by Marc Peyser
Capitol Hill was Alice’s main stage, but it wasn’t the only place she received the superstar treatment. In 1945, the brilliant but rabidly anti-Semitic poet Ezra Pound was sentenced to St. Elizabeths mental hospital near Washington after a judge ruled that a series of anti-American radio broadcasts he made in Italy during the war amounted to treason. Not long after Pound began his internment, Robert Lowell, one of many eminent American writers who lobbied for Pound’s release, asked him what, if anything, might help his case. “Well, I’d like to meet Alice Longworth,” said Pound. “She is a good friend of Senator Robert Taft, who will win the presidential nomination at the Republican Convention this summer. Taft will be elected in November, and I have something that I want him to read. If he reads it, America will be saved.”15
Pound was wrong about Taft—needless to say, his political instincts were consistently rotten—and the reading material that would “save” America turned out to be his translation of a Confucius essay called “Unwobbling Pivot.” Still, after her first visit, Alice became a regular at St. Elizabeths, alongside author Huntington Cairns, the librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, and a string of eminent writers from T. S. Eliot to E. E. Cummings. “In the winter it was really unpleasant. You had to go through one locked door after another, and there he was in an alcove off the general ward…occasionally a fellow inmate slouching in, staring at him,” Alice remembered. “He used to wear three hats piled on top of each other. At the time it seemed quite natural, but now as I look back it does seem rather odd.”16 Pound held special appeal for Alice, a woman who had memorized far more poetry than most people read in a lifetime. He had also been an unabashed fan of TR. More recently, he had emerged as something of the in-house bad boy among conservatives who had opposed the war and, especially, FDR. Certainly the Democrats weren’t looking to help the foul poet. At one point, Pound did try to take his case to Eleanor, writing to her sporadically and flattering her as “Madame President” and “Her Excellency Mrs. Roosevelt” in hopes that she would convey his isolationist views to the president.17 Many years later, after the war and after his letters to Eleanor had all gone unanswered, Pound changed his tune. “[She] has carried vulgarity to the point of obscenity,” he wrote to a friend, “and has the mind of a lavatory attendant.”18
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Alice was called many names over the years, but no one ever accused her of being simpleminded. After all, there weren’t many people—not to mention people who had never attended high school—who could chat about Confucianism with Ezra Pound one day and champion an obscure book of short stories set in Polynesia the next. In fact, if it weren’t for Alice, the world might never have heard of James Michener or his Tales of the South Pacific. Omnivorous, nocturnal reader that she was, Alice had come upon Michener’s volume of stories and began talking about them to her friends, one of whom happened to be Arthur Krock, an eminent New York Times writer who for many years was also the chairman of the Pulitzer Prize committee for fiction. When Alice heard through the grapevine that Tales of the South Pacific finished fifth in the Pulitzer voting in 1948, she was incensed, and she called Krock to tell him off. “That’s a nothing work. No vitality!” she announced about the book that had been selected (and remains unnamed, and unheralded, to this day). “Do you know something better?” Krock replied. “I certainly do,” she said, at which point she insisted that the committee reconsider Tales of the South Pacific. “When they finished, they agreed with me,” Alice crowed. She only met Michener years later at a party, but she was still thrilled with having single-handedly changed the course of his career. “You received the prize most deservedly, I must say,” she told him, before grasping him warmly by his hands and adding, “I’m proud of the fact, Michener, that you didn’t let us down.”19 By “us,” she meant the Pulitzer committee—and its not-so-silent partner.
