Eleanor and Franklin (148 page)

She listened carefully to the tart, occasionally catty observations of close friends like Tommy, Trude Pratt, and Elinor Morgenthau. She herself rarely said anything belittling of another person. “Yes, dear,” was her smiling comment on her friends' cynical chatter, leaving them to guess whether she was taken in by someone like Mme. Chiang or, in the interests of her own larger purposes, preferred to accent the positive.

The president returned to Washington from Casablanca on January 31. Chiang had not been invited because, the president told Eleanor, Stalin had said he could not meet with Chiang and hope to stay out of war with Japan, but then Stalin himself, in the midst of the battle of Stalingrad, had not been able to come. Their exclusion enraged the Chinese, as Eleanor learned from Mme. Chiang, whom she visited, with a friend, before returning to Washington. The president, to whom she had spoken on the phone, asked her to inform Mme. Chiang that he had obtained agreements from Churchill that would much improve the airplane situation in China. When Eleanor conveyed this information to Mme. Chiang, the tiny figure looked up at her appraisingly, clearly unmoved. Sensing immediately what the coolness implied, Eleanor asked if she had heard from the generalissimo about Casablanca. At first Mme. Chiang refused to say but then in a torrent that mingled ice and fire, China's anger and resentment poured out.

China considered herself a full member of the United Nations, Mme. Chiang began. Global strategy could only be made by all of
the United Nations, or at least the four main ones, never by two only, and then imposed on the rest or simply communicated to them. That was not a democratic way of working together, and if nations did not cooperate as equals during the war, no good peace was possible. China subscribed to the Atlantic Charter and was fighting for the Four Freedoms, not for herself alone, but for all peoples. She and the generalissimo were telling the Chinese people that while they had had a raw deal in the past, in the future it was to be different, that they were to be an equal member of the family of nations. If that was not to be the case, why should China fight on?
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It was an outburst that Eleanor, sensitive to the global nature of the “white supremacy” issue, listened to with sympathy. Would the generalissimo be willing to meet the president at some spot close to China? That would make two, Mme. Chiang answered, and there are four of us. Russia might be worried about Japan, Eleanor pointed out. Mme. Chiang acknowledged that this was a difficulty, but it did not preclude a meeting of Great Britain, the United States, and China.

When Eleanor spoke with the president the next night at dinner, he insisted that the Casablanca discussions had centered on military problems alone, “and they were not China's except where they concerned getting military supplies to China”—mostly planes, and General H. H. Arnold was on the way to Chungking to discuss the airplane situation. But there were other obstacles to the treatment of China as one of the Big Four. Churchill resisted it, because a strong China might threaten Britain's imperial position in the Far East. Roosevelt anticipated less trouble between the United States, Russia, and China, he told his wife, “than between any of us and Great Britain.”
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Several times during Eleanor's visits to the hospital, Mme. Chiang had urged her to come to China, and Eleanor brought the matter up with Harry Hopkins, who had asked to talk to her about the need to set up some UN postwar planning machinery in such fields as food and education. That was all well and good, she wrote, but what was needed at the moment was

