The 40s: The Story of a Decade (75 page)

Shortly after her husband’s death, Mrs. Roosevelt announced that she intended to lead a “private and inconspicuous existence.” It was her idea to devote her working hours merely to her newspaper column, her
Ladies’ Home Journal
articles, and the writing of a book of memoirs that would be a sequel to an autobiographical volume,
This Is My Story
, which was published in 1937. Thus far, her private existence has been so limited that she has been able to get only halfway through the book. A man who has seen some of the early chapters says that it looks like a promising entry in the sweepstakes for reminiscences that depend for their appeal mainly on the authors’ relationship to President Roosevelt. “There won’t be anything sensational in Mrs. R.’s book,” he said. “It’ll just probably be the definitive one of the lot.” Her hopes of enjoying a tranquil life ended in December, 1945, when President Truman appointed her a representative in the United Nations General Assembly. He did this on the recommendation of the State Department, which was eager to have a woman on the United States team and decided, despite the demurrers of some of its more conservative officials, that Mrs. Roosevelt was the ideal choice for this distaff role. She took the job gladly, having often expressed high hopes for the United Nations and for the idea of having an American woman in its General Assembly. She got along amicably with the State Department until it did a back flip on Palestine this March. Since then, her disagreement with parts of the Middle East aspect of our foreign policy has been sharp and outspoken. A high-ranking statesman was overheard to observe after a recent conference with her, “That was the most effective ‘damn’ I ever heard.”

Mrs. Roosevelt’s language is usually impeccable, but her performance as a United Nations delegate has not been notable for the ladylike decorum that the State Department may have had in mind. She is often
thought to be a dreamy, idealistic type of woman, incapable of the practical, down-to-earth wrangling expected of male statesmen. She
is
idealistic, and, as she has admitted, she is vague, but at the United Nations she has demonstrated many times that she can be exceedingly practical, and even tough, though in an outwardly dreamy and idealistic way. Every now and then, she will retort as quickly as possible to a statement by another delegate, as if motivated only by a righteous, womanly instinct to get in a word fast. Actually, her haste is apt to be prompted by her familiarity with newspaper deadlines and by her extremely practical realization that a rebuttal attains widest notice if published coincidentally with the remarks that provoked it. This knowledgeable trick is referred to admiringly in the State Department as the “smother technique.” Mrs. Roosevelt has, moreover, polished to a high degree an effective method of debating that comes naturally to her but of the value of which experience has made her thoroughly aware—a shy, Socratic approach to the matter at hand. In an arena dominated by men who seem to have made up their minds, she goes out of her way not to appear opinionated, even though her own mind may be pretty well made up, too. “Now, of course, I’m a woman and I don’t understand all these things,” she will remark softly, almost maternally, “and I’m sure there’s a great deal to be said for your arguments, but don’t you think it would be a good idea if …” Stating her position hesitantly, interrogatively, and above all sensibly, she sometimes manages to elicit a “Yes” or a “Maybe” from someone who a moment before had seemed in immutable opposition. This might be called the mother technique. A State Department career man, after watching her artfully maneuver her way through a delicate discussion, once murmured, “Never have I seen naïveté and cunning so gracefully blended.” On the whole, Mrs. Roosevelt gets along better with the men accredited to the United Nations than with the women. Occasionally, to be sure, her outlook seems conventionally feminine. “No one can ever tell me that women like to talk longer than men,” she wrote in her column after one session, and “I’m frank to say it is always a surprise to me to find how passionately men can feel about rules of procedure” after another. All in all, however, she takes a dispassionate view of feminism, and at times she apparently regards herself as not typical of her sex. Reflecting in “My Day” on a conversation about current events with three of her four sons and their wives, she intimated that in such discussions women perhaps belong in the background but that the rules of the game do not apply to her. “Now here we were again,” she wrote, “all of us arguing
passionately on ideas, all of us trying to talk at once, even the wives becoming so interested that they could not help but join in!”

