THE UNITED STATES HAD REACHED its zenith—out front of all other nations, the richest and mightiest in the world.
The U.S. contributed the lion’s share to securing the North Atlantic community against aggression and to the Marshall Plan’s rebuilding of all of Europe. Just as it anchored its fellow member nations in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a full-scale peacetime military alliance, mutually ensuring the defense of the Western Hemisphere, the United States also sent a missile higher than ever before (250 miles), prompting Eleanor to comment, “Anyone who really thinks about war is thinking about annihilation.”1
Dread of premature extinction would filter through global thinking for the rest of Eleanor’s life. “Fears breed fears,” she noted in 1947 (much as she had in 1937), “and if we who are at present the strongest nation in the world have fear, we will breed it in other people.”2
The peace that Franklin had not lived to see had succeeded in reducing suspicion to a single new enemy. The still-non-nuclear Soviet Union, represented by Vyshinsky in ER’s confrontations with the Soviets in London, now did to smaller nations and vulnerable populations what it had been doing to individuals in secret throughout Stalin’s murderous regime.
She herself remained consistently committed to influence—not to holding power. When wily Clare Boothe Luce flushed out Truman in July 1948, advising a switch in vice-presidential nominees, Truman agreed that Mrs. Roosevelt would be all right with him as a running mate. Eleanor for the umpteenth time declared that she had no intention whatsoever of running for any public office.3
As an elected or appointed official, she would have felt that any office was a demotion or a constraint. Now free to speak her mind, she was uniquely influential because her audience was listening. Through her column she could give her opinion on matters six days a week. Firmly, unscoldingly, she was there each day to remind people that a powerful America was supposed to be above racism, had a responsibility to find ways to give basic decencies to the poor. In a postwar nation where women were now supposed to go back to the kitchen and have lots of children, she voiced a radical domesticity.
“Never forget,” she told a visiting graduate student at Val-Kill one day, “human rights are too important to be left to governments.” Too important—and too easily abused or turned to disinformation and propaganda by authoritarian regimes. Eleanor pointed out to Richard N. Gardner, a future ambassador to Italy and Spain, the critical role that the non-governmental organizations were playing in implanting human rights in the UN Charter.4
She was concerned with individual people living their lives.
She felt individual pain, and it energized her. She saw the world dissolving back into individual lives, the individual welfare of people, their connectedness to one another, and to the organizations that served their likes and dislikes. “Few seem capable of realizing,” she had written thirteen years earlier, “that the real reason that home is important is that it is so closely tied, by a million strings, to the rest of the world.”5
ON JUNE 19, 1949, WHILE speaking at Fordham University, the New York archbishop laid into U. S. Congressman Graham Barden’s bill for federal aid to education, arguing that if the North Carolina Democrat aimed to provide $300 million annually for public schools, then Catholic parochial schools, paid for by U.S. taxpayers, had every right to claim their share. Cardinal Spellman declared the legislation “un-American” and himself opposed to a public-supported and exclusively state-controlled school system, which he termed “tyrannical totalitarianism,” while attacking Barden as a “new apostle of bigotry,” and charging the congressman with “venting his venom upon children” and “conducting a craven crusade of religious prejudice.”6
“The philosophy behind the Barden bill, whether its author or defenders intended so or not, is that the only truly American school is the public tax-supported school,” asserted Spellman. “This is not true.”7
Protestant groups flared at this Catholic attempt to “raid the public treasury.”8 A Methodist bishop charged the New York Diocese with “putting its hands in the public treasury” and Spellman with calling anyone who disagreed with him a bigot.9
From her own bully pulpit, Eleanor insisted that public funds should be used solely for public education: “The controversy brought about by the request made by Cardinal Spellman forces upon the citizens of the country the kind of decision that is going to be very difficult to make.”10
She pointed out that it was possible to believe in the right of any human being to worship in whatever church he or she chose, and, at the same time, to wish to see federally supported public schools kept entirely separate from any denominational influence. The inability of any one religious group to dominate the country’s public schools had contributed to a community of tolerance among all groups.
Spellman took her position as pretext for a personal assault, sending ER a letter questioning her fairness: “Why do you repeatedly plead causes that are anti-Catholic?”
Eleanor denied the charge, although in truth she saw in American Catholicism a social conservatism of the most startling kind. In 1951, an Irish minister of health was driven out of office by the bishops because his suggestions for subsidized health for the poor were seen as undermining the family.
Eleanor had first known Spellman as a vigorous opponent (with his fellow Massachusetts Irishman Joseph P. Kennedy) of Father Coughlin. She had approved of FDR’s appointment of the new cardinal as the President’s special wartime envoy in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Yet she was not surprised when Spellman supported Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, rejecting his friend Joe Kennedy’s son because of JFK’s stand against federal aid for parochial schools, the very issue that had ignited Spellman’s feud with Eleanor eleven years earlier.
She criticized Spellman for calling her “an unworthy American mother,” knowing full well that Spellman had actually said that the stand Mrs. Roosevelt took in her column was “unworthy of an American mother.” But Eleanor had correctly interpreted Spellman’s letter as a condemnation of her children’s divorces issued by the one authority in the Catholic hierarchy whom rich and powerful Catholics knew to be the most likely procurer of a marriage annulment.11 One could infer that Spellman wanted people to believe that “her children might have been better [to their spouses] if they had had proper moral and religious education.”12
The cardinal had New York’s newspapers in his pocket. He had sent his letter to the major dailies before Eleanor had time to receive it, and reaction came swiftly. The Church was incredulous. Several cardinals flew to Rome to protest Cardinal Spellman’s treatment of the former first lady. Governor Lehman objected in a forthright letter.