more confidence in Russia & China that as a people we want to understand them & their problems & work
with
them. I asked Harry if he thought my going there now during the war would help here & there. He said if I thought so I should make Franklin let me go but to wait until Mme. Chiang came. She will be here next Wednesday & she is now at the Big House in Hyde Park. I think she is going
to surprise Franklin a good deal but she will charm him. She won't lean like Martha of Norway though! She can't be fooled either, somehow it seems to me that she compels honesty.
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Her tartness about Princess Martha was less an expression of irritation with the president for his flirtatiousness—for there was always a Martha for relaxation, she explained to a friend—than it was exasperation over the weakness of the feminine sex. The princess said little, but coquetted like a young girl, making sheep's eyes at the president's sallies and giving her protector, whom she addressed at his request as “dear godfather,” the adoration in which he luxuriated. What man doesn't?
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Mme. Chiang arrived in Washington on February 17, and for almost two weeks Princess Martha was eclipsed. The president and Mrs. Roosevelt met her at Union Station. “My husband has a wonderful way of making people feel that he has known them for a long time,” she wrote in an article for
Colliers
which she decided not to submit. “He calls it his fatherly attitude and I think he used it that day.” At dinner that night there were only the president and Eleanor, Harry Hopkins and his wife, the former Louise Macy whom he had married in July, 1942, and Helen Gahagan Douglas. Eleanor must have advised Mme. Chiang that the president liked ladies to constitute an admiring audience. “She is wise. She listened at dinner & in her half-hour later with F.D.R. she listened but she will talk & she has already asked F.D.R. if I can go back with her!”
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Talk Mme. Chiang did, and most effectively for China's cause. “Mme. Chiang & Franklin had a wonderful press conference this morning. She is very quick.” Eleanor sat with the president and Mme. Chiang, with her left hand resting reassuringly on the right arm of Mme. Chiang's chair. Occasionally during the conference they exchanged quick understanding smiles. Mme. Chiang played to the president, Raymond Clapper observed, “as the big strong man who could work miracles.” The previous day, Eleanor had accompanied her to Capitol Hill for her speeches to Senate and House. Her appearance, Eleanor wrote, “marked the recognition of a woman who, through her own personality and her own service, has achieved a place in the world, not merely as the wife of the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, but as a representative of her people.” It was a revealing observation. She was still unwilling to admit that the place she
herself had achieved in American life was due to her own efforts and personality, but her admiration went to the women who did succeed on their own. As she watched the slim figure in a long black Oriental dress, slit at the sides, come down the aisle escorted by senators who towered over her, Eleanor “could not help a great feeling of pride in her as a woman but when she spoke it was no longer as a woman that one thought of her.”

She would remember “for a long time,” she added, “the applause which both sides of the House gave her when she made a plea that we look upon Japan as our major enemy.” So effective was Mme. Chiang in her advocacy that for a time the Combined Chiefs of Staff feared she might unhinge the “Germany First” strategy of fighting the war. She sometimes held long discussions with the president that went on so late into the evening that Eleanor would have to rescue her and send her to bed, a salvage operation that sometimes ended with Eleanor wading into the discussion herself.
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Mme. Chiang had scarcely left the White House when Prince Olaf and Princess Martha arrived for tea, giving at least one other guest at that tea party the feeling that the handsome princess did not wish to allow even a day to elapse without moving to wipe out the impression Mme. Chiang had made on the president. She was outrageously flirtatious, this guest thought, adding, “Mrs. Roosevelt seems to grow in situations like that and become even more a queen.”
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Some of Eleanor's friends did not share her view that Mme. Chiang was a slit-skirt version of Eleanor Roosevelt. Tommy thought China's First Lady snobbish and spoiled. Harry Hooker, though something of a society gallant himself, was amused to hear Mme. Chiang's niece, Miss Kung, underscore that she was the seventy-sixth generation directly descended from Confucius. He had not known, Harry later confided to Eleanor, that China had its Newport Set.
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Pearl Buck came to dine with Eleanor shortly after Mme. Chiang's stay at the White House. It was a small party and Miss Buck, who, having experienced the generalissimo's rule in Nanking, was evading a public appearance with Mme. Chiang, felt free to speak critically. She questioned Mme. Chiang's use of the word “democracy.” China's First Lady was beautiful but also imperious and expensive, Miss Buck said, and the generalissimo was a great man, but uncouth and, of course, a warlord. China would not develop democratically, she cautioned, unless the United States gave it a strong lead in that direction. Eleanor
indicated that she understood; it had been “very interesting to have Madame Chiang Kai-shek at the White House.”

The novelist was upset that publisher Henry Luce and his group had had so much to do with the arrangements for Mme. Chiang's tour of the United States. Here, too, Eleanor was sympathetic. Although she appreciated Mme. Chiang's desire to have Republican support for China, she had been a little taken aback at her lack of interest in a proposal Eleanor had conveyed from Walter White that Mme. Chiang address a mass meeting under NAACP auspices. Even though Eleanor had indicated her readiness to join Mme. Chiang on the NAACP platform, the Chinese First Lady had decided that she would appear only “under the auspices of her Chinese and American friends.” Nor was she willing even to see White.
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Princess Martha need not have worried that Mme. Chiang might displace her. Eleanor, with a smile that suggested that behind the innocence there was great sophistication, told Pearl Buck that one day she had informed the president he would have the pleasure of dining alone with Mme. Chiang that evening as she (Eleanor) had to be elsewhere, and he had replied firmly, “Indeed I shan't! I am going to bed early!”