Alice’s footprint had been so big for so long it’s hard to appreciate the uniqueness of her cultural longevity. Unlike during her salad days as the daughter of the president, the wife of the Speaker of the House, and the lover of a revered senator, she no longer had a personal connection to power. As a full-time resident of Washington, she couldn’t even vote in a presidential election until 1964. Her continued claim on the country’s attention was based on two things: her wit and her bloodline. She hated being called princess, but for Americans fascinated with dynasties Alice was as close to royalty as you’d find. She was the foremother to all those women named Kennedy and Clinton who parlayed their family names and their powerful personalities into their own kinds of relevance. It’s telling that in July 1948, when a group called the Women’s Club for America conducted a poll asking what woman would be best qualified to become vice president, Alice finished in the No. 2 spot. No. 1, of course, was her cousin Eleanor.20
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No one was more surprised by ER’s enduring prominence than Eleanor herself. Unlike Alice, who was so despondent about having to vacate the White House in 1909 that she planted voodoo dolls on the grounds, Eleanor was eager to slip out of the spotlight following FDR’s death. After she loaded his body on a train in Warm Springs and performed her grieving-widow duties at his Hyde Park funeral, the Trumans insisted she take as much time as she needed to find a new address. She packed up everything—twelve-plus years of belongings, enough to fill twenty army trucks—and retreated to New York within a week. “The Trumans have just been to lunch & nearly all that I can do is done,” she wrote to Hickok from the White House for the final time. “The upstairs looks desolate & I will be glad to leave tomorrow. It is empty & without purpose to be here now.”21 About a year earlier, she and Franklin had taken an apartment in New York’s Washington Square, and when she arrived there at about 10:00 p.m. on April 20, Lorena was already inside arranging the boxes of flowers and condolence cards and Tommy was at her side ready to help unpack. A few days later, a reporter buttonholed her as she was leaving her building. She had very little to say. “The story,” she told the reporter, “is over.”22
Perhaps she really did expect to settle back into a quiet life of teaching and writing. Success, no matter how substantial, never did convince Eleanor that she was much more than a hardworking but modestly gifted woman. She had learned to take a backseat to Franklin whenever his career demanded it, and she expected to follow a similar path now that he was gone. “I had to tell several people quite forcibly that nothing would induce me to run for public office or to accept an appointment to any office at the present time,” she wrote in My Day on April 19, a week after the president’s death. Of course, she was probably the only person on the planet who believed that, as the high-profile job offers soon proved. Harold Ickes, FDR’s secretary of the interior, wanted her to run for senator. She said no. Her old friends Harry Hooker and John Golden arrived at her apartment one day and announced they were going to help manage her career. She showed them the door. The United Feature Syndicate asked her to travel to the Soviet Union to meet and write about Stalin. Realizing that the Soviets would consider her a quasi-government dignitary by dint of their affection for FDR, she declined.23
But Eleanor Roosevelt could never not stay busy, and before long her restless mind got the best of her stubborn humility. That was clear from a column she wrote a mere twelve days after Franklin’s death. “Someday,” she wrote, “we will actually find ourselves sitting down to read a book without that guilty feeling which weighs upon one when the job you should be doing is ignored.”24 For a while, that job was tending the flame of her husband’s memory. She entertained a constant stream of dignitaries at Hyde Park, including Madame Chiang Kai-shek, General Eisenhower, President de Gaulle, and Churchill, who laid a wreath of white flowers on FDR’s grave and looked surpassingly glum, even by his usual standards. At the same time, she and the children prepared to make good on Franklin’s request that his lifelong home be turned over to the Department of the Interior and transformed into the FDR Presidential Library and Museum, the first presidential center of its kind. FDR’s will
stipulated that Eleanor and the children could stay until their deaths, but she had no great love for Springwood. She was only too happy to retreat across the road to Val-Kill. But the finality of the move took its emotional toll, especially after Eleanor unearthed a small watercolor of Franklin by Madame Shouma-toff, the painter who, along with Lucy Mercer, was with him when he died. Eleanor had only recently discovered that Lucy had, on at least one occasion, visited the White House when she was away. And to twist the knife further, their daughter, Anna, had been the hostess there that evening. Anna never told her mother, until ER confronted her after finding out about Lucy’s being with FDR at the end. Anna still didn’t back down. “All that mattered was relieving a greatly overburdened man, to make his life as pleasant as possible when a few moments opened up for relaxation,” she explained later.25 Anna also failed to mention that she called Lucy to commiserate in the days after FDR’s death and that Lucy had written her a lovely and personal condolence note in reply. “This blow must be crushing to you—to all of you—but I know that you meant more to your father than anyone and that makes it closer & harder to bear,” Lucy wrote.26
Fortunately, Harry Truman made it impossible for Eleanor to dwell on the past. Almost immediately after he became president in 1945, he struck up an extraordinary working friendship with her, turning the former First Lady into his personal sounding board via dozens and dozens of letters, phone calls, and visits. They discussed how to handle the Russians, Churchill, domestic employment, Japanese internment camps, and more, a head-spinning collection of policies to debate with someone outside the administration, not to mention a woman who had never held elective office. Truman corresponded with ER so often—he remembered her birthday and commented on her My Day columns, too—that she urged him to start having his letters typed. It was taking her too long to decipher his handwriting.
