IN HER LAST YEARS AS a dynamic public presence, Eleanor continued to seek resolutions to the most vexing of global issues. She also continued to write, to lecture, and, most of all, to matter.
When her husband no longer occupied the White House she could have faded into a kind of public insignificance, as had been the fate of other presidential wives. But not this one. It had been a long time since insignificance afflicted Eleanor Roosevelt, and now that she was a different person she would not allow it to happen again. As the colleague (rather than the conjugal companion) of the late chief executive, and a woman who had influenced numerous and varied pieces of legislation on her own, she was seen by many in the worlds of public affairs and journalism as a repository of the knowledge, acumen, and connections at the highest levels of governance.
But the acknowledgment of her power, and the dedication with which she wielded it, came well before widowhood did. On the occasion of her fifty-fourth birthday, with her husband more than halfway through his second term, the New York Times celebrated Eleanor in two editorials, commenting in one of them that she was “not in the tradition of the wives of former Presidents. But she is so patently . . . unpretentious in all she says and does, so ebulliently a part of every activity she undertakes, so good-humored even in the face of criticism, that she remains today one of the most popular women who ever lived in the White House. At 54 she could command a landslide of votes as Mrs. America.”
She had opined on international issues for the Women’s Democratic News, and gone on from there to write articles and columns on foreign affairs for numerous other publications, as well as speaking on such topics at the most prestigious forums. But she probably made her first indelible impression on the world stage three years after her husband’s death, when she was named chairman of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which opened its hearings modestly enough in the library of Hunter College in the Bronx. “She kept the job when sessions were moved to Geneva [Switzerland], then back again closer to home, into temporary United Nations headquarters in Flushing, Long Island. Since she was also to be reconfirmed as an American delegate, she would be wearing two hats, as an individual and as a diplomat.” But two hats was one too many. Perhaps, given all of her other duties, it was two too many. Regardless, the strain was great. It “erupted in a case of shingles, a considerable embarrassment because she was impatient of impairment to her health. A scarf around her neck concealed the rash.”
In his biography of Eleanor, her son Elliott gives an idea of the scope of her duties, which could not have ranged further, and at the same time easily damaged her health.
The unchangeable subject there was how to prepare an international bill of rights, which Mother and her fellows decided was the main task. Foremost was writing a declaration to define literally everything to which mankind has just claim—life; liberty; freedom from servitude and torture; equality before the law; the right to travel, choose a job at adequate pay, join a church, a political party or a union; to enjoy the vote, schooling, social security, rest and leisure time.
The charter, assuming it could ever be completed, would be followed up as the second step by treaties, legally binding on those nations which signed them—mere resolutions of the United Nations carried no such power. The third and final step would be to develop a system for enforcing the covenants.
The challenge was more intimidating than that confronting the Continental Congress, gathered in the summer steam of Philadelphia in 1776 . . .
But the Continental Congress succeeded, as did future assemblies of the Founding Fathers. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights did not. The Continental Congress was in tune with the temper of the times, representing the views of the majority. The UN Commission on Human Rights seemed in opposition to the very core of human nature, with a set of goals virtually utopian.
A few years later, though, Eleanor came closer to one of those goals, passage of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was a nonbinding series of aspirations inspired by the Holocaust, “by the victims beyond tally of that Social Darwinist category Hitler introduced into the mainstream of world politics . . . Eleanor Roosevelt was among the first civilian witnesses to speak with Holocaust survivors, to tour concentration camps, to consider the needs of the future as mandated by that historical moment. And she wondered: ‘When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?’”
The question, of course, does not have a satisfactory answer. As for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it was one of the great struggles of Eleanor’s life, bringing out all that was fiery and impatient in her, qualities seldom seen. “Some meetings left her dazed” by the complexity of the task.
At others, she would remove her spectacles, which automatically deprived her of her hearing aid, and catnap for a while, relying on a friendly nudge to awaken her if a television camera peered in her direction. As Madam Chairman, she would slam down her gavel so hard it made the water pitcher jump, as when she shrilled at [Soviet representative] Dr. [Alexei] Pavlov, “We are here to devise ways of safeguarding human rights. We are not here to attack each other’s governments, and I hope when we return on Monday the delegate of the Soviet Union will remember that.” One more crash of the gavel. “Meeting adjourned!”
