Eleanor (6 page)

Since the press was full of stories about division in the American delegation, Stettinius scheduled a meeting of the delegation with reporters to show this was not the case. But ten minutes before the conference began, Dulles informed Stettinius that he and Vandenberg would not attend. Not having much of a choice, Mrs. Roosevelt and Stettinius went into the meeting alone where “all went well,” she later recorded, “till the inevitable question came: ‘Where are the two Republican members of the delegation? Does their absence indicate a split in the delegation?’ Mr. Stettinius said: ‘Certainly not, you men who were on the boat know that is not so. I think Senator Vandenberg is probably at a committee meeting.’ Then we left quickly.” A few moments later Vandenberg walked in and “took some of the remaining press people up to his room. It seemed to me pretty shoddy behavior, though I was in sympathy with parts of his memo. I think he is right that language should be clear.” The U.S. delegation met the press today, Reston cabled his paper, and appealed for unity and peace, “but two members of the delegation were absent from the conference.”

The next day Byrnes arrived and saw the senators, “and all seems serene on the atomic bomb statement which stirred up such a rumpus with Senator Vandenberg,” she noted. “I am not sure the gentleman does not like a little newspaper publicity.”
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She was told at the delegation meeting that she had been assigned to Committee III, which—scheduled to deal with humanitarian, social, and cultural matters—was supposed to be a relatively uncontroversial and, therefore, it was thought, safe berth for her. Durward
Sandifer was her chief adviser. Short, sandy-haired, dryly spoken, he had been an assistant on legal matters in Pasvolsky’s office. She quickly came to depend on him. “I went with her to all the sessions,” he recalled. “I started carrying her brief case as well as my own—over her protests.” She invited him to Claridge’s to dinner. She had half a dozen people there, including a cousin. “I rushed home to write a long account of this dinner to Irene [Sandifer].” By the end of the Assembly they were good friends. He should come to lunch at Washington Square once they were back in New York, she urged. He did. “I was so nervous at having lunch with Mrs. Roosevelt,” he confided to Tommy afterward, “that I put salt in my coffee.” Mrs. Roosevelt overheard him. “You—nervous at having lunch with me? I am the one who should be nervous at having lunch with you. You will never know how frightened I was getting on that boat. I knew what the British thought of Franklin and what they expected of me. You don’t know what a help you were to me.”
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The General Assembly opened. She drove to Westminster with Stettinius—“How your husband planned for this day,” he said to her—and in Westminster’s Central Hall as the delegations filed in, most of them led by their foreign ministers, and the temporary president mounted to the high podium which was framed from behind by a huge map of the world on a blue and gold background with two great olive branches below it, she felt that FDR’s spirit “must be with us.” She noted the flowing robes of the Arab representatives and also that there were “very few women on the delegations.” She was seated at the end of the U.S. delegation, next to the Soviet group. By mistake she took the seat of V. V. Kuznetzov, who gallantly invited her to join the Soviet delegation, and relations between them got off to a good start.

The business of the first meeting was to choose a president of the Assembly, and Paul Henri Spaak, Socialist and foreign minister of Belgium, was elected over Trygve Lie, Socialist and foreign minister of Norway.
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Spaak won by a vote of 28 to 23, and Lie, who had
originally been urged to run for the position by the United States, was angry with the American delegation for its failure to support him openly. “
If
the United States had spoken out in the Assembly in support of my candidacy as it had spoken out to me in August, in December, and that very day,
if
Mr. Byrnes had not sat there tight-lipped, then, the result might well have been otherwise,” Lie wrote. “We were very stupid over the election of President of the Assembly,” Mrs. Roosevelt felt, but in her column describing the impressive opening of the Assembly she struck a more edifying note. The job before the United Nations was too serious to feel exhilaration over victory or disappointment over defeat. As she left Westminster Hall, she overheard a woman, standing in the rain, say, “They must succeed, the future of the world depends on it.”
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On the carbon of the column that she sent in about the Assembly’s opening, Mrs. Roosevelt noted, “For this column the United Press men here have given me great praise.” Her account had omitted one of the Assembly’s most solemn moments when Spaak, in his speech of acceptance, taking note of the large number of delegates “who have done much more for peace than I have,” went on to speak of Mrs. Roosevelt:

