Eleanor (40 page)

They [the United Features Syndicate] fear that the feeling would spread that whatever I said on political subjects would not represent my own thinking but the thinking of a political
party group. . . .I think the column people are right in feeling that my influence will be greater, as I write a daily column, if I am not a full-fledged member of the Committee.
²

In New York City the loss of the Scripps-Howard paper there, the
New York World-Telegram
, was more than offset by the acquisition of the
New York Post
. The latter’s liberal publisher, Dorothy Schiff, had tried, since 1939 when she acquired the paper, to persuade Mrs. Roosevelt to come over to it, and she quickly renewed the invitation when the
World-Telegram
dropped the column. It was a more satisfactory arrangement for Mrs. Roosevelt. The
World-Telegram
had taken to editing her copy mercilessly, shifting it from page to page, sometimes omitting it altogether. The
Post
was honored to have her as one of its columnists, published all that she wrote, gave it prominent display in the paper, and suggested assignments that would take her into newsworthy situations. “How would you like to go to Red China for us?” Mrs. Schiff inquired not long after Mrs. Roosevelt had joined the paper. She was ready, but the State Department was not. It declined to modify its embargo on travel to Red China even—or, perhaps, especially—for her, maintaining that it had no way to protect U.S. travelers in that sealed-off country. Mrs. Schiff wanted to test the travel ban in the courts, but Mrs. Roosevelt did not wish to make herself a
cause célèbre
. It might be wiser to have the case brought to court by someone more exclusively the representative of the newspaper fraternity. Would she go to Russia instead? Mrs. Schiff asked.
³

That was a journey she had been wanting to make since wartime. She had been all set to go in 1954 for
Look
magazine—indeed, had had her bags packed—but had reluctantly abandoned her plans when the Russians declined to issue a visa to a Russian-speaking reporter whom she had wanted to accompany her.

No visa came through for [William] Atwood or the other man
Look
offered tho’ I warned twice, so this morning at 10 I had a press conference in
Look
’s office & explained why reluctantly I had to give up the trip. At 3:25 the Soviet Embassy phoned
the second man could have a visa & if he could not get it in Washington he could in Paris! Everything was cancelled & we decided not to go later.
⁴

In 1957 she still feared that the Russians might not want to have her accompanied by someone who spoke the language (i.e., David Gurewitsch, who, in addition to being her doctor, was an accomplished amateur photographer and spoke Russian fluently). But this was the Khrushchev era, and in time the visas came through.

On her arrival in Moscow she learned that Mrs. Anna Lavrova, who had helped interpret for FDR at Yalta, had been assigned to her as an interpreter. She realized that a special effort was being made for her, and even though she did not receive red-carpet treatment, she found “the welcome in spots almost embarrassing.” But she had come as a correspondent, and the Russians evidently were happy to respect her wish that she be treated as such. She had the foreigner’s usual difficulties in making appointments with top officials, and discovered that in order to get the interviews she wanted she had to insist and in the end go to the “head man” at Intourist.

Getting appointments to see “services” and not just museums is very difficult. No one does anything till you arrive & then Intourist is a reluctant agent.

On her arrival she immediately asked to meet with Nikita Khrushchev, who had survived the brutal succession struggle after Stalin’s death to emerge as premier and party leader. She was requested to submit the questions she intended to ask and then was informed that in time she would learn their decision. “They love to keep you waiting,” she wrote friends, “but they hate you to deviate from a plan you once make!”
⁵

So she began her tour of inspection, not knowing whether she would see Khrushchev or any other important Soviet leader. After a few days in Moscow, attending the ballet and the circus, touring the museums, and negotiating with Intourist, she was taken to a state farm twenty miles outside of the city. Despite her long
training at breaking away from the officially guided tour in order to see the things she wanted to see, Soviet bureaucracy bested her. At the state farm she asked to see a worker’s home. They would arrange it, she was told, and later was escorted down a village street to a house that looked to her like the newest in the group. Spotting some older ones on the other side of the street, she asked whether she could not look into one of them. Her guide would not hear of it and firmly steered her into the demonstration house. Even that, she noted, lacked running water and inside toilet, although it did have a television set.
⁶

At the suggestion of Justice William O. Douglas, she had asked to visit Tashkent and Samarkand in central Asia. Tamerlane became “quite real” to her in Samarkand, but the hospital and health institutions that she visited there, although primitive in facilities by U.S. standards, provided modern treatment with good results. She traveled to Zagorsk, where there were

really lovely 15th Century Churches & a most amusing midday meal at the Greek Orthodox divinity school! They are stout these gentlemen & eat & drink well. We were plied with champagne & I was glad of my agreement to drink only water. Maureen found her limitation of one glass looked upon with incredulity & not accepted!

There were jaunts to Sochi and Leningrad. “What a lovely city this is!” she wrote of the latter:

Far lovelier than Moscow but they tell me cheerfully that it rains every day except in summer & summer is over & even then it rains now & then! They were badly bombed by the Germans but rebuilding has gone on fast & the scars are almost hidden but 900 days of siege are still much on the minds of the people.

