Eleanor Read online

  No amount of argument ever changes what your Russian delegate says or how he votes. It is the most exasperating thing in the world, but I have made up my mind that I am going through all the arguments just as though I didn’t know at the time it would have no effect. If I have patience enough, in a year from now perhaps the Russians may come with a different attitude.7

  Borisov’s abstention was a portent of things to come, but did not affect the commission’s proposals. “I think we have done a helpful piece of work,” she summed up. “The real work, of course, remains to be done in the next series of meetings, when the actual writing of an international bill of rights will have to be undertaken.”8

  President Truman had said he wanted her to continue with the delegation when the General Assembly reconvened in New York City in October. She had a busy summer ahead. The estate was still unsettled. Tommy was not well. George Bye, her literary agent, was pressing her to go to work on her autobiography for the White House years. She worried about her children, all of whom faced problems of adjustment and settling down. She had financial problems. Her total income, including $30,000 from her husband’s estate, would come to $80,000 annually, she estimated, of which taxes would take $54,000. She needed $30,000 a year for living expenses, charities, pensions. She must not incur additional expenses, she told herself, and try somehow to bring her budget into balance.9

  She had kept her summer calendar free in order to work on the autobiography, but by Labor Day had managed to get drafts of only two chapters written. It bored her to write about herself, she told friends. Her memory no longer was any good, she insisted. But basically what held her back was a fear she might not be able to do a good job. Many of FDR’s associates, meanwhile, were coming to her with their drafts of books and articles, asking for her help and imprimatur. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., wrote into his Colliers contract that not one word should be printed without her approval. He did so out of loyalty to the president and Mrs. Roosevelt, but she did not wish to be saddled with such responsibility. And all the time she claimed she could not do a book, she was regaling guests and family with stories and evaluations of the White House years that seemed to them clearly to have the makings of a book. Labor Day week end she decided that it might be fun after all to go ahead. She had read Frances Perkins’s third installment of The Roosevelt I Knew and felt it gave an inaccurate account of Franklin’s third-term decision and failed to do justice to the president’s background in economics. She began to see she had something to contribute toward history’s appraisal of her husband. She would get to work on it, she promised her household.10

  In August, 1946, she had an automobile accident while driving down from Hyde Park. It was a sign that even she was vulnerable to the ravages of age.

  . . .I must have become drowsier than I realized and, before I knew it, I had come head on with another car in a collision and then sideswiped a second one. I was terrified to think that someone else might have been hurt.

  There were some injuries but none serious. She had never had a motor accident before, she wrote in the column, which she insisted on filing, despite her shock and bruises. The sun, “together with the fact that I had no one sitting by to talk to me,” had combined to make her sleepy. “My eyes are black and blue. In fact, I am black and blue pretty much all over.” Her two front teeth had broken off about halfway. “Now I shall have two lovely porcelain ones, which will look far better than the rather protruding large teeth which most of the Roosevelts have.”11 She had to cancel several meetings and engagements, but by the end of October, when the General Assembly reconvened, she was ready again for the diplomatic fray.

  Daily her tall, black-garbed figure could be seen at Lake Success and Flushing Meadow, slipping in and out of committee rooms, toting a worn briefcase, a fur scarf dangling over her arm, “the only delegate who is familiar with all the background material of her committees,” said a colleague. At lunch time she queued up in the large, noisy cafeteria, passing up the privacy and exclusiveness of the delegates’ dining room, talking animatedly with her State Department adviser on international law.12

  Again, as the U.S. representative on the Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee of the General Assembly, she crossed swords with Vishinsky. Again, the issue was forced repatriation of refugees. There were still one million displaced persons in Europe, and Committee III debated the charter of an international refugee organization whose function it would be either to help repatriate, if that was what the refugees wished, or to resettle them. “Mr. Vishinsky’s view is that the problem is very simple and can be solved by repatriating all the displaced persons,” she said beginning her rebuttal. “This thesis ignores the facts of political changes in the countries of origin which have created fears in the minds of the million persons who remain, of such a nature that they choose the miserable life in camps in preference to the risks of repatriation.” Mr. Vishinsky wanted to know who these people were who, for political reasons, felt unable to return to their country.

  I visited two camps near Frankfurt [she replied], where the majority of people had come from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. They did not want to return because their country no longer belonged to them. They did not appear to me to be fascists and Mr. Vishinsky’s assumption that all people who do not wish to return to the country of their origin because those countries are now under what is called “a democratic form of government” does not seem to allow for certain differences in the understanding of the word democracy. As he uses it, it would seem that democracy is synonymous with Soviet. . . .Under that formula I am not very sure that he would accept some of the other nations in the world who consider themselves democracies and who are as willing to die for their beliefs as are the people of the Soviet Union.

  The delegates from the non-Communist countries forgot diplomatic decorum to applaud her. The “Gibson girl” had again worsted the commissar, or so it seemed to one observer.13

  In January, 1947, the eighteen-nation Human Rights Commission held its first plenary session. Mrs. Roosevelt was the U.S. representative, appointed by President Truman to a four-year term. Again she was chosen chairman by acclamation. The other officers were a vice-chairman, Dr. Peng-Chun Chang, a scholarly Chinese diplomat, and the Commission’s rapporteur, Dr. Charles H. Malik of Lebanon, a Christian humanist with an ever-ready reference to Thomas Aquinas.

  The initial debate was somewhat philosophical. There was a time, Dr. Chang challenged his European colleagues, when Chinese philosophic writings were well known to all the thinkers of Europe, but in the nineteenth century, Europeans became parochial and self-centered. Now, after the global war mankind must again think on a global scale. The Declaration should incorporate the ideas of Confucius as well as those of Thomas Aquinas. Later, when the professors tended to wander into the byways of abstraction and philosophic discourse, Mrs. Roosevelt would promptly call them back to the business that had to be accomplished, but at those first sessions, as she heard her learned colleagues argue the source and validation of human rights, she looked across at the visitors’ section, filled with high-school students, and wished she were “young again with years ahead of me to acquire knowledge!”14

  A more difficult task of intellectual reconciliation soon revealed itself in the remarks of the Yugoslav representative, who said that the emphasis in many of the bills of human rights that had been assembled by the Secretariat reflected the social and political ideals of the middle classes and were, therefore, obsolete. New trends in the world made it impossible to consider individuals except collectively. In the modern world the social principle should have priority. Dr. Malik challenged the collectivist thesis with his own set of dicta: the “human person” is “prior” to any group to which he may belong whether it be class, race, or nation; his “mind and conscience” were the “most sacred and inviolable things about him”; the group “can be wrong, just as the human person can be; in any case it is only the human person who is competent to judge.” That touched off a philosoph
ic Donnybrook Fair, with Russian Communist, British Socialist, and American democrat all entering the debate. “We’re living as individuals in a community and society,” protested the Soviet delegate, “and we’re working for the community and society and the community and society are providing the materials for existence.” The British spokesman, a trade-unionist, representing a Labor government, tended to agree:

  There is no such thing as complete personal freedom. . . .If freedom or complete detachment from society were possible it would provide a very poor life indeed. We must all pay the price for advantages resulting from calling upon the state to safeguard our liberties both in the sense of personal freedom and also in the direction of the minimum degree of economic security.

  Mrs. Roosevelt sided with Dr. Malik. She considered his statement “of particular importance. . . .It is not that you set the individual apart from society but that you recognize in any society that the individual must have rights that are guarded.” Malik got in the last word: “I’m not arbitrarily setting the state against the individual. But which, I ask, is for which? I say the state is for the individual.”15

  The debate had revealed two schools of thought within the Commission. “Our policy was to get a declaration which was a carbon copy of the American Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights,” said Hendrick. The Soviet stress was on the need to include all sorts of economic and social rights, “and the less said about freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, etc., the better.” The State Department was lukewarm toward the inclusion of the newer rights. Mrs. Roosevelt, however, saw no reason why such rights should not be incorporated into the draft, and she succeeded in pulling the department along with her.16

  Policy was formulated by an interdepartmental committee. But, in effect, Mrs. Roosevelt set the policy. She was a presidential appointee, a woman of world stature; and the State Department was eager to do what she wanted. Hendrick kept her advised on what was going on in the policy-committee meetings, “I tried to be watchful that nothing went into the instructions that she would not go for.”17

  Hendrick sat behind her during the meetings of the Commission. He started in by trying to whisper into her good ear* his suggestions on the best way to handle matters that came up in the Commission, but since that proved unsatisfactory, he took to writing her notes—the speeches in the Commission tended to be lengthy and there was plenty of time to do so. His notes, in addition to suggestions for replies, included advice on how to vote, whom to appoint, resolutions to be submitted:

  On the Belgian resolution we have no position, so use your discretion. See no objection to it.

  On Philippine resolution, assume you will vote yes.

  If there is a sub-committee of three, suggest—Malik, Dukes [Lord Dukeston of Britain], Mora [José A. Mora of Uruguay].18

  The Commission set up a drafting committee of three to prepare a text for their next session. Mrs. Roosevelt felt “ill-equipped” compared with such “learned gentlemen” as Dr. Chang, Dr. Malik, and Dr. John Humphrey, the United Nations’ Human Rights director, but perhaps she could help her colleagues put their “high thoughts” into words that the average person can understand. “I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me understand something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country—and perhaps that will be my real value on this drafting commission!”19

  The drafting committee met in Mrs. Roosevelt’s Washington Square apartment. While she poured tea, Chang and Malik argued philosophy. The group finally agreed that if a draft was to be prepared by June the responsibility for doing so would have to be taken by the director of the Human Rights Division, Dr. Humphrey. He should first spend a year in China studying Confucianism, Chang grinningly admonished Humphrey, which was his way of reminding the UN official that something more than western rights would have to go into the Declaration.

  “I get more and more the sensation of something happening in the world which has a chance to override all obstacles,” Hendrick wrote her after the session, “and more and more that this ‘something’ could never have come into being without you.”20

  In June, an enlarged drafting committee went to work on the draft prepared by Humphrey.

  They should write a bill, Mrs. Roosevelt told the drafting group, that stood some chance of acceptance by all fifty-five governments. As she said this, some of her colleagues wondered how explicit a statement of the state’s responsibility for full employment the United States was prepared to accept. At the February session Mrs. Roosevelt had not been sure, but in the intervening months she had overcome resistance within the U.S. government and now said the United States was prepared to support not a “guarantee” of full employment, but an undertaking to “promote” it.

  The Soviet representative thought this a pretty feeble affirmation of the right to work. “It would be incorrect for him to ask the U.S. representative to undertake to eliminate unemployment in the United States,” he said scornfully. “The economic system in the United States made that impossible. . . .He could, however, ask that something concrete should be done. Instead of making a general statement about the right to work, the relevant article should list measures to be taken to ensure that right.” “The right to work in the Soviet Union,” Mrs. Roosevelt replied,

  means the assignment of workers to do whatever task is given to them by the government without an opportunity for the people to participate in the decision that the government should do this. A society in which everyone works is not necessarily a free society and may indeed be a slave society; on the other hand, a society in which there is widespread economic insecurity can turn freedom into a barren and vapid right for millions of people.21

  At her urging, the drafting committee did not spend too much time on the precise wording of the articles. A touchier issue had arisen and was dividing the committee—the binding character of the rights that were to be listed in the Declaration. The small nations in particular wanted something more than a moral manifesto. They wanted states to assume a treaty obligation to grant, protect, and enforce the rights enumerated in the Declaration. Neither the United States nor Russia favored this, but the United States, chiefly as a result of Mrs. Roosevelt’s pressure, deferred to the views of the majority. There would be two documents, the committee decided, one a relatively brief declaration of principles that would provide “a common standard of achievement,” the other a precise convention that would constitute a treaty binding on the states that ratified it and become a part of their own law. It was largely owing to Mrs. Roosevelt, wrote Marjorie Whiteman, that the Commission gave priority to the Declaration. “In her view the world was waiting, as she said, ‘for the Commission on Human Rights to do something’ and that to start by the drafting of a treaty with its technical language and then to await its being brought into force by ratification, would halt progress in the field of human rights.” René Cassin was asked to rework the Humphrey draft with a view to determining which rights should go into a declaration and which into a convention, and by June 25, with Mrs. Roosevelt insistently pressing her colleagues on, the committee had gone over the text presented to them by Professor Cassin and had authorized the Secretariat to forward the draft to member governments for their comments.22

  The moment had arrived when the U.S. government had to define its attitude toward the two documents that were in the process, the Declaration and the Convention. She explained the situation to Sen. Warren R. Austin, the amiable Vermont Yankee who headed the U.S. mission at the United Nations. The United States had wanted to move slowly on the Convention, but a strong majority on the drafting committee demanded that a convention be written at the same time as a declaration and the United States yielded. What Mrs. Roosevelt wanted to know from Senator Austin, who before his appointment to the UN post had been part of the Senate leadership, was whether a convention would be acceptable to the Senate at this time. He could not say, Austin replied.

  We should be perfectly willing to enter into a Convention as
well as a Declaration, but we must be reasonably certain that the country will back us up. We should not try for too much. It would be most unfortunate if we were to take a lead in forcing a Convention through the General Assembly and then be turned down by the Senate.23

  Public opinion in the United States and the mood in Congress were turning hostile toward additional UN commitments. In part, this was a response to the fact that the end of the war, instead of ushering in an era of peace, order, and friendliness, had brought almost chaotic conditions as well as a perilous confrontation with the Soviet Union. In part, it reflected domestic developments—the postwar swing to the right that culminated in McCarthyism and McCarranism. In part, it was a reaction to Soviet behavior in the United Nations. The readiness of the Soviet Union to exploit the platform and high principles of the United Nations in order to abuse the West and to boycott and paralyze the organs of the United Nations when those principles were invoked against Russia’s mundane interests turned congressional sentiment against a legally binding convention, which, it was said, the Russians would disregard, even as they did their own constitution.