Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  ER often worked from dawn to midnight, and after she finished her official duties, she wrote her daily column. In Bora Bora and the Cook Islands, she noted, all the troops teamed up together, and there “seemed to be no trouble anywhere out here between Southern white and colored.” The men and officers in Bora Bora welcomed her, but the army colonel in charge of Aitutaki greeted her coldly. A Massachusetts Republican, he seemed rather “snobby and not pleased to see me.” He protested the lack of army nurses, since too many of his men wanted to marry Maori women.

  The hospital in Samoa held seven hundred men and was well equipped, but the lack of beer and wine troubled ER, who wrote Tommy, “Last night four men died from drinking distilled shellac.” She wanted Norman Davis and the Red Cross to be informed.

  Admiral William Halsey, the hero of the South Pacific, initially “dreaded” ER’s arrival but was ultimately moved by the strength and stamina with which she endured her punishing schedule, and by the impact her visits to navy hospitals had on the men. He became her great ally.

  When I say she inspected those hospitals, I don’t mean that she shook hands with the chief medical officer, glanced into a sun parlor, and left. I mean that she went into every ward, stopped at every bed, and spoke to every patient: What was his name? How did he feel? Was there anything he needed? Could she take a message home for him? I marveled at her hardihood, both physical and mental; she walked for miles, and she saw patients who were grievously and gruesomely wounded. But I marveled most at their expressions as she leaned over them. It was a sight I will never forget.

  In Australia, General Douglas MacArthur assigned his aide, Captain Robert M. White, to be her escort. At first resentful of her presence, in the end he was dazzled by her manner: wherever she went, “she wanted to see the things a mother would see. She looked at kitchens and saw how food was prepared. When she chatted with the men she said things mothers say, little things men never think of and couldn’t put into words if they did.” She left “many a tough battletorn GI” moved to tears of hope, restoration, and gratitude.

  Private Calvin Thompson described ER’s epochal visit to one Red Cross club. He had been seated in the Negro canteen eating an ice cream cone when a sudden great commotion at the door announced ER’s arrival. She entered, shook hands, and spoke with each man. “When she came to me I was still eating my ice cream cone . . . and she looked straight into my eyes and said, ‘May I have some of that ice cream?’ . . . Very gently, Mrs. Roosevelt took the cone out of my hand, took a big bite, and handed it back to me. ‘You see,’ she said and smiled real wide, ‘that didn’t hurt at all, did it?’”

  Ultimately, she so impressed Admiral Halsey that he allowed her to go to Guadalcanal, the site of much carnage that was now a temporary home for wounded troops. In Guadalcanal, she reflected on war:

  The natives of Guadalcanal completed a week ago the chapel which stands near the graves and it is a labor of love. . . . We must build up the kind of world for which these men died. They may never have put it into words, but I think they wanted a world where no one is hungry or in want for the necessities of life. . . .

  Long ago [I learned] the big thing men got out of war was the sense of shared comradeship and loyalty. . . . Perhaps that is what we must develop at home to build the world for which our men are dying.

  In Guadalcanal, she spent several hours with Joe Lash, who was stationed there. “I shall have much of interest to tell Trude,” she noted in her diary. At dawn the next morning she left for Espiritu Santo, writing to Joe, “How I hated to have you leave last night. When the war is over I hope I never have to be long away from you. It was so wonderful to be with you, the whole trip now seems to me to be worthwhile. It is bad to be so personal but I care first for those people I love deeply.”

  Admiral Halsey came to wish her a bon voyage and said (as Joe, who was standing with her, recalled) that “it was impossible for him to express his appreciation for what she had done for his men.” Later Halsey wrote, “I was ashamed of my original surliness. She alone had accomplished more good than any other person, or any group of civilians, who had passed through my area.” But Halsey’s fears about her safety, noted Joe, were warranted. Both the night before her arrival and the night after her departure, the Japanese bombed Guadalcanal.

  ER’s Pacific trip was the longest and most perilous of her career. It was a journey of revelation and self-discovery, a soul-changing experience. The photographs and newsreels show an animated, engaged, free-spirited woman. Protesting all the limitations imposed on her, she enjoyed the opportunity to do vital work on her own. Thereafter, she wrote, “hospitals and cemeteries” would forever be “closely tied together in my head and my heart.”

  During her return flights, she spent many hours writing recommendations for her husband as well as a nine-page memo about changes needed in the Red Cross. Above all, she wanted legislation to guarantee veterans jobs and education, modeled on GI bills that had already been passed in Australia and New Zealand, and she wanted certain attitudes revised: “Men not chief concern anywhere. Officers have too much men too little. . . . French natives poorly cared for.”

  On her stopover in San Francisco, she phoned Tommy, who phoned Hick, saying, “I talked to her. I was crying.” Esther Lape wrote to ER that she supposed we all “seemed pretty feeble to you, to have suffered jitters until you landed. . . . We are weaker than you thought us!” She had a splendid reunion with her granddaughter Sistie, who was “happy” at her boarding school, and the “headmistress likes her.”

