Eleanor (20 page)

For the moment United States policy seemed right to her.

Henry Morgenthau brought a Mrs. Meyerson [Mrs. Golda Meir] from Palestine to breakfast last Tuesday. A woman of great strength & calm & for me she symbolizes the best spirit of Palestine. Evidently at last we mean to follow through on a policy of aid to the Jewish State. The British role seems to me quite stupid, no more greedy & self interested than ours has been but at last we seem to be doing better.
⁵⁷

By summer, 1948, the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, appointed mediator by the United Nations, was seeking to bring about a cease-fire and a permanent settlement. His peace plan would have taken the Negeb, which was assigned to Israel under the partition resolution, and given it to Transjordan, thus providing a land bridge between that state and Egypt, both of them British controlled. Israel was to be compensated by land in the Galilee. But in September, Bernadotte was assassinated by Jewish terrorists, an act that horrified the Jewish community despite its hostility to the Bernadotte proposals. The cease-fire lines, in the absence of a permanent settlement, became the
de facto
boundaries of Israel. Again there was a struggle within the U.S. high command between the
president on one side and State Department and Defense Department officials on the other over whether to go forward with the Bernadotte proposals.

“I wish you would do some work in putting pressure on Secretary Marshall so that he will consider his approval of the Bernadotte Plan was not tantamount to complete acceptance of all the recommendations contained in it, but only as being a good basis for negotiation,” she wrote Bernard Baruch, who was a good friend of the secretary:

It seems highly unfair to me to turn the whole of the Negev over to the Arabs. The portion of Galilee given to the Jews is not fertile and I do not think it fair compensation because in Jewish hands the Negev would be developed and may turn out to be the only place where they can receive immigration. I have expressed these thoughts in the delegation meetings but I do not think I carry much weight. I have only one real backer and that is Ben Cohen. Neither of us was consulted before the Secretary made his announcement to the press of the acceptance of the Bernadotte report. We were simply handed a statement to read in the session after he had given it out to the press.

He had already conveyed his views to Marshall, Baruch replied. “I do not see why they ever turned any of the Negeb area over to the Arabs, nor do I yet see why, when we lobbied for the Palestine settlement, we turned our backs on it. That hurt America’s position in the world more than it has been able to recover. In our fears, we are letting England put a lot of things over on us and it is not confined to Palestine.” She could be tough with the British. The Palestine refugee issue was a sensitive one in the U.S. presidential election, so the American delegation sought to postpone consideration of how much it would contribute toward refugee relief until after Election Day. But British policy was oriented toward the Arabs, and its delegation pressed to have the matter come up immediately. “I have the votes,” Hector McNeill, the
British representative, admonished Mrs. Roosevelt. “Very well, Mr. McNeill,” she replied, “but I have the money,” and walked away. The British desisted.
⁵⁸

Truman finally settled the debate over the Bernadotte plan. In an election-eve speech in Madison Square Garden he came out flatly against it. “Israel,” he said, “must be large enough and strong enough to make its people self-supporting and secure.”
⁵⁹

“I have a feeling,” Mrs. Roosevelt advised the president when she reported to him at the end of the 1948 General Assembly,

that your attitude on Palestine did a great deal to strengthen our own delegation and help the situation from the world point of view. The Arabs have to be handled with strength. One of the troubles has been that we have been so impressed that we must have a united front in Europe that it has affected our stand in the Near East. I personally feel that it is more important for the French and for the British to be united with us than for us to be united with them, and therefore when we make up our minds that something has to be done, we should be the ones to do what we think is right and we should not go through so many anxieties on the subject.
⁶⁰

She hoped that the truce negotiations being conducted by Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, who had succeeded Bernadotte, would lead to a final settlement,

since there is no question that they [the Israelis] have full control in the areas which the United Nations considered a fair partition in November, 1947. The Arabs may not like the idea of having the Jews in the Negev, for instance, but I imagine the Jews are the only people who would be energetic enough to develop it.
⁶¹

In May, 1949, Israel was voted a member of the United Nations. The day the flag of Israel was added to all the other flags outside of the UN area at Lake Success was a memorable one:

There was a lump in almost everybody’s throat, I think, at the thought of a new nation being born and one whose people had suffered greatly. . . .
⁶²

Ralph Bunche later said that one of the difficulties in discussing the Palestine problem with Mrs. Roosevelt was her almost “primitive” conception of the Arabs. She still saw them in the terms her husband had used when he described his encounter with Ibn Saud—as desert-dwelling sheiks who pitched their tents on the decks of cruisers and were interested neither in irrigation nor trees. If that was the case, a visit to several Arab countries and Israel in February, 1952, did not change her point of view:

The Arab countries are awakening but oh! so slowly & painfully! The refugees were a horror & it is the Arab governments who keep them stirred up to go home with a little help from the communists! It is like being in another world even in Lebanon & that is the most progressive. . . .

Israel is like a breath of fresh air after the Arab countries.

Horrible problems but wonderful leaders & such able assistants. . . .I felt at home with the people of Israel.

