Eleanor (32 page)

I know that it must have been terrible to face yourself—to realize that you have been persuaded that you must go out and stand beside men who had said things about someone who had been your best friend, someone who had really given you the opportunity to rise to great position.

Yet he [Eisenhower] stood by the side of [Sen. William E.] Jenner, who said that General Marshall’s life was a living lie.

How General Eisenhower could do that I cannot understand. I cannot understand how he could give a mark of approval to Senator McCarthy. I consider that Senator McCarthy in fighting communism has injured the people of the country because he fought it in the wrong way. . . .
¹⁶

Of Governor Stevenson, Mrs. Roosevelt said that “he knows more about the world than almost any other man in this country,” and that as governor of Illinois, in working with the legislature, he had received good training for working with Congress. The August annoyance with Stevenson for having spoken disparagingly
of FDR was wiped out. She arranged for Stevenson to come to Hyde Park to lay a wreath at Franklin’s grave and to breakfast with her. “I have heard no one in the campaign who could make the people understand the complicated situations before us so well and in such simple and beautiful prose, as Governor Stevenson,” she wrote in her column.
¹⁷

The western alliance was building up its armed strength, but for Mrs. Roosevelt this was strength needed in order to bring about a settlement with Soviet Russia. Her report to Truman after the 1951 General Assembly had returned to the subject, Ambassador Murphy’s admonition notwithstanding, of the need to make some dramatic bid for a settlement with Moscow:

We need something dramatic to prove to our allies that we are not planning war when we have attained equal strength with the Russians or what we feel is equal power, but we must show that we are going to use NATO to bring about peace.

I think it can easily be proved that nothing can be done with the Russians except when we have power but with SHAPE doing a military organization job something dramatic must emphasize what our ultimate objectives are.

Stevenson understood the interrelationship between power and peace, she thought, and would know how to handle the Russians. “Mr. Stalin, I think, will find a better match in Governor Stevenson than in General Eisenhower,” she wrote privately.
¹⁸

But Election Day produced a Republican landslide. Eisenhower received the largest vote ever given a presidential candidate up to that time in American history. There was, nevertheless, some comfort for Stevensonians like Mrs. Roosevelt. More than 27 million Americans voted for Stevenson, which was the largest vote ever given any Democratic candidate.

“The campaign was well worth while,” she wrote Mrs. Ives, Stevenson’s sister, “in that it started a process of education which I hope will continue for the next four years.” She saw Stevenson
leading the Democratic party in opposition; and to the tender, solicitous note that she wrote him after his defeat, he replied that he had no regrets except the disappointment of his friends, and she was at the front of the list of those to whom he was grateful.
¹⁹

She would help Stevenson, but she also had to face the problem of her own role under a Republican administration. In 1948, after Truman’s surprise victory, she had told reporters that she planned to devote the rest of her active life to the United Nations as “the best hope we have for peace.” By the end of 1952 as the Republicans prepared to take command, she had come to symbolize humanity’s search for common ground more than any other UN personality, except the secretary-general. While FDR was alive there had been an internal monitor that kept her from statements and actions she thought might embarrass him. In her service to the United Nations since his death, it was as if the brakes had been taken off. As a public personality she was freer, more self-assured, a powerful voice for world peace and respect for human dignity.
²⁰

She seemed a natural choice for President-elect Eisenhower to continue at the United Nations, especially in the light of the principle of bipartisanship that had governed U.S. representation at the United Nations since its inception. She wanted to stay on, but she also wanted Eisenhower to feel free to designate whomever he wished. Her appointment as a delegate to the General Assembly automatically ceased with its adjournment in December. Her appointment as the U.S. representative on the Human Rights Commission was for a five-year term, but, she informed the State Department the day after the election,

even though I was appointed for a full term on the Human Rights Commission I would prefer to resign so that the incoming President and Secretary of State may feel free to appoint a Republican woman.
²¹

There were press reports that she would refuse a UN appointment from President-elect Eisenhower. They upset Baruch. “May
I ask that you do not resign or take any step before we have a talk,” he asked her. “You have learned much and are the recipient of as much experience as anyone in dealing with the Russians.” Her reply indicated not only the reasons why Eisenhower might not wish to reappoint her but the terms under which she would be willing to serve in a Republican administration:

November 18, 1952

My dear Friend:

Thank you for your kind letter.

It isn’t within my hands to resign or not to resign. Each of us does that automatically and I think it would be highly unfair not to resign from the Human Rights Commission.

I want you to think over the problem in the following way. I have been able, because the President has always been willing to see me, to discuss with him at the end of every meeting or of any mission which I undertook, everything that had occurred. The State Department, which always received my report first, was glad to have me do this because they felt that frequently reports sent from the State Department go to secretaries and never reach the President. Therefore I was able to get to the President what I thought the non-government organizations and the women of this country generally felt on a great many subjects, as well as the routine report of what had occurred and my opinion of what other nations felt.

This would be impossible with General Eisenhower, since I hardly know him and since I do not belong to the party that will be in power. If there were a number of American women being given important positions on the policy-making level in the United Nations, then I think it would be right to have representatives from both parties. But since the number of women is very limited, I think it is important that it be a woman who can reach the President with the point of view of the women and who also has the interests of the United Nations at heart. . . .

