Eleanor (29 page)

She had not made herself clear, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Murphy in July after the North Korean attack on South Korea.

I was not thinking of any gesture that would impress Russia because I long since decided that nothing but force would impress that particular country. What I had on my mind after visiting the Scandinavian countries was the fact most of them required at that time some gesture from us, some gesture that would make them feel that we were counteracting the Russian words constantly repeated in favor of peace, by something more tangible and which stood out to them as a real gesture.

Since the Korean episode the whole picture has changed. . . .
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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, so also was she the country’s most effective ambassador to the emerging Third World. The Voice of America asked the Indonesian embassy who would
be the best person to comment on the prospective signing of a Point Four agreement with that country. “The answer was Mrs. Roosevelt.”
¹⁰

The 1950 General Assembly was a grueling affair, its major preoccupation being Korea, since it was during that Assembly that General MacArthur advanced to the Yalu River and the Chinese intervened to send MacArthur’s forces reeling back. But that essentially was the business of Secretary Acheson, Ambassador Austin, and their advisers in the Assembly’s First (political) Committee. Her responsibility was Committee III, and there were momentous developments there:

I have never seen such bitterness as I have in Committee #3 this year on the race problem and on the “haves” against the “have nots,” and small nations against big nations.
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That was the burden of her report to the president at the end of the Assembly.

My own feeling is that the Near East, India and many of the Asiatic people have a profound distrust of white people. This is understandable since the white people they have known intimately in the past, have been the colonial nations and in the case of the United States, our businessmen. . . .

The result is that in Committee #3 at least, there has been a constant attitude among a great block of these countries to oppose everything the United States has suggested. The mere fact that we spoke for something would be enough to make them suspicious. I have completely changed my way of presentation and made it as conciliatory and reasonable as I could, but even then I know they are not believing me, they are thinking (if they are kindly disposed toward me personally) that I am duped or else they feel I am changing my point of view on humanity. They are joined by the whole Soviet block and while I am not always sure they are fooled by the
Soviets, they are very glad to have their votes. They feel the Soviet attitude on race, at least, is better than ours and that is point one in the Soviets’ favor. They also feel that the Soviet economy may be the only possible economy for them, and that is point two in the Soviets’ favor. . . .

They are dissatisfied with the amount of help that we give them. They feel we have overemphasized help to Europe as against help in either Latin America or Asia. In fact, Mr. Bokhari of India told me we were willing to try to save the children of Europe but we did not care whether the children of India died or lived.

She was so troubled by the antagonism she had encountered that she suggested to President Truman that it might be better if the United States were represented on these questions

by Mrs. Sampson, or some other person chosen because he or she could not be accused of siding with the white race against the colored races of the world.

Another suggestion she made to Truman was that he send Dr. Frank Graham, at the time UN commissioner for India and Pakistan, as a “roving ambassador” to the Near East and Asia “to talk philosophy and get a line on attitudes and reasons for those attitudes that we really do not understand too well. . . .”
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Truman did not send Graham, but Eleanor Roosevelt. The administration encouraged her to accept the invitation to visit India that Nehru had extended to her during his stay in the United States in 1949. She arranged to visit India and the Middle East in early 1952, flying directly to Beirut from Paris after the adjournment of the sixth General Assembly, which was held there. She thought she might do some articles, perhaps even a book, based on the trip and her experiences in the United Nations. “The State Department asked me to make this trip,” she wrote Ambassador Avra M. Warren in Karachi,

but I am entirely unofficial and on my own and coming as a writer and I need no extra protection and no particular attention. I would be grateful if you would make whatever hotel reservations you think I need. I do not want to be extravagant. I will have one secretary with me.
¹³

She left Paris with a sense of achievement. Ambassador Austin had fallen ill, and in the final weeks of the Assembly she served as the delegation’s chairman as well as its representative in Committee III. She had provided “wise and tactful” leadership, Acheson thanked her. Her speeches and appearances outside the Assembly in which she had presented “the American viewpoint most successfully to the European people, were a major contribution to our general effort,” he added. At the request of the “Voice of America” she had done a weekly fifteen-minute broadcast in French all during the Assembly. “I am speaking to you today from the Palais de Chaillot where the sixth session of the United Nations General Assembly is taking place,” she began her first broadcast.

