Eleanor (15 page)

She found working with Marshall “a very rewarding experience.” For the first time she was getting a real knowledge of the
inner workings of the State Department, and of the various cliques in it. Byrnes had kept her on the periphery, but Marshall consulted her regularly and had her present at the small meetings. One of the first problems the delegation faced was which Slav nation to support to succeed Poland on the Security Council. The USSR had proposed the Ukrainian SSR to which the United States refused to agree. Vishinsky had then proposed Czechoslovakia, but her representatives had come privately to beg the United States not to support her, since as a member of the Council, she would have to line up with the Soviets. Mrs. Roosevelt felt, as did Marshall, that Czechoslovakia’s wishes should be respected; but advisers like Chip Bohlen were all for forcing Czechoslovakia to get off the fence. Mrs. Roosevelt considered this attitude a blunder, but all of Marshall’s top advisers supported the Bohlen position. And even if the secretary agreed with her, she pointed out, could he go against their recommendation?
⁴³

The 1947 General Assembly session did much to persuade her that Russia interpreted efforts to take account of her anxieties as weakness rather than as a desire for friendly relations. In October the Cominform, successor to the Comintern, was established. She had never believed that the Comintern had ceased to function. “There were too many signs throughout the world of activity that was well directed and unified.” She thought the Cominform manifesto a warmongering document because it arbitrarily divided the world into two camps and denounced “concessions to the United States of America and the imperialist camp” as a form of Munich-like appeasement. She found it “strange” that the Wallace liberals and the Cominform parties “are condemning with one voice the Marshall proposals!”
⁴⁴

The 1947 Assembly brought a return engagement with Vishinsky, who pictured American defense of freedom of the press as a defense of warmongering. “I found myself in the absurd position of defending the
Chicago Tribune
,” she wrote afterward:

I defended that paper, certainly not because I either agree with or believe most of the things which it stands for, but because
I think we should defend the right of all individuals to their freedom of thought and speech.
⁴⁵

In her rebuttal of Vishinsky in Committee III she noted that the author of the pamphlet cited by the Russians in their attack upon the “monopolistic” American press was “one of our American Communists.” The fact that “we allow American Communists freedom to print what they want to say in criticism of this country” demonstrated that the United States had freedom of the press. She was still reluctant to end on a polemical note. Despite a basic difference in philosophies, “we must work together; growing apart is not going to help us.”
⁴⁶

She had not wholly abandoned the idea of a trip to Russia. Her
Ladies’ Home Journal
publishers, Beatrice and Bruce Gould, reported to her that when they had applied for a visa at the Soviet consulate, they were told, “Now if you would get Mrs. Roosevelt to go over with you, there would be no trouble at all about visas or interviewing Stalin.” The Czechs were also anxious for her to visit them, she informed Marshall. A visit to Czechoslovakia would be worthwhile, he replied, but it might acquire a different significance if she only visited Prague, and he feared that a visit to Moscow might be subject to exploitation both by Soviet and Republican propagandists. In view of his doubts, she decided not to make the trip. “In fact, I am relieved at not having to go, but I felt it my duty to make the inquiry if I could in any way be helpful.”
⁴⁷

Nine days later, February 24, 1948, an armed Communist coup ended Czech democracy and independence and led to the death, either by murder or suicide, of her old friend Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk. On top of these sinister events came the chilling top-secret telegram from Gen. Luicius Clay, chief of U.S. occupation forces in Germany, in which he stated that he was no longer able to advise Washington “that war was unlikely for at least ten years. Within the last few weeks, I have felt a subtle change in Soviet attitudes which I cannot define but which now gives me a feeling that it may come with dramatic suddenness.” The shock waves of the ensuing war scare in Washington reached Mrs. Roosevelt.
On March 13, she wrote Marshall an alarmed letter. She was becoming “more and more worried.” She urged a peace mission of a “picked group” that would sit down with Great Britain and Russia “around a table before we actually get to a point where we are in a war.”

You say the situation is serious and any one can see that we can not let the USSR go on pulling coups in one country after another. It looks as though Sweden and Norway were pretty worried as to whether they will not be treated to the same kind of “invitation” that Finland has had, and certainly it will not be very difficult to pull a coup off in Italy. . . .

I am sure that we have not been blameless and probably the Russians think we have done some things against them. I am sure they believe we are trying to build up Germany again into an industrial state. I some times wonder if behind our backs, that isn’t one of the things that our big business people would like to see happen in spite of two World Wars started by Germany.

If war comes and this final effort has not been made, I am afraid the people of this country are not going to feel that we have done all that we should have done to try to find a solution to the deteriorating situation between ourselves and the USSR.
⁴⁸

She sent to President Truman a copy of her letter to Marshall, saying,

I do not think I have been as alarmed before but I have become very worried and since we always have to sit down together when war comes to an end, I think before we have a third World War, we should sit down together.

You and the Secretary must feel the rest of us are a nuisance. Nevertheless, as a citizen I would not have a clear conscience if I did not tell you how I feel at the present time.
⁴⁹

Truman replied on the sixteenth, Marshall a day later. The president reviewed the record of agreements broken by the Russians. He thought Soviet aggressiveness was fed by a belief that Wallace would win the presidency in 1948 and if that did not end the U.S. policy of firmness, a depression would. The only hopes for peace rested in the European Recovery Program and in U.S. military build-up. “I am as much concerned as you are,” Marshall wrote Mrs. Roosevelt, “as much troubled, and I am seeking in every way to find a solution which will avoid the great catastrophe of war. It is evident that we cannot sit quiet in this situation and also that mere words get us nowhere at this time.” He was “terribly disturbed over the rapid growth of a highly emotional feeling in this country which runs to extremes, yet at the same time something must be done.” He was sending Bohlen to talk with her about her suggestion of a “picked group” to sit down with the Russians. Evidently the suggestion interested the administration. It surfaced in abortive form in the 1948 election when Truman announced that he was sending Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson to Moscow, a suggestion that was dropped when Secretary Marshall opposed it and it was widely criticized as a campaign gesture. “Truman’s last move on Vinson and the resulting publicity have been very bad,” she wrote. Bernard Baruch, an old friend, informed her that he had known about her proposal to send a peace mission to Moscow as early as last spring. It

made good sense then. When I was told about it this time (and it was even suggested that I be on it) I said it was impossible in the present circumstances, and as far as I was concerned, I would not go for it would be by-passing and destroying the usefulness of the UN. The proper person to make the statement, or undertake any discussion now, is either the President or General Marshall.
⁵⁰

Mrs. Roosevelt received this letter in Paris, where she was attending the General Assembly. There was nothing like daily
contact with the Russians to quench hopes of an easing of tension. “The Russians attack verbally in every committee,” she wrote.

They seem to want to see nothing accomplished until one wonders whether they should be banned from contacts until they want them enough to try to cooperate.
⁵¹

She took General and Mrs. Marshall to Les Porque-rolles, a little restaurant she had discovered on the Left Bank:

I like him so much & he is a strong person, but I fear very tired.

Russia’s attitude is discouraging & Marshall I think believes it is a case of outstaying & outbluffing your adversary but the stake of war is such a high one that this game cannot be played lightheartedly.
⁵²

“It is sad, dear,” she wrote a friend a few weeks later,

but I think it will take a long time to get real understanding with the USSR government. It will be the result of long & patient work. Their government & its representatives think differently. They will have to reach a higher standard of living & not be afraid to let others in & their own out before we can hope for a change.
⁵³

She had begun her career at the United Nations bending over backward to show the Russians she was ready to meet them halfway. By 1949 she was stating publicly she would “never again” compromise, “even on words. The Soviets look on this as evidence of weakness rather than as a gesture of good will.” When State Department counselor Ben Cohen expressed misgivings about statements that implied it was impossible to get along with the Russians, she replied, “But we have to win the cold war.” “The only way to win the cold war,” he counseled her, “is to end it.” And, of course, basically she agreed with him, even though the Russians, who had begun by courting her as FDR’s widow, now
denounced her as a “hypocritical servant of capitalism. . .a fly darkening the Soviet sun.” Vishinsky was even heard, in the heat of the 1948 debate, to characterize her as a meddling old woman, which reminded one observer of Stalin’s reported threat to appoint someone else Lenin’s widow “if that old woman doesn’t shut up.” “There is no doubt,” commented author-reporter Elizabeth Janeway, after observing Mrs. Roosevelt at the United Nations, “he would like to have the power to appoint someone else Franklin D. Roosevelt’s widow.”
⁵⁴

In September, 1949, President Truman disclosed that “within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.” There was little danger of war, Mrs. Roosevelt reassured friends. She did not believe Russia had a stockpile of bombs, certainly not one as large as that of the United States. But then she added, and it was a measure of how completely Russia had alienated this woman of good will, that it would do well to be more on the alert than ever in order to avoid another Pearl Harbor, this time with atom bombs.
⁵⁵

*
Wallace released this letter to the press on September 17, 1946.

†
Douglas, who had resigned from the Roosevelt administration in 1934 in protest against its spending policies, had been named ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s.

‡
John Foster Dulles, who had accompanied Gen. George C. Marshall to Moscow and with whom she corresponded about the inclusion of Soviet Russia in an over-all economic aid program, shared her uneasiness about the negative stress of U.S. policy. He sent her an advance copy of an address that he was to deliver at Northwestern University, “which seeks to clarify our national attitude in certain respects where it seems to be unduly aggressive and imperialistic.” She was interested. “It makes me want to talk to you more than ever on certain things,” she wrote back.
³⁰

§
This emerged more clearly in Kennan’s later writings. The famous Kennan dispatch, published in
Foreign Affairs
in 1947 under the pseudonym “Mr. X,” was a penetrating analysis of the springs of Soviet conduct, but it left open the question of how American power might be mobilized to cope with Soviet pressures and probings. “I read the article (I imagine somewhat abbreviated) in
Life
which was published by
Foreign Affairs
. It was interesting but not very illuminating and I don’t really know just what our policy is going to be, do you?”
³²

5.
THE UNITED NATIONS AND A JEWISH HOMELAND

A
MONG THE WAR’S VICTIMS, THOSE WHO SEEMED TO
E
LEANOR
Roosevelt to have the strongest claim on humanity’s compassion and charity were the pitiful survivors of the death trains and gas chambers.

They had been a weight upon her heart for a long time. In 1943 word had filtered out of Fortress Europe that Hitler had given orders for the extermination of all Jews. She took part in a memorial service of protest and had written afterward: “One could not help having a great pride in the achievements of the Jewish people; they are the great names in so many nations, and yet rage and pity filled one’s heart for they have suffered in this war in so many nations.” Louis Bromfield, author and the head of the Emergency Conference to Save the Jews of Europe, wired her: “The Nazis are rapidly carrying out the threat to annihilate the Jewish people of Europe as reprisal against approaching doom. . . .” Would she serve as a committee sponsor? “I have your telegram and cannot see what can be done until we win the war,” she replied. And to another, she wrote: