Eleanor (28 page)

“At last,” she wrote Maude a few days later, “the book is finished. . . .Of course I suppose I’ll have to do some revising as they (the publishers & those who buy the serial rights) suggest, but the real job is done & it is an immense relief.” But Gould did not like the manuscript. “You have written this too hastily—as though you were composing it on a bicycle while pedaling your way to a fire.” Except for “a few good passages,” the book despite the changes she had made in response to his earlier suggestions remained “very dull.”
³⁷

The negotiations over how to proceed became unpleasant. “I’ve had a disagreeable time with George Bye [her agent] and Bruce Gould & had to leave it to Tommy & Elliott to settle. . . .” Tommy was involved because she was to receive half of the proceeds from the serial rights. Gould’s proposal at the meeting with Elliott and Tommy was “three months solid work—day after day with a collaborator and then Mr. Gould only hoped that it would suit him,” she explained to Martha Strayer, a Washington newspaperwoman. “In the first place I would have felt the book wasn’t mine and in the second place I wouldn’t have the time.” Gould not only conditioned his price on the acceptability of the manuscript but he brusquely warned Elliott and Tommy that if she offered the manuscript to anyone else he would withdraw his offer and reduce his price, and if the manuscript were accepted by a competitor, he would immediately drop her monthly question-and-answer page.

Mrs. Roosevelt refused to accept his conditions. “So we told her,” wrote Gould, “to sell her book elsewhere if she wouldn’t improve it, and her column, too.”
³⁸

Although George Bye was her agent she felt that he was not representing her with sufficient vigor. She permitted Elliott to approach Otis Wiese, the publisher of
McCall’s
. He offered $150,000 for the manuscript sight unseen. He also took the monthly question-and-answer page, paying her $3,000 a month for it, which was $500 more than Gould had been paying her, and giving her a five-year contract where Gould had insisted on a month-to-month contract.
³⁹

Wiese was enthusiastic about the book when he read it. So was Cass Canfield, the chairman of Harper & Brothers who had
contracted for the hardcover rights and who had considered an earlier version “very badly written.” She had a long conference with him and Marguerite Hoyle, whom he had assigned as her editor. Afterward she summed up his comments, “In general, book gives wonderful pictures of FDR—very vivid. Ms on the whole fresh and unusual.—Main criticism—need some rephrasing.” Soon there were other indications that Gould’s harsh, arrogantly expressed editorial judgment had been wide of the mark. Wiese sent the proofs of the first installment, which was to appear in June, 1949, to Jonathan Daniels. “I have written a letter saying I think it almost the most important memoir of our times in America.” Bruce Gould ate humble pie: “When Beatrice and I returned from England, we found
McCall’s
selling like hot cakes on the newsstands. . . .It is quite possible that in this instance we were wrong.”
⁴⁰

All summer she worked with Marguerite Hoyle, who, in addition to copy-editing the manuscript, compiled lists of questions designed to jog her memory, fill out a portrait, delete an irrelevancy, heighten a climax. By the end of August she was reading galleys, and in November the
New York Times
and the
New York Herald Tribune
book-review sections carried enthusiastic lead reviews of
This I Remember
. In an age of ghosted memoirs, wrote author Elizabeth Janeway, “it is almost shockingly delightful to read a book which could have been written by absolutely no one else in the world than the great and important figure whose name is signed to it. . . .” She is no stylist, commented Vincent Sheean, but in this book words, structure, and style are subordinate “to the character of the author, and therefore it is from the character of the author that the pervading sense of great beauty arises.”
⁴¹

There was one dissenting note in the chorus of praise that greeted
This I Remember
. “Pegler is just writing as much nastiness as he can on it,” she informed the Grays, “& is now trying to dig up the Lucy Mercer story & chides me for not telling it.” She should not allow Pegler to bother her, David Gray replied. “It would probably have been better for you to have mentioned Mrs. Rutherfurd as being at Warm Springs but it is not very important one way or another. I certainly wouldn’t let it worry me.”
⁴²

But she did worry over what her obligations as a writer were as was clear from a letter to John Gunther, whose
Roosevelt in Retrospect
appeared in 1950. She thought it “extraordinary” that he had achieved so much understanding of FDR with so little personal knowledge of him:

I know you wrote with admiration and a desire to be completely fair. There are certain things you did not entirely understand and of course, certain things that neither you nor anyone else knows anything about outside of the few people concerned. Whether it is essential they should ever know is something on which I have not made up my mind since they are personal and they do not touch on public service.
⁴³

But the Lucy Mercer affair had affected the public as well as private lives of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. As Elizabeth Janeway perceptively noted in her review of
This I Remember
: “Unable to dedicate herself to her husband—why, we shall never be sure—she ended by dedicating herself to his work. . . .On the basis of an unusual if not unsatisfactory marriage was built an edifice of cooperation, of mutual aid and respect which was of immeasurable influence.”

Her book was her final service of love to her husband’s work. By the time it appeared, however, it was becoming increasingly clear that her own greatness had not depended on his. Readers read
This I Remember
as much for the light that it shed on her as on him. Her standing as the woman most admired by Americans, columnist Elmo Roper noted, had survived her husband’s death and now seemed to be based upon her activities as an individual.

