Eleanor Read online

  The other amendment that Pavlov sought to add was the “little, rather tricky” clause, “corresponding to the laws of the State.” Article XIII of the Declaration, for example, provided that “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and return to his country.” To add the phrase “according to the laws of his state” would have nullified the article because Soviet laws did not permit free departure and return. In fact, Moscow at the time was outraging western opinion by its detention of Russian wives of foreign citizens, as Mrs. Roosevelt pointed out.

  It was an effective thrust, blunted somewhat when Professor Pavlov at the opening session of the full Commission charged that the United States had delayed the arrival of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian delegates by holding up their visas and requiring them to fill out an elaborate questionnaire, both in contravention of the UN headquarters agreement. She sent General Marshall a private protest. “I regret the embarrassment caused you,” he replied. The problem arose from a conflict between the UN Headquarters Site Agreement and the revised visa requirements mandated by Congress. “The Department will make every effort to prevent unnecessary delay in the granting of visas to authorized individuals coming to UN headquarters.” Some good might result from the incident, the general added. “There is now some prospect of working out with the USSR a more liberal and reciprocal form of visa procedure.”41

  “Reciprocity” was becoming a key concept in U.S. response to Soviet attacks. The Russians, she wrote Walter White, wanted to accept for discussion only those petitions that were critical of the United States. She took the view that the Commission should accept all or none. When the Commission discussed the Declaration’s draft article on the right to adequate housing and medical care, Pavlov, who always arrived at sessions with two bulging briefcases, delivered carefully researched speeches on American housing shortages and soaring medical costs. In reply, Mrs. Roosevelt invited the Soviet Union to send a group of experts to the United States to examine housing and medical standards, provided an American team was given the same opportunity in the Soviet Union. Pavlov did not accept the offer.42

  She discomfited him on another occasion when he grandiloquently asserted that with the outbreak of the war Russia had been able to increase its medical facilities, including the supply of doctors and nurses, by 50 per cent. She cornered him after the meeting and innocently asked—in French—how it had been done.

  “Oh, it is the system,” said Professor Pavlov. “We just plan.”

  “I see. Then you must have known when the war was coming.”

  “No, we didn’t know when the war was coming.”

  “Well, then did you take student doctors that had one year of training and suddenly graduate them overnight?”

  “No, it takes five years to make a doctor.”

  “That’s interesting—I still don’t understand how you produced 50 per cent more doctors, nurses and hospital facilities overnight.”

  “I am sorry, I do not understand,” he said, moving away.

  And Mrs. Roosevelt, in reporting the conversation, added after a pause: “and his French is perfectly good, too.”43

  Although Pavlov was brilliantly polemical and propagandistic, much more so than any previous Soviet delegate, he was always careful to conclude his attacks on the U.S. approach with a conciliatory statement that despite the different views the two could come to some understanding. On June 18, late in the evening, the draft Declaration was finally adopted. No vote was cast against it, although the Soviet bloc abstained and Pavlov submitted a minority report calling the draft “weak and completely unacceptable.” When the vote was announced the Panamanian delegate, expressing the sentiments of his colleagues, paid tribute to Mrs. Roosevelt, and the United Nations Department of Public Information, in its subsequent account of the writing of the Declaration, departed from its usual style of bland impersonality to declare that from the Commission’s first meeting she had “guided and inspired the work of the U.N. in the field of human rights.”44

  The 1948 General Assembly met in Paris at the end of September. It was a moment of tense confrontation with the Communists, who were on the offensive throughout western Europe. Soviet Russia’s blockade of Berlin was being abetted by Communist-instigated strikes, street demonstrations, and violence inside France and Italy. At the heart of the confrontation, in the view of the West, was the issue of human liberty. The Assembly would have before it the draft Declaration. The president and General Marshall thought Mrs. Roosevelt should give a major speech in Paris.

  I saw both the Secy of State & the Pres. on a flying visit to Washington the other day. They are putting considerable responsibility on me in this session. Dulles has suggested that we point out that all our troubles are rooted in a disregard for the rights & freedoms of the individual & go after the U.S.S.R., not, thank heavens, claiming perfection but saying that under our system we are trying to achieve those rights & succeeding better than most. They want me to make an opening [address] to set this keynote outside the Assembly & I am trying to plan it now. I feel as you do, there cannot be a war but strength & not appeasement will prevent it.

  She accepted René Cassin’s invitation to come to the Sorbonne and talk on “The Struggle for the Rights of Man.” She arrived at the Sorbonne accompanied by General and Mrs. Marshall. The amphitheater, which held 2,500, was packed and many hundreds were unable to gain admittance. The French minister of national defense presided, the French foreign minister was in her audience, and the French Broadcasting System broadcast the entire proceedings. The basic obstacle to peace, she said, sounding her central theme, was the different concept of human rights held by the Soviet Union. It was the battle of the French and American Revolutions all over again. “The issue of human liberty is as decisive now as it was then.” Her excellent French and extreme graciousness of manner charmed her audience, as did her ad-libbed departures from her text. Her audience “was particularly delighted when she said she thought she had reached the limits of which human patience is capable when she brought up her family, but that since she had presided over the Commission on Human Rights she had realized that an even greater measure of patience could be exacted from an individual.” So the foreign service officer who was assigned to cover the meeting reported to the State Department.

