Eleanor (45 page)

Mrs. Roosevelt spoke for him and worked for him, always careful to note his stand on separation of church and state. She also sent him suggestions from time to time. It would be useful for one of his people to see Bernard Baruch. Kennedy sent Galbraith. After his first debate with Nixon she advised him of a few simple oratorical rules, the observance of which would give his audience a stronger sense of being included. She was so prejudiced against Nixon she did not trust her own reactions, but she thought the debates, “judging by this first one, are definitely an advantage to you.”
⁵¹
Kennedy’s statements on Cuba worried her:

I thought I understood you to say during the last debate that you did not intend to act unilaterally but with the other American states. Since this is not fully understood, I pass the letter along to you because I think it would be unwise for people to have the impression that you did expect separately to interfere in the internal affairs of Cuba.

She thought the campaign was going well.

I cannot, of course, ever feel safe till the last week is over because with Mr. Nixon I always have the feeling that he will pull some trick at the last minute. On the whole, however, things look pretty good. In the meantime, good luck!
⁵²

She became increasingly confident as the campaign progressed that he would make a good president:

As you know, I wanted Mr. Stevenson as our nominee but I have grown, as I watch Mr. Kennedy and talk with him, to have a great respect for his mind and ability and his truthfulness of purpose in wanting to be a good public servant. I don’t think it is a choice of the least of two evils. I think we will have a good President in Mr. Kennedy who will take the advice of the best people around him and who will be honest with the people. To say he would not make mistakes would be silly. Anyone would make mistakes with the problems that lie ahead of us.
⁵³

Mrs. Roosevelt was unhappy, after Kennedy’s victory, that he did not appoint Stevenson as secretary of state. His failure to do so may have been a factor, as well as her aversion to Joe Kennedy, in her insistence on sitting with a few friends in the stand below the inaugural platform instead of coming to the presidential box, as he had invited her to do. He wanted her at his side, Kennedy had written. She preferred to sit where she could see better, she replied. So she came early and sat in the twenty-degree cold wrapped in a mink coat and an army blanket.

It was a sky-blue, frosty day with the new snow crisp on the boughs of trees and the ledges of the Capitol. The vast crowd of people, their breath filling the air with vapor, clung to each other for warmth and chafed their hands impatiently as the red-hatted cardinal intoned his blessings, the wispy-haired poet recited his prophecies, and the chief justice solemnly administered the oath of office. Then the youthful voice, blend of Irish lilt and Boston flatness, rang out: “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.” Her stooped shoulders straightened. She looked at her friends with pleasure in her eyes as she heard the sound of youth and fearlessness again filling the land. “Let us begin anew. . . .Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate. . . .And so, my fellow Americans—ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

She left the stands with the vivid phrases ringing in her ears and her heart sang with new hope for America and mankind.

On the eve of the inauguration she had spoken in her column of the qualities a strong and successful president must have—confidence in himself, buoyancy and optimism, joy in the meeting of responsibilities, and a mind “flexible enough to be willing to try new approaches. . . .” She left Washington feeling that perhaps this young man had the making of a strong president.
⁵⁴

*
“I wish he were better known throughout the country,” she wrote of Governor Muskie when he was running for the Senate in 1958, “for I think he has the qualities of greatness which might even lead him to be considered for the Presidency some day” (“My Day,” August 29, 1958).

15.
TO THE END, COURAGE

A
FTER
F
RANKLIN
R
OOSEVELT’S DEATH, ADMIRERS AS WELL AS
detractors had assumed—as she had herself—that Eleanor Roosevelt would gradually fade from public sight into “a private and inconspicuous existence.” Yet of all of Roosevelt’s associates, she had become more rather than less of a public eminence. Henry Morgenthau came to her upset because he had gone to the White House and had not been recognized. “Don’t you know that if you are out of the limelight three days they will forget you?” she comforted him, adding, “they will forget me too.” They did not. The leading woman in the Roosevelt administration, Frances Perkins, was given refuge in her final years at the Cornell School of Industrial Relations. Miss Perkins was never wholly reconciled to the contrast between herself, almost forgotten after President Roosevelt’s death, and Mrs. Roosevelt, who had moved onto a world stage and was functioning as a world figure. Why Eleanor Rosevelt did not even have an intellectually tidy mind, she confided to her Cornell associates.
¹

Tidy mind or not, Eleanor Roosevelt had a right to feel, as she did, that she had made a success of her professional career and had done so on her own. Sixteen years after her husband’s death she continued to be America’s “Most Admired Woman,” more popular than Jacqueline Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth, Mrs. Dwight Eisenhower, Clare Luce, and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek. Her professional income in 1961 totaled more than $100,000, of which lecture fees accounted for $33,500, her writing close to $60,000, her column $7,794, and Brandeis University paid her $6,500.
²

“When you cease to make a contribution you begin to die,” she
wrote in her seventy-fifth year. “Therefore, I think it a necessity to be doing something which you feel is helpful in order to grow old gracefully and contentedly.”
³
Occasionally she resurrected the image of herself contentedly sitting by the fire in lace cap and shawl. Her friends and children never took it seriously. Perhaps it was her way of indicating a readiness to retire to Hyde Park and a life of “dignified obscurity” rather than yielding to her critics or to the president on a point of principle. Or perhaps it was a reaction to a calendar that suddenly became overcrowded with things she did not wish to do, places she did not wish to be, away from the people of whom she was really fond. Sometimes, especially after she was seventy-five, she even reached the point of telling Maureen Corr to send off wires canceling everything. But in a few weeks the fat little engagement book filled up again.

