Woman of Valor (63 page)

From Tucson, Margaret announced immediately that she was prepared to debate Eisenhower in order to “straighten him out” on the question of family planning, and her statement made headlines as far away as Tokyo. She then wrote a letter to
The New York Times
insisting on the importance of population control to future world peace and protesting the position of the Catholic Church. Prominently displayed in the Sunday edition, it provoked an immediate exchange between Senator Kennedy and reporters on that morning's edition of “Meet the Press” in which he again protested his independence.

Shortly after the program aired, the telephone rang at Margaret's house, and her old friend, Norman Thomas, was on the line. Margaret almost always stayed clear of partisan politics and quietly cast her Presidential ballot for Thomas, but the lively, perennial candidate of the Socialist Party urged her to become more actively involved on this occasion by pointing out to the press that Kennedy's longtime acquiescence to church interference during successive referenda on the question of reforming punitive birth control laws in Massachusetts surely belied his claims of autonomy. She rose to the challenge and immediately wrote Kennedy a letter along the lines Thomas suggested, but when she never received any response, she seems to have dropped the matter. Nor did Thomas pursue it, his restrained, gentlemanly demeanor in campaigns being legendary.
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Had Margaret been twenty years younger, or perhaps just a bit healthier, she might have been less reticent. She did create international headlines once again after Kennedy's nomination, when she baldly announced that she would leave the country if he were elected, but the empty threat of an old woman in the middle of a hot summer hardly stirred up much of a fracas. Just two weeks before the November vote, however, three Catholic bishops in Puerto Rico issued a pastoral letter instructing their parishioners to oppose the island's popular incumbent governor, Munoz Marin, because he had endorsed public schools and birth control, and Washington's political reporters went crazy over the story. Catholic spokesmen in Washington quickly repudiated the statement, and Kennedy himself condemned the church-state interference, but according to the memoir by his aide, Theodore Sorensen, he knew he had been hurt. “If enough voters realize that Puerto Rico is American soil,” Kennedy is reported to have said, “this election is lost.”

It was, indeed, won with just over 100,000 votes out of more than 68 million cast, and various pollsters estimated that from 1 to 2 million voters deserted Kennedy in the last two weeks of the election when the Puerto Rican story broke. For the second time in her life, Margaret voted for a Republican Presidential candidate and announced publicly that religion was the reason. She then added that mutual friends were assuring her that the new President had an open mind and promised to give him a year before making good on her threat to find another place to live.
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The election controversy generated a windfall of publicity for birth control advocates. More Americans than ever before became aware of the world population problem.
Reader's Digest
, with some 15 million subscribers, featured a flattering biographical portrait of Margaret. NBC News tried to match the ratings of the CBS show on India with an investigative piece of its own on Hong Kong.
Newsweek
prepared a special report on the “crisis,” and Vance Packard wrote a best-seller on the subject. Planned Parenthood presented a statement of conviction about overpopulation to the United Nations, signed by 200 internationally prominent individuals, including thirty-eight Nobel laureates. Even the once publicity shy Population Council contracted with a public affairs agency and issued a pamphlet called
This Crowded World
.

According to population policy analyst Phyllis Tilson Piotrow, the election of a Catholic President, publicly committed to analyzing the matter in terms of objective national interest—rather than as a religious or moral dilemma—put great pressure on all parties to work toward reconciliation. Perhaps, as President Eisenhower is reported to have said privately, a Catholic in the White House might be able to accomplish what a Protestant could not.
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For the time being, however, the matter remained in private hands. Incensed by Eisenhower's public disavowal of the Draper Panel, Hugh Moore called a group of prominent citizens together in Princeton, New Jersey, in March of 1960 to consider what could be done voluntarily to address the population issue. Margaret promised to be there—“if humanly possible, if I have to crawl,” as she put it. Though quite nervous about her health, she did make the trip and brought along $25,000 from Martha Rockefeller toward the $100,000 that Moore put together to launch a World Population Emergency Campaign, which would run for two years and generate a membership of 10,000 individuals and more than a million dollars in funding for the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

So long as Moore could attract powerful men to the cause, like General Draper and Lammot duPont Copeland, of the industrial family, Margaret was willing to forgive the Dixie Cup king his rhetorical excesses, not to mention the fact that he was already on his fourth wife, whom she not so incidentally described as “beautiful and young,” in a gossipy letter to Mrs. Rockefeller. Moore, in turn, recognized the mass marketing potential of Margaret's name, and asked her to sign a direct mail fund-raising appeal and a full-page advertisement in
The New York Times
, after agreeing to her demand that the population crisis be postured as a humanitarian concern, with all references to the threat of Communism excised from the text. Responses came back with small contributions and tender greetings from women who had followed Margaret's career throughout the years—one who first heard her speak in 1916 and then organized clinics in California, another who said that reading
Woman and the New Race
had changed her life. An ever vigilant Federal Bureau of Investigation also noticed the salutation and, seeing Margaret's name, transmitted a copy of the letter to the agencies in its regular security network. Only one apparently bothered to respond. A baffled William Josephson, then the young and earnest general counsel at the Peace Corps, took the time to note that he didn't think the matter warranted any further investigation.
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Had Margaret known about this internal communication, the interest J. Edgar Hoover and his agents demonstrated in her might have meant a great deal, or, at least, given her a good laugh. Alone much of the time in Tucson, she was drinking more and taking stronger doses of Demerol to ease her pain. In March of 1961, a fund-raising consultant hired by the World Population Emergency Campaign orchestrated a tribute in New York to honor her forty-fifth anniversary as a birth control advocate. The tragic deterioration in her physical and emotional condition is evident in the handwritten note she sent in response to his invitation, admitting that she was not “so rugged” as in the past but nevertheless hoped she could “pep up” and come to New York for the celebration. With the help of a secretary, she then wrote a more cogent reply admitting no less poignantly: “I cannot tell you how my heart goes out to you for all you are doing. As a matter of fact, you are the only one in recent years who has any knowledge of the history of the Movement or that Margaret Sanger had anything to do with it. It is to laugh, but that is the way it is.”