· · ·

Until Mrs. Roosevelt got into the United Nations, she had had very little experience in dealing with public affairs at the diplomatic or conference level. She made no bones about the fact that the tactical intricacies of international negotiation were largely unknown to her, and, shortly before the Assembly convened in London, she wrote in her column, “Some things I can take to the first meeting—a sincere desire to understand the problems of the rest of the world and our relationship to them; a real good-will for all the peoples throughout the world; a hope that I shall be able to build a sense of personal trust and friendship with my co-workers, for without that type of understanding our work would be doubly difficult.” The United States delegation sailed on the Queen Elizabeth. It was a fairly historic occasion—the beginning of this country’s participation in a fellowship of nations—and some of our departing standard-bearers understandably made the most of the event, turning up at the pier in glittering limousines with a retinue of well-wishers and intoning solemn prepared farewell statements while floodlights warmed them and newsreel cameras purred flatteringly. Mrs. Roosevelt arrived alone in a taxi and proceeded along the pier unobserved until a Customs man spotted her and escorted her on board. The following day, a statement
she
had prepared in advance was published in her column. “The day is here at last when I am to set sail, apparently with quite a number of others, for London Town!” she said. “I am told we will be ‘briefed,’ whatever this may mean, during the trip.… I need it in the worst possible way.”

Whether an American spokesman at an official international gathering has been thoroughly briefed or not depends pretty much on his inclinations and durability. Not far from the portals of all major conference chambers there are obscure State Department career experts on one aspect of foreign policy or another to whom briefing comes as easily as breathing. They stand ready to provide our delegates with up-to-the-minute, authoritative counsel, and they, or even more shadowy aides, prepare thoughtful essays setting forth the official United States position on all foreseeable points of contention. These documents are called “position papers.” As a rule, they come to the delegates bound in folders and are then called “position books.” The delegates are not, of course, supposed merely to parrot the sentiments expressed in these treatises. Our
representatives on United Nations committees and commissions are counted upon to use their own knowledge, intelligence, initiative, instinct, skill, and viewpoints in reconciling the United States position to that of other nations—without, however, straying in any important respect from Department policy—in order to arrive, if possible, at a multilaterally satisfactory solution of the issue under discussion. The delegates, who are expected to read the position books, along with many supplementary texts, between the conclusion of one long-drawn-out meeting and the beginning of the next, informally call this literature “homework.” Its unsung authors know that much of it is not read or, at best, is hastily skimmed, so they were flabbergasted, in London, when Mrs. Roosevelt accepted her homework gratefully and did all of it, an unorthodox practice to which she has heroically adhered ever since. She showed further signs of eccentricity in London by remarking that her hotel accommodations seemed unnecessarily elegant, by making an effort to attend every session she was supposed to attend, and by being on time. So unflagging was her devotion to duty that when the King and Queen of England invited her to a private luncheon one day, she replied, to the astonishment of several State Department protocol men, that she would be delighted to come but that she’d have to leave early, to make a subcommittee meeting.

Our delegates to each session of the General Assembly are picked by the President, and their assignments lapse upon adjournment. Mrs. Roosevelt is the only American who has been an official representative at every regular Assembly session. Her appointment to the Human Rights Commission, in April, 1946, was a separate one, for the duration (four years) of the United States’ current term of service in that group. She was immediately elected chairman by its other members. The commission has been engaged principally in framing an International Bill of Rights. Some United Nations officials do not consider this as urgent a piece of business as, say, the control of atomic energy, but Mrs. Roosevelt feels that it is time the United Nations stated clearly and ringingly what rights it thinks its member nations should guarantee the individuals residing in them. Our State Department, and Mrs. Roosevelt, originally had in mind simply a brief declaration of fundamental rights, possibly to be followed later on by one or more covenants setting forth basic civil rights, along the lines of the American Bill of Rights. The Soviet Union was agreeable, but whenever anybody brought up the subject of the exact contents, the U.S.S.R. delegate and his cohorts insisted on putting all
the emphasis on economic rights—like the right to work, the right to be housed, the right to free medical care, and so on. The majority of the other nations represented on the commission were not satisfied with the idea of beginning merely with a declaration. They wanted a formal covenant to be drawn up at the same time, and they won their point at Geneva. “We often make the mistake of thinking, when we go into an international meeting,” Mrs. Roosevelt said afterward, “that our views will naturally please everyone else. Besides, you really couldn’t blame the small nations for feeling the way they did. Many of the things that happened to some of them during the war might not have happened if there had been existing and binding international agreement on what human rights could not be violated.” The project is still in draft form—a declaration, a covenant, and a section dealing with proposals for implementing the covenant. The Commission is now revising these at Lake Success, on the basis of recommendations by the United Nations’ fifty-eight member states. By the end of this month Mrs. Roosevelt hopes to have a final draft ready for the Economic and Social Council, which, if it endorses this version, will pass it along to the General Assembly for consideration at its next regular session, in September. If the Assembly approves the bill, the covenant will be submitted to the member nations for ratification, and if ratified (locally, if it were regarded as a treaty, the United States Senate would have to approve it by a two-thirds vote), it will become binding—if, that is, it can be enforced.

