Eleanor (5 page)

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“Father said several times,” Anna Halsted recalled, “that once he stopped being president he would no longer be afforded privacy through the Secret Service. It would be quite natural for people to come up the driveway to look at the house of an ex-president. He wanted privacy—to be able to go out driving without braces or being watched. He wanted to live in a house of his own, close to Mother’s cottage and really in the woods. It had to be away from any kind of main road and small enough so that a small staff could manage it. So he designed the Top Cottage, probably with the help of Henry Toombs. He also had it in the back of his mind that if he could persuade the family, the Big House would be turned over to the government even before his death. He must have realized that Mother would never be happy living in the Big House.”

†
Franklin’s will provided that the income from his estate, which was valued at roughly $1,200,000 at his death, went to Eleanor during her lifetime. At her death the estate was to be divided into five equal parts. Each of his children was to get half of his or her one-fifth share as well as the income from the other half of the one-fifth share, which was to be held in trust during their lives and to go per stirpes to the children of each of the five.

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This was an old and overriding objective with her. A few months before Franklin’s death Chester Bowles, administrator of the Office of Price Administration, had come to see her on a Sunday afternoon while Franklin was in Warm Springs. Bowles had helped FDR draft his “economic bill of rights” and was unhappy about Roosevelt’s failure to make plans to fulfill the pledges contained in the bill, including the commitment to “60 million jobs.” He confided his anxieties to Eleanor, who had spoken “of her own frustrations.” Franklin’s mind was focused on the war, and almost all of his visitors were diplomats, generals, and admirals. She considered it her responsibility to bring another point of view to Franklin’s attention and told Bowles that she called the president on the telephone every morning to urge an immediate beginning to postwar planning. “I have learned by experience,” she explained to Bowles, “to recognize the point at which the President’s patience is about to give out and he will begin to scold me. At that moment I hurriedly say, ‘Franklin, my car is waiting. I must be on my way. I shall call you again tomorrow.’”
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2.
THE HARDEST-WORKING DELEGATE

A
FEW DAYS OUT AT SEA ON THE LINER
Q
UEEN
E
LIZABETH
, which was carrying the United States delegation to the first session of the United Nations General Assembly in London, Mrs. Roosevelt was persuaded to hold her first formal press conference since she left the White House. The United Nations might not be “final and perfect,” she told the reporters, but

I think that if the atomic bomb did nothing more, it scared the people to the point where they realized that either they must do something about preventing war or there is a chance that there might be a morning when we would not wake up.

One comment she put off the record, “For the first time in my life I can say just what I want. For your information it is wonderful to feel free.”
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It was a sign that she was emerging from the shock of April 12. So much had happened since then—the atom bomb, the growing split with Russia, civil war in China, the Pearl Harbor inquiry, the renewal of domestic bickering. “We have all been plunged into a new world.” She would have liked to have drawn upon Franklin’s thinking, but she also valued the feeling that she was on her own now, able to speak her own mind in meeting the problems of this new world. And she had an astute appreciation of just how much influence she might be able to wield. “The delegation won’t follow me, dear,” she wrote an overenthusiastic friend, “but I think they won’t like to propose anything they think I would not approve of!”
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The delegation was a prestigious one. It consisted of five
representatives—Secretary of State James F. Byrnes; Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., who was the U.S. representative on the Security Council; Sen. Tom Connally (D-Texas), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg (R-Michigan), ranking Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Mrs. Roosevelt. In addition there were five alternates—Rep. Sol Bloom (D-New York), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; the committee’s ranking Republican member, Charles A. Eaton of New Jersey; Frank Walker, former postmaster general and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee; the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, John G. Townsend, Jr., who also was an ex-senator from Delaware. The fifth alternate was John Foster Dulles, chief foreign affairs adviser to Gov. Thomas E. Dewey in the 1944 presidential campaign.

Mrs. Roosevelt had boarded the war-gray giant troopship (for the
Queen Elizabeth
was still unreconverted) at 7:30 the night before it sailed, a lonely figure in black who stepped out of a small car, waved the reporters aside, and began to come up the gangplank by herself until someone on board spotted her. Most of her colleagues had boarded several hours earlier, having come from Washington on a special train and having been driven to the pier in a dozen Army limousines and buses preceded by motorcycle outriders, their sirens moaning and red lights blinking.

“I breakfast alone at the Captain’s table each morning,” she noted on New Year’s Day, the second day out, in the diary which she sent back to Tommy to circulate among her children and a few friends, “as the senatorial families do not arise and shine early.” She had decided not to take Tommy. She had thought the mail would drop off after she left the White House “but I have never had less than 100 a day and frequently 300 and 400 a day,” and if Tommy had come along, they would never catch up.