To Eleanor, Spellman’s fatuous hypocrisies rankled—his claims to be the simple priest of the people (“Frankly, I prefer the Vargas girl to the Venus de Milo,”13 Spellman had once boasted), when he was leader of the richest diocese in Mother Church. But what made her effective was her self-discipline. She could go to the edge with Spellman and stop there. She could now see underneath American politics’ hard high-gloss surfaces to the cracks and flaws in many of the players. If Spellman’s behavior toward Eleanor could be chalked up to “little more than a moment of peevish aggression,” argued the writer and Catholic observer Wilfrid Sheed, it also suggested a subtext “of either unhappiness or well-earned indigestion.”14
Spellman was, in truth, a sexually active closeted pederast.15 Eleanor saw in his increasingly arch-conservative postwar politics a deeply reactionary intolerance—intolerance of, among other things, homosexuality. With his Red-baiting, fear-mongering, and “little mincing ways,” as Jacqueline Kennedy noted,16 Spellman epitomized, according to one observer of the period, the “self-loathing, closeted, evil queen, working with his good friend, the closeted gay McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn, to undermine liberalism in America during the 1950s’ communist and homosexual witch hunts.”17
No politician was more talented at twisting the truth than “Tailgunner Joe,” the Roman Catholic senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy—and none twisted the country more in the postwar era, starting with his fellow Catholics. “McCarthyism,” observed one Protestant theologian, “was a special Roman Catholic temptation.”18 As early as 1951, Eleanor came out strongly against McCarthy and his anti-Communist witch hunt, later defending the Nation against McCarthyite censorship and coming to the aid of numerous entertainers who came under attack. As she said in 1950: “We are trying to prevent the establishment of a gestapo in our midst, and the curtailment of the right of free speech.” Hollywood producers were “chicken-hearted about speaking up for the freedom of their industry.”19
One friend of Eleanor’s in particular had been badly hurt. Josh White, country bluesman and social activist, a favorite of FDR’s, had performed repeatedly at the White House and at the third Inaugural, joining the Roosevelts at Thanksgivings and Christmases. But from 1947 on, White had been ensnared by anti-Communist hysteria; and in 1950, against Eleanor’s advice, he voluntarily appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), defending his right to earn a living as an African American folksinger with anti-segregationist views. Blacklisted—barred from radio, movies, television, and recording; unwelcome, even at folk festivals—White had left the United States for England, his career in limbo. By way of doing whatever she could to help, Eleanor had hired Josh’s younger brother, William, as Val-Kill manager and chauffeur; and she took pride in serving as godparent to Josh White, Jr., now eight years old.20
On August 18, at Val-Kill, she had a sudden phone call from Spellman. The cardinal “happened to be in the neighborhood” and would like to drop by and pay his respects. Eleanor took mischievous pleasure in inviting His Eminence to tea.21 He was well south of Hyde Park that morning, dedicating a chapel in Peekskill, New York, but if Spellman was willing to drive out of his way to continue his charm offensive, Eleanor decided to use the visit to enlist the cardinal’s help.
When her guest arrived, jolly and chatty, without saying a word about their disagreement, Eleanor was jolly and chatty right back. Over the teacups, she raised the matter of Josh White and asked the cardinal’s help. As she later explained to Justine Wise Polier, she would “at least try to get help for one person.”22 In these days of McCarthyism at its most toxic, Eleanor believed more strongly than ever that the country “had to be concerned with the individual,”23 but it would take another decade and the country’s first Roman Catholic President to break White’s blacklisting.
IN AUGUST 1949, THE SOVIET Union covertly tested its first atomic bomb, stunning the United States, up to that point the world’s sole nuclear power.
Eleanor entreated both the U.S. and the USSR to resist the natural instinct toward retaliatory buildup that would lead to an arms race.
A month later, the victory of Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution on mainland China raised the question of whether it would be advantageous to both the United States and China to remain friends. China needed U.S. technicians to help with their development and certain types of machinery that could be obtained more easily from the U.S. than from the Soviet Union. Eleanor questioned whether Mao meant to prevent the counterrevolution threatened by Chiang Kai-shek and other more conservative forces in China by holding the loyalty of the Chinese people through lifestyle improvements. “The question, of course,” wrote Eleanor, “must be raised as to how much Russia will supply [to] meet in part or in whole the needs of the Chinese people. [The USSR] is not yet fully meeting her own needs, nor, so far as one can discover, are her own satellites in Europe able to ship to her in sufficient quantities such things as she cannot produce or cannot as yet produce in great enough quantities.
“There is an enormous job of organization still to be done in the Soviet Union,” she warned. “Transportation alone would be a development requiring many years, and without it there is no chance of reaching the remote parts of her own country. This is true to a far greater extent in China, and one wonders how long and how much can be put into purely military operations by the Chinese leader who must also promise his people many reforms.”24
Eleven years later, while interviewing Bertrand Russell on British defense policy,25 Eleanor locked horns with the philosopher when he proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union sign a declaration before arms negotiations stating that all-out nuclear war would be a greater disaster than all-out victory of either side. Eleanor, however, would have none of it. “Now that I would not be willing to sign,” she said, adding that she doubted that Russell could get such a document signed by the people of the United States.
