Eleanor Read online

  There were more moderate proposals for changes in the structure of the United Nations that had been agreed to at San Francisco and in the Preparatory Commission. “At 6:30 Lady Pethick-Lawrence (nice old lady) and Mrs. Gram Swing (very high-powered) came to persuade me to back a woman’s group in UNO with special privileges and I was noncommittal as I don’t think it should be done but I must, of course, look into it.” Mrs. Roosevelt was dubious about the particular suggestion of these two women who came to her representing the World Women’s Party for Equal Rights, but she was acutely conscious of the underrepresentation of women at the Assembly. Women delegates and advisers—they numbered eighteen in all from eleven countries—met at her office under her chairmanship to discuss how women might achieve a larger role in UN affairs. They issued a discreetly worded manifesto that called

  on the Governments of the world to encourage women everywhere to take a more conscious part in national and international affairs, and on women to come forward and share in the work of peace and reconstruction as they did in the war and resistance.22

  Lady Pethick-Lawrence and Mrs. Swing had pushed ahead in the meantime with their demand that the United Nations establish a permanent commission on the status of women to implement equal rights. Mrs. Roosevelt would serve as the first U.S. representative on this commission, but she never manifested much enthusiasm for this aspect of UN activity. She preferred to do her politics with the men. “I am sorry that Governments in all parts of the world have not seen fit to send more women as delegates, alternates or advisers to the Assembly,” she wrote in her column. “I think it is in these positions that the women of every nation should work to see that equality exists.” She did not want women represented as a special group. She wanted them working together with the men on an equal basis to frame the policies of the organization.23

  The more she saw how the men in the U.S. delegation worked, the more certain she was that women could do as well, if not better. “He is able,” she wrote of one of her male colleagues, “but so many foibles! All these important men have them, however. I’m so glad I never feel important, it does complicate life!” But that was Eleanor Roosevelt—not women as a breed. More distressing to her was the reluctance, at times, of the men to move boldly. Four of the members of the delegation—Vandenberg, Connally, Bloom, and Eaton—were members of Congress. Byrnes, although secretary of state, was also a product of the Senate, as was Townsend.

  I am interested in the way all the legislators react. I think not having strong convictions they doubt their ability to defend a position which they may take, so they can not decide on any position and go on arguing pros and cons endlessly.

  She was harsh in her judgment of Byrnes.

  I watch our delegation with grave concern. Secretary Byrnes seems to me to be afraid to decide on what he thinks is right and stand on it. I am going to try to tell him tactfully that everyone has to get the things they need from us and that is our ace in the hole. We could lead but we don’t. We shift to conciliate and trail either Great Britain or Russia and at times I am sure a feeling that we had convictions and would fight for them would be reassuring to them. Secretary Byrnes is afraid of his own delegation. He has held very few meetings and now we begin to need them and yet we have to ask to see him in separate groups. It isn’t that he is leaving me out, for the others complain to me.

  Her British friends urged on her the necessity of cooperation between the United States and Britain against Russia.

  I’m not so concerned that Great Britain and ourselves must line up to keep the Russians in hand. I think we must be fair and stand for what we believe is right and let them, either or both, side with us. We have had that leadership and we must recapture it.24

  A key issue at this organizational Assembly—and it was a troublesome one—was the election of a secretary-general. Lie of Norway was a candidate, but during the session, some members of the U.S. delegation who had favored his election as president of the Assembly had cooled toward him considerably. They were fearful that Norway, sharing a border with Russia, might fall under its domination and influence Lie’s policies as secretary-general. Eleanor thought they were wrong both about Norway’s vulnerability to Soviet pressure and Lie’s staunchness. The United States’ first choice for the post was Lester B. Pearson of Canada, but when he proved unacceptable to the Russians, who countered with the candidacy of the foreign minister of Yugoslavia, the United States switched to Lie and persuaded the British to do so as well.

  It was well done I think and we took the lead and though our first choice was Pearson of Canada, when we found the Russians wouldn’t consent, but would compromise, we proposed Lie. The papers should not be pessimistic, progress is being made here. Vandenberg and Dulles are largely responsible for pessimism, I think. These representatives of ours don’t build friendship for us. They have no confidence, so they are rude and arrogant and create suspicion. Honesty with friendliness goes down, but they haven’t the technique. Jimmy Byrnes’ overcordiality isn’t right either. Why can’t we be natural and feel right inside and just let it come out?25

  She was having her own difficulties with the Russians. Contrary to the expectations of the men when they assigned her to Committee III, the hottest East-West issue of the Assembly boiled up in it. “A new type of political refugee is appearing,” she noted in her diary after studying a memo on the refugee question, “people who have been against the present governments and if they stay at home or go home will probably be killed.” There were approximately one million such refugees in displaced-person camps, most of them from the East. The Communist position was simple, brutally so. They could not see why the refugee question should be a matter of international concern. There were only two categories of refugees in their view: those who wanted to be repatriated and those who did not because they are “quislings, traitors, war criminals or collaborators,” and the international community should waste neither sympathy nor resources on this latter group.

  She wanted to avoid a collision with the Communists, but drafting a resolution acceptable to them proved impossible:

  I have spent 9 hrs. of meetings these last two days to try to frame a resolution on refugees to which the Russians & ourselves can agree. The Dutch, British & ourselves reach agreement fairly quickly but the Jugo-Slavs & Russians start from different backgrounds. Everything must be in terms to cover their point of view, their needs, no one else’s situation is ever considered! I’ve learned so much, I’m not sure what they are learning!26

  A week later she was still at it.

  Committee meeting was one long wrangle. Finally at one I asked for a vote. The Russians who always play for delay asked for a subcommittee to try to get a resolution we could agree upon. It is hopeless as there are fundamental disagreements, but Peter Fraser (New Zealand, Chairman of the Third Committee) is fair to the utmost. He asked if I would withdraw my motion and then appointed a committee. I was a half hour late for lunch with the Anthony Edens in the House of Commons. At 2:30 I opened a doll show. At 3:10 we sat down in the sub-committee at Church House and we got up at 6 having agreed on 25 lines!27

  Debate was endless “and so many words,” but finally a vote was reached.

  We defeated the Russians on the three points we disagreed on, they were all fundamental, and I’m afraid while I was brief I was clear in my opposition. Wise Mr. Sandifer of the State Department seemed pleased but whispered “The Russians won’t like that.”28

  The Communist amendments would have curbed “propaganda” in the refugee camps and placed the latter under the administrative supervision of officials from the refugees’ countries of origin. The item came up again in plenary when Andrei Vishinsky, the head of the Russian delegation, challenged the committee’s recommendations and announced he would make a speech on the subject.

  The British had their representative ready to speak but I saw all the heads in our delegation come together because nobody was ready to speak except the woman in Committee 3 whom they had
put there, thinking she would be harmless. Finally Mr. Dulles asked me to say a few words and I agreed to do so.29

  Behind Mr. Dulles’s request was a great change in attitude toward Mrs. Roosevelt. New Dealer Benjamin V. Cohen, who was in London as counselor to the State Department, had lunched with Dulles and Vandenberg. While talking with him they also talked to each other, exchanging expressions of amazement at Mrs. Roosevelt’s good judgment. They really had not known her before, writing her off as an emotional, rattle-brained woman. “One of the most solid members of the delegation” they now agreed, as Ben Cohen chuckled to himself.30

  The exchange between Mrs. Roosevelt and Vishinsky, the Soviet Union’s wiliest and most formidable debater, provided a moment of high drama. He was the grand inquisitor, the relentless Stalinist prosecutor in the Moscow purge trials, arguing with the twentieth-century embodiment of humanitarianism before a world jury. If democracy had saints, Adlai Stevenson would later say, Eleanor Roosevelt would be among the first canonized. Vishinsky was not happy, Mrs. Roosevelt’s aides thought, to find himself ranged against a woman revered for her goodness, who, moreover, bore a name still highly respected in the Soviet Union. His argument was low-keyed. Mankind had paid too much already for tolerance and the right of asylum, he contended. There were limits to liberty. He refused to accept a tolerance “which is known in history by the name of Munich.”

  She talked over the points she intended to make with Sandifer, but she spoke extemporaneously—“the most important speech ever given by an American delegate without a prepared text,” Sandifer later said.31

  Where Vishinsky sought to exploit the emotional symbolism of Munich, she countered with an equally potent symbol—Spain. Forced repatriation from the refugee camps, Mrs. Roosevelt began, might mean forcing Spanish Republican refugees to return to Spain, “a fascist country.” Refugee camps should not be used for political activity, she agreed, but she upheld the right of the refugees to hear good or bad against any UN member. “Are we so weak in the UN that we are going to forbid human beings the right to hear what their friends believe? It is their right to say it and their right to hear it and make their own decision. To say otherwise,” she added, would be like saying “I am always right,” but “I am not sure my Government or nation will always be right, and we should aim at being so right that the majority will be with us and we can stand having among us those who do not agree.”

  She recognized that some European countries torn by wars that were both civil and international might take a different view of human rights and human freedom than the United States which, since the Civil War, had no political or religious refugees fleeing its borders, but it was the task of the United Nations “to frame things which will be broader in outlook, which will consider first the rights of man, which will consider what makes man more free: not governments but man!”32

  The Soviet amendments were again voted down, and afterward she wrote home:

  Yesterday we fought the whole battle over again in the Assembly on refugees which we had fought in Committee & we won again hands down. This time Mr. Vishinsky & I fought it out, evidently they, the Russians, don’t let any but delegates speak in the Assembly! The Russians are tenacious fighters but when we finally finished voting at 1 a.m. last night I shook hands & said I admired their fighting qualities & I hoped some day on that kind of question we would be on the same side & they were cordiality itself! Also you will be amused that when Mr. Dulles said goodbye to me this morning he said, “I feel I must tell you that when you were appointed I thought it terrible & now I think your work here has been fine!” So—against odds, the women inch forward, but I’m rather old to be carrying on this fight!33

  * Lie was a candidate both for president of the General Assembly and secretary-general of the United Nations.

  † Michael Straight was the son of Mrs. Leonard Elmhirst and one of the heirs to the Whitney fortune. Golden-haired and idealistic, a brilliant writer and orator, he was at this time publisher of the New Republic and a leader in the American Veterans Committee.

  3. A MAGNA CARTA FOR MANKIND

  ON A MONDAY MORNING LATE IN APRIL, 1946, A TALL WOMAN in black, black stockings, a black gauzy scarf around her neck, emerged from the last stop of the Bronx subway and with swift stride began to cross the Hunter College campus (Hunter has since been renamed the Herbert H. Lehman College). Behind her, an impeccably dressed gentleman in a dark suit tried to catch up with her without breaking into a run. This was James P. Hendrick, Wall Street lawyer during the thirties, War Department aide during the war, and now assistant to the chief of the International Affairs Division of the State Department. Both were on their way to the first meeting of the “nuclear” United Nations commission on human rights.1

  In Mrs. Roosevelt’s clash with Vishinsky over forced repatriation, she had cited the guarantees written into the UN Charter of fundamental human rights. The trampling upon those rights by Nazism and fascism, especially Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, was considered by the drafters of the Charter as among the underlying causes of the catastrophe, and a major respect in which the Charter was an advance over the League Covenant was its provision for the establishment of a commission “for the promotion of human rights.” It had been the American hope to annex to the Charter a Declaration of Rights, and Durward Sandifer had been assigned to draft such a document. But there was no time before San Francisco to obtain agreement on a Declaration, so its drafting was assigned to the human rights commission as its first order of business.2