At this point, the fate of the declaration seemed uncertain at best. But Eleanor would continue to work ceaselessly on its behalf—ending up, one glorious but exhausting night, in Paris.
WHEN HER OFFICIAL DUTIES WITH the United Nations ended in 1953, her unofficial duties began. For much of the next decade, by the end of which she would be seventy-six years old, she traveled around the world speaking on behalf of human rights as a private citizen. Her conscience drove her relentlessly, from the grand forum to the grass roots. In 1958, she asked touchingly:
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of individual persons; the neighborhood . . . ; the school or college . . . ; the factory, farm or office. . . . 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.
As an ambassador sans portfolio, Eleanor represented causes of the United States or United Nations the world over, becoming in the process our country’s most admired export. Her journeys were supported by various groups, most often the federal government, but regardless of the sponsoring agency, she spoke and wrote her mind, no matter whose point of view she was ostensibly representing.
To name a few, though only a few, of the places she alighted, there were the Scandinavian nations . . .
She was received at royal palaces and trade-union headquarters. She visited industrial and agricultural cooperatives as well as housing and health projects, addressed large meetings of women, held press conferences, and spoke over national radios. “Eleanor Roosevelt has come to Stockholm,” wrote the conservative Svenska Dagbladet. “She came and lived up to every expectation.”
There was Brussels, where she made it clear that . . .
Just as she was a reassuring symbol to the labor and social-democratic movements of western Europe of the basic sanity, decency, and idealism of the United States, she also was the country’s most effective ambassador to the emerging Third World.
There were Paris, Beirut, and Chile, in the latter of which . . .
she visited housing projects and health and hospital centers, toured slum areas, held a free-swinging press-conference, and so won the hearts of press and people that not even the Communists dared to criticize her.
There was Hiroshima, which she found . . .
a moving experience. . . . I walked on eggs while there. I know we were justified in dropping the bomb but you can’t help feeling sorry when you see suffering. . . . It is always hard to tell people that it is the causes of war which bring about such things as Hiroshima, and that we must try to eliminate these causes because if there is another Pearl Harbor, there will be undoubtedly another Hiroshima.
Hong Kong, where . . .
she was feted and shown the sights. She was briefed on the Chinese refugee problem and given “the English point of view” on the Far Eastern question “with a heavy hand,” she wrote her son John . . .
Greece, where she . . .
toured archeological diggings, visited the Acropolis at sunset, and she lunched with the king and queen. . . . She evidently did a little missionary work in the palace of the Hellenes, for she asked her son to send Her Majesty information about Berea and Antioch colleges, where work was a part of the curriculum, as well as material on the Henry Street settlement and the Alfred E. Smith low-cost houses.
And there was Yugoslavia, where she conversed with Marshall Tito, the independent Communist leader who, among other things, took Eleanor to his private vacation island in the Adriatic Sea and showed her his fleet of speedboats. “You cannot meet this man,” Eleanor said, “without recognizing that he was a real mind. He is a doer and a practical person.”
On a personal level, her most important destination was India, which had been such a splendid hunting ground for her father many years earlier, and perhaps the apex of his public persona. Among other cities, she stopped at Agra, and her son Elliott wrote of what her father Elliott had said about the site many years earlier, of how profound she would find the experience.
“‘Little Nell,’” Elliott [the father] had told her, ‘when you grow up you must go and see the Taj Mahal on a night of the full moon. There is a bench not far away, next to one of the lotus-leaf basins, where you should sit and contemplate.’
“This was such a night. She waited through the day, then, finding the same place where he had sat before she was born, she recaptured his feeling that this was the one unforgettable sight he had seen in India.
“‘I will carry in my mind the beauty of it as long as I live,’ she said. She had never known great tranquil joy than this.”
Little Nell was no longer afraid of either strange people or strange places.
