The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (70 page)

There was a time, at the outset, when people disillusioned by the League of Nations could scoff at the idea of another world organization designed to work for the peaceful settlement of international disputes. But that time has passed. Today we are seeing more and more clearly that it
can
work, that it
does
work, and it will be increasingly effective if we back it with all our strength. After all, it is because it is an effective organization that Mr. Khrushchev has been so determined to destroy it.

My estimate of Mr. Khrushchev’s purpose has been challenged by Professor Golunsky, of the Soviet delegation to the UN. He says I have completely misunderstood Mr. Khrushchev. He points out that five major nations were able to agree on the establishment of the UN. Why, then, could not three heads be set up to carry it further? Obviously, this is ridiculous because, while Mr. Khrushchev’s course could be represented by one of the three heads, since satellites are never allowed to differ, the Western countries have many differences and it would be impossible for one head to represent all the divergent opinions. The same thing holds true for the neutralists.

Clearly, colonialism is practically dead. In a very few places there has been some resistance on the part of colonial powers, but the great majority of the nations in Africa which are now becoming free have been granted this freedom by the colonial powers themselves.

If Mr. Khrushchev really believes in the self-determination of peoples, he should allow a free election under United Nations supervision in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Albania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany—all Russian satellites.

One can well understand the desire of the emerging African states to remain free of the cold war in Europe, and one hopes that this will be possible. They have troubles enough of their own in setting up governments and in finding peaceful accommodations between their own tribes. Nkruma, head of the Ghana delegation, has suggested that an African agency, working under the UN, be responsible for the solutions of the African situations which are probably going to arise pretty continuously for a long time. This may be a good suggestion, and I think it should be carefully discussed between the African groups themselves and the Secretary-General.

One result of Mr. Khrushchev’s attack on the Secretary-General was the tremendous tribute paid to Dag Hammarskjöld in the vote of the UN special session. The adopted resolution passed 70 to 0 with a number of abstentions.

In passing the resolution the General Assembly called on all states to refrain from sending military aid to the Congo, except on request of the UN through the Secretary-General. This, of course, will only be done for a temporary period until the Congolese can work out their own difficulties and set up a central government. After that, it is hoped there will be no further need for UN military forces.

But, while Mr. Khrushchev was sternly rebuffed by the UN and endured a total defeat in his attempt to destroy the organization, one question troubled me then and still troubles me. For it was not all defeat. Mr. Khrushchev banged his shoe on the table, he shouted, he interrupted, he behaved hysterically and with gross bad manners. But this was not a pointless exhibition. There was method in it. By his clowning and his interruptions during Mr. Macmillan’s excellent speech, he succeeded in forcing the newspapers to carry so much about his capers that the focus of interest was on him and therefore the impact of Mr. Macmillan’s presentation was lessened.

What worried me most was that I did not feel that any one of the Western delegates succeeded in giving a real sense of inspiration about the ideals of democracy. No one said, with the force and the passionate conviction with which Mr. Khrushchev discusses Communism, what we are all about. And yet that is the one thing the Russians most fear, the one thing they cannot combat, the one thing they cannot compete with by production and more production, by space ships and space men. Indeed, it seems apparent to me that the focus has been deliberately thrown on outer space by the Russians to distract attention from our essential differences, to lead us cleverly to try to compete in outer space, to distract attention from the fact that, if people knew the true situation, knew what we stand for, what we live by, there could be no real competition at all.

Some leader must appear from the West who can put into words not the advantages of any form of economy, or any degree of production, but the inspiration of belief in the dignity of man and the value of the human individual. This is the basic difference; this is what we of the West must really fight for, and speak out about in ringing tones.

I would like to say, however, that I do not feel that we, as individuals or as a nation, gain either in dignity or in prestige by refusing to know the people who lead the great opposition to our way of life, by refusing to deal with them in friendship or at least with good manners when possible, or by refusing to learn to understand them as far as we can. To refuse to know or understand the opposition seems to me madness. It reminds me of one of the strangest attitudes during World War I when German was no longer taught in our schools, apparently on the theory that we could deal better with people with whom we could not communicate.

Because on his first visit to America Mr. Khrushchev had paid a most unsatisfactory and fleeting visit to Hyde Park and had been deprived of his lunch, I tried to make up for this situation by asking him to lunch or tea on his second visit. I got a prompt reply saying that he would be glad to come to tea.

On his arrival in this country, of course, he had proceeded to behave badly, trying to destroy the UN because he had not been able to get his own way and had been put out of the Congo just as we had been put out; trying, too, to exploit as far as possible the differences between Castro and the United States government. As a result of these antics, I had written several columns about his efforts to wreck the United Nations, so when the time for the tea arrived, I was rather dreading it.

The only other person I asked was Mrs. Kermit Roosevelt, who said she would pour. Mr. Khrushchev arrived, bringing Mr. Gromyko, Ambassador Mikhail Menshikov, and an interpreter. On the whole, our meeting was outwardly very friendly. He lost no time, however, in telling me about the growing economic strength of the Soviet Union, the increasing amount of iron ore, the fact that in twenty years they would be producing an astronomical amount of steel.

I remarked gently that if you produced that amount of steel you would have to have a market for it. That would require a rise in the standard of living in Russia and China, if they were to accomplish their objective.

As usual, within a couple of days after Mr. Khrushchev came to tea I began to receive letters that were more emotional than thoughtful and that took me to task sharply and bitterly for entertaining in my house the head of a great foreign power because his system of government happened to be different from our own. How, I wonder, do these people feel that we can learn to live together—as we must—if we cannot sit down over a cup of tea and quietly discuss our differences. At least, Mr. Khrushchev remarked at the end of our first long interview at Yalta, we didn’t shoot at each other!

