Eleanor Page 9
Above all, American leadership meant vigorous support of the United Nations in order to keep the world from dividing into armed camps. In this respect she found herself at loggerheads with Winston Churchill, who, on March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, in the presence of President Truman, delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech calling for an Anglo-American military alliance and a showdown with Russia.
Even before that speech she had been afraid of his influence over Truman. She intended to see the president as soon as she returned, she had written from London, “It seems to me he is being too attentive to Churchill. I fear Winston will make him believe certain things which just aren’t so.”4 Elliott agreed with her. He had attended most of the wartime conferences as his father’s aide, and he recalled many bedtime conversations with his father in which the latter had spoken of his differences with Churchill. When Elliott proposed to write a book reporting those conversations she encouraged him to do so.
Churchill came to Hyde Park after his “Iron Curtain” speech to lay a wreath on his wartime comrade’s grave in the rose garden, and, of course, Mrs. Roosevelt received him with respect and affection. “No matter how much any of us may differ at times with the ideas which Mr. Churchill may hold,” she wrote, “none of us will ever cease to be grateful to him for the leadership which he gave during the war.” Having paid her respects to the great man, she proceeded to take issue with him:
Unless we build a strong United Nations Organization it is fairly obvious that the U.S.S.R., the United States and Great Britain, the three great Allies in the European war, are each going to become the center of a group of nations, each building up its individual power.
All three countries wanted peace,
but the old way of counting on our own individual force seems still to have a strong hold on us. We have not worked together enough really to feel that we understand each other. We still question whether our different political and economic systems can exist side by side in the world. We still suspect each other when we belong to different racial and religious groups. We are still loath to give up the old power and attempt to build a new kind of power and security in the world.
I am convinced that this timidity is perhaps the greatest danger today.5
Part of her suspicion of Churchill stemmed from a fear that he spoke for a group in the United States and Britain that wanted to rebuild and rearm Germany “as a buffer in Central Europe against the spreading out of the Soviet Union and its influence over neighboring states.” An American official, whose business it had been during the war to keep track of the international cartels and their efforts to circumvent the blockade, sent her a report on proposals to rebuild German heavy industry. She sent it on to Truman:
Mr. [Bernard] Baruch tells me that what he has to say is undoubtedly true. I have always known that a certain group in Great Britain would try to bolster Germany’s economy as they are really less afraid of a strong Germany, in spite of the wars which we have had, than of a strong Russia because that group in Great Britain is more afraid of an economic change than anything else. I am also afraid that Mr. [Robert] Murphy, our representative in Germany, has always played with this group and this line of thought. From my point of view it threatens not only the peace of Europe but of the world.6
Yet, uneasy as she was over some of the developments in western policy, she did not exempt Soviet Russia from its share of responsibility for the breakup of wartime Big Three unity: “We must get together with Russia, but it must be a two-way matter.” Her cousin, Joe Alsop, sent her an article that he and his brother Stewart had written for Life. It was called “Tragedy of Liberalism,” and its theme was that “by ignoring the challenge of Soviet imperialism, U.S. liberals are destroying their nation’s chances of building a peaceful world.” Soviet realpolitik, the Alsop brothers argued, could not be handled by “loving kindness.” He was sending the article to her, Joe Alsop wrote, “because with perhaps less patience and good temper than you, I think along precisely the same line that you do.”
“Slowly I have been coming to much the same feeling that you have on Russia,” she replied two days later,
with one exception, namely, that I do not feel there has been enough plain speaking among the people in our countries. Since Harry Hopkins, I do not believe that anyone has talked “turkey” to Mr. Stalin personally, and certainly most of us haven’t talked honestly with people like Mr. Gromyko, Mr. Vishinsky, etc. I am going to make a great effort to get to know Mr. Gromyko and tell him a few of the things I feel.