“I was horrified,” he later recalled, “to hear Mrs. Roosevelt enunciate the belief that it would be better, and that she would prefer, to have the human race destroyed than to have it succumb to Communism. I came away thinking that I could not have heard aright.”
But, upon reading ER’s remarks in the next morning’s papers, Russell had to face the fact that Eleanor really had expressed the popular “Better dead than Red” view,26 revealing herself kin to the Sagamore Hill Roosevelts, with a surer sense of the country than her detractors admitted.
As Uncle Ted had gone from being the most progressive of conservatives to being the most conservative of progressives, Eleanor now arced from her image as the most unrealistic of liberals to becoming the most liberal of realists. As the historian Allida Black writes, postwar Eleanor “hid behind her traditional image to shape policy.”27
HER SMILE WAS NOW EASY where for so long it had been merely dutiful. In the first decade of widowhood, she attained a far greater degree of authentic joy, and in so many respects a better life. She never thereafter had to wonder if people were thinking that Franklin had put her up to this.
She could be her passionate, adoring, uncritical self—the girl who found bliss dancing for her father and receiving his unfettered adoration in return. She raised the stakes with the small circle of her most beloved by showing the Lashes and David and Tommy unlimited affection, now also expecting it in return. “She made a great fetish of this,” recalled Anna, with mixed feelings, for as she saw Eleanor deliberately opening herself to what at first seemed a more reciprocal relationship she well remembered how closed and acrid Mother had been in the family during Anna’s childhood.28
On July 31, 1948, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd died of leukemia. She had been seeing her sister through a depression, when Violetta took her own life, with a revolver Lucy kept in a bedside drawer, never dreaming her sister knew how to fire it. A friend believed the shock brought on Lucy’s final illness.29
Two months later, Aunt Edith died at Sagamore Hill. In Eleanor’s last letter to her, she had been glad to have an almost official opportunity to write her condolences for Cousin Ted—a tribute to Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt’s heroic death on July 12 after leading his first-wave battalion up Utah beach.30
The 1948 General Assembly met in Paris at the end of September, and the entire U.S. delegation prepared for the meetings, complete with jealousy among the delegates, condescending attitudes toward Eleanor by the career diplomats, and her old feeling of inadequacy when working among professionals. The difference from 1946, however, was that she was not on the job now as “a woman”—but as herself.
Nervous and apprehensive about her speech on September 28 at the Sorbonne—the heart of French studies and intellectual life—Eleanor checked over every word with her State Department advisers, including delegation leader George C. Marshall. She arrived to find the amphitheater packed by a jubilant crowd.
The audience listened with mounting excitement to introductions by the rector of the university, Rene Casin, and Paul Ramadier, former prime minister of France, then settled in to hear the widow of the great president speak—in French, no less—on “The Struggle for the Rights of Man.”
ER spoke of the challenge to preserve individual liberty in a democratic society against the totalitarian model of empowering the state at the citizen’s expense. She recalled her discussion two years earlier in London, when Vyshinsky had told her there was no such thing as freedom for the individual in the world. She attacked the Soviets, charging Russia with ruthless suppression of human rights at home and interference in other countries’ concerns. “We in the democracies believe in a kind of international respect and action which is reciprocal. We do not think Russia should treat us differently from the way they wish to be treated. It is this interference in other countries that especially stirs up antagonism against the Soviet government.”31
Her Canadian adviser, John Humphrey, was shocked to hear “a speech obviously written by someone in the State Department.” He didn’t blame the Americans for talking back to the Soviets, but “disliked their using Mrs. Roosevelt in these polemics. For she had become a symbol which should have been kept above the Cold War—a symbol around which reasonable men and women everywhere might have rallied.”
But confidence in the UN’s power had wavered from the start, just as news of a UN Human Rights Commission convening in New York in 1946 had left even those hailing its potential doubting its practicality. “Commissions cannot create human rights,” argued the essayist E. B. White. “So far, the peace proposals do not include popular representation in the [UN] council and the assembly, and the people [of the U.S. and other countries], therefore, assume no personal responsibility for anything, and therefore will gain no personal rights.”32
“Where,” asked White, “do human rights arise, anyway? In the sun, in the moon, in the daily paper, in the conscientious heart?”33
Twelve years later, she reframed the question: “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 person; 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.”34
BY DECEMBER 9, 1948, EVERYBODY in the UN looked exhausted. The session had gone on too long. Its length depressed people and adversely affected the UN’s standing in the world.
Eleanor worked six-and-a-half days a week, eighteen to twenty hours a day. The last lap would end with the vote in the plenary session on December 10. The Arabs and the Soviets would probably balk—the Arabs for religious reasons, the Soviets for politics. And she knew there would be trouble at home. Americans wanted security. They wanted control of atomic energy. They wanted peace. Some of them wanted formal evidence of international cooperation—treaties, agreements, pacts—but only on their terms and, as in 1919, without subordinating national sovereignty. Whether the American people would accept a document from the high councils of an international body was in doubt as the Declaration came to a vote.
She did not have to leave Paris to know that Americans were living in fear, acting with suspicion, appalled at the prospect of further atomic test explosions opening up holes in the floor of the sea, or incinerating deserts with heat equal to the interior temperature of stars. Many intelligent people had been shopping for something—anything—that might guarantee them peace.35
On December 10, Garry Davis, a former U.S. flier who in May had renounced his U.S. citizenship and rendered himself stateless to promote world citizenship, gave a rally at the Velodrome d’Hiver. Twelve thousand attended—many more than had ever been attracted to a UN General Assembly meeting.36 People had lost confidence in the UN. If the Third World War was going to be fought with hydrogen bombs, went the thinking, and the Fourth with bones and stones, then the nation state system was pointed in one direction only—to mutual destruction—and Davis, a brave man, sick of violence, was simply the human face of what an enormous number of people felt.
Eleanor, meanwhile, radiated practicality. If Davis was the adolescent, saying, We can do this overnight, Eleanor was the grownup, forced to take the adult line that it would take longer. Garry Davis, the self-proclaimed first World Citizen, showed distress when ER advised him in a motherly way to go home and work in his own community before tackling the world.
AT LAST, AT 3 A.M. on December 10, 1948, at the Palais de Chaillot, after thirty-two straight months of the committee’s work, forty-eight nations cast their votes for the Declaration. Two were absent and eight abstained: South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet bloc, which opposed it on the grounds that the Declaration did not condemn Fascism. No votes were cast against it, and the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Moments later, Eleanor walked into the General Assembly, quietly dressed, wearing no makeup, briskly taking the podium. The entire Assembly got to its feet. Her fellow delegates then accorded her something that had never been given before and would never be given again in the United Nations: an ovation for a single delegate by all nations.
AFTER TRUMAN’S COME-FROM-BEHIND UPSET OF Dewey in November, the tide had gone out fast on the administration’s domestic agenda. From universal health insurance, to education, to the antidiscrimination policies of the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), few Fair Deal proposals escaped the new congressional conservative coalition that joined Southern Democrats to a majority of Republicans to crush Truman’s ambitious attempt to modernize New Deal liberalism.
Amid the general shift away from pioneering liberalism toward self-conscious conservatism, there stood Mrs. Roosevelt. Just when her fellow citizens wanted a holiday from war and began to feel prosperous enough to take one without apology, she wanted to buckle down and make sure nothing like World War II would ever happen again. The world must not forget.
“The lid was off,” Philip Roth would write of this moment. “Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together. If that wasn’t sufficiently inspiring—the miraculous conclusion of this towering event, the clock of history reset and a whole people’s aims limited no longer by the past—there was the neighborhood, the communal determination that we, the children, should escape poverty, ignorance, disease, social injury and intimidation—escape, above all, insignificance. You must not come to nothing! Make something of yourselves!”37
Eleanor was the custodian of basic human impulses that could not be tacked onto a party platform. She was the elderly relative who recalled you to your basic principles: Everyone, as a member of society, deserves to eat, to have decent health care, safe shelter, a public park. In the new postwar prosperity, Eleanor Roosevelt reminded her fellow citizens that they owed a debt to those on whom the world had landed hard—a debt that went beyond politics.
More than a professional politician, she herself was now a globalist. From her three months in Paris with the General Assembly, she had emerged as the world’s foremost champion of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights had established, according to one of the foremost scholars in the field, a platform for global transformation that authorized all people to live in “humane” societies.38
She could now reach out and seek to make a difference anywhere—supporting India under Gandhi’s leadership as it won independence from Britain; threatening to resign if Truman failed to recognize Israel as a sovereign Jewish homeland; meeting with Chilean protestors and rebels, victims of the atomic bomb, and, with characteristic evenhandedness, displaced Palestinians. Her constituency was the people of the world, and this made her all the more formidable at home, arousing puzzlement and fear. Was she a communist? A Civil Rights agitator?
As the years went on, Western diplomats would wobble over the Declaration’s inclusion of health, education, decent living standards, and economic security. No one could agree how to codify economic and social rights that depended upon government intervention into the legally binding obligations of international treaties. In ways that weakened its practical usage, the Declaration reflected the Rooseveltian belief in government as the guarantor of individual liberty. As FDR had said in his 1944 call for a “Second Bill of Rights”: “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.… People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”39
Eleanor had assured the General Assembly on the eve of voting for adoption that her government wholeheartedly supported economic, social, and cultural rights. Her committee, however, had not meant to “imply an obligation on governments to assure the enjoyment of these rights by direct governmental action.”40 But as time would tell and scholars came to see, “that was how all the states and civilian actors saw economic and social rights, and that is how her own husband’s presidential administration viewed such rights.”41 Any requirement that the state make provisions so that the people could attain their individual rights to economic well-being was not likely to become law in the United States Congress, even if at the level of the State Department—and as foundation to the 1975 Helsinki Accords—the Declaration’s articles had a lasting influence. For nearly seventy years thereafter, every administration would support human rights as a necessary commitment of American foreign policy.
SHE WAS EVEN NURSING HER doctor. At the zenith of her postwar power, Eleanor had fallen in love, but as Esther Lape perceived, David “never really reciprocated Mrs. R’s feeling.” Lape’s impression was “that he was delighted to be taken by her on trips, and to be involved in a lot of things he would never otherwise have been near, but that he was selfish and thoughtless in many things.”42
The uncomfortable truth about David Gurewitsch was not just how unloving she allowed him to be, but how willing Eleanor was to settle for being needed. Their exchange of lovers’ photographs, placed on each other’s bedside nightstand, speaks for itself:
David gave Eleanor himself in profile, the exemplar of the dark, handsome Mitteleuropa male in his magnificent prime. But Eleanor had to spring for its equally glamorous gold frame, which she also took the trouble to engrave. After Eleanor was gone, David would discreetly remove this emotionally ambiguous object from its place of honor at her bedside. Still later, he would confess to a writer he hired to help publish his photographs of Eleanor that it was the one thing he “stole” from among Eleanor’s possessions.43
Eleanor gave David a framed and signed photograph for his bedside—a formal portrait of herself at sixteen, tender, clear, her upswept gold-spun hair and searching melancholy eyes the very image of an orphaned Edwardian princess. She had inscribed it in her shaky older woman’s hand: “FOR DAVID—From the girl you never knew.”
FOR DAVID SHE POURED OUT her every wish to be loved. She thirsted for the revelation she had been in search of her whole life, the surprise that she could feel loved. Yet as never before, she risked making herself vulnerable, opening herself to a man whom she knew to be aloof and distant. “Above all others,” she told him, “you are the one to whom my heart is tied.”44
David was dazzled by ER’s prestige. He did not dare to respond at the level she wanted, and it tore at him; but, not to worry, he was setting the pace not she, the prime proof of which was his curious insistence upon “Mrs. Roosevelt” as the only form of address he would allow her45—and her steadfast resignation to the pain it would cause her in the years ahead. “I want you to feel at home with me as you would with a member of your family and I can’t achieve it! Something wrong with me!” she lamented in February 1956, after they had known each other for almost a decade. “I’d love to hear you call me by my first name but you can’t. Perhaps it is my age! I do love you and you are always in my thoughts and if that bothers you I could hide it. I’m good at that.”46
It was strange—willful. He would not relent and call her Eleanor. She blamed her own neediness: “I love you dearly David,” she repeated, “but try to remember to tell me that you want to be loved by me now and then because I don’t want to be a duty or a bother!”47
The more tender she was in her wish, the more assertive he became in his refusal. A punctilious executor of the most minor detail, he would croon “Mrs. Roosevelt” as he kissed her hand in the Continental manner that so irritated her children. (He was, noted a younger woman just after meeting David at seventy, “an inveterate hand rubber and toucher… almost holding onto you so you don’t escape until he finishes talking.”48) He insisted upon “Mrs. Roosevelt,” almost as a form of commanding respect for himself instead. To those accustomed to hearing statesmen and politicians call one another by rank and honorific—“Mr. President,” or “Colonel Howe”—David’s insistence carried a touch of bluff, as if beneath his hard exterior he felt the weakness of his position with her, the unmanning awkwardness of unrequitedness, and was conflicted, or afraid, or just not strong enough to say Eleanor, lest he arouse unrealistic hopes—a doctor’s worst fear—or, yet more dangerous, something real.
Adlai Stevenson, sixteen years younger, had never been able to call her Eleanor. They had met in Washington several times, but their friendship dated from the 1946 UN conference in London, when Stevenson had met the boat on which the delegates were arriving. Eleanor jumped off and said, “You probably know more about this than anyone here and I know less. Won’t you come to dinner tomorrow night?” She then surprised—and flattered—Stevenson by including him, despite the slightness of their acquaintance, in a frank discussion of family problems, including her infuriated disappointment when a daughter-in-law, whom ER had asked to comment on a recent “My Day” column, pronounced it “Communist.”49 In this instantly trusting friendship with Stevenson, the issue of “Eleanor” v. “Mrs. Roosevelt” had not mattered. She and Adlai cared equally and tenderly for each other, perhaps because their working relationship—not without its problems over assertiveness—nonetheless had not yet faltered from its essential Good Aunt/Brilliant Nephew professionalism and symmetry.
David was different. “He was very attached to her,” recalled a close colleague and friend. He knew that she was making more difference to him than he was to her, and he cultivated his status: “He felt she elevated him into a place he wouldn’t have been without her. David was a self-promoter. He dressed well: bespoke suits, the finest shirts, the finest ties. He had that European air about him. He looked in the mirror.”50
In certain ways, the transactional nature of David’s presentation as Eleanor’s personal physician was not unlike that of Thomas Louis Stix, her radio and television agent, who found that in granting exclusive rights to Mrs. Roosevelt’s singularly prestigious image, he himself was given validation of a wished-for superiority. “She was special,” said Stix. “And when you told people you represented Mrs. Roosevelt, you were special too.”51
What drew Eleanor to David was the painstaking nature of this classically handsome man’s lack of trust in himself. Right from the start, his loss of nerve about flying to Geneva had invited Eleanor not only to be his companion but to switch roles with her “sick doctor.” She, the “failed” parent, fearful of harming her children, was almost effortlessly able to succeed at mothering this lovely, gentle man.
Well beyond their initial reversal in the fogged-in Shannon Airport, David’s focus on his insecurity and chronic discouragements put Eleanor at the center of his life and career. Alert to the needs of his wife, Nemone, his daughter, Grania, and his cherished mother, he included Eleanor in this innermost feminine circle of his caring and protection, giving her for safekeeping the secrets and lies of his marriage and the affairs that overlapped it. His serial appeals for her support were catnip, as he often enlisted Eleanor in bearding his rendezvous.