I have been asked to tell you, from time to time, what I think of the work we are doing here and why we, of the United States delegation, believe that these meetings are so very important. . . .

I think that what you want to know—especially you the women of post-war Europe—is whether you shall be able, tomorrow, to tell your children that peace is, at long last, a reality. For it isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
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Her talks were carried over the French, Belgian, and Swiss networks at the peak listening hour, right after the main news program. She talked simply as a woman to women, but the men listened, too, for she was “Madame Roosevelt,” a beloved name in Europe, with a reputation in her own right as a fighter for social
justice. And like her husband, she had a gift for stating problems simply and concretely. She even managed to state the differences with Russia over disarmament in a way that was easy to grasp, wrote Richard N. Gardner in an admiring article in the
New York Times
. By the time the Assembly was over the Communist press was attacking her savagely, and she had added talks in German, Spanish, and Italian to her regular French broadcast.

“I am sure,” Acheson’s note to her at the end of the Assembly added, “that your present trip will be a means of bringing the American views effectively to some of the Far Eastern peoples.”
¹⁵

It was a journey filled with many hazards. She canceled a stopover in Cairo. “I think it will relieve your mind and my family’s,” she advised Ambassador Jefferson Caffery, “to hear that we have thought it best not to stop in Cairo,” but fly directly to Beirut.

Even western-minded Beirut presented problems. David Gurewitsch and Maureen Corr were to accompany her:

I hope David enjoys his trip; being with me won’t add to his joys but it may give him opportunities to see some of the things he wants to see. I rather imagine I’ll have to do some women’s affairs & speeches & I’m sure they will plan for him to see medical things for I wrote that was his interest.

But David was Jewish. “As Mr. Malik (Lebanese Ambassador in Washington and a colleague on the Human Rights Commission) has doubtless intimated to you,” Harold B. Minor, the American ambassador in Lebanon, advised her, “in case [the] physician [is] Jewish it would be politically most unwise if not impossible for him to enter Lebanon or other Arab countries.” So David arranged to join them in Israel. The American ambassador in Pakistan, Avra Warren, invited Mrs. Roosevelt and Maureen to stay with him. “We will make suitable arrangements for Dr. Gurewitsch to stay elsewhere.” It would be better if the “three of us stayed at a hotel,” she replied. The governor general and the begum “are most anxious that you and your party should find it convenient to stay at
the Governor-General’s residence,” the ambassador’s next message read. “We will be delighted to accept for us all but do not want anyone to put themselves out,” she wrote back.
¹⁶

From the moment that she arrived in Beirut she sensed that behind the official courtesy and kindness there was hostility. She was guarded at the beginning by a carload of soldiers and security officers. She finally got rid of this escort and was able to go among the people. She was determined to get the Arab point of view, and drinking endless tiny cups of black and bitter coffee, heard many presentations of it—from Americans stationed in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, from educated Arabs who had managed to build new lives for themselves but still hoped to return to their former homes, and from the refugees in the camps. She came away saddened that the Arabs still talked hopefully of wiping out the people of Israel. “I have a feeling that this would not be easy.”
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“This country teems with life and purpose,” she wrote of Israel, which she entered through the Mandelbaum Gate in divided Jerusalem. She spent six days there, dismayed at the schedule the Israeli government had arranged. “The program here is simply appalling. . . .” she wrote Ambassador Chester Bowles in New Delhi. “While I will gladly visit anything you feel is necessary and important, I don’t want to do it at this breakneck speed.” Could the official things be crowded into the first two days? “After that I would be delighted if they would furnish us with transportation facilities to go wherever we really wanted to go.”
¹⁸

Vain hope. As the plane made its approach to Karachi, David suddenly leaned over and touched her arm. “Look!” he said, pointing in astonishment at the huge crowd gathered at the airport. “That’s not for us,” she said firmly. “That’s for someone of importance who is arriving.” But the “sea of women” was there for her, and throughout her stay in the subcontinent she was to be attended by crowds the denseness of which she had never before encountered. They knelt in the streets when she passed. “I hadn’t realized how they cared about Franklin” was her comment when she spoke of this later.
¹⁹

In Pakistan she met with all of the dignitaries, female as well as
male, lectured veiled Moslem women about the League of Woman Voters, taught the Virginia Reel to some emancipated Pakistani youngsters, visited Peshawar and Lahore, and made “a sentimental journey” to the Khyber Pass, which her father had visited seventy-two years earlier.

“I have come here to learn,” she declared upon her arrival in New Delhi. “Eleanor Roosevelt zindabad!” (Long live Eleanor Roosevelt!) the crowd chanted, and Mme. Pandit, Nehru’s sister, garlanded her with a chain of cloves and fragrant beads. Her thirty-day tour took her to almost all the important cities in India. She received an honorary degree from Aligarh University in northern India and spoke to a large civic audience in Trivandrum, in southwest India. In New Delhi she addressed Parliament. That was the most challenging and touchy of the many speeches she made while in India. What were the points she should be careful about? she asked Ambassador Bowles before her appearance. He gave her a list several pages long. She looked it over thoughtfully and remarked, “What is there left to talk about?” Talk, however, she did, and without notes. The president and prime minister were in attendance as well as the deputies. The latter, however, were cool toward her, almost impatient, as if to say: Why do we waste our time with this woman? She ignored the lectern, advanced to the edge of the rostrum, and stood there, pocketbook in hand, wearing a flowered hat and sturdy shoes, her tummy slightly visible—an American presence—her warm smile perceptibly thawing out her audience. Instead of singing America’s praises, she suggested that India might well benefit from the mistakes that the United States had made during its developmental period. “Your problems are more difficult, but you are meeting them in the way our people met theirs.” She showed understanding of India’s desire for nonalignment. “Hear! Hear!” the deputies murmured as she said, “India’s neutrality is akin to that of United States’ foreign policy as far back as the thirties.” Bowles already had a splendid relationship with Nehru and most of India’s leaders, but the climate for his mission palpably improved after her speech.

Mrs. Roosevelt was equally effective with the left-leaning,
anti-American students, drawing heavily on her own experience with the youth movement in the United States in the thirties. Having heard from Nehru that too many of India’s students preferred the traditional law and humanities training to engineering and technical studies, she recalled that students with technical degrees had come through the Depresson in better style than the others. “Technical training, I imagine, is the best way by which you can help solve the problems of your country.”
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Her experience in the thirties was particularly helpful in Allahabad, Nehru’s home district in northern India, where she went, accompanied by Mme. Pandit, to receive a degree from the university and to address the student body. In anticipation of her appearance, left-wing students published an open letter stating that Allahabad students were not interested in hearing her apologies for American imperialism. Nehru, to whom this was reported, angered at this rudeness to a guest of the country, ordered that the meeting be canceled. Timid university officials, fearful the meeting would turn into an unruly anti-American demonstration, overruled Mrs. Roosevelt’s plea that she be allowed to handle the situation. At least, she suggested, let the signatories of the open letter come to the house and she would answer their questions. Mme. Pandit was furious that the students should undertake to cross-examine Mrs. Roosevelt. “Don’t worry about it,” Mrs. Roosevelt sought to reassure her. “I have been booed for 15 minutes at a time—it doesn’t bother me. And their questions are things I have been through before; it sounds just like the Youth Congress back home.”