. . .I have spent many years of my life in opposition and I rather like the role.
²²

Despite this letter, she did not forbid Baruch to talk to the president-elect. His report back was most surprising. The general, he said, had been angered by some personal remarks about Mrs. Eisenhower that Mrs. Roosevelt was alleged to have made at a dinner party in Europe and which had been passed on to him by Perle Mesta. Gossip was so out of character for Mrs. Roosevelt—she could not recall ever having made the remarks ascribed to her—that her friends concluded that the general, perhaps because of her stinging attack on him for having turned his back on General Marshall, perhaps out of deference to the McCarthy wing of his party, was glad to accept the resignation of someone who, although esteemed throughout the world, was execrated by the extreme right.
²³

She made her last speech in the United Nations. Appropriately it was on the political rights of women in the course of a discussion of a draft convention on the subject. Her theme—when it came to the “great decisions” in politics and government, men still made them, while the women were left to cool their heels outside. The draft convention, she said, went far deeper than encouraging equal political rights for women in all countries. It reached to the “real issue of whether in fact women are recognized fully in setting the policies of our governments.” She doubted this was the case. She conceded that women in forty-five countries voted on the same basis as men, but added, “Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression.”

“Too few women” were serving in positions of real leadership, even in countries where women’s suffrage and eligibility for public office were of long standing. “I am not talking now in terms of paper parliaments and honorary appointments.” The Soviet delegate had boasted that thirty-seven women were members of the National Assembly in Bulgaria, thirty-one in Romania. Neither was she talking about

any such artificial balance as would be implied in a 50-50, or a 40-60 division of public offices.

What I am talking about is whether women are sharing in the direction of the policy-making in their countries; whether they have the opportunities to serve as chairmen of important committees, and as cabinet members and delegates to the UN.

Thus Eleanor Roosevelt, whom the
New York Times
termed the “most popular delegate,” whom even the blasé members of the Secretariat always stopped to look at when she went whisking down the corridors or lined up in a cafeteria queue, ended her tour of duty.
²⁴

On December 22, Sandifer, who was now deputy assistant secretary for UN affairs, wrote her that “It really makes me sad to see your signed letter of resignation from the Human Rights Commission. I certainly hope that it is not accepted. . . .We are registering a strong recommendation that you be continued on the Human Rights Commission.” On December 30, she received an impersonal, lukewarm note from Eisenhower, formally thanking her for her services and accepting her resignation as a delegate to the United Nations. She replied immediately.

December 31, 1952

My dear General:

I am very grateful to you for your extremely kind letter.

You will receive, when the State Department thinks it proper to present it, my resignation from the Human Rights Commission as a Presidential appointee. This would naturally have to wait until you became President.

I do not have to resign formally from the Delegation since any Delegation to the General Assembly is only appointed for the term of that General Assembly. Therefore, at the end of each Assembly we automatically cease our services. As only that part of this Session which is concerned with the political questions will reconvene in February, I have, of course, terminated the services for which I was appointed.

I appreciate your saying that you feel I have rendered good service and I want to thank you for your letter.

Very sincerely yours,

Eleanor Roosevelt
²⁵

“From top to bottom in this Mission,” Richard S. Winslow, its secretary-general, wrote her, “you will stand as the finest symbol of all that is best in the United Nations and, in a personal way to each of us, as the finest type of civic leader, public servant and working colleague.”
²⁶

“There seems to be a jinx on my getting to Washington!” she advised President Truman as inauguration day approached.

I have completely lost my voice and decided the weather was not propitious for going down to Washington today. This means I will not see you and Mrs. Truman before the 20th, I am afraid, and so I want to send you this line to tell you how grateful I am for all you have given me in the way of opportunity for service in the UN in the last few years and to wish you relief from the burdens of state which I know have been overwhelming and an interesting and happy life from now on with many satisfactions.
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Years later, at Mrs. Roosevelt’s burial service in Hyde Park, which was attended by the three presidents who had succeeded FDR, David Gurewitsch went up to General Eisenhower and asked him, “How could it happen that you did not make use of this lady? We had no better ambassador.” Eisenhower shrugged and moved on.

“I made use of her,” commented Truman, who was standing nearby. “I told her she was the First Lady of the World.”
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11.
PRIVATE CITIZEN AGAIN

T
HE
E
ISENHOWER ADMINISTRATION TOOK OFFICE JUST AS THE
“know-nothing” campaign against U.S. support of the United Nations was reaching its shrillest crescendo. Senators McCarthy and McCarran regularly portrayed the organization and the Secretariat as a nesting place of Communist spies. Sen. John W. Bricker’s amendment, which would seriously hobble the treaty-negotiating powers of the president, seemed assured of the two-thirds vote it needed for adoption in the Senate. The neoisolationist slogan “take the United States out of the UN and the UN out of the United States” was no longer considered a jesting matter. A counterattack at the grass roots was sorely needed.

One day, shortly before Eisenhower’s inauguration, Clark Eichelberger, director of the American Association for the United Nations (AAUN), was surprised to see Mrs. Roosevelt walk into his office.