Everywhere she tried to get figures, and though “reliable statistics are hard to get at,” it seemed to her that

security exists materially. The lower paid workers find life hard but shelter & food are available. Clothes are poor. Glamorous women, well dressed & groomed, do not exist & yet the older women dye their hair!
⁷

She tried to understand what was happening in Soviet Russia by looking at the country through the eyes of its people. The most important thing she learned about the Soviet Union she summed up in the formula—Lenin and Pavlov. As she watched thousands of Soviet citizens patiently queue up outside of 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.”
⁸

It frightened her that this vast apparatus of discipline and power was dedicated to the triumph of Communism, and it frightened her even more that her own people misread the danger as primarily military. She thought the immediate arena of challenge was in the Third World, where the Soviet model of forced industrialization seemed more relevant than the American model of free enterprise to the leaders of the developing nations. The abstract talk of democracy, to which America’s leaders were so addicted, seemed to her meaningless. The freedom that primarily interested the peoples of Asia and Africa was the freedom to eat, she wrote after her return.
⁹

As her trip drew to an end, she still had no answer to her request to see Khrushchev. She had just returned from Sochi, on the Black Sea, and was saying her good-bys to various government officials preparatory to departure, when Mrs. Lavrova informed her abruptly: “I forgot to tell you, but we go to Yalta early tomorrow morning.” That meant a thousand-mile trip back to the Black Sea. Mrs. Roosevelt was so irritated with this rude way of doing things
that she was scarcely able to reply. “Well,” she said. “I’m glad you finally remembered!”
¹⁰

Early the following morning, she flew to Yalta with David and Mrs. Lavrova, spent the night in a Yalta hotel, and managed, in the hour before Khrushchev’s car came to fetch them the next morning, to visit the palace where the Yalta conference took place. Khrushchev’s villa on the outskirts of Yalta was comfortable but not ostentatious. The Soviet leader, bareheaded, in a white, handsomely bordered peasant’s blouse, came to greet her. He was relaxed and friendly and first insisted on showing her about the grounds. Then the group settled itself on the porch, and David placed the portable tape recorder that they had brought from the United States just for this occasion on the table. Khrushchev made a little speech about FDR and then the interview began. It soon turned into a debate about which nation was responsible for the cold war, the arms race, the violation of the Yalta agreements, the tensions in the Middle East, with Khrushchev’s hearty peasant vehemence sometimes shading into red-faced anger and with Mrs. Roosevelt upholding her viewpoint graciously, but with equal firmness. It was inconclusive, as all such debates, inside the UN and out, had been since the end of World War II. The discussion took on the flavor of practicality only when Mrs. Roosevelt challenged Khrushchev on the subject of Soviet treatment of the Jews. When, in answer, he cited the many Jews of high rank in the Soviet Army and elsewhere, she was not satisfied. “That may be but it is very difficult for any Jew to leave the Soviet Union to settle or even visit Israel.”

“I know,” Khrushchev answered defensively, “but the time will come when everyone who wants to go will be able to go.”
¹¹

It was a long two-and-a-half-hour interview. The visit ended on a family note—a table laden with delicacies and Khrushchev’s whole family joining them.

“Can I tell our papers that we have had a friendly conversation?” Khrushchev asked as he bid her good-by.

“You can say,” she replied, “that we had a friendly conversation but that we differ.”

He laughed. “At least we didn’t shoot each other.”

She departed from Moscow the next day. “I was oh! so happy when our airplane, flying out of Moscow, touched down at Copenhagen.” It was only after she was in the Danish capital “and heard laughter and gay talk and saw faces that were unafraid that I realized how different were our two worlds. Suddenly, I could breath again!”
¹²

She arrived back in the United States as the world was reverberating to the news of the first Soviet sputnik, a spectacular development in science and technology that Soviet propagandists were exploiting to suggest that the balance of power was moving in favor of the Soviets. There was that possibility, Mrs. Roosevelt thought. Khrushchev was “honest” when he told her that war was unthinkable, she told interviewers, because he and other Soviet leaders “have made up their minds they can win what they want without war.” Khrushchev was committed to coexistence but it was “competitive coexistence,” and the West, especially the United States, could not afford to be complacent. The need was to turn it into “cooperative coexistence.” “It seems to me,” she wrote Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, who hoped for a long talk with Mrs. Roosevelt about her Russian trip, “we have reached a place where it is not a question of ‘can we live in the same world and cooperate’ but ‘we must live in the same world and learn to cooperate.’”
¹³

She never gave up trying to establish on a personal basis points of communication and cooperation with the Russians. Many of the Soviet delegations that visited the United States were her guests. She visited the Soviet Union again in 1958. And a year later, when Khrushchev toured the United States as a guest of President Eisenhower, he accepted her invitation to visit Hyde Park even though in the interim, at the suggestion of the Russian-born novelist Vladimir Nabokov and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., she had written him to protest Russia’s refusal to permit Boris Pasternak to accept the Nobel Prize.
¹⁴

The visit to Hyde Park was a hectic expedition, as were most of Khrushchev’s travels in the United States. There was, however, 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, walked to FDR’s grave in the rose garden and placed the wreath at the graveside. It bore the inscription:

T
O THE OUTSTANDING STATESMAN OF THE

U
NITED
S
TATES OF
A
MERICA
—

THE GREAT CHAMPION OF PROGRESS

AND PEACE AMONG PEOPLES
.

C
HIEF OF THE
C
OUNCIL OF
M
INISTERS OF THE

U
NION OF
S
OVIET
S
OCIALIST
R
EPUBLICS

N. S. K
HRUSHCHEV
.

Khrushchev stood for a moment in silence, his head bowed, and then Mrs. Roosevelt led him to the Big House and library for hurried inspections and finally to her cottage at Val-Kill, where she offered him tea, coffee, and cake. But there was little time. It was all “very rush-rush,” she said later. “He enjoyed nothing. A man behind him all the time kept whispering, ‘seven minutes. . .seven minutes.’” As he came out of her cottage, he held up a seed roll for the photographers and said in Russian, “one for the road.” Back in New York, Khrushchev sent her a handsome shawl. “Tell your wife and daughter,” she wrote, “if they are here and in need of any help in shopping, I can easily arrange to give them guidance.”
¹⁵