FOR A LONG TIME, ELEANOR had wanted to visit the Soviet Union. Shortly after World War II ended, and the United States and the Soviets, nominal allies, were settling into the cloak-and-dagger, hide-and-seek of the Cold War, she got her wish. She departed “to see this vast, mysterious troublesome country with her own eyes.” Although she made the trip as a correspondent for a newspaper syndicate, she had conferred with government officials beforehand and been assured by Harry Hopkins, formerly one of Franklin’s top advisers, that the Soviets would permit her to visit “everything you wanted to see everywhere in the country . . . although, of course, the Russian Government and the Russian people would receive you as the widow of the President and there is just no way out of that one.”
It was not until a later trip to the Soviet Union in 1957, four years after Stalin’s death, that she satisfied another desire, meeting the mass murderer’s successor, the First Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev. At first, there were no assurances that she would see him. She did her homework nonetheless, reading everything from books to newspapers, from position papers to once-classified documents. Thus, even before Khrushchev agreed to talk to her, she believed that she had learned some new and valuable lessons about the people over which he now presided.
“The most important thing she learned about the Soviet Union,” according to Joseph Lash, “she summed up in the formula—Lenin and Pavlov [the Soviet physiologist known for his theory of reward and punishment that results in ‘Pavlov’s dogs’]. As she watched thousands of Soviet citizens patiently queue up outside the tomb of Lenin—and, at that time, the tomb of Stalin as well—she realized that it was through the teachings of these two men—and chiefly that of Lenin—that the Soviet citizen saw his society and the world, and that this vision embodied relentless hostility to the West. And in a visit to a pediatrics institute in Leningrad, it dawned on her that the Pavlovian system of conditioning children embodied the methods by which the Russians as a whole were turned into a ‘completely disciplined and amenable people.’”
It was not a conclusion that made Eleanor want to meet Khrushchev any the less. It did, however, make her feel a certain eeriness, confirming specifically what she had previously thought in general terms about the Soviet Union. But despite the photographs and newsreel footage she had seen of Khrushchev, her first look at him was a jolt, as he seemed terribly miscast for the role of an Orwellian despot. “In a loose-fitting suit that did nothing to disguise his paunch, the stocky, bald little man was standing outside the villa, grinning a welcome.” He might have been a farmer, not a tyrant.
A tape recorder was set up on a table between Eleanor and Nikita, and the second most powerful man in the world began to talk to the most influential woman for posterity.
“I want to speak of President Franklin Roosevelt . . .” Khrushchev began. “He was a great man, a capable man who understood the interests of his own country and those of the Soviet Union. We had a common cause against Hitler, and we appreciate very much that Franklin Roosevelt understood this task.” And on he went, with Eleanor, who had other things on her mind than listening to yet another encomium for her late husband, growing ever more impatient. Finally, Khrushchev stopped to catch his breath, and his companion rushed into the breach.
“Mother proceeded to business,” son Elliott wrote. “Disarmament was the opening subject on the agenda. The Red Army outnumbered United States armed forces. Why was that?”
Eleanor knew that nothing substantive would come of their conversation, that the Soviets’ First Secretary was not about to make any revelations, alter any policies. The point of the conversation was to satisfy her own curiosity about the Soviet leader, and, further, to establish a friendly basis for continued dialogue between Khrushchev and American officials. “Sometimes, the discussion grew sharp, but [Khrushchev] was consistently affable, revealing nothing of the boorishness displayed three years later, when he took off a shoe to pound a desk at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.”
After two and a half hours, the tape recorder was turned off, and Eleanor and her few escorts joined their host, his wife, daughter, and son-in-law for a hearty Russian peasant meal. It represented more than just the image he wished to portray; the food was the truth of his upbringing, a staple of his heritage.
The two principals got along so well that they exchanged visits. The following year, when President Eisenhower invited Khrushchev to tour the United States, he agreed. But only on the condition that he be able to stop at Hyde Park. Permission was granted, and, with government assistance, Eleanor began to prepare the Big House for company.
Once she and Khrushchev greeted each other and chatted for a few minutes, grinning widely for the cameras, he told her he had something important on his mind. Then there came “a moment of the deepest solemnity and ceremony when Khrushchev, preceded by two aides carrying a large floral wreath and followed by Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Khrushchev, proceeded to the Big House’s rose garden and placed the wreath at FDR’s graveside. It bore the inscription:
To the outstanding statesman of the United States of America—the great champion of progress and peace among peoples.