During all these years, of course, I have continued my regular newspaper column, which has run since 1935. After the Warsaw meeting I changed from a regular five-day column to a somewhat longer column which appears three times a week. I have continued, too, with my monthly magazine page, with my work for the A.A.U.N., with radio and television work, and with the lectures that take me far and wide.

And then, in spite of all my protestations that I would never again campaign actively, I did take part in John Kennedy’s campaign for the Presidency, not so strenuously as I had worked four years earlier for Adlai Stevenson but as well as I could with the commitments I already had to carry out.

Having supported Adlai Stevenson during the convention, I was uncertain what I would do after the nomination. I withheld my decision to join Herbert Lehman as honorary chairman of the Democratic Citizens Committee of New York until I might have a chance to see and talk with the Democratic candidate and judge his qualities for myself.

When he came to see me at Hyde Park I found him a brilliant man with a quick mind, anxious to learn, hospitable to new ideas, hardheaded in his approach. Here, I thought, with an upsurge of hope and confidence, is a man who wants to leave behind him a record not only of having helped his countrymen but of having helped humanity as well. He was not simply ambitious to be president; he wanted, I felt convinced, to be a truly great president. He neither desired nor expected his task to be easy. He saw clearly the position of the United States in the world today as well as the shortcomings at home and was both too honorable and too courageous to color these unpalatable facts or distort them.

He believed that Americans could, as they have done in the past, meet and conquer the obstacles before them, but only if they knew what the obstacles were, what the conditions were, what must be done, by sacrifice, if necessary, by courage and conviction, certainly, to accomplish our ends.

And yet, because what happens in the next few years may well settle the future of the world for decades if not for longer, I waited, knowing what hinged on this election, for the first of the Great Debates. After that, I had no further hesitation. On the one side, I heard that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, that we lived in a country without unemployment or want, that our world leadership was unchallenged, and that it was, presumably, un-American to think differently. On the other side, I heard the less popular story, the one I had met face to face, over and over, in my travels around this country and around the world.

So I took part in the campaign. Unfortunately, I started out under a slight handicap as I picked up a virus and was far from feeling well, but I traveled to California by plane one afternoon and the next day was a fair example of what followed. In the morning, press conferences, television interviews, radio spots. A hasty bite of lunch. A long drive to a totally unimportant meeting. A long drive back. A brief rest at the home of my friend Mrs. Hershey Martin. A big meeting in a church, a meeting in a theater, a quick dinner, and a plane back to New York.

One day at home—and whenever I was at home I had meetings in various parts of the city—then a day in West Virginia, where we traveled 250 miles, stopping to shake hands and speak to outdoor crowds ten or eleven times. An hour’s rest, a large rally, and back to New York by a small plane.

I campaigned in four states in the Middle West, two of which, I am glad to say, turned up in Mr. Kennedy’s column. In the other two I felt I had not been very effective.

Again I say I am never going to campaign again. After all, next time I will be eighty and that would be absurd.

As the campaign advanced and I followed Mr. Kennedy’s speeches, I came more and more to believe that he has the power to engender the sense of identification with him which is so important. If a man has this quality he can call out the best that is in people. Today the United States needs to be reminded of its greatness, and the greatness of a nation can never be more than the greatness of its people.

If my observation is correct, I have more hope for the solution of our problems than I have had for a long time. This does not mean that I am sure we can solve them all or that we will not make mistakes. But I do now have hope.

One feature of the campaign that dismayed and shamed me was the injection of the religious issue. It is a long time since I sat in my office and read the scurrilous literature that came into the Democratic headquarters during Alfred E. Smith’s candidacy. Nothing quite so vicious happened during the 1960 campaign.

But the ugly feature was that it should arise at all. The question seems to me fairly simple. The Constitution gives us all religious freedom and we are not to be questioned about our religious beliefs. Some preposterous notions were set loose during the campaign: the Pope would dictate our form of government, our way of life, our education, our reading. The Catholic Church would dominate the nation politically as well as spiritually. This idea, of course, arises from the fact that in Spain, which is a Catholic country, the church does, for the most part, control the state. But Spain is not the United States and we have a Constitution which expressly provides for separation of church and state.

It is, I am afraid, true that frequently various religious groups endeavor to exert pressures and control over different legislative and educational fields. It is the job of all of us to be alert for such infringement of our prerogatives and prevent any such attempts from being successful. Like all our freedoms, this freedom from religious-group pressure must be constantly defended.

What seemed to me most deplorable was not the fact that so many people feared the strength of the Roman Catholic Church; it was that they had no faith in the strength of their own way of life and their own Constitution. Have we forgotten so quickly that our Founding Fathers came here for religious freedom—Protestants, Catholics, Quakers—for the right to worship God as they chose? This is our foundation stone. I, for one, believe in it with all my heart, and I reject, with shame and indignation, the fear, the lack of faith, the shaken confidence of those who would topple the stone on which we stand so proudly.

When the Great Debates had ended and another election was over, one could sit back, in a new quiet and calmness of spirit, to weigh what had happened. One thing I believe no one would challenge: the debates were a landmark in democratic procedure; they brought before the people of the whole country the candidates and their views. They stimulated a new interest in the issues, they emphasized the importance of the voting public’s familiarizing itself with the issues at stake; they made the citizens, as they should be, a vital and participating element, with a stake in what happens to their country. The telling point, of course, is that, as a result of the debates, more people voted than have ever voted in the history of the country. And that was a victory for the democratic system.