Mrs. Roosevelt approached her work on the Human Rights Commission with the skittish self-deprecation that has characterized her sorties into other fields. “The writing of a preliminary draft of the bill of rights,” she confessed in her column, “may not seem so terrifying to my colleagues in the drafting group…all of whom are learned gentlemen. But to me it seems a task for which I am ill-equipped. However, I may be able to help them put into words the high thoughts which they can gather from past history and from the actuality of the contemporary situation, so that the average human being can understand and strive for the objectives set forth. I used to tell my husband that, if he could make
me
understand something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country—and perhaps that will be my real value to the drafting commission!” Mrs. Roosevelt has since admitted that she is surer of herself than that, and while it would be impossible to credit any one person with sole responsibility for a statute so often rephrased as the bill already has been, in United Nations circles it is generally conceded to be her baby.

Mrs. Roosevelt has run her commission as firmly and efficiently as she has run her private life. Two and a half years ago, she was an indifferent parliamentarian, and it still seems to bother her a bit when she has to cut off a speaker in mid-flourish, but nowadays she can chairman a meeting as expertly as if she had been born with an “Out of order” on her lips. When the Geneva meeting was convened, last December, some of the delegates muttered gloomily that, because of the inevitable tendency of such conferences to drag on, they wouldn’t get home for Christmas. Mrs. Roosevelt had sixteen grandchildren (she now has one more), and she likes to spend Christmas with her family. On December 3rd, she announced from the chair that she expected the delegates to attend to all the items on their agenda in the next two weeks. The commission wound up its business at eleven-thirty on the night of December 17th. Later, Mrs. Roosevelt was asked by the envious chairman of another commission how she had managed this minor miracle. “There was nothing to it,” she replied. “I simply made them work from the beginning exactly as people at conferences usually do at the very end.” As the delegates were bidding each other farewell, the Soviet representative complained good-humoredly to her that Madam Chairman had driven everybody too hard, and that while she didn’t appear terribly tired, his wife, who had served him as secretary and interpreter, was exhausted. Mrs. Roosevelt was not feeling good-humored about her colleague—who, she thought, had been needlessly severe toward the delegates of several small nations who had disagreed with him at the meeting—and in saying goodbye to the Russian she emphatically indicated her devotion to the human right of freedom of expression by murmuring that she was sorry to hear about his wife but glad that he had learned that even in the decadent democracies some people knew how to work.

As a rule, Mrs. Roosevelt sternly forbids herself the luxury of any overt show of exasperation. Her patience is formidable, but once or twice she has, if not quite lost it, at least mislaid it momentarily. Last fall, she delivered a sharp impromptu lecture to the General Assembly’s Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee, which had just been treated to a statement on war-mongering and slander by a Yugoslav humanitarian. “The longer I listen to this committee and I hear what happens in other committees,” Mrs. Roosevelt said, “the more I think the time has come for some very straight thinking among us all. The ultimate objective that we have is to create better understanding among us, and I well acknowledge that this is going to be difficult. And I will give you the reasons
why. I have never yet heard a representative of any of the U.S.S.R. group acknowledge that in any way their government can be wrong. They may say it at home—I do not know—and they may think it is wrong to do it outside. They are very young, and the young rarely do acknowledge anything which they may have done that may not be quite right. With maturity we grow much more humble, and we know that we have to acknowledge very often that things are not quite perfect. [At this point, two listening officials of the State Department, which traditionally takes an unkindly view of acknowledging American imperfections, looked at each other and gulped.] Because we acknowledge it does not mean that we love our country any less, that we do not basically believe in the rightness of the things that exist in our country. What it does mean is that we know that human nature is not perfect and that we hope that all of us can contribute to something better.” She concluded with, “Now, I don’t expect the millennium immediately, but I do expect and hope and pray that we are going to see a gradual increase in good will rather than a continual backwards and forwards of telling us what dogs we are and how bad we are. I see no use in that at all. I am weary of it all, and all I can say to my colleagues is that I hope we can work with good will.”