“I suppose I should slow down,” she acknowledged when children and friends remonstrated with her, but to reporters on her seventy-seventh birthday she said, “I think I have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore in me, because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. The fatal thing is the rejection. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.”
⁴

At seventy-five Mrs. Roosevelt launched a new career as visiting lecturer at Brandeis University, declining, however, to be called “professor.” She did not deserve the title, she said. She met her class faithfully. One week end she finished at Brandeis late in the evening. The airport was fogged in when she arrived there. She went to the railroad station only to find the sleeper would get her in too late to make a plane at Idlewild the next morning for the Midwest. So she took a coach and sat up the entire night all the way to New York. She was then seventy-six. When she was seventy-seven, Brandeis offered to send a car to the airport for her, but she refused. She did not want to be treated either as Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt or as an old woman, she said. Once as she set out she looked so weary that a worried Maureen called the office of Dr. Abram Sachar, the president. “She will kill me if she finds out I
called, but please have someone meet her.” They did. When she returned to New York, she marched straight into Maureen’s office and told her, “Don’t ever do that again.”
⁵

She still had a regular television show, now called “Prospects of Mankind,” which was produced by Elinor (Mrs. Henry) Morgenthau’s oldest son, Henry. She lent herself willingly to the stratagems of her agent, Thomas L. Stix, to get her a sponsored program and a wider audience. He found she was “a very difficult person to get a job for” because she was “controversial.” Finally an advertising agency asked whether she would be willing to do a commercial for margarine. It was a chore for which she would be well paid, but Stix was hesitant. She would come in for a lot of criticism on the grounds that it was undignified, he cautioned her, but if it were successful she would no longer be “poison” to sponsors. She thought it over and the next day told him, “I’ll do it. For that amount of money I can save 6,000 lives,” thinking of the number of CARE packages the approximately $35,000 fee would purchase. She did the commercial, and the protests poured in. “The mail was evenly divided,” she said. “One half was sad because I had damaged my reputation. The other half was happy because I had damaged my reputation.” Tom Stix was right. Advertisers lost their fear of her. “In a few weeks Frank Sinatra asked her to appear on a ‘spectacular.’ There was no argument about the high price I named,” wrote Stix.
⁶

She continued to be an indefatigable writer, doing her brisk monthly question-and-answer page for
McCall’s
and a variety of books and articles, many of them suggested by Nannine Joseph, who had succeeded George Bye as her literary agent after Elliott bowed out of the picture.
You Learn by Living,
a reflective distillation of her life experience, appeared in 1960. It originated during a Hyde Park drive in her tiny Fiat roadster, the objective of which was to find a roadside stand from which to buy apples. She was at the wheel, Nannine beside her. “You have more energy than any person I have ever known,” Miss Joseph said. “People always ask me where I get it,” she replied. “Why don’t you write it?” Miss Joseph urged, and Cass Canfield of Harper & Brothers, with whom she discussed it, immediately agreed. Miss Joseph
got Elinore Denniston, who had written over two hundred books under other peoples’ signatures, to help, and Mrs. Roosevelt found her a congenial collaborator. She still filed her column regularly, although now only three times a week, the number of papers taking it about forty.
⁷

She had become pretty good at saying “No,” she assured friends: requests that she wanted to get out of, if they related to articles she sent to Nannine Joseph; speeches to Colston Leigh; radio or television appearances to Thomas Stix. “Yes or no?” she wrote on the letter. They tried to save her from engagements they considered unimportant, but then, as often as not, her sense of duty would bother her, and she would call them to say a little apologetically that she wanted to make an exception.

Although over seventy-five, she retained a freshness of vision that was always on the lookout for excellence, a spirit of compassion that inevitably made her the ally of the victim, and an unspoiled goodness of heart that was especially responsive to integrity and courage. A Negro poet seeking a publisher suddenly discovered that he had Mrs. Roosevelt acting as his literary agent; a mimeographed petition reaching her through the mails on behalf of some Communists who had been jailed too long was returned with her signature; a vituperative racist received a courteous and reasoned reply in the hope of touching some chord of humanity in him. One day on her way to a charity meeting in Greenwich Village at her hairdresser François’, a Negro youth carelessly backed a station wagon into her and knocked her down as she was crossing Eighth Street. She told him to leave quickly, before people gathered and he got into trouble, limped to François’, and although in considerable pain, made her speech. Later David Gurewitsch taped up her leg, but despite torn ligaments, she insisted on going through with the rest of her engagements for the day, ending up at 10:00
p.m.
at the Waldorf-Astoria, where she apologized to her audience for making her speech seated on a high pillow. “People saw that I was in pain and we raised more money,” she later told David, who had not wanted her to go.

Anna Halsted, who was in Shiraz, Iran, with her husband and
had seen a news item about her mother being knocked down, wrote anxiously to David Gurewitsch. Mother was doing “far too much. . . .If there was something specific about her health on which you could base the essentiality of her cutting down on her activities, then I think she will cooperate—particularly if she realizes that cutting down now will prolong her total years of activity—activity which is so much needed in today’s world.”