Eleanor (47 page)

She had a vivid sense of American history and the Roosevelt contribution to it and a strong feeling for tradition which she enjoyed passing on to her grandchildren. At her last Thanksgiving dinner, before Franklin Jr. and John began their competition as to who could carve the two turkeys as elegantly as their father, she read FDR’s 1933 Thanksgiving Day proclamation. Memorial Day,
1961, when the Roosevelt Home Club conducted its annual ceremony in the rose garden, she arranged for Mayor Robert Wagner to speak, entertained him, and had her cottage bursting at the seam with New Dealers, family, and friends.

On New Year’s Eve, 1961, at midnight, as on every preceding New Year’s Eve, she proposed a toast “to the United States of America” as the president had done in the White House, and followed it with a toast “to absent family and friends.” And then the company toasted her.

She was in gay spirits, that last New Year’s Day, taking a long walk through the snow with Trude and Maureen out to the Harritys’. On the way back she stopped to watch John teach his new retriever his duties. At dinner there was much banter and uproarious Roosevelt laughter.

On July 4, there was the usual picnic lunch at the pool outside the stone cottage that she, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman had built in 1925 and that now was occupied by the John Roosevelts. Afterward, she read aloud the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. On that last July 4 before she died, besides sundry children belonging to Franklin and John and to her niece Ellie, the company that grouped itself around her included the Soviet cultural attaché and his young wife and ninety-two-year-old Uncle David. When Mrs. Roosevelt had finished her reading, noting for the benefit of the younger ones the signatories who were among their ancestors, Uncle David’s voice was heard accusing her of “trying to indoctrinate” her Russian guests.

“You should have put fingers in your ears,” he said, turning to the somewhat embarrassed Soviet couple.

“No, no, David,” she interrupted. “I was only trying to indoctrinate my grandchildren.”
¹⁴

David Gray stayed with her most of the summer. He was a man of elegance, wit, and good manners, who still wore country tweeds made for him before World War I. He was sharp-tongued and a favorite of the old Hudson River families. “I am her wicked uncle,” he had introduced himself to Khrushchev during his visit to Hyde Park. At his age he had a right to say what he thought,
Mrs. Roosevelt maintained, but she, too, gasped at one of Uncle David’s sallies during a Soviet medical group’s visit to Hyde Park. The group’s leader had just finished a little speech to “dear Mrs. Roosevelt” about how much they appreciated her hospitality and how highly regarded she was by the Soviet people, when suddenly Uncle David’s voice was heard: “And when you get ready to drop that atom bomb on us, I hope you will think of dear Mrs. Roosevelt.” There was a moment of shocked silence. Fortunately the Russians understood that they were being teased.
¹⁵

She was full of stories in her final years about her childhood in New York City. She loved telling them when there were grandchildren around. She had run into a contemporary of her aunt Maude’s, she said, who blamed all of Eleanor’s unorthodoxies on the fact that she had been brought up by her young aunts, Maude and Pussie. At the turn of the century those two were regarded as wild: they had even driven in hansom cabs alone, without a maid. When her grandfather, the first Theodore Roosevelt, built his house at Fifty-seventh Street, she said, beginning another story, Freddy Weekes, who lived on Washington Square, was invited to the housewarming. That is an overnight trip, his mother warned him. When he said he planned to be back the same night, she refused to believe him. She remembered Mrs. Weekes as a gentle, charming old lady, who, she added, “once danced with Lafayette.”

When Mrs. Roosevelt regaled the company with these recollections, young eyes gleamed as all American history seemed to materialize in the person of their grandmother.

It was especially pleasurable for her when her own grandchildren gave signs of sharing her interests and values. One of her stories was of how she had been a volunteer for the Consumers League when she was eighteen and, at a rally in Union Square, had heard the labor song “Joe Hill” for the first time. Nothing delighted her more than the lively and intelligent way in which Nina, John’s child, entered into their trip together to Israel and Iran in 1959, or Nina’s brother Haven’s spending a year teaching in the Tanganyika bush, or Anna’s son Curtis’s involvement in the New York reform movement, or Franklin III’s quiet assistance to the freedom movement
in the South, or her grandson Johnny Boettiger’s heading up the college clubs for the AAUN.