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Truman finally persuaded Eleanor to get back to work, though it took some doing. In early December 1945, he called her at home in New York to ask if she would join the first American delegation of the United Nations, meeting in London in January. “But Mr. President, I have no experience in foreign affairs. I don’t know parliamentary procedure. I couldn’t possibly do it,” she told him as Franklin junior sat beside her, listening in as Truman pressed his case. “All right, Mr. President. I will think it over.” She wasn’t the only one who had doubts. Although she relented and was ultimately confirmed by the Senate, the four other members of the UN delegation, all-male, weren’t exactly thrilled to have the former First Lady on their team. While they were all crossing the Atlantic en route to England on the Queen Elizabeth, she ran into Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican heavyweight who would soon become chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. “Mrs. Roosevelt,” he bellowed importantly, “we would like to know if you would serve on Committee Three.”
Eleanor remembered having two “rather contradictory reactions” to Vandenberg’s invitation. “First, I wondered who ‘we’ might be. Was a Republican senator deciding who would serve where? And why, since I was a delegate, had I not been consulted about committee assignments?”27 For someone who claimed to lack the proper experience to serve, she certainly possessed a sharp enough grasp of negotiations and power politics. Of course, she proceeded to hide her light under a bushel of insecurity. “My next reaction crowded these thoughts out of my mind. I realized that I had no more idea than the man in the moon what Committee Three might be.”28
As it turned out, neither did Vandenberg. The men knew, on paper at least, that Committee Three was the committee on social, cultural, and humanitarian issues, seemingly a perfect, and perfectly harmless, parking spot for Mrs. Roosevelt and her bleeding heart. What Vandenberg didn’t realize was that Committee Three was going to rule on one of the most contentious issues facing this first United Nations session: the fate of Europe’s one million war refugees. The British, the Americans, and other countries in Western Europe believed that the refugees—or “displaced persons,” as they were called—should be allowed to settle wherever they wished. The Soviets thought they should be forced back home. They disliked the possibility, and the implication, of comrades from Poland, the Balkans, the Baltics, and other Iron Curtain countries refusing to return from Germany and elsewhere. After all, many of them didn’t deserve asylum, according to the Soviet Union’s Andrei Vyshinsky. “These criminals, these traitors, are not refugees,” Vyshinsky said. “Those who still pass themselves off as refugees should be sent back forthwith to their respective countries for trial and for the just appeasement of the public conscience, which has been deeply stirred by the fascist aggression perpetrated with the participation of these criminals.”29
The Americans didn’t buy that argument, but they were also intimidated byVyshinsky. He was the fiercest litigator and diplomat in the Soviet Union, having served as the chief prosecutor during Stalin’s show trials in the late 1930s that purged the supreme leader’s Bolshevik enemies and sent them to the firing squads. When it came time for a member of the American delegation to face off with him on the floor of the United Nations, the men decided they knew just the right woman for the job. “ ‘Mrs. Roosevelt,’ he [ John Foster Dulles, later secretary of state] began lamely, ‘the United States must speak in the debate. Since you are the one who has carried on the controversy in the committee, do you think you could say a few words in the Assembly?’ ” Eleanor wrote.30 Perhaps Dulles and the others thought that Vyshinsky wouldn’t attack a woman as he would a man. Perhaps they finally realized that Mrs. Roosevelt—after her private lunches with the royal family and the Churchills, her almost daily interviews on the BBC, and her keynote speech at Albert Hall welcoming the UN delegates—could handle herself after all. She certainly had her fellow American delegates figured out. Just a few days earlier, she had written a none-too-flattering assessment of them to her friend Elinor Morgenthau. “J. Foster Dulles I like not at all,” she said. “Vandenberg is smart & hard to get along with and does not say what he feels.”31