Chief of the Council of Ministers of the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
N. S. Khrushchev
It almost sounded as if the Soviets would support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Eleanor, of course, knew better.
Afterward, she offered Khrushchev and his party their choices from several tables full of food, but they did not have time for it. Nor for more conversation, a resumption of their previous bonhomie; the First Secretary was on a tight schedule. Not so tight, however, that his wife would refuse a glass of champagne. She took one and gulped, rather than sipped; Khrushchev smiled ruefully. “They call me a dictator,” he said to Eleanor. “You see how little power I have? I told my wife not to drink any alcohol, and in front of me she takes champagne.” Khrushchev himself took a roll, a single roll from the table of plenty, and was hurried out the cottage door, back to his limousine. “One for the road!” he called back, waving the roll at his hostess, and then he was gone.
When he returned to Manhattan, Khrushchev sent Eleanor a present, a handmade, Soviet-knitted shawl. “Tell your wife and daughter,” Eleanor wrote, expressing her gratitude, that “if they are here and in need of any help in shopping, I can easily arrange to give them guidance.”
KHRUSHCHEV WAS NOT THE ONLY dignitary to call on Eleanor in the long, venerated days of her widowhood. Although part of the reason that others came to Hyde Park was to pay their respects at her husband’s final resting place, they also wanted to meet the remarkable woman who had accomplished so much both with and without her legendary spouse. She happily took them on a tour of the grounds, fed them, and picked their minds for forthcoming columns, articles, and speeches. No one in the United States, man or woman, had the access that Eleanor Roosevelt had.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, “the young, hawk-eyed shah of Iran,” who would later be overthrown by less dictatorial forces in his country, was one of her first callers. He had admired Roosevelt ever since the American president spoke to the shah about irrigating his desert nation, explaining to him how the construction of dams and consequent availability of hydroelectric power could transform “a country of sand and dust into an oasis of industry serving as a bugger to Soviet expansion in the Near East. The shah was following the course outlined for him by FDR, he explained, and Mother,” wrote Elliott Roosevelt, “glowed with pleasure.”
She took Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia and the so-called “Lion of Judah,” on a tour of her property as part of a visit to America arranged by the State Department. He had little of interest to say to her and she was not especially impressed with him.
Jawaharlal Nehru was the first man to serve as prime minister of an independent India, and Eleanor found him “a remarkably intellectual man,” one who proclaimed himself an apostle of Mahatma Gandhi. Eleanor took advantage of his thoughtfulness. When the Hyde Park sightseeing was over and he sat cross-legged on the floor in front of his hostess’s chair, the first words out of her mouth were, “What do you contemplate as India’s future, Mr. Nehru?” Right to the point, and a substantive one at that; so did Eleanor converse with the world leaders who sought her company. They were small-talkers no more than she.
And not long after entertaining Nehru, despite the fact that “Mother was of an age to qualify for social security,” Secretary of State Dean Acheson asked her to go winging off again. She accepted the mission, and became again, as she had long been an unofficial but most eminent ambassador for the United States. Her destinations this time included England, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark.
It was the last trip she would make with so many stops, and she could not have been more pleased. Or more weary. But she never lost her interest in world affairs; to the contrary, she cared about them and wrote about them more than ever, and had built up a storehouse of firsthand information greater than that of any other columnist—perhaps more than any government official—in America. Her perspective was a unique one, and more often than not perceptive. She was, thus, worth reading for the rest of her life. Her writing style remained as it had always been: simple, informal. But the foundation of her commentary was deep, more sturdily based than ever. She is to be forgiven if she thought she knew more about how the world worked than President Eisenhower, a Republican for whom she did not have the highest opinion.
With few exceptions, though, her globe-hopping days were now over. It was time to live a more sedentary life, and although she continued to maintain an active lecturing schedule, she also began to settle at Val-Kill for longer periods of time than she had before. Her mind was active as ever, but her body was nearing the end of its ability to ride the whirlwind.