  On 25 September she joined FDR at the White House. “Pa asked me more questions than I expected,” she wrote Anna, “& actually came over to lunch with me . . . & spent two hours!” She was pleased that Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson told Bernard Baruch that “I did a wonderful job & that will help” promote some of her recommendations.

  Nevertheless, upon her return, she experienced “the onset of a depression severe enough to be evident to the people around her.” Some considered it merely exhaustion, but her depression, as revealed in her letters to loved ones, resulted from several factors. Her bedside visits with grotesquely wounded and psychologically devastated combatants had been deeply disturbing. Her son Jimmy was planning to return to the Pacific for his next assignment, under Admiral Chester Nimitz. And FDR had decided to travel to his upcoming meetings in Cairo with Chiang Kai-shek and in Tehran with Churchill and Stalin—without ER. She had wanted to be close to the center of gravity, close to the dialogue that would be taking place among these world leaders, but FDR’s decision made it clear that he thought her safer at a remove.

  Her impressions of her trip to the Pacific may have influenced his decision. She told him about the miles of hospital wards where “the men had been mentally affected by the experiences they had been through.” She told him of her “horror” and of how the war’s human agony that had caused so many to be “broken mentally and emotionally made me lie awake nights.” She gave him vivid accounts of troops’ exhaustion and battle fatigue, resulting in the disturbances we now call PTSD.

  FDR was so upset by her report that he urged the secretaries of war and the navy to make immediate changes: “I know that the Army and Navy are doing the best they can with the subject of fatigue and stress . . . but I wish that further special consideration be given in all combat services.” All officers and men in “tropical commands” where “there has been much fighting and where malaria and other diseases are serious factors” must from now on be offered definite schedules of relief.

  ER’s good work should have given her a new level of influence, but any hopes for that were quickly dashed. In August, while she was away in the Pacific, Sumner Welles had left the State Department and been replaced as undersecretary by Edward Stettinius, leaving her without even a modest ally on refugee issues.* And that same month, during the Quebec Conference, FDR had agreed with Churchill not even to address rescue or Palestine until
after the war.

  On 6 October 1943 in Washington, four hundred Orthodox rabbis converged for a pilgrimage, organized by Peter Bergson, to call for rescue. Marching from Union Station to the Capitol, they carried a petition to FDR to create a rescue agency. For weeks in advance they had appealed to the president for a meeting with them, but he refused. On the day of their pilgrimage, he left for Bolling Field to dedicate four bombers. So instead the rabbis met with Vice President Wallace. They read the petition aloud in Hebrew and English—“some Rabbis sobbed audibly”—and handed it to him. They then marched to the Lincoln Memorial to pray. At the White House they were met by FDR’s secretary Marvin McIntyre.

  Among the rabbis was a contingent of young theologians—including Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Years later, during his classes at Jewish Theological and Union Theological seminaries, he would frequently repeat the most profound lesson he had learned from this bitter moment: “In a democracy, some are guilty—but all are responsible!” Unfortunately, we have no record of ER’s feelings about this episode, but that sense of responsibility defined her spiritual convictions. Responsibility for war and peace belongs to everyone, she wrote repeatedly. When a Japanese-American soldier told a reporter that he was happy to serve his country anywhere, ER called his attitude “perfect,” for it underscored the unity of America and its peoples: “You are an American whether your features are those of a Japanese, or whether you have Italian or German ancestry, are born or bred in this country, or are naturalized.” Under “the Constitution and Bill of Rights . . . we are Americans all.”

  The week after the rabbis’ march, ER fulfilled her promise to Peter Bergson to record a message of encouragement to the Jews of Europe for international broadcast by the Office of War Information.

  But on the issue of rescue, ER remained basically silenced. One searches her writings and correspondence in vain for a single reference to Bergson’s Emergency Committee to Save the Jews of Europe. Nor did she refer to Britain’s Emergency Committee to Rescue the Perishing, vigorously led by Eleanor Rathbone, independent member of Parliament for the Combined English Universities. From 1942 until the war’s end, Rathbone issued many pamphlets and made numerous speeches demanding that Britain help rescue European Jewry. ER’s friend Lady Stella Reading and more than 277 members of Parliament supported her efforts. ER’s neglect of Rathbone’s work remains a historical mystery.

  On the evening of 11 October 1943, ER’s birthday, FDR presided over a surprisingly congenial Hyde Park gathering including Hick, Elinor and Henry Morgenthau, Tommy, Grace Tully, and Trude—who reported to Joe, “The Boss was very gay and almost raucous and [ER] in the end seemed to enjoy it too. She looked very slim and beautiful in a marvellous long black dress.” But she and Tommy were worried about ER. Often when she wasn’t working, speaking, or presiding, she would become strangely silent and remote. Trude attributed her withdrawal in part to the effects of her Pacific trip. “As long as she had to keep going,” Trude wrote Joe, “—her iron will carried her through in spite of her deep horror at what she saw and the great sadness at the continuing bloodshed and dying. And the happenings here since her return have not contributed to make her feel that everything possible is being done.” ER did not want to discuss her feelings, and “brushed aside” Trude’s concern.