Among them there is one delegate to whom I wish to extend particular sympathy and tribute. I refer to her who bears the most illustrious and respected of all names. I do not think it would be possible to begin at this Assembly without mentioning her and the name of the late President Roosevelt and expressing our conviction that his disappearance was a great grief to us all and an irreparable loss.
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There was one tribute to FDR about which she could say nothing—that dealing with whether or not to locate UN headquarters at Hyde Park. “I have been particularly careful to express no preference on the subject whatsoever,” she advised her Hyde Park neighbor Gerald Morgan, “and to stress that the Government is the owner not the family.” She doubted the choice of Hyde Park, she wrote her aunt, Maude Gray, “because the Republicans are so
opposed. They are afraid it might perpetuate FDR’s name.” In the end the site committee recommended selection of a location as close to New York City as possible and the establishment of temporary headquarters at Lake Success.
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“You know I don’t like sitting and doing nothing,” she noted in her diary as business sessions began and there was an endless number of speeches on rules of procedure all of which had to be translated from English into French or vice versa. “I notice that men always feel passionately about these rules, and on our own delegation Congressman Bloom keeps impressing upon us how very important it is to get these rules just as you want them.” She agreed it was wise to have the rules of procedure thought out and accepted in advance, but it did not seem to her “quite as desperate a question” as it did to the men. She informally inquired at the delegation meeting whether she might bring her knitting. The men looked nonplused, so she left her knitting bag at the hotel.
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Despite the tedious stretches devoted to the counting of ballots, the voting behavior of the countries—especially the USSR—was interesting.

I wish you could have watched the Russian faces when New Zealand apparently opposed Great Britain’s choice of Canada for the Security Council. They would feel such behaviour among their satellites showed weakness & it is going to take time to realize that when you are sure of fundamentals you can differ on non-essentials. Great Britain had told the Dominions to decide and they could not agree. S. Africa and Canada chose Canada, New Zealand & India and Australia wanted Australia. We had told Great Britain we’d vote for Canada & we did but Australia won!
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More than any other member of the delegation she was drawn into jobs unrelated to her UN assignment. There were endless delegations calling upon her, starting with a group of GIs who wanted her to find out from General “Ike” whether there was a demobilization policy for 45 to 60 point men. She went down to
Waterloo Station to counsel some GI wives. At Louise Morley’s request she talked to nearly a thousand British brides and fiancées of American servicemen and then to seven hundred enlisted men and officers stationed in London. Almost every day, and sometimes more often, she had to dash off to the BBC studios to broadcast. She was fascinated by the conversations that went on between the men in the London studios and those in New York. Once Edward R. Murrow walked into the New York studio as she was preparing to broadcast, and she sent him a message that she had seen his wife, Janet, and their nine-week-old son and had thought him a beautifully healthy baby.
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She lunched with the Churchills, with the leaders of the Labor and Liberal parties, and with the royal family.

Yesterday I lunched alone with the King & Queen & Elizabeth & Margaret Rose. It was nice & they are nice people but so far removed from life it seems.

Teas, cocktail parties, and dinners, the delegations wanted her especially. She went to the Byelorussian party, she noted, and “said some pleasant things. Tasted Vodka and don’t like it.” “I am seeing all the deposed kings, this week,” she noted another time.
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She preferred her work in Committee III, but other members of the delegation took more happily to the social end.

My buddy, Sen. Townsend, and Dulles went to Germany on Sat. a.m. and today I got a message they were grounded in Paris. The boys, no matter what their age, can’t resist a good time.

