Eleanor (50 page)

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“Nothing could have been done to save her,” David Gurewitsch wrote after the autopsy. “The pathological findings show without any question that Mrs. Roosevelt had a primary disease of the bone marrow, in which the bone marrow, to a very high extent, lost the capacity to form blood. Therefore the anemia. We know no treatment for this condition.” At the end of his letter, David added that the men who examined her brain said she had the brain of a young person.

As you know,” Dr. James Halsted wrote to James Roosevelt, “the diagnostic problem confronting her physicians during the last two years of her life were extremely difficult. . . .She had aplastic anemia (also known as bone-marrow failure) which was diagnosed in 1960. The cause of aplastic anemia is usually unknown and this was the case with your Mother. Approximately six months before her death she was given steroids because the course of the anemia indicated that she might begin to develop internal bleeding and steroids are an effective remedy for that in aplastic anemia. Unfortunately she had an old tuberculosis lesion dating back to 1919, the scars of which were shown in the x-rays of her chest. Steroid treatment of many illnesses sometimes ‘light up’ inactive and healed tuberculosis if carried out over several weeks or more. That is what happened in your Mother’s case. The tuberculosis which was activated by steroid treatment spread rapidly and widely throughout her body and was resistant to all kinds of anti-tuberculosis treatment. This was the cause of her death.”
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Illustrations

Discussing the draft Covenant on Human Rights. Left to right: Dr. Charles Malik of Lebanon; Prof. René Cassin of France, who was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in this field; Marjorie Whiteman, a State Department adviser to Mrs. Roosevelt; Mrs. Roosevelt; and James Simsarian, another State Department adviser.

She called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “a Magna Carta for mankind.”

Eleanor Roosevelt with Adlai Stevenson and John Foster Dulles at the United Nations, 1946.

Addressing the General Assembly at the United Nations, 1947.

Mrs. Roosevelt addresses a plenary session of the General Assembly, October 20, 1949. Carlos Romulo of the Philippines is in the president’s chair.

Mrs. Roosevelt with Anna, James, John, and their children.

Mrs. Roosevelt with grandchildren Nina and Sally and dog Fala at Val-Kill, November 1951.

Mrs. Roosevelt with Norman Thomas and Alf Landon at a peace rally in New York City, May 1960.

Arriving in Washington on one of her many journeys there.

“I am not a candidate,” Adlai E. Stevenson insisted in 1960, but Mrs. Roosevelt would not take “no” for an answer.

To President Truman she was the “First Lady of the World.”