“Israel was one of the most exciting experiences I have ever had,” she wrote her aunt, Maude Gray. “The Jews in their own country are doing marvels & should, once the refugee problem is settled, help all the Arab countries.”
⁶³
‡

*
Secretary James Forrestal, former president of the Wall Street firm of Dillon, Read & Company, was himself not oblivious to the Near East’s oil reserves. Saudi Arabia was one of “the three great [oil] puddles left in the world,” he told Secretary of State Byrnes in July, 1945, and although the United States was spending millions there, “the British and not ourselves were getting the benefit of it.”
³⁴

†
In 1956 the United States reversed itself on this, Benjamin V. Cohen has noted, when it vigorously supported the creation of a United Nations Emergency Force to supervise and police the Suez cease-fire and the withdrawal of British-French-Israeli forces, and, in connection with the Congo operation in 1960, supported Dag Hammarskjöld’s concept of the United Nations as an executive agency as well as a conference one.

‡
See Appendix B: “Mrs. Roosevelt and the Sultan of Morocco.”

6.
THE 1948 CAMPAIGN: A NEW PARTY—NOT A THIRD PARTY

I
N
A
LBANY AT THE BEGINNING OF
S
EPTEMBER, 1946, IN A
smoke-filled room, the county leaders of the Democratic party had gathered for their preconvention caucus when there was a sudden hush as Mrs. Roosevelt entered. She tried to put everyone at ease but it was a little as if Saint Theresa had walked into a meeting of the Mafia and had said, “Carry on, Signori.” Everyone was on his best behavior.

The state chairman, Paul Fitzpatrick of Buffalo, began his canvass of the leaders’ views on a slate for the election to run against the incumbent Republicans headed by Gov. Thomas E. Dewey. Mrs. Roosevelt said little. She would have her say the next day as temporary chairman of the convention, in which capacity she was to deliver the keynote address. But when the county leader of Westchester observed that the Democrats did not need to worry about having a veteran on the ticket because the Republicans did not have one on theirs, she bristled. “We want a veteran on the ticket,” she protested, “because of what the country owes the veteran.” Moreover, “we want these younger men and women to come into the leadership of the Party.” A little later when the leader of Rochester minimized the importance to the Democrats of the rural vote and said it would be the cities that carried the ticket, she again gestured to Fitzpatrick that she wished to speak. It was a weakness of the Democrats, she said, and of the party’s program, that agricultural interests in the state were not better represented.
¹

The convention nominated a ticket headed by Sen. James M. Mead—a move that had evidently been discussed with FDR:

I remember very well talking with my husband about his hopes for the candidate, and at that time he told me that he felt if General O’Dwyer could be run for Mayor of New York City, Mr. LaGuardia could be induced to run for the Senate, as running mate for Senator Mead as Governor and that this ticket would be a winning ticket.
²

But the top Democratic leaders did not want La Guardia and chose former Gov. Herbert H. Lehman to run for the Senate. Lehman had come to see her at Hyde Park just before the convention. She had suggested mildly that La Guardia, a political maverick, might do better in what looked like a Republican year. She was pessimistic about the ticket’s chances and preferred to see La Guardia lose rather than him, she told Lehman. But the ex-governor had replied that the party wanted him to run and he could not let the party down.
³

So many of the men who had once held public office found themselves lost when out of it, she observed. Public office as such held little attraction for her. She had firmly stopped a movement to draft her for the state ticket, partly because she preferred her work at the United Nations but also because she thought that “no woman has, as yet, been able to build up and hold sufficient leadership to carry through a program.” And if you could not put through a program what was the point in holding office? She wanted to be free to speak out, a freedom that she would have to surrender in taking party office. “If I do not run for office, I am not beholden to my Party. What I give, I give freely and I am too old to want to be curtailed in any way in the expression of my own thinking.”
⁴

She was sixty-two. She felt a responsibility for helping young people move into the management of the world in which they lived. If she ran for public office, it would make it difficult for her sons. They all had political ambitions—James in California, Elliott and Franklin Jr. in New York. They all had lived in the shadow of their father. She did not wish to place them under a similar disability.
⁵

The Republicans swept the 1946 elections, gaining control
of both the House and the Senate. “The Party and the nation have been without leadership,” Charl Williams, who traveled the country for the National Education Association, wrote her, “this includes the President of the United States, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and party leaders in Congress. Loyal rock-ribbed Democrat as I am, I could feel no sense of enthusiasm as in former days.”

Mrs. Roosevelt agreed that the country lacked leadership, “but perhaps we will pull ourselves together and keep going.” What she meant by leadership, she indicated a few months later when a reporter for
PM
came to talk with her on the second anniversary of Franklin’s death. She met people often, she told the reporter, who said to her:

“We miss hearing his voice in our living room.” You know I think he gave people a sense of security. They felt he had a pretty complete understanding of their own problems and the problems they must face in the rest of the world. Hearing his voice, they were inclined to feel they were part of what was going on.

Now, they feel left out.

Franklin had a good way of simplifying things. He made people feel that he had a real understanding of things and they felt they had about the same understanding.
⁶

There was not too much that Truman at sixty-two could do about his dry, rasping voice or how he related to people. Nor did Mrs. Roosevelt look at him and think, “Franklin wouldn’t do it that way,” as Harry Hopkins had warned that the Roosevelt people would. She understood Truman’s problems with Congress and thought he might be better off with straight-out Republican control, since the Republicans then would have to take the responsibility.
*
Yet his difficulties with Congress did not explain or justify
his neglect of important elements of the Roosevelt coalition—the women, the cities, the liberals. That, she feared, reflected his middle-American conservatism, and many of the new men he brought in with him, including the so-called “Missouri Gang,” were similarly oriented.