“Only a great woman could have written it,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote of
This I Remember
. “Mrs. Roosevelt has long since tired of hearing herself described as ‘the first lady of the world.’
This I Remember
establishes her all the more firmly in that place.”
⁴⁴

She was “an American phenomenon comparable to the Niagara Falls,” said Sir Benegal Rau, the representative of India at the United Nations.
⁴⁵

*
When Mrs. Roosevelt was hurt or disappointed by someone she loved, she withdrew into heavy silence, like Patient Griselda in Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale.”

9.
AMERICA’S BEST AMBASSADOR

I
T WAS
G
ENERAL
M
ARSHALL WHO FIRST RECOGNIZED THAT
in Mrs. Roosevelt the United States had a remarkable national asset in its relations with the rest of the world. She was truly an ambassador-extraordinary. “Everywhere she went large crowds greeted her enthusiastically,” Ambassador Lewis Douglas reported from London, where she had gone for the unveiling of the statue of FDR. “I think that her visit to England improved greatly the relations between the American people and the people of this island.” At the 1948 General Assembly, when Russia’s blockade of Berlin made Europeans jittery, her presence in Paris reassured people and helped to counteract the systematic Communist effort to portray the United States as a money-grubbing, atom-bomb-brandishing, imperialistic nation bent on preventive war. Large crowds followed wherever she went. When the delegates to the General Assembly traveled on a Sunday to Amiens to a celebration in honor of the United Nations, it was Mrs. Roosevelt whom the crowds that lined the roads wanted to see.
*

In 1950 the Norwegian government invited her to come to Oslo for the unveiling of a statue of Franklin. “Having gone to England, I think it would look unappreciative on my part if I did not accept their invitation,” she wrote Elliott’s former wife, Mrs. H. Eidson, asking that Elliott’s children Chandler and Tony be permitted to accompany their father and her. The State Department persuaded
her to extend her trip to include all the Scandinavian and Benelux countries. “We are all delighted that you are going to Europe this year because we consider you our finest ambassador abroad,” Dean Rusk wrote her. The leader of the labor movement in Norway felt that Mrs. Roosevelt’s visit would help expose “the phoniness of the Communist ‘Peace’ Congresses and would help recapture the peace slogan and to identify the Western powers with the positive concept of peace rather than the negative one of containment.”
²
Other labor and socialistic parties that were in power in northern Europe felt the same way.

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. . . .Her great warm smile filled the door of the plane when it opened at Broome, it shone over the entire illustrious assembly at the airfield, and it was still just as alive when she later talked seriously to the press, met the King and spoke at the City Hall banquet.” “She did not try to impress us,” commented the liberal
Dagens Nyheter
, “she did impress us.”
³

“All goes well & the Embassy too seems happy about the visit,” Mrs. Roosevelt reported from Stockholm.

The one unanimous feeling is fear & small wonder. . . .Finnland [
sic
] is most ticklish so pray for me—From Holland on I’ll relax.
⁴

The Finns, sitting up against the Soviet border and balanced precariously between their western sympathies and rude Soviet pressures, seemed to her

very gallant. I went to two resettled farm families this p.m. & wondered at their courage. . .to-morrow I speak to audiences which won’t understand me! I dread it & yet so far it has gone well everywhere.
⁵

In Copenhagen she found the same mood of apprehension:

My feeling everywhere so far that people were valiantly living with fear is keener here but they have talked more openly here to me in high places. . . .Of course there is no complete unanimity here on what course should be followed any more than at home but fear is unanimous! I have to spend my time explaining that I hold no position in our government & have no influence!
⁶

In Holland people seemed less afraid. There, in talks with Princess Wilhelmina, the title the old queen had assumed after turning over the throne to her daughter, and with Queen Juliana, she learned that

at least in high places they seem less worried here & very pleased over the progress of integrating European interests.
⁷

The fear in northern Europe was primarily of the Russians; but it was fed also by uncertainty about the United States. Could the United States be counted on in a showdown with Russia? At the same time there was anxiety as to whether or not the United States might not be preparing for a preventive war. “Now I must report something that troubles me,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Acheson in the course of her journey, sending a copy to Truman:

namely, some of our industrialists and some of the members of Congress seem to have left the impression that we are not averse to going to war on the theory that we will have to go to war in the end and we might as well do it while the balance of power is on our side. I do not know that they have actually said it but that is the impression they left and it frightens most of the people very much indeed.
⁸

When she reached Brussels, she talked to Ambassador Robert Murphy about the need to counteract this feeling. He misunderstood
her, and wrote afterward that he was disturbed that at the end of her stay she had spoken of the urgent necessity for the United States to make an early effort to arrive at an understanding with Russia and that if Russia evaded or refused the offer this would then be the United States’ ace in the hole with world opinion. “I indicated scepticism but the time was brief,” he wrote her.

I wanted you to know that after four years of dealing with the Russians in Berlin plus conferences during the war and since, I am convinced that your thought, unless I misunderstand it, is not adapted to the type of mentality or the aims of the group dictating Soviet policy. There is so much evidence that these men do not want agreement with us except on their terms. They are avowed enemies, determined on the liquidation of the social order for which our Government and people stand.

Any offer by the United States will be seen by “the hard men who direct matters for the USSR. . .as evidence of weakness and fear.”