“A curious New Year’s Eve!” she had recorded in her diary. “I went to bed at 8:30 and was glad to be oblivious to the ship’s roll at midnight. I did think of you all at home before I went to sleep and wished for each one individually a happier New Year than the
last.” John Golden, the producer, sensing how lonely she might feel, had sent a collection of gifts with a card that read:

Here’s a little game to play

Just because you go away

One to open every day

Keep or give or throw away
.
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She worked hard on shipboard. Even on the “mammoth” walks, as Dr. Ralph Bunche described them, that she determinedly took around the deck in fog or sunshine, she was usually accompanied by a fellow delegate or adviser. “That was the best way to talk to her,” Bunche said. “Mr. Dulles and Mr. [Abe] Fortas joined me, and continued a discussion on trusteeship. Mr. Fortas wants us to make the proposal that all territories shall have the right of appeal to the Assembly when difficulties arise.” After her breakfast and luncheon walks she settled down to study the massive briefing materials that the State Department had prepared for the members of the delegation. “I read till I had to get ready to go to a party Mr. Stettinius gave for the whole delegation at five o’clock. More reading, dinner, more reading and ten-thirty bed.” There were briefing papers and briefing sessions. Alger Hiss, “Principal Adviser,” went over the conference agenda with the whole delegation. Dr. Bunche “went over questions of trusteeship with me,” and later that day “the State Department boys” discussed questions connected with the United Nations’ specialized agencies. Then back to reading “and fell asleep occasionally.” She decided that she liked the Vandenbergs better than she did the Connallys, “but I don’t like any of them much.” She had another session with Hiss, this time together with Leo Pasvolsky, who had been Cordell Hull’s principal deputy in the drafting of the UN Charter. Pasvolsky was “a smooth article, but Hiss I am inclined to like.”
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So the days on shipboard passed. The night before they disembarked she talked with Stettinius, whom Truman had replaced as secretary of state with Byrnes. “The tears came to his eyes when he spoke of Franklin and the ideas which he had talked over with him. I believe it is a sense of loyalty to F.D.R. which keeps him on the job.”
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As the delegation disembarked at Southampton, James Reston cabled the
New York Times
that Mrs. Roosevelt had impressed her colleagues “by her industry in studying the technical details” of the approaching Assembly. The reporters had noted that not only had she attended all delegation briefings but she had sat in with the reporters during their interviews with State Department officials.
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Westbrook Pegler did not think the country was getting its money’s worth. Back home he attacked her appointment, calling it “a political job paying $12,000 a year, which is $2,000 more than the salary of a Senator or Representative, plus expenses at the rate of $25 a day and other perquisites.” Actually the government only paid for the days she worked. Congress had authorized her to send out her mail under government frank and this she accepted, but she had refused the lifetime pension of $5,000 a year that it had wanted to vote her as it had done with other widows of presidents. “I won’t need any money from home,” she informed Tommy, “as I find I have some in my account here with Barings. I must have left it since the trip I made with the boys. I can’t take it out of the country so I might as well use it.”
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They disembarked on a Saturday. On the way to London Senator Connally kept repeating to her, “Where is all this destruction I’ve heard so much about? Things look all right to me.” She started to point out the telltale signs “but soon found he just wasn’t interested.” “Cliveden,” she added, referring to an invitation from Lady Astor that she had declined but most of the others had accepted, “probably did nothing to change their point of view.” The delegation was lodged at Claridge’s. She had scarcely removed her coat when an old friend, Lady Stella Reading, head of the Women’s Voluntary Services, knocked on her door. Then the Noel Bakers came in. As minister of state in the British Labor government, Baker headed the British delegation to the Assembly when Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, could not be present. His chief concern was to impress upon Mrs. Roosevelt his belief that the League of Nations had not failed since it had laid the groundwork for all that was being done today. “He was a great League man and they tell me feels called upon to defend it at every turn.” American
Ambassador John Gilbert Winant was another visitor. “The tears came to his eyes in talking of Franklin.” Dorsey Fisher, a member of the embassy staff who had traveled with her during her wartime trip to Great Britain, arrived, as did her young friend Louise Morley Cochrane, whom the embassy had sent to show her how to get to the necessary places in London. The three of them went for supper to the embassy canteen, “which is a godsend since we get army foodstuff which is really good.”

There were scores of “welcome” letters—from the queen, from the Winston Churchills, from Allenswood classmates, from old family friends such as Hector Ferguson and Sir Arthur Murray, from Lady Pethick-Lawrence of Peaslake, who was president of the World Women’s Party for Equal Rights, and from Lady Eva Reading, who wanted a little of her “precious time” to talk to her about the problems of world Jewry. All the world sent flowers, including the Emir Faisal Alsaud. Sunday night she dined with Adlai Stevenson. “He has headed our work on the temporary [preparatory] commission. . .so I hope to learn something about the people on the other delegations who are still not even names with which I am familiar.” Stevenson had been to Cliveden with the senators, who, he told her, had made much the same remarks there about the lack of signs of destruction that they had made to her. She and Stevenson got along well.
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By Sunday, too, she had visited her office and established a morning routine. From nine to ten she intended to do all the personal work—“columns, notes, telephones”—but when the delegation meetings began she would have to move “the personal stuff” to eight to nine. Although it was a five-minute walk from hotel to delegation offices, she would have to leave at nine sharp to make the 9:15 delegation meetings because “we meet on the seventh floor and the lift runs more slowly and far less reliably than the one in our old apartment house here.”

The first delegation meeting confirmed her view that senators were an egotistical breed. The issue was whether the delegation should speak with a single voice to the press. Vandenberg especially did not take easily to such discipline. Before leaving for London he had “very nearly resigned” from the delegation because he thought
the wording of the Moscow Communiqué of the Foreign Ministers agreeing to the establishment of a United Nations Atomic Energy Control Commission could be interpreted to mean that the United States might be obliged to disclose its atomic secrets before there was agreement on adequate inspection and controls. He had sailed with the delegation after receiving assurances from Truman on the matter, but on the boat he slipped several of the newspapermen a memorandum stating his objections to the Moscow wording. “He gave it to the press, in confidence,” Mrs. Roosevelt scornfully noted. “Tonight it is on the front pages of the New York and London papers.”
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