  There is no doubt that the speech, far from being submerged by the more immediate and critical international political issues, benefitted from the current feeling of apprehension and nervousness in Paris. The words of the speaker seemed to evoke a response from the audience and to make everyone feel that the fundamental principles of our civilization were still uppermost in the mind of, and being defended by, the United Nations.45

  The greatest test of patience was still ahead. The Declaration was on the agenda of the Committee III of the General Assembly. To Mrs. Roosevelt’s dismay the Committee insisted on debating the Declaration “exactly as though it was all an entirely new idea and nobody had ever looked at it before.” It devoted eighty-five meetings to the subject, “considerably more time than any organ of the General Assembly had spent on any other subject.” Again the Soviet bloc delegates sought to delay and postpone, but they met a worthy antagonist in Dr. Malik, chairman of the Committee, who, commented Sandifer, was “the only person I ever knew who succeeded in holding a stopwatch on Pavlov.”46

  The debate was repetitive and tedious. Patiently, she sat through the usual Soviet bloc onslaughts “telling us what dogs we are,” happy, she confessed, to escape the “wordy atmosphere” occasionally to do a little Christmas shopping, leaving Sandifer to sit in for her, until finally the Declaration was approved by Committee III and forwarded to the Assembly plenary. “I hope,” she wrote Maude Gray,

  the last lap of my work on the Declaration of Human Rights will end tomorrow & that we get it through the General Assembly plenary session with the required ⅔ vote. The Arabs & Soviets may balk—the Arabs for religious reasons, the Soviets for political ones. We will have trouble at home f
or it can’t be a U.S. document & get by with 58 nations & at home that is hard to understand. On the whole I think it is good as a declaration of rights to which all men may aspire & which we should try to achieve. It has no legal value but should carry moral weight.47

  The Moslem defection did not materialize. Although the Saudi Arabian delegate abstained because he did not think the king of Saudi Arabia would agree that one could change one’s religion, the minister of foreign affairs of Pakistan, Sir Mohammed Zafrullah Khan, considered it a misinterpretation of the Koran. “I think we are permitted to believe or disbelieve. He who will believe, shall believe; he who cannot believe, shall not believe. The only unforgiveable sin is to be a hypocrite.”

  At 3:00 a.m. on December 10 the Assembly adopted the Declaration and she could write “long job finished.” The final vote was 48 countries in favor, none against, 2 absent, and 8 abstentions, mostly of Soviet bloc countries. The Assembly delegates, in recognition of Mrs. Roosevelt’s leadership, accorded her the rare personal tribute of a standing ovation.

  She glowed when General Marshall told the delegation that the 1948 session would go down in history as the “Human Rights Assembly.” “I do not see,” commented Charles Malik, who succeeded her as chairman of the Commission, “how without her presence we could have accomplished what we actually did accomplish.” Helen Keller, after reading the Declaration in Braille, wrote her, “my soul stood erect, exultant, envisioning a new world where the light of justice for every individual will be unclouded.” She was being proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize, Clark Eichelberger of the American Association for the United Nations informed her, but the French felt she and Cassin should share the award. Would she object? He could go ahead, she wrote back, but she did not see why she should be nominated at all. Dulles sent her a copy of a letter he had sent the American Bar Association defending the Declaration and her role in drafting it:

  As regards Mrs. Roosevelt, she has worked loyally and effectively on this matter for two years and, while herself without legal training has had the assistance of competent draftsmen. It is to be borne in mind that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not, at this stage, primarily a legal document. It is, like the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, a major element in the great ideological struggle that is now going on in the world, and in this respect Mrs. Roosevelt has made a distinctive contribution in defense of American ideals.48

  Some were cynical about the Declaration, stating there was “an inherent absurdity” in an “organization of governments, dedicating itself to protect human rights when, in all ages and climes, it is governments which have been their principal violators.” But this was precisely the value of the agreement on the first intergovernmental bill of rights and fundamental freedoms. “Man, the individual human being, has emerged on the international scene which in the past was the jousting ground only of States.”49

  “The first step has been taken,” Mrs. Roosevelt replied to Helen Keller. “We shall now go ahead with the work on the Covenants.” Progress would be very slow on the Covenants. For a time after Mrs. Roosevelt had left the delegation in 1953, the United States declined to take any part in their drafting. In 1966 two Covenants, one on civil and political rights and the other on economic and social rights, were approved by the Assembly and opened for ratification, but as of this writing fewer than twenty countries have deposited such ratifications and neither of the Covenants has gone into effect.