“I got 3 rooms in the Dolder in Zurich,” he wrote in his curiously passionless way. “Dolder is a big hotel. All the main rooms face a golf course. Very big. Each with a balcony. 3 rooms—for myself, Tommy and Mrs. R. I walk out to balcony just to look at the view and at that moment on the very next balcony to mine, somebody walks out and the person who walks out is my girlfriend. I know nothing about it and there is a connecting door between the two rooms. Mrs. R. on the other side. That lady had a husband with whom she was staying in that room. It took some maneuvering.52
“I had met the lady in the sanitarium. She had left the sanitarium and returned to London. Married to a concert pianist. He was giving a concert in Zurich.…”
Gurewitsch was having an affair with the tall, elegant Griselda Gould, recently married wife of Hungarian pianist Louis Kentner, who, with world-renowned violinist Yehudi Menuhin, was giving the first performance of William Walton’s violin sonata in Zurich.53 So David had brought Eleanor to Switzerland and into a nest of intrigue in the Grand Hotel Dolder, its black gabled roofs surmounted by witch-hat spires overlooking the wide blue mirror of the lake. “There was nothing that escaped her,” he later remarked.54
Nothing—except David himself. On their trip to Pakistan and India in 1952, he again challenged her with a beautiful younger woman—in fact, by his own account, one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen.55
FOR SIX YEARS ELEANOR HAD felt “rather like a harassed commuter,” hurrying back and forth across the Atlantic. When the General Assembly was finished in Paris in 1952, the end of her duties as a delegate, plus the ensuing election of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower as president, meant that she was at last free to travel for its own sake. “It had been a good many years since I was a little girl reading anything I could find that told me about the world, but the fascination of faraway lands had not waned.”56
Invited by Prime Minister Nehru (as he sat on the floor at Val-Kill talking to students) to the newly independent India, Eleanor was determined to go, and while there, to do no harm politically. Both Pakistan and India, having established their separate spheres of freedom, now took strong exception to being told how to handle their new sets of problems. They did not care for arrogant, meddlesome Americans telling them what to do, particularly since several billion dollars in U.S. aid was still required for the process of establishing full independence.
The State Department became anxious about Eleanor’s travel plans. Starting from Paris, she and David had intended to go home the long way around (much as her father had done from India), flying from Paris to the Middle East—first Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan—then to Israel, then on to Pakistan, and India, and so on, around the world. But the United States minister in Beirut advised Eleanor that it would be “politically most unwise if not impossible” for David to enter Lebanon or other Arab countries.57 In Washington, the State Department was also “troubled about a Jew going to an Arab country,” Tommy, typically candid, told Anna. “Yesterday I was asked whether he is a U.S. citizen or not, and I am quite sure he is so I said yes. I asked Trude [Lash] and she is sure also.”58
The State Department was afraid that David, traveling with Mrs. Roosevelt, would go with her into a country like Syria, get arrested himself, and then, not being “evacuable,” touch off an international crisis. “So I gather,” said Tommy, “they settled that by having him go straight to Israel.”59
Going on to Pakistan and India, Eleanor had the impression that she and David would have to tread very gently, with great care against giving offense in word or action.60 They were accompanied on the trip by still another young woman, Maureen Corr, Eleanor’s new fresh-faced Irish-American assistant, as much a representative of the clean-cut, sardonic new youth of the 1960s as Tommy had modeled the hardboiled golden-hearted dame of the thirties. Eleanor had urged Tommy to stay home, sit this trip out. “These hops from one place to another are rugged,” agreed Tommy, “and I think perhaps it is wise for me not to attempt them. However, it is a little deflating to be told that I am too old, and that she (Mrs. R.) is taking someone much younger. Conceit.”61
David’s life had been in flux; as had his relationship to Eleanor, remaining some amorphous combination of surrogate son, companion, Rooseveltian pioneer-of-rehab-medicine, and fellow outsider. His plan to accompany Eleanor now that he and his wife, Nemone, had made final plans to divorce, seemed to indicate some kind of new start. In any case, David was freer than he had been. Without the cover of his dramas with Nemone, however, his myriad quirks only became the more pronounced. By appearing shy, or by hiding behind his camera lens, he camouflaged his passive aggression. Sometimes, he spent entire social occasions, even in his own home, taking pictures. On the journey over the Khyber Pass, Eleanor made a great point of asking their driver’s permission to stop so that “my physician,” as she referred to David, could take some pictures.
For Eleanor, the Khyber Pass evoked her father, his 1881 hunting expedition, and a promise Elliott had made to Eleanor in 1894.62 With David, all was well and good on the twenty-two-mile-long pass from Peshawar to the Afghan border, until they came to a place where it looked as if his picture-taking might be getting him into trouble.63
Midway across the pass, they had stopped on the side of the road to look at the houses in a tribal village, each heavily fortressed by high walls with gun slits and its own mud watchtower. Eleanor was fascinated by this image of neighbor defended against neighbor. Inside each compound, as they would discover, living areas were formally divided between men’s and women’s quarters. David had followed his eye to one or another of these and climbed higher for a better camera angle from which to take a picture. As Eleanor recalled the moment, “Suddenly a guard appeared and leveled his rifle at him.”64
Eleanor learned that the sentry thought David was trying to spy on the women in a nearby house. The man was vehemently sure that David’s camera was a pair of binoculars. Eleanor left the matter untouched, vaguely indicating that by the time this was settled, her curiosity to see the inside of one of these houses had become the driving force.
“Mrs. Roosevelt never lets anybody feel embarrassed in her presence,” a profile writer had tried explaining years earlier. “You can do something wrong, but nobody will notice it, because Mrs. Roosevelt covers it up.”65 With David, it was more complicated. He was habituated by boyhood in Weimar Berlin to being one step from becoming a victim. This allowed Eleanor to take charge in ways that Franklin had denied her; with David she could enact the healing relationship, but this time with love, as she had been unable to do with her father and with Franklin.