There were so many speeches at public meetings that her voice finally gave out. “For two days I’ve had no voice,” she reported. She hoped it would return in time for her to speak at the Pilgrim dinner. (The Pilgrim Society, dedicated to Anglo-American friendship, was one of the most prestigious in the realm.) It was the first time in forty years they had invited a woman. Perhaps that was
why her voice had fled, she speculated. The diagnosis was fatigue, not fright. “Frank Walker seemed pleased with my speech; I was the
only
woman!”
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Her other big public meeting was at Albert Hall, where she was the main speaker at a ceremony welcoming the delegates to the General Assembly. It was in connection with her speech at this meeting that Noel Baker was concerned she do justice by the League of Nations. Robert Viscount Cecil, who had drafted the Covenant of the League of Nations, sat next to her. “He is very deaf but has transferred his allegiance from the League to the UNO.” He had attended the first session of the Assembly, but since no one had recognized him and he was unable to hear he did not go again. “Old age is pathetic,” she noted in her diary and paid tribute to him in her column, which during the Assembly appeared in many British papers. Albert Hall was filled to its topmost gallery. Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander presided, which brought from Cecil the whispered comment, “We go about peace in a very belligerent way, don’t we!”

“We must be willing to learn the lesson that cooperation may imply compromise,” Mrs. Roosevelt said in her speech, “but if it brings a world advance it is a gain for each individual nation. There will be those who doubt their ability to rise to these new heights but the alternative is not possible to contemplate.”
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Some, like Noel Baker, looked backward to the League. A more numerous group wanted to transform the United Nations into a world government even as the first session was demonstrating the reluctance of nations to compromise or to yield any authority to a higher international body.

I gather Mike Straight
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must have talked as many people write to me. They beg me to stand now for world government, and seem to ignore the stark reality that Russia would be out at
once and our Congress would never have let us go in. We couldn’t get any one of the big three powers to give up their veto. We will have to crawl together, running will be out of the question until all of us have gained far more confidence in each other than we now have. I can’t even get Byrnes to agree that we might do better if he talked at one time to Bevin, [Andrei] Gromyko, [Georges] Bidault, and [V. K. Wellington] Koo on the Secretary General. There are too many old League people here and far too many elderly statesmen. They are accustomed to diplomatic ways, secrecy appeals to them, and this will only succeed if everyone says what they really think. Perhaps the biggest job to be done is to make the people at home feel this is their machinery which they may use to build peace, but they will have to keep it oiled and make it run. Oratory ended Saturday and tomorrow committee work begins. I’m curious to see how that works. I’ve certainly been briefed on all the agenda that may come up tomorrow.
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There were more moderate proposals for changes in the structure of the United Nations that had been agreed to at San Francisco and in the Preparatory Commission. “At 6:30 Lady Pethick-Lawrence (nice old lady) and Mrs. Gram Swing (very high-powered) came to persuade me to back a woman’s group in UNO with special privileges and I was noncommittal as I don’t think it should be done but I must, of course, look into it.” Mrs. Roosevelt was dubious about the particular suggestion of these two women who came to her representing the World Women’s Party for Equal Rights, but she was acutely conscious of the underrepresentation of women at the Assembly. Women delegates and advisers—they numbered eighteen in all from eleven countries—met at her office under her chairmanship to discuss how women might achieve a larger role in UN affairs. They issued a discreetly worded manifesto that called

on the Governments of the world to encourage women everywhere to take a more conscious part in national and international affairs, and on women to come forward and share in
the work of peace and reconstruction as they did in the war and resistance.
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Lady Pethick-Lawrence and Mrs. Swing had pushed ahead in the meantime with their demand that the United Nations establish a permanent commission on the status of women to implement equal rights. Mrs. Roosevelt would serve as the first U.S. representative on this commission, but she never manifested much enthusiasm for this aspect of UN activity. She preferred to do her politics with the men. “I am sorry that Governments in all parts of the world have not seen fit to send more women as delegates, alternates or advisers to the Assembly,” she wrote in her column. “I think it is in these positions that the women of every nation should work to see that equality exists.” She did not want women represented as a special group. She wanted them working together with the men on an equal basis to frame the policies of the organization.
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