  The Declaration, meanwhile, demonstrated an influence far beyond expectations. It has proved to be “a living document,” Dag Hammarskjöld observed on the tenth anniversary of its adoption. “It has entered the consciousness of the people of the world,” Adlai E. Stevenson wrote in 1961, “has shaped their aspirations, and has influenced the consciences of nations.” The European Convention on Human Rights was a spin-off effect of the Declaration, even going beyond it, since it established a commission to hear complaints and a court to adjust them. The Declaration has found its way into many constitutions and is increasingly cited in domestic court decisions. Its provisions often have been invoked in General Assembly resolutions and by Soviet dissenter and black resister. Pope John XXIII, in his encyclical Pacem in Terris, called the Declaration “an act of the highest importance,” an “important step on the path towards the juridical-political organization of the world community.”

  Most international lawyers now think that, whatever the intentions of its authors may have been, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is now binding on states as part of the customary law of nations.50

  The decision of Mrs. Roosevelt and her advisers to give priority to the Declaration was vindicated. The first United Nations Human Rights prize was awarded to her posthumously.‡

  But more than the prize, she would have enjoyed the knowledge that the Declaration was slowly working its way into the ethical conscience of mankind. For as she wrote in 1958:

  Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual persons; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.51

  * Mrs. Roosevelt was deaf in her right ear, and, after a plane descent, even her left ear was none too good, as she explained in a 1944 column in reply to a woman’s complaint that she had ignored the latter’s question.

  † Covenant and Convention were used interchangeably for the legally binding instrument, and in time Covenant became the preferred term.

  ‡ In 1962 President Kennedy nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in connection with the Declaration. She was “overcome,” she wrote him, and “grateful. . .but I shall not be surprised in the least if nothing comes of it. . . .” Nothing did come of it, but in 1968 the Norwegian Parliament awarded the prize to René Cassin, primarily for his work in the field of human rights. See Appendix A: “Eleanor Roosevelt and the Nobel Peace Prize.”

  4. RELUCTANT COLD-WARRIOR

  THE SOVIET BLOC’S ABSTENTION ON THE DECLARATION OF Human Rights, after all her effort as well as that of others to find language that would be acceptable to the Soviet group, confirmed anew for her the difficulty of dealing with the Russians. She was not prepared to say that agreement was impossible and certainly she was not resigned, as some Americans were, to the inevitability of war, but she no longer believed, as she did at the beginning of her career as an American representative to the United Nations, that at the heart of Soviet aggressiveness were insecurity, fear, and a misunderstanding of U.S. intentions that genuine dialogue with her Soviet colleagues might help to overcome. Real communication, she found, was impossible, no matter how hard she tried.

  A letter that she received from Harry Hopkins just before she left for the London General Assembly and her first encounter with the Russians represented the view of many of Roosevelt’s New Deal associates about the breakup of Big Three unity.

  I cannot say I am too happy about the way the atom bomb is being handled. In fact, I think we are doing almost everything we can to break with Russia which seems so unnecessary to me.1

  Her run-in with Vishinsky in London over the issue of forced repatriation gave her a taste of how difficult it was to reconcile the outlooks and interests of East and West; yet she thought that with patience, firmness, and a willingness to look at Russia’s economic and security needs without self-righteousness a harmonization of interests might in time be achieved. When, during the quick trip that she made to occupied Germany after the London meetings, GIs asked for her ideas on how to deal with the Russians, she crisply ticked off four points:

  Have convictions.


  Be friendly.

  Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs.

  Work as hard as they do.

  The Russians had “an inferiority complex,” she went on, and also “tenacity.”

  We shall have to work very hard to understand them, because they start from a different background. They have a great belief in their own reasoning and if we don’t have just as great convictions, they won’t understand.2

  Unlike Vandenberg, who had captured the headlines on his return from London with a speech to the Senate on “What is Russia up to now?,” she did not believe there was any mystery about Russian behavior, telling Truman as much when she saw him shortly after Vandenberg’s speech and giving him her own assessment of Soviet policy.

  Soviet agitation in Iran and the Dardanelles, she thought, reflected at bottom a reaching out for “security in the economic situation,” which the Russians evidently felt could only be secured through political control. In eastern Europe she thought Russia was “chiefly concerned with military security. That is why she will try to control the governments of the nations in all those areas and why she dreads seeing Germany built up as an industrial power against her.” Russia had not yet learned how to live with an opposition at home, and this was reflected in her foreign policy. “This is largely a question of maturity and of course, trust in the people themselves and not such great dependence on the absolute control of the head of the government.

  “It will take some time for Russia to achieve this.” America, meanwhile, must act out of affirmative belief, not fear. The United States was the strongest country on earth. “The whole social structure in Europe is crumbling,” she counseled the president, “and we might as well face the fact that leadership must come from us or it will inevitably come from Russia.” The key to the future was the economic situation in Europe. “I feel very strongly that it cannot be handled piecemeal. . . .The economic problem is not one that we can handle with a loan to Great Britain, a loan to France, a loan to Russia. It must be looked on as a whole.”3