Her grandchildren paid her the most satisfying compliment of all—wanting to learn from her. Her grandson Frank counted her his most important teacher in trying to find a meaningful purpose in his life. He sent her a review he had written for his own edification of William F. Buckley’s
Up from Liberalism
. She liked it very much and would try, if he wished, to get it published.

I have only one comment on what you say about Social Security on page four. You seem to think that everyone can save money if they have the character to do it. As a matter of fact, there are innumerable people who have a wide choice between saving and giving their children the best possible opportunities. The decision is usually in favor of the children. Social Security has meant they could obtain insurance for future life at a much lower rate than they could possibly get it in any other way and stand by the employers.
¹⁶

Advanced in her views about the acceptance of social responsibility, she was curiously strait-laced in her views about social behavior. In Iran, where she and Nina visited Anna and Jim Halsted, the U.S. ambassador arranged some parties for Nina with young people in the diplomatic colony.

“Grand’mère says I have to be in at twelve,” Nina complained to her aunt. “Suppose I can’t get home by twelve?”

“Oh, she will be asleep,” Anna assured her, to which Nina replied that her grandmother had told her to come in and kiss her good night when she got home. The young lady got in at 2:00
a.m.
and, of course, her grandmother, who was sleeping, woke up.

“But Nina, it’s two o’clock,” she chided.

The next morning Anna went to her mother. “Mummy, dear. Please realize times have changed. . . .She shouldn’t be under restrictions and have to check in with you. She is with people selected by the Ambassador. Nothing will happen to her.”

Mrs. Roosevelt was visibly annoyed. “Oh very well. If that’s the way it has to be, I’ll tell her.”
¹⁷

If there was sickness or a family crisis, she was the one the children turned to for counsel and comfort. In their many divorces and marriages, the “moment of truth” with their mother was the one they found hardest to face. By her middle seventies, however, she had survived so many family crises and witnessed so much history that nothing surprised her any longer. Even what appeared to be disaster, she took with philosophical detachment.

At dinner in 1959, David Lilienthal, as he helped her serve the plates that she filled, mentioned how deeply impressed he had been by her article in
Harper’s
on “Where Do I Get My Energy?,” particularly by the part “about not getting too self-absorbed. She looked at me in the most earnest way and said: ‘And this becomes more important as one gets older. Inevitably there are aches and pains, more and more; and if you pay much attention to them, the first thing you know you’re an invalid.’”
¹⁸

These “aches and pains” were coming with increasing frequency. On Adlai Stevenson’s recommendation, Kennedy appointed her a member of the U.S. delegation to the Special Session of the General Assembly that convened in March, 1961. She paid a visit to the Human Rights Commission. There was applause as she entered the chamber, accompanying the U.S. delegate Mrs. Ronald Tree, the granddaughter of Endicott Peabody, FDR’s old rector at Groton. The chairman, Chandra S. Jha of India, asked her to say a few words. She hoped to see the day when the principles enunciated in the Declaration would be accepted as law, she said. “Then we will have made real steps forward in human rights.”
¹⁹

There was nothing to do, Stevenson had assured her, except attend the plenaries. Yet illness kept her from fulfilling even that limited role to her own satisfaction. She was not a good assistant, she apologized.

To all intents and purposes I am marooned at Hyde Park till Wednesday afternoon with the
’flu. Actually, I don’t have the ’flu but phlebitis! I didn’t want to talk about it and thought the ’flu a good excuse.

If there is a delegation meeting Tuesday or Friday, I will try to come but I think I should probably be at home with my two old legs in the air!