The notable British scientist Sir Julian Huxley chaired the event, which included a dinner and a symposium of eminent scholars, physicians, and policymakers speaking about world population. Agnes Meyer, who had died in the interim, gave the initial gift that made it all possible, and Katherine McCormick provided the basis of a $100,000 endowment for IPPF to be maintained in Margaret's name. An eloquent testimonial was prepared, including greetings from friends in thirty-five countries and a charming printed program with old photographs of Margaret.
The New York Times
made her its “Woman in the News,” while to everyone's surprise, an article in the Catholic journal,
America
, for the first time acknowledged the existence of an international population problem but rejected the position of those who would “Sangerize” the world, contending that so long as Communist countries were encouraging growth, so should nations in the free world.

Stuart Sanger accompanied his mother to New York, and he assisted her to the podium to deliver a brief message of thanks. Emotionally overwhelmed and exhausted by the experience, however, she then nodded off to sleep at the dais and was returned immediately to her hotel room. It was her last appearance in public.

Back in Tucson a new doctor slowly weaned Margaret of her addiction to painkillers and limited her to one drink a day. By the testimony of friends, she was serene and at peace with herself as she had not been in years, but even as she grew stronger and more coherent, she could no longer live alone or manage her own affairs. Barbara Sanger dutifully came in every day to check up on her, but the Sanger girls were grown and had left Tucson, and Stuart seemed utterly incapable of dealing with the dependency of the figure whose difficult but forceful presence had dominated his life for so long. Neither he nor Grant ever told their mother of William Sanger's death at the age of eighty-seven from a heart attack on July 25, 1961. And Bill, in turn, never saw the poignant letter Margaret had written forty-two years earlier to be given to him after her own death. She had looked at it herself on several occasions, but never made any practical arrangements to ensure its delivery.

Olive Byrne Richard had retired to Tucson and stopped by regularly to assist Margaret with correspondence and other domestic chores. She remembers her sitting for hours in the corner of the large living room she had furnished in a minimalist Oriental style. All of a sudden, Margaret began to fill every available surface with old photographs of family and friends that seemed strangely out of place in these spare surroundings. Yet they provided the only company she could find.
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In the fall of 1961, Ellen Watumull asked friends and former colleagues to join her in a friendly conspiracy. Margaret was feeling much better than in the past, but there are times when she feels completely forgotten, Watumull confided. Would they write occasionally with news of what was happening in their part of the world? Would they bring some problem to Margaret's attention, ask her advice, needle her a bit about some controversy? Would they send her a book review, a news clipping, or just a postcard?

A typical response came from John D. Rockefeller III, who had just received the Lasker Award for family planning and had also spoken in Rome before a United Nations assembly. “In these two public appearances I realized that what I was doing was following in your footsteps—in a small way helping to carry forward the tremendously important work for which you were so largely responsible,” he wrote. And then, lest the letter sound too programmed, perhaps, he added a personal note. “I remember so well how much my mother and father used to enjoy their visits with you in Arizona. They spoke of you often. My personal regret is that our paths have not crossed more often.”

Within two weeks, Rockefeller received two responses to his greetings. The first carried on obsequiously about the “splendid heritage” of the Rockefeller family. The second, asking for money to fund the deficit of the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in New York, demonstrated that Margaret might be down but could not yet be counted out. Rockefeller instructed his staff to investigate why Planned Parenthood in New York was not taking responsibility for the clinic, which seemed to him only proper, but on the grounds that he did not support freestanding medical institutions, he never made a contribution and never wrote again.
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In his remarks at the Sanger anniversary symposium, Marriner Eccles, a former New Dealer and chairman of the Federal Reserve, had predicted that the rate of world population growth might prove more explosive than the atomic or hydrogen bomb. The alarmist rhetoric occasioned an editorial in
The New York Times
, which called on the Kennedy administration to accept the recommendations of the Draper Report and assist friendly nations in population planning at their request. Key appointees at the State Department did not disagree with this proposal in principle but determined, after extensive internal debate, that active intervention by the United States was simply not “feasible” because of religious and social obstacles at home. A compromise strategy recommended that the federal government quietly support more extensive demographic and medical research through the National Institutes of Health, but a report proposing a preliminary agenda for work by the agency was then quashed in 1962 by politically timid advisers to the President. All this in spite of an increasing recognition that the Kennedy Administration's desire to leave a strong and innovative foreign aid program as its legacy was being compromised by the magnitude of a staggering world population problem. Further capitulation to fears of inciting the Catholic Church was also evident that year at the United Nations, where the United States at first supported, but then, by abstaining on a necessary second vote, helped to defeat, a resolution introduced by the government of Sweden permitting technical assistance in population planning to nations requesting it.
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As the Kennedy administration waffled, however, an extraordinary mobilization of private resources for addressing the population issue took place. The budget of the Population Council expanded fivefold, while the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations got ready to make a major commitment of their own resources to programs in the population field. Following its dramatic successes in fund-raising and public relations, the World Population Emergency Campaign merged with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America on the grounds that a single organization marketing family planning at home and abroad would be more effective. Cass Canfield, the highly considered and well-connected head of the publishing firm of Harper & Row, who was already serving as chairman of Planned Parenthood's board, took charge of the combined organization. The venerable Alan Guttmacher of Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York then retired from medical practice and replaced William Vogt as a full-time president and chief executive officer.