I think the difficulty with them is to make them see that they have to trust for safety to the United Nations. Otherwise there is no safety for anybody. They are doing exactly what you describe but I think they are doing it because they have no conception of what a strong UN might mean in security for all, and no trust in any one. However, we have no more trust than they have and neither has Great Britain.7
The Soviet government still wanted her to visit the Soviet Union. But U.S. officials feared, as did some of Mrs. Roosevelt’s friends, that the Russians would turn her visit into proof of their propaganda thesis that Truman’s policy of firmness toward Russia was responsible for the breakup of the wartime alliance and was a betrayal of Roosevelt. She had dropped her plans to go to Russia, she told the press. “Just say I am going to be at Hyde Park working on my autobiography.”8
Although Mrs. Roosevelt said she agreed with the Alsop analysis of Soviet expansionism, she carefully refrained from endorsing their further view, expressed in the same Life article, that Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace was the liberal leader most guilty of an “idealized” and “otherworldly” view of the Soviet Union. And when, in September, 1947, Wallace publicly broke with the Truman administration over its “get tough with Russia” policy, her reaction was by no means unfriendly. He was the Roosevelt associate from whom she expected the most in the way of liberal leadership. On the day she moved out of the White House she had written him:
Though I hope to see you today and perhaps to talk with you more about my hopes for America and the future, I do want you to know that I feel that you are peculiarly fitted to carry on the ideals which were close to my husband’s heart and which I know you understood.9
She shared many of the misgivings about American policy that he voiced in his departure from the Truman cabinet. Commenting on his letter to Truman of July 23, 1946,* in which Wallace condemned the increased army budgets and the bomb tests in the Pacific and which made it look to the rest of the world as if we were only paying “lipservice to peace,” Mrs. Roosevelt said, “I do not agree with it in every detail, but it’s a good letter.” She thought Wallace’s explanation of the break with Russia, showing that the United States was not blameless, was a “fair analysis. . . .The test of any situation is to put yourself in the other man’s place and we have not done that very successfully in our attitude towards Russia.” She, too, had deplored the phrase “tough policy” to describe the U.S. attitude toward Russia. Wallace’s highly critical stand on the increasingly military emphasis in the U.S. approach to the world, his assertion that some military men favored a “preventive war,” also struck a responsive chord. In May, 1946, when President Truman had threatened to draft striking railroad workers into the Army, she had written Truman in dismay:
You will forgive me, I hope, if I say that I hope you realize that there must [not] be any slip, because of the difficulties of our peace-time situation, into a military way of thinking, which is not natural to us as a people. I have seen my husband receive such advice from his military advisers and succumb to it every now and then, but the people as a whole do not like it even in war time, and in peace time military domination goes against the grain. I hope now that your anxiety is somewhat lessened, you will not insist upon a peace-time draft into the army of strikers. That seems to me a dangerous precedent.10
She gave public expression to her fears about the growing influence of the military in her Armistice Day column:
Someone
said to me the other day that the atmosphere in the country was changing. From having been a non-militaristic nation where the majority of the people wanted only a small army and navy, we were almost imperceptibly moving toward a situation where the wishes of the War and Navy departments carried more weight than did the State Department. That is more or less natural at the end of a war—particularly a war like the one we have just been through, where our men are still scattered throughout the world and where peace has been so long in the making.
Nevertheless, I believe the time is approaching when we had best take thought about where we are drifting. . . .
Whenever our fleet is particularly strong, we have a tremendous urge to send it around the world, or to some far-away point. The Mediterranean has been particularly attractive of late, and I must say it did not fill me with great joy to have the planes from the carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt writing the ship’s initials in the sky over Greece at a time when many people wondered just what was going to happen in that country.
Our ships are just paying nice, friendly visits, and it surprises us when anyone thinks that some ulterior motives might lie behind these visits. This is another example of a trait no other nation seems to possess in quite the same degree that we do—namely, a feeling of almost childish injury and resentment unless the world as a whole recognizes how innocent we are of anything but the most generous and harmless intentions.
It is true that we do not have a Red Army anywhere in the world, but we do make a pretty good showing with our navy and our air force and—tucked away, out of sight of the rest of the world—a few little atomic bombs. On the whole our armed services have been doing pretty well in the way of keeping us defended, but I hope our State Department will remember that it is really the department for achieving peace. . . .11
Fearful of the growing influence of the military, Wallace’s pressures in the other direction seemed healthy to her. But there were differences between her attitude and Wallace’s which in time proved to be basic. “I have always wanted cooperation with Russia,” she wrote after Tito’s planes had shot down two unarmed U.S. transports that had strayed off course. “We have an obligation to meet other nations halfway in friendliness and understanding, but they have that obligation, too—and these latest developments show no realization of their responsibility.” She was able to go along with Wallace’s speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden in September because he criticized Russia as well as the United States and Britain for the breakdown of Big Three unity. But Wallace’s listeners, among whom Communists were heavily represented, had not liked that part of the speech. “Why any American audience should boo Mr. Wallace for saying what he did about Russia and the need for Russia to come halfway in her contacts with us, is beyond my understanding.”12
Her disenchantment with Wallace began when he seemed willing to associate himself with American Communists in his attacks upon U.S. policy and his speeches fell silent about Soviet responsibility for international tensions.
She had to deal with the Russians at the United Nations. That made for realism. Her hopes that personal friendliness might pave the way for frank exchanges were proving illusory. Russian representatives, she found, despite diligent effort, were “hard to get to know as human beings” even though “more frankness between individuals would bring their governments closer together.”13
Wallace had criticized the Baruch Plan for the international control of atomic energy. It only told the Russians, his July 23 letter said, that if “they are ‘good boys,’ we may eventually turn over [to them] our knowledge of atomic energy. . . .” Baruch was deeply upset. He telephoned Mrs. Roosevelt and left a message for her, saying Wallace’s statement simply was not based on fact and that his effort to get Wallace to come in and talk with him so far had not succeeded. “Send Wallace a wire saying I hope he will talk to Mr. Baruch,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote on this. The two men, seconded by their advisers, eventually did talk, and Wallace, according to Baruch, agreed that Baruch’s idea on “stages” was sound, and even agreed to the necessity of suspension of the veto in an international control agency. But in the end Wallace, again according to Baruch, “reneged” on issuing a statement amending his earlier criticism.
That disturbed Mrs. Roosevelt. Soviet delaying tactics in the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission seemed to her to show that it was Moscow, not Washington, that was keeping the world from moving toward disarmament. Nor did she like Molotov’s attack on Baruch as “a warmonger”:
On Tuesday the Russian Foreign Minister, V. M. Molotov, had impugned our motives in our plan for atomic control and development and attacked Bernard Baruch personally, and, therefore, I felt that his speech lost much of its value. People are rarely convinced by exaggerated and violent statement. So I was particularly pleased at the restraint shown by Senator [Warren] Austin.14
Not even Elliott’s espousal of an attitude toward Russia very similar to Wallace’s checked her maturing conviction that Soviet Russia was primarily responsible for the breakup of Allied unity. Elliott’s book, As He Saw It, appeared in the autumn of 1946 and caused a world-wide sensation. It detailed Roosevelt’s differences with Churchill over colonial policy and the second front. It described FDR’s careful moves to make it clear to Stalin that the United States and Great Britain were not allied in a common bloc against the USSR. It gave examples of the late president’s distrust of the State Department, because, among other things, he thought it too much under the influence of the British point of view.
Mrs. Roosevelt had heard her husband say many of the same things reported by Elliott, but her own experience with the Russians, the knowledge she had acquired in the thirties of how Communists exploited unwary liberals, kept her from endorsing the conclusions that Elliott drew from his father’s wartime table talk—that the peace Franklin had sought to build was being lost because of the maneuvers of British imperialism and American militarism against a Soviet Russia that was portrayed in Elliott’s book as largely guiltless. “Naturally every human being reports the things which he sees and hears and lives through from his own point of view,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote in the carefully phrased Foreword. “I am quite sure that many of the people who heard many of the conversations recorded herein, interpreted them differently, according to their own thoughts and beliefs. The record written by all these individuals is invaluable.”15
She was grateful to Elliott and Faye. By settling at Hyde Park they had made it possible for her to continue to live there. He was currently the favorite whipping boy among the Roosevelt children of the Roosevelt-haters, and that only endeared him the more to her. She loyally defended him and his book against his detractors and critics, taking indignant issue, in particular, with a column by Joseph and Stewart Alsop in which they pointed up the contrast between Elliott’s attitude toward Russia and that of his mother and his brothers James and Franklin Jr. She was upset that Franklin Jr. had supplied information to the Alsops. “I assure you that I can corroborate the actual things which he said in his book, and so can a good many other people because they were told many times. He may have misinterpreted but that is a matter of opinion.”16
The differences in her own household made her acutely miserable. She knew that this author and his wife as well as Franklin Jr. felt that Elliott was being used by the Communist propaganda apparatus, and the only way that Christmas to preserve peace at Val-Kill was to stay off difficult subjects.
Despite her support of Elliott and defense of his book, her own point of view was being made clear, as the Alsops noted, by her involvement in the plans for a meeting in Washington on January 4, 1947, of American non-Communist progressive leaders to “hammer out an American non-Communist Left program with emphasis on the ‘non-Communist.’”17
She had spent the whole day “from 9:30 in the morning till after five in the afternoon with a group of people, many of whom I have known before, who were trying to set up a liberal and progressive organization.” So she wrote about the founding meeting of
the Americans for Democratic Action in Washington on January 4, 1947. Looking in on the group, columnist Drew Pearson quipped, “New Deal in Exile.” James Loeb, Jr., and Prof. Reinhold Niebuhr, leaders of the Americans for Democratic Action, were the moving spirits in the convening of the conference; but it was Mrs. Roosevelt’s presence and, to a lesser degree, that of Franklin Jr. that immediately gave it a power of attraction for FDR’s New Deal associates as strongly magnetic as Henry Wallace and the Progressive Citizens of America.
“If we fail to meet our problems here, no one else in the world will do so,” Mrs. Roosevelt keynoted the meeting. “If we fail, the heart goes out of progressives throughout the world.” The United States, she said, had to pursue a course between fascist and Communist totalitarianism. She gave her blessing to the projected new liberal organization, and at the end of the day-long meeting, down-to-earth and organization-minded, she asked for the floor again. Ideas were very fine, she said, but how were they going to be put into action? She answered for herself by giving the ADA’s first contribution—$100—and pledging to raise $500 more within a week. “That’s all she said,” recalled Loeb, “but there followed the most rapid and spontaneous and most successful fund raising in ADA’s history.”18
Wallace, who had approved the establishment of the Progressive Citizens of America, sought to minimize the break with Mrs. Roosevelt: “I am not a member or officer of the P.C.A. and Mrs. Roosevelt, to the best of my knowledge, is not a member or officer of the A.D.A. I spoke to one organization urging unity in the progressive ranks. Mrs. Roosevelt spoke to the other.”
She had no wish to feud with Henry Wallace, whose integrity she believed in and whose ability she admired, “but that does not mean that you have to agree on the way in which you wish to work for your objectives.” She intended “to be helpful” to the ADA, she went on, and then pointed out what basically distinguished the ADA from the PCA: