Eleanor (22 page)

But where did Mrs. Roosevelt stand, the White House anxiously wondered. She commanded a respect and affection from the American people second only to Eisenhower. Chip Bohlen was directed to find out when he went to brief her on the administration’s over-all foreign policy. At the end of his visit Bohlen asked her about Franklin Jr.’s “draft Eisenhower” statement. “I want to tell you,” she wrote Truman afterward,

that while Franklin told me he intended to make this statement, he did not ask me for my opinion.

There is without any question among the younger Democrats a feeling that the party as at present constituted is going down to serious defeat and may not be able to survive as the liberal party. Whether they are right or wrong, I do not know. I made up my mind long ago that working in the UN meant, as far as possible, putting aside partisan political activity and I would not presume to dictate to my children or to anyone else what their actions should be. I have not and I do not intend to have any part in preconvention activities.
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She was irritated by the effort to make Franklin Jr. feel that the move to draft Eisenhower was against the national interest. She wrote General Marshall:

Mr. Bohlen told me that you felt this move would so jeopardize President Truman’s standing that it would hurt the
position of our foreign policy in the world. I hardly think that is really true. In an election year all countries know that the man who is at the head of the government may not win.

It was unfortunate, she acknowledged, that the United States had

to have an election at a crucial time in the nation’s history just as it was in 1940 and 1944, but we managed to have elections in both of those years when the rest of the countries gave up holding elections temporarily. I rather think we will weather holding an election this year.

She understood the secretary’s anxiety

not to have anything rock the boat at the present time, but I doubt if the injection of any new Democratic or Republican candidate is going to have any great effect on the actions of the rest of the world.

While she was in London, a message came to her from Marshall: “Bohlen must have confused matters a little by leading you to think that I was approaching you regarding the Eisenhower matter. I have no intention of expressing any view of the matter to you. I am sorry you were troubled about it.”
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When she returned from London and the unveiling of FDR’s statue, she went down to see Truman. Her arrival at the White House was preceded by reports from Ambassador Lewis Douglas on the extraordinary reception she had received from the British people. Truman was eager to have her endorsement. But when she came out of the president’s office she turned aside reporters’ questions on the subject so sharply that a surprised May Craig later cautioned her that the press had interpreted her brusqueness to mean “we had hit you in a painful spot.” She was sure reporters would draw the conclusion they did, Mrs. Roosevelt replied, but for May’s confidential information she wanted her to know, “I haven’t made up my mind.”
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Despite renewed indications from Eisenhower that he was not available, the draft movement continued among the Democrats. Chester Bowles went to talk to him. He came away with misgivings about Eisenhower’s stand on domestic issues, Bowles informed Mrs. Roosevelt, but if Eisenhower chose liberal advisers, Bowles thought he would provide a liberal administration, and, of course, a liberal Congress would be swept in with him. So he, Helen Gahagan Douglas (the wife of actor Melvyn Douglas), and some one dozen other prominent Democrats were about to issue a call for an “open convention,” and if the Eisenhower move failed, perhaps Justice William O. Douglas could be nominated. Would she join them?
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She turned Bowles down. “I know little about General Eisenhower and hesitate to take any part in politics, but I shall consider again in the light of the Republican nomination.” A few days later the Republicans adopted a remarkably liberal platform and selected a Dewey-Warren ticket. It was thought to be invincible. Clare Boothe Luce, although a Republican, offered the Democrats some advice. Their only hope was a Harry S. Truman–Eleanor Roosevelt ticket: “She is the only person in the party qualified to tear the Roosevelt mantle from Mr. Wallace and, by sharing it with Mr. Truman, partially restore it to him.” It would, in addition, raise “the woman issue. . . .To put a woman on the ticket would challenge the loyalty of women everywhere to their sex, because it would be made to seem that the defeat of the ticket meant the defeat for a hundred years of woman’s chance to be truly equal with men in politics.” The column was good copy and it made headlines, but among some of Mrs. Roosevelt’s supporters there was doubt that benevolence toward the Democrats or Mrs. Roosevelt had inspired it. Several correspondents cautioned Mrs. Roosevelt that the Republicans wanted to have her on the Democratic ticket in order to raise the issue of Yalta and Roosevelt’s appeasement of Communism. Mrs. Luce, wrote Doris Fleeson in the
Washington Star
, “is not in Mrs. Roosevelt’s confidence. . . .She is not friendly with Mrs. Roosevelt and has frequently made her the victim of one of the sharpest tongues in politics.”
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The president, predicting his own nomination on the first ballot at Philadelphia, said Mrs. Roosevelt would be acceptable to him as a running mate. What else did they expect him to say? he added, almost
sotto voce
. And less than three hours later Mrs. Roosevelt directed Tommy to tell the press she had “no intention whatsoever of running for any public office.” Her swift, terse rejoinder was rightly interpreted by some newspapermen as another sign of her aloofness from the Truman candidacy. The president was not feeling kindly toward the Roosevelt clan. He was always courteous, almost deferential toward Mrs. Roosevelt, but just before the Democratic convention, while he was in California on a “nonpolitical” tour, he had backed James Roosevelt into a corner and dressed him down. “Here I am,” Truman said, “trying to do everything I can to carry out your father’s policies. You’ve got no business trying to pull the rug out from under me.” Perhaps the reproof was meant to get back to the mother of the brood. If so, it would not have altered her view. Her reservations were less about the president’s intentions than his capabilities and his failure to surround himself with a better circle of advisers.
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As it became clear that President Truman could not be denied the nomination, the liberal and labor groups that had been fighting for an open convention, began to press for Justice Douglas as the vice-presidential candidate. Truman said he would welcome the justice as a running mate, and Clark Clifford, with the president’s approval, asked Mrs. Roosevelt to help persuade the justice. “I feel you are the best judge of where your services are most valuable,” she wired the justice,

but you would be of great value and give some confidence in the party to liberals if you accept. My confidence in your good judgment prevents my urging you to do anything but I want you to know that your acceptance would give hope to many for the future of a liberal Democratic party.

But Douglas, not wishing to be associated with what almost everyone assumed would be a debacle, turned Truman and the liberals down.
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Truman’s prospects could not have been bleaker. Wallace’s third party, which at the beginning of the year looked as if it might draw as many as five million votes, most of them from Truman, was still going strong. But the hand of the Communists in its operations was becoming increasingly visible. “Your description of the Wallace meeting was wonderful,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Maude Gray, “& all of them follow a similar pattern.” Her work with the youth movement in the thirties had given her an understanding of Communist tactics and discipline, she wrote a Wallace backer. “Their power of control and infiltration is plainly visible in the Progressive Party’s platform. I wish Mr. Wallace had had some of the same experiences.” The support that the Communists gave her husband, she wrote still another aggrieved Wallaceite, “was quite different from the power they have in the third party at present. They are a hard core that does much of the organizing.” However strongly she felt about Truman and the Democrats, “no matter what I question, and I question many things, I could not vote for Henry Wallace, I have completely lost faith in him.”
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She still held back from an open endorsement of Truman. She had been nominated to serve as a member of the U.S. delegation to the 1948 General Assembly, which was to open in Paris in September. She hoped she might get out of the country without having to turn the president down. But the Truman managers had their eye on her. The Democratic National Committee advised Clark Clifford, who was managing Truman’s campaign strategy, that a considerable ceremony should be made out of Truman’s signing of the bill authorizing a $65,000,000 loan to the United Nations for its headquarters building and that Mrs. Roosevelt be invited because “it is felt that Mrs. Roosevelt’s presence in the White House at this time would be advantageous to the President in a public relations sense.”

The President wants to see me so I go down on Wed. 18th for 2 hours—a chore but not too much for him to ask! He wanted to send me to Holland for the Jubilee & coronation but I said I couldn’t go.
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When she appeared at the White House, Truman did solicit her support. She was staying out of partisan politics, she put him off, but she would say in her column that she was a Democrat and would vote the Democratic ticket and would write what she could to help the Democratic party. She appreciated the difficulties under which he had labored, she wrote him afterward. “I wish you could have had better assistants.” She hoped the Democratic National Committee would aggressively make clear to the country what the president stood for and the necessity, therefore, of the voters giving him “the kind of men in Congress who will make it possible for you to carry through a program for the benefit of the average man.”
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By the time Mrs. Roosevelt left for Paris, the Wallace movement was fading away, but he still might draw enough Democratic votes in New York, Illinois, and California to enable Dewey to carry them. In the South the Dixiecrats, led by Strom Thurmond, were cutting into that traditional Democratic bastion. She left for France assuming, as did most Americans, that Dewey would win. She hoped not, but if there was a Republican landslide she prayed that liberals like Stevenson, running for governor in Illinois, Chester Bowles, running for governor in Connecticut, Hubert H. Humphrey, and her friend Helen Gahagan Douglas would survive it. Although she had written a column stating the case for the Democrats and, by implication, for Truman, Frances Perkins telephoned her in Paris to beg her for a letter endorsing Truman by name and to ask her to try to get Baruch to help. “I am enclosing to you a copy of a letter which I sent to the President today,” was her approach to Baruch:

I am sending it to Frances Perkins because she telephoned me last night pointing out that Drew Pearson was saying that I had never come out for the President as the Democratic candidate and was supposedly in favor of Governor Dewey. That, of course, is untrue and I do agree with Frances Perkins that we should try to get as good a Democratic vote as possible. I told her there was no chance of a Democratic victory
except that we might keep some of the liberals in Congress and even increase the number if we acted wisely. I hope you will approve of this letter even though I was, as you know, loath to do more than state in general my support of the Democratic Party and its policies.
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Her covering letter to Frances Perkins could not have given President Truman much comfort if he was shown it:

I haven’t actually endorsed Mr. Truman because he has been such a weak and vacillating person and made such poor appointments in his Cabinet and entourage, such as Snyder and Vaughan, that unless we are successful in electing a very strong group of liberals in Congress, in spite of my feelings about the Republican Party and Governor Dewey, I can not have much enthusiasm for Mr. Truman. Though there are many people in the government that I would hate to feel would not be allowed to continue their work, I still find it very difficult to give any good reasons for being for Mr. Truman. . . .

Nevertheless, since you asked me to send you the enclosed letter, I am doing so because you are quite right, if we are going down to defeat, we probably should go down having done what we could for the candidate and we should try for a good vote. I have addressed my letter to the President as being the most effective way.
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“I am unqualifiedly for you as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency,” her endorsement read. She hoped as many liberal Democrats would be elected to Congress as possible. “A Democratic administration, backed by a liberal Democratic Congress, could really achieve the policies for which you have stood.” That was as much as her conscience permitted her to write. A few weeks later, on the eve of the election, she went a little further in a broadcast from Paris. Mr. Truman “has shown courage,” she said, and “needs the peoples’ mandate to help him if he’s going to be our President. I still believe in the Democratic Party and its leadership.”
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Truman’s victory surprised and pleased her but it did not change her assessment of his leadership:

It is rather nice to be an American when the people so evidently take their democracy seriously & do their own thinking as they did in this election. I did not have enough faith in them! Dewey wasn’t just big enough & I think they felt more sincerity if not ability in Truman.

I do feel, however, that those among us who want the Democratic party to stay a progressive party will have to try to remind the members of Congress that they were elected on that basis & owe labor groups & liberals some real consideration. The President is so easily fooled in spite of his good intentions. I am going through a very difficult time with the delegation on its true & future position in Palestine & am much upset by some of the things that go on. The interchange of letters between the Secretary & myself would be funny if it were not so tragic, for he as well as the President is fooled. I hope & pray Mr. Lovett goes for I think he is a dangerous person in the State Department.
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