In New Delhi, at Jawaharlal Nehru’s official reception for Mrs. Roosevelt in the gardens behind the prime minister’s residence, David was dazzled by the turbaned maharajahs, ladies in their brightest saris, beribboned military officers—a thousand guests from the A-lists of the world.
After chatting briefly with the minister of health, David took refuge behind his Leica, circulating through the party taking pictures, interrupted now and then by the factotum who had been assigned by the Indian Foreign Office to introduce Mrs. Roosevelt’s consort formally to very important guests.
One of these was a maharajah resplendent in the gold braid and stars of a major general’s uniform. He seemed to think that David was coming to Jaipur. David replied that he was sorry, but he and Mrs. Roosevelt had just spent two hours trying to make travel plans. The country was so enormous, Mrs. Roosevelt could not be everywhere. Alas, they had decided that they could not come to Jaipur.
The maharajah explained that he and his office had arranged a full schedule, many fetes, and entertainments. The most important was the Elephant Festival, held on the Hindu celebration day of Holi, a two-day rite of spring, when celebrants drenched one another with bright colored powders and water. It had been hoped that David and Mrs. Roosevelt would ride the biggest elephant at the head of the magnificent procession.…
David’s foreign office guide just then touched his elbow, saying, “May I introduce you to Her Highness the Maharani of Jaipur?”
Gayatri Devi was among the most striking women of her generation. She was thirty-three, tall, elegant, with jet-black hair and a light in her eye.66
He blurted, “The Maharani of where?”
She was to become one of India’s most powerful women, winning a seat in the Indian Parliament by a landslide. As a maharani, she was the third of Man Singh II’s three consort-wives, all of whom lived with the maharajah in his resplendent Rambagh Palace at the center of Rajasthan’s capital city.
“Of Jaipur,” the factotum answered.
Without another word, David turned on his heels and said to Man Singh II, “Your Highness, we are coming to Jaipur.”67
FOR MRS. ROOSEVELT, DAVID LATER conceded, “going to see a beautiful maharani would not be her reason for going to Jaipur.” He added, “but if I wanted to go there, if she could give me pleasure, of course she would do it.”68
Eleanor had gamely agreed to play her part in the plan, though from David’s eagerness for the visit she might already have blushed many shades of festival colors. Gayatri Devi never forgot Eleanor Roosevelt arriving at Rambagh Palace “scarlet-cheeked and puzzled, but otherwise unharmed.”69
The damage had been done. “Of course, she’s very beautiful,” said Mrs. Roosevelt to David, as soon as they had a moment in private.
Upon their arrival at Rambagh, it was honeymooning at the English country houses with Franklin all over again. For the niece of Theodore Roosevelt there must be a tiger hunt. Eleanor declined, preferring instead to see a museum exhibition. David, however, sprang to join the maharani and set off with her to the Dravyavati River, where a slain goat baited the far riverbank. When the tigers appeared, David and his hostess were hidden on the near side. Both fired their rifles. She hit the mark.
For Eleanor, brought out to admire the kill as the poor creature hung from bearer’s poles, David’s tiger hunt with the Maharani of Jaipur was Franklin roped to Kitty Gandy, bursting back into the mountain inn to tell their tales. Then, as now, there was more to come.
The next day, Eleanor, David, and Maureen were invited to ride on one of the maharajah’s elephants at the head of a ceremonial procession as part of the city-wide celebration of Holi. Servants demonstrated how they must climb a ladder, then maneuver into the box on top of the beast, who would then rise and lumber into position for the ride through the city. Eleanor was thrilled, Maureen also excited, as was David.
But, as they made final preparations to go aloft, something changed. Perhaps David had learned something about the festival, which signified the blossoming of love—“a day to meet others, play and laugh, forget and forgive, and repair broken relationships.”70
Whatever it was, Dr. Gurewitsch was all at once concerned, very concerned, about Mrs. Roosevelt’s “dignity and status.” It was up to him, he decided, to protect her, and he all but forbade her to climb the ladder.
Eleanor Roosevelt had all her life been happiest when she discovered something she could do that she had been told she could not do. But when David Gurewitsch gave doctor’s orders, she listened to him.
In the palace forecourt, she merely frowned, lowered her head by inches, and stood by, a little stooped and listing leftward, to watch as David and Maureen were lifted high up in the air on the back of the maharajah’s magnificent elephant. Left alone, she scolded herself, furious “that I let myself be kept from trying,” only later “chastising” David, as he told it, the grievance now his, since he had only been doing his duty.71
Whatever it was that made David give the order and Eleanor to obey it, both left Rambagh Palace in states of intense annoyance and frustration, which tinted the rest of their journey. As always, Eleanor remembered every detail and would not forget, or, this time, forgive.
David remained closed on the episode. Later he struggled to put his feelings into words, dodging first into ponderous quotations about dignity from George Santayana, until he pointedly faced the truth that Eleanor Roosevelt “did not need me to safeguard her ‘dignity.’ ”72 Still, as that later-day philosopher would so famously remind a new generation of spouses suffering their malignant narcissist partner’s predations, “Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
Eleanor was not yet ready to take her own advice, nor of course was David. At Hyderabad several days later she abruptly canceled the remainder of the trip, sending cables to Dean Acheson at the State Department, but then changed her mind and continued on to scheduled events in Allahabad, Benares, and Calcutta. “Part of her strong reaction,” Maureen Corr revealed in later years to Joe Lash, “was that, in Hyderabad, David not only went off on the town, but there were girls involved.”73
Before all that, however, she had one appointment of her own in India, a final rendezvous that she had not expected would ever come to pass.
“INDIAN FEVER” WAS THE EXCUSE that her father would use to the end of his shortened life. Although initiated into self-medication by his family’s dependence on mercury-based stimulants, Elliott entered full-blown addiction after an elephant hunt on his 1881 India odyssey, from which he returned bearing a single trophy: the teeth from the Bengal tiger he killed and now mounted as a magnificent necklace that he planned to present to his mother. But then, finding himself in delightful courtship with the “second-most beautiful” of Old New York’s belles and so brief, intense a reprieve from his darker mercurial self, he married Anna Hall, shortly to become Eleanor’s mother in the stunning fog of 1883. The tiger’s teeth had by then become a talisman of their courtship’s not-yet-exposed underbelly, and Eleanor wore it still. Its crescent of amber-colored fangs gave an exotic flair to her UN dinners.
Elliott’s one other respite had been the Taj Mahal—world symbol of wonder, symmetry, and love’s true beauty. He had been deathly sickened by “Indian fever” by the time the column of the hunt’s bearers, beaters, and stooped-over mahogany-colored men under big boxy medicine chests reached the city of Agra. Yet through his delirium he found hidden within the perfect forms of the Taj a kind of coded intervention from which he took a recognition of his own doom and his responsibility to save himself.
Surrounded by the beauty and squalor and vast colonial corruption of the British Raj at its Edwardian heights, Elliott had been upset by the Empire’s injustices, even as he indulged on verandahs far from India’s worst misery. “How easy,” he diarized, “for the smallest portion [of the population] to sit down in quiet luxury of mind and body—to say to the other far larger part—lo, the poor savages. Is what we call right, right all the world over and for all time?”74
Only at the Taj Mahal had he somehow regained his spirit and balance, vowing afterward to do better, to redeem his promise as the family’s “good” boy, to make his father, Theodore, and mother, Mittie, proud, of the man he would make himself once and for all—a pledge that collapsed into shame when Elliott returned home with an unspecified infection, likely a sexually transmitted disease. He continued the same cycle of pledge-making and -breaking first with Eleanor’s mother, then with ten-year-old Eleanor, telling her that the Taj was the one place he wanted to be at her side.75 By visiting the Taj together, they could be fused, spirits eternally symmetrical, Nell/Little Nell. He had vowed to take her someday.
As Eleanor remembered of her father’s broken promise: “We were not to have a life together, and I suppose,” she wrote at the time of her trip with David, “I have always felt, because I loved him so deeply, that I missed a part of my life that was promised me as a child.”76
THEY HAD JUST LEFT AKBAR’S fort in late afternoon languor77 when Eleanor realized that if they were going to get their glimpse of the Taj Mahal at sunset, as they had planned, they had better go very soon. David needed to check for his mail back at the hotel, and once they arrived there and saw how many letters awaited them both, they lost themselves in mail time.
Suddenly it was six-thirty, and they were dashing for the Taj, which they entered through the walled garden as the coming night tinged the sky mauve. Before them lay the long series of oblong pools in which the tomb and its tall, dark cypresses were reflected. “I held my breath,” wrote Eleanor, “unable to speak in the face of so much beauty.”78 She did not want to talk or to say the expected things about the Taj’s perfection. This first time, she wanted to sit at a distance and respond with repose, much as she had done in Rock Creek Cemetery, sitting before Henry Adams’s monument to the grief of love’s loss.
Eleanor knew well the story of how a Mughal emperor, builder of many beautiful palaces and tombs, had erected this most perfect tomb of all for his lovely wife, lost to death in childbirth, so that he could keep his promise to her that he would make her name live forever. But Shah Jahan unwittingly discovered a darker side of real love’s purity when, in the painstaking process of making Mumtaz Mahal live forever in perfect white marble forms, he bankrupted himself, and then died before he could undertake the final curious project that had preoccupied him to the end of his short life, a matching tomb on the other side of the river, to be constructed entirely of black marble.
The idea of an exact mirror-image tomb for himself, a Black Taj connected by a river-spanning bridge to the Taj Mahal, fascinated Eleanor. “It was mind-boggling to us both,”79 recalled William Levy, another close companion of these later years who filled in the smaller cracks as they opened in Eleanor’s normalizing of David’s neglect.
That night, when she and David returned to see the Taj by moonlight, Eleanor had reached the point in her life where helping those she loved was finally reversing its charge. David had sparked the turnaround on their first journey—overnight in Shannon Airport barracks—where Eleanor had taken it upon herself to read to him and bring him food, hiking back and forth a mile each way from sleeping quarters to airport dining room. Her version of “help,” he later acknowledged, was overpowering.80
Now, drinking in the whiteness of the moonlit Taj, she and David could neither go further with their own romance nor force themselves to quit and get on with their lives. They looked at Mumtaz Mahal’s perfectly symmetrical mausoleum from every side. Finally, Eleanor broke away and sat by herself on a stone bench halfway down the reflecting pool, as her father had long ago hoped that some day she would.
And there it was, mirrored in the pool—the image of a Black Taj. The perfect whiteness of Mumtaz Mahal’s tomb, cast into darkness by the angle of the moon, hung upside down in silhouette on the still surface of the water.