“I don't think that Franklin likes women who think they are as good as he is,” Eleanor added wickedly.
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Although the president had enjoyed Mme. Chiang's company, he had few illusions about the hardness behind those calculating eyes. John L. Lewis was threatening a coal strike during the time of Mme. Chiang's White House stay, and the president asked her one evening at dinner how China would deal with such a labor leader. Swiftly and expressively she drew her small ivory hand across her throat. The president looked at his wife and later teased her, “Well, how about your gentle and sweet character?” And in later years Eleanor herself would say softly, “Those delicate little petal-like fingers—you could see some poor wretch's neck being wrung,” and at that point she would make a twisting motion of her own fingers, which were as expressive as Mme. Chiang's.
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When Eleanor had first broached the idea of visiting China to her husband he seemed quite eager to have her go, but she thought it would be a mistake to visit China and not also go to Russia. During his White House visit in May, 1942, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had asked to see her, and they had talked about women in Russia. Eleanor had said she was greatly interested and would like to visit Russia and
see for herself. Molotov said he would remember that, and during Eleanor's visit to England the Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky had made the invitation specific. But the president was reluctant to have her go to Russia: “F.D.R. feels the moment for that hasn't come.” Admiral Standley, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, was threatening to resign if any more dignitaries were sent to him; Willkie's visit had been quite enough for the duration.
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A few weeks later the president ruled out the trip to China, too. “I think he hopes to meet Stalin & Chiang this spring or summer & wants to wait on that,” she wrote a friend. Perhaps he also feared that his wife's visit to China might strengthen the pressures on him to give the Chinese front a higher priority in Allied war plans. Representative Walter Judd, a former missionary in the Far East and a strong advocate of such higher priorities, lunched at the White House and afterward urged Eleanor to visit China, “perhaps going with Madame Chiang when she returns.” Eleanor's cousin, columnist Joseph Alsop, who was with General Claire L. Chennault as a volunteer, was warning of a Chinese collapse “if there is not some sort of immediate, fairly spectacular action to revive the spirit of the Chinese people and troops.” Perhaps the president feared his wife would join this “China lobby.”
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She accepted his decision uncomplainingly. He must, however, have sensed her disappointment, for a few days later he told her he would like her to go to New Zealand and Australia. “I'm glad of course,” she wrote, “as I may see James & I'll see many of our soldiers but it won't be as interesting as China or Russia!” But that suggestion, too, was subject to the vagaries of politics as well as of war: “FDR told me tonight after the Congressional party that the gentlemen were clamoring to go to the front & he thought it might be impossible to send them & in that case I would also be barred. I told him anything he decided was all right with me. I wanted to be a help & not a bother.” However, C. R. Smith, who was at Air Transport Command, was asked to begin to plan her itinerary. “It would mean stopping everywhere. . . . Incidentally Australian and New Zealand officials have both asked but Franklin is still doubtful because of Congressional desires to visit in large numbers every front.”
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Mme. Chiang came back to Washington after a triumphal tour of the country and again urged the president to permit Eleanor to visit her in Chungking, but the president would only vouchsafe a vague “sometime in the future” reply. Yet the increasingly clamorous “third
world” could not be ignored. She wrote a friend that, “Next week the Liberian President comes, & won't that be a funny dinner? I really wish it wasn't a stag party for I'd like to observe Senators Connally & Barkley & one or two others!” She accompanied the president to a meeting with the president of Mexico on the U.S.-Mexican border and then went on to visit Japanese-American relocation camps in Arizona. “I just asked F.D.R. if I could take on an American-Japanese family but he says the Secret Service wouldn't allow it.”
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