  No delegate in London had more eminently personified the cause of respect for human dignity than Eleanor Roosevelt, and it was not surprising that the Economic and Social Council asked her to serve on the “nuclear” human rights commission whose job it would be to prepare a plan of work and the permanent setup of the Commission. The choice was as widely acclaimed as her appointment as delegate to the London Assembly. Senator Vandenberg, who immediately after FDR’s death, had been alarmed by reports that Mrs. Roosevelt might be added to the U.S. delegation to the San Francisco conference, was now enlivening Washington dinner tables with his paeans of praise for Mrs. Roosevelt. “I want to say that I take back everything I ever said about her, and believe me it’s been plenty.”3

  “I have cabled Mr. Lie that I would accept,” Mrs. Roosevelt informed Secretary Byrnes. “The cable stated that we would meet here in New York City and the meeting would last three weeks and my compensation would be $15 a day and travelling expenses.” Would the State Department provide her with an adviser and with secretarial assistance?4

  Finally catching up with Mrs. Roosevelt, Hendrick introduced himself as her adviser. “I was pretty scared. I didn’t know how she’d take to me personally. As an expert picked by the Economic and Social Council she was not under U.S. instruction—and my job was to see to it that she took the State Department line.” She quickly put him at his ease. “She was just as kind and hospitable as she could be, welcomed me, and said that what she needed was advice and I was her adviser from then on in human rights meetings.” They got along very well. She liked Hendrick, who was a quiet-spoken man of patrician background with a gentle sense of humor. “I don’t think there was any time when we had a serious disagreement over what the policy should be,” Hendrick asserted.5

  The meeting of the “nuclear” commission, as it was called, took place in makeshift quarters in the Hunter College library. The furnishings were of hewn oak, and the delegates sat around tables which had been arranged in the shape of a hollow square in the middle of which sat the interpreters and secretaries.

  Henri Laugier, assistant secretary-general for social affairs, opened the meeting and Mrs. Roosevelt was promptly elected chairman by acclamation. She accepted the post with obvious pleasure. “Although my knowledge of parliamentary law is limited, I shall do my best.” Fluent in both French and English, she kept the proceedings moving, on occasion even aiding the interpreters, some of whom at that time were not quite as accomplished as they were la
ter to become. Prof. René Cassin, the French representative, a white-bearded jurist, voluble and swift in technical discussion, spoke once for twenty minutes without a halt and then with a courtly gesture to the interpreter said “traduction, s’il vous plaît.” The young woman began, stammered, flushed red, and ran from the room. When it became clear she was “gone for good,” Mrs. Roosevelt, hoping no one would say no, asked, “Did everyone understand what M. Cassin said?” When several said they had understood nothing, she undertook the translation. “I can’t give M. Cassin’s speech verbatim, but I can render the essential meaning.” She gave the commission a competent summary.6

  She was a vigorous, businesslike, although always gracious, chairman. She was four minutes late the second day. “I got mixed up on the subway again,” she explained to her colleagues, “but it won’t happen again.” The second week a case of the shingles, which explained why she had been wearing a gauze scarf, “got a little the better of me,” so she turned over the chairmanship to Professor Cassin. “But by Wednesday, I was able to start out again at 9:30, stay at Hunter College all day, and even keep my speaking engagement for the evening.” By the end of the three weeks the group had gotten through its agenda, which included proposals to the Economic and Social Council on the setting up of the permanent eighteen-nation Commission on Human Rights and on the drafting and implementation of an international bill of rights. At the very end of its deliberations, the Soviet delegate, a young man from the embassy, was replaced by the permanent representative on the commission, Alexander Borisov, who had just arrived. He asked Mrs. Roosevelt to fill him in and she carefully went over the points that had been accepted, with the concurrence of the Soviet delegate, and asked the interpreter to translate. He did, but Mr. Borisov said he did not understand and asked her to go over the points again. She did so patiently and carefully. Again he claimed he did not understand. She made a third try but still without success, and it finally became clear to her that Mr. Borisov did not want to understand because not only did he refuse to join in the recommendations, but he wanted changed those records showing how his predecessor had voted on those recommendations. This, as chairman, she refused to do. She was “quite annoyed” with Borisov’s performance, she confessed a few months later.