To the president she wrote, as the session drew to an end, “I don’t think I have been very useful but I think I accomplished what Adlai wanted in just appearing at the UN.”
²⁰

Although her strength had begun to ebb, she took on a variety of assignments for President Kennedy. She served on the “Tractors for Freedom” Committee after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion (an enterprise to which she euphemistically referred as “this unfortunate raid”). She accepted a place on the Advisory Council of the Peace Corps. Of Kennedy’s first 240 appointments, only nine were women, so in March she called at the White House to turn over to him a three-page list of women she considered eligible for high positions in his administration. At its head was Dr. Leona Baumgartner, whom he subsequently appointed as deputy chief of the AID. Law, custom, and the forgetfulness of men, Mrs. Roosevelt told members of the Lucy Stone League, were keeping women from equal opportunities in government and other jobs. She abandoned her forty-year opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. “Many of us opposed the amendment because we felt it would do away with protection in the labor field. Now with unionization, there is no reason why you shouldn’t have it if you want it.” Having reminded the president that women, too, were qualified for top government jobs, she agreed to preside over the Commission on the Status of Women that he appointed at the end of 1961 and faithfully chaired its meetings until illness made attendance impossible. “You are very much in our thoughts today,” the members of the commission wrote her as they realized no ordinary illness was keeping her away.
²¹

She followed avidly all the news from Washington brought to her by her sons Franklin and James and by Abba Schwartz, whose efforts to become assistant secretary of state for immigration and refugee affairs she backed. “I have tried not to speak for anyone in
connection with positions,” she wrote the president in February, 1961, “but. . .”
²²

Since Kennedy encouraged her to stay in touch with him, there were letters of advice. He should jog the Veterans Administration, she suggested. He did, and asked her never to hesitate to call such matters to his personal attention. A month later she was writing him that she feared because of his preoccupation with Cuba he might not be paying much attention to legislation affecting the migratory farm worker. Migrants were receiving short shrift from the House Agricultural Committee, he replied, but he was in close touch with the situation.
²³

She hoped he would forgive her presumption, she began a long letter to him on the subject of the president as educator,

but I am concerned because I feel that there is not as yet established a real feeling among the people that you are consulting them and that they must react and carry on a dialogue with you on such subjects as you choose to bring before them.

I listened during a rather long drive which I took, to your last press conference and decided that it did not take the place of fireside chats. The questions asked were asked by men and women of good background and were much too sophisticated for the average person to understand. I think the people are anxious to have you talk to them on one question at a time and explain it fully and ask for their reactions and understand that their answers will be analyzed and considered.

I wish you could get someone like my old teacher (probably her daughter) to help you deepen and strengthen your voice on radio and TV. It would give you more warmth and personality in your voice. It can be learned, and I think it would make a tremendous difference. . . .

The problem with his voice was an old one, the president answered. He had tried voice instruction during the campaign and would try again. “It is difficult to change nature, but I will attempt to nudge it.”
²⁴

She went to the White House as a member of a delegation that also included Benjamin V. Cohen, Norman Cousins, and Clark Eichelberger, to urge that the United States, instead of involving itself in the fighting in Vietnam as the Taylor-Rostow Report had recommended, take the question to the United Nations. The White House referred the delegation to the State Department. There the delegates were told that the department had considered going to the United Nations but, after talking to Dag Hammerskjöld, had concluded that it could not get the action there that it wanted. “They decided they could handle the situation better alone,” Ben Cohen commented. “Had they gone to the United Nations I am sure they would not have gotten what they wanted. But the American people might have had time and opportunity to learn into what a tragic pit they were being asked to leap.”
*

In the face of highly provocative actions by Khrushchev—the building of the infamous Berlin Wall and unilateral abrogation of the nuclear test ban moratorium—she urged Kennedy not to abandon the effort to negotiate with the Soviet Union. She had just signed a “Declaration of Conscience and Responsibility” circulated by the American Friends Service Committee, “and one of the things I had to promise to do was the write to you.” She urged him to resist “the usual pressures being put on the government by certain scientists, by the Pentagon,” and by others opposed to a treaty to end nuclear tests.
†
She pleaded for give and take on Berlin. She understood East Europe’s fear of the revival of German power.