But when duty called, Eleanor Roosevelt always answered. She prepared meticulously for her showdown with Vyshinsky and addressed the assembly without notes, speaking until nearly 1:00 a.m. after the Soviet finally finished his long diatribe. “I was badly frightened. I trembled at the thought of speaking against the famous Mr. Vishinsky,” she said. “The hour was late and we knew the Russians would delay a vote as long as possible on the theory that some of our allies would get tired and leave. I knew we must hold our South American colleagues until the vote was taken because their votes would be decisive. So I talked about Simón Bolívar and his stand for the freedom of the people of Latin America. The South American representatives stayed with us to the end, and when the vote was taken, we won.”32 When she had finished, the members of the assembly applauded for a full two minutes.33
It was a small victory for the United States but a huge one for Delegate Roosevelt, over both the Soviets and her own comrades. “You will be amused,” she wrote to Joe Lash on the morning after the vote, “that when Mr. Dulles said goodbye to me this morning he said, ‘I feel I must tell you that when you were appointed I thought it terrible and now I think your work here has been fine’!”34 Vandenberg was a convert as well, telling many a dinner-party acquaintance, “I want to say that I take back everything I ever said about her, and believe me it’s been plenty.”35 Mrs. Roosevelt had gone to London as a celebrity. She returned to New York as a diplomatic superstar. “Mrs. F.D. Passes UNO Test,” wrote the Boston Daily Globe, one of the virtually unanimous slate of favorable press accounts.36 Within days, there was talk of nominating her for the Nobel Peace Prize.37 Within months, President Truman asked her to serve on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. This time she accepted readily, and this time her fellow delegates more than appreciated her abilities: they elected her chair by acclamation.
She spent the next two years globe-trotting as the driving force behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document based o
n the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights giving countries a framework for fair treatment of their citizens. Overall, the Human Rights Commission proved similar to her work on Committee Three, including lengthy and maddening philosophical fights with the Soviets over how to ensure individual liberties in both democracy and communism. (The touchiest, and perhaps most ingenious, Soviet argument was to question what right the United States had to determine the notion of individual freedom given the plight of American blacks living under Jim Crow laws. Unfortunately for the Soviets, Eleanor Roosevelt was the last person to pick that fight with.) As with her first battle against Vyshinsky, the Soviets dragged their feet at every opportunity. The final vote on the Declaration of the Rights of Man, on December 10, 1948, wasn’t tallied until 3:00 a.m. Once again, Eleanor triumphed. And once again, the General Assembly erupted into applause for her, only this time they gave Madame Chairman an almost unheard-of standing ovation. She would later call her Human Rights Commission work the “most important task” of her life.38
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Alice Longworth had spent the last twenty-five years using her cousin for target practice, with her mocking dinner-party imitations and her withering quips about her politics, her appearance, and her husband as ammunition. Without Franklin, Eleanor had perhaps an even bigger bull’s-eye painted on her back. Alice’s “irreconcilable” objections to international peacekeeping organizations coupled with Eleanor’s prominence at the United Nations set them on another potential collision course. Yet Alice largely held her fire-breathing tongue regarding Eleanor’s work at the UN. One of her few punches was to publicly endorse a group that wanted to abolish United Nations Day in October in favor of something to be called United States Day. But for someone who helped trounce the League of Nations, that was small potatoes. (Only the governor of Utah signed on to the plan.)
