, but it did not seem to her “quite as desperate a question” as it did to the men. She informally inquired at the delegation meeting whether she might bring her knitting. The men looked nonplused, so she left her knitting bag at the hotel.15

  Despite the tedious stretches devoted to the counting of ballots, the voting behavior of the countries—especially the USSR—was interesting.

  I wish you could have watched the Russian faces when New Zealand apparently opposed Great Britain’s choice of Canada for the Security Council. They would feel such behaviour among their satellites showed weakness & it is going to take time to realize that when you are sure of fundamentals you can differ on non-essentials. Great Britain had told the Dominions to decide and they could not agree. S. Africa and Canada chose Canada, New Zealand & India and Australia wanted Australia. We had told Great Britain we’d vote for Canada & we did but Australia won!16

  More than any other member of the delegation she was drawn into jobs unrelated to her UN assignment. There were endless delegations calling upon her, starting with a group of GIs who wanted her to find out from General “Ike” whether there was a demobilization policy for 45 to 60 point men. She went down to Waterloo Station to counsel some GI wives. At Louise Morley’s request she talked to nearly a thousand British brides and fiancées of American servicemen and then to seven hundred enlisted men and officers stationed in London. Almost every day, and sometimes more often, she had to dash off to the BBC studios to broadcast. She was fascinated by the conversations that went on between the men in the London studios and those in New York. Once Edward R. Murrow walked into the New York studio as she was preparing to broadcast, and she sent him a message that she had seen his wife, Janet, and their nine-week-old son and had thought him a beautifully healthy baby.17

  She lunched with the Churchills, with the leaders of the Labor and Liberal parties, and with the royal family.

  Yesterday I lunched alone with the King & Queen & Elizabeth & Margaret Rose. It was nice & they are nice people but so far removed from life it seems.

  Teas, cocktail parties, and dinners, the delegations wanted her especially. She went to the Byelorussian party, she noted, and “said some pleasant things. Tasted Vodka and don’t like it.” “I am seeing all the deposed kings, this week,” she noted another time.18

  She preferred her work in Committee III, but other members of the delegation took more happily to the social end.

  My buddy, Sen. Townsend, and Dulles went to Germany on Sat. a.m. and today I got a message they were grounded in Paris. The boys, no matter what their age, can’t resist a good time.

  There were so many speeches at public meetings that her voice finally gave out. “For two days I’ve had no voice,” she reported. She hoped it would return in time for her to speak at the Pilgrim dinner. (The Pilgrim Society, dedicated to Anglo-American friendship, was one of the most prestigious in the realm.) It was the first time in forty years they had invited a woman. Perhaps that was why her voice had fled, she speculated. The diagnosis was fatigue, not fright. “Frank Walker seemed pleased with my speech; I was the only woman!”19

  Her other big public meeting was at Albe
rt Hall, where she was the main speaker at a ceremony welcoming the delegates to the General Assembly. It was in connection with her speech at this meeting that Noel Baker was concerned she do justice by the League of Nations. Robert Viscount Cecil, who had drafted the Covenant of the League of Nations, sat next to her. “He is very deaf but has transferred his allegiance from the League to the UNO.” He had attended the first session of the Assembly, but since no one had recognized him and he was unable to hear he did not go again. “Old age is pathetic,” she noted in her diary and paid tribute to him in her column, which during the Assembly appeared in many British papers. Albert Hall was filled to its topmost gallery. Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander presided, which brought from Cecil the whispered comment, “We go about peace in a very belligerent way, don’t we!”

  “We must be willing to learn the lesson that cooperation may imply compromise,” Mrs. Roosevelt said in her speech, “but if it brings a world advance it is a gain for each individual nation. There will be those who doubt their ability to rise to these new heights but the alternative is not possible to contemplate.”20

  Some, like Noel Baker, looked backward to the League. A more numerous group wanted to transform the United Nations into a world government even as the first session was demonstrating the reluctance of nations to compromise or to yield any authority to a higher international body.

  I gather Mike Straight† must have talked as many people write to me. They beg me to stand now for world government, and seem to ignore the stark reality that Russia would be out at once and our Congress would never have let us go in. We couldn’t get any one of the big three powers to give up their veto. We will have to crawl together, running will be out of the question until all of us have gained far more confidence in each other than we now have. I can’t even get Byrnes to agree that we might do better if he talked at one time to Bevin, [Andrei] Gromyko, [Georges] Bidault, and [V. K. Wellington] Koo on the Secretary General. There are too many old League people here and far too many elderly statesmen. They are accustomed to diplomatic ways, secrecy appeals to them, and this will only succeed if everyone says what they really think. Perhaps the biggest job to be done is to make the people at home feel this is their machinery which they may use to build peace, but they will have to keep it oiled and make it run. Oratory ended Saturday and tomorrow committee work begins. I’m curious to see how that works. I’ve certainly been briefed on all the agenda that may come up tomorrow.21