  Joe replied that part of ER’s “terrible sorrow, made more acute by what she saw in hospitals out there, [is her fear] that [progressives] may be losing the peace. But I think another and larger part of it has to do with a great inner loneliness.” He believed that Trude might “help a great deal there . . . [and] help dispel that kind of loneliness . . . [since ER] loves you.”

  • • •

  FDR was working on plans for peace in the Middle East, for economic development and oil pipelines, for rescue, and for Palestine. In October 1942, he had sent Colonel Harold B. Hoskins to Saudi Arabia to “find out whether the Jews and Arabs could reach a modus vivendi about Palestine.” The son of American missionaries, Hoskins spoke Arabic fluently and had many friends in the region. He returned to advise that all discussion about Palestine should be suspended until after the war.

  Then on 1 November the president appointed Isaiah Bowman to head the top-secret M Project, which would conduct a global survey of “waste spaces for waste people” and study the possibilities for relocating and resettling European Jews in thinly populated areas worldwide. A geographer and president of Johns Hopkins University, Bowman argued, as we have seen, that European Jews should be resettled as thinly as possible around the world.* He had already concluded that Palestine was an “arid land” and overpopulated. For this study, he had FDR’s mandate to be comprehensive and to also pursue the president’s own hydrological fantasies of irrigation, waterways, dams, canals, and bridges.

  Other experts disagreed. Walter Clay Lowdermilk, an agronomist with the Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service, insisted to Vice President Wallace that it would be easy to bring water in “from the Mediterranean Sea by canal to the Jordan River, thus developing power.” In addition to “all the streams running into the Jordan River for irrigation,” he believed there were “great possibilities of mining magnesium, bromine, and potassium in the Dead Sea.” Lowdermilk’s article “The Absorptive Capacity of Palestine” proposed a TVA-like program to develop Palestine’s water resources and turn the area into “another California,” able to absorb “20 to 30 million people.”* The Jews should be allowed to develop such irrigation projects in Palestine, he argued, and Jews and Arabs alike would benefit, living together in prosperity and in peace. Hadassah leader Rose Halprin sent the article to ER.

  The first lady was impressed by Lowdermilk’s democratic visions of peace and development. Through Marion Frankfurter, Justice Frankfurter’s wife, ER met with Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the world’s leading proponent for Jewish settlement in Palestine. That autumn she also had several conversations with Peter Bergson about his vision of a democratic Palestine, where members of all faiths would be equal citizens with equal rights. He told her about many changes already under way due to irrigation and forestation programs.*

  She was eager for FDR to consider Lowdermilk’s and Bergson’s views, but the president insisted that there was nothing to discuss until war’s end. For the time being, he suggested that ER meet with Bowman herself and bring her contrary information to him directly. She proceeded to invite the geographer to tea. Aware of ER’s public significance, Bowman knew he could not simply ignore her, but behind the scenes the patronizing university president expressed contempt for the first lady’s interference in “questions beyond her understanding,” and he was filled with “scorn” for this “mischievous” woman, whom several of his State Department colleagues called “a meddling pest.”

  For several weeks he delayed responding to her invitation, then finally accepted. Facing her in person, he politely, even patiently, detailed his geographical understanding, then concluded by posing a political question: Were not Zionist intentions to dispossess the Palestinians akin to the Nazis’ goal to root out the Jews? The future he pictured was one of perpetual war, at great cost to the United States in lives and money.

  At a White House luncheon on 22 May 1943, the president told his guests that he agreed with Bowman’s idea. FDR claimed, that in the U.S., local communities would not object “if there were no more than four or five Jewish families at each place.”

  FDR insisted that ER and Wallace maintain a public silence about Palestine, and both acquiesced, turning down all requests to speak about it. They declined an invitation to speak on behalf of Jewish settlement in Palestine at a Carnegie Hall rally on 1 November. But both Willkie and Dewey accepted. That night Willkie called for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and Dewey called for opening Palestine to Jewish refugees from Europe. If FDR worried about the Jewish vote, it did not extend to allowing ER and Wallace to speak. The next week ER wrote Joe that her day had begun with upset when she
rendered “some Zionist ladies . . . sad because I felt I could not take up the question of the future of Palestine.”

  • • •

  In July 1943, Secretary Morgenthau proposed to save seventy thousand Romanian Jews, who were eager to be evacuated, in exchange for payment of $170,000. The World Jewish Congress in Switzerland, as well as Bergson’s group, agitated in favor, and Rabbi Wise made a personal appeal to FDR. The president verbally agreed to Morgenthau’s plan, although he wanted no public discussions of it until he returned from Cairo and Tehran.

  But with amazing indifference, the State Department delayed for six months, blocking every effort to move forward on rescuing the Romanian Jews. On 26 November 1943, Breckinridge Long, testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, denied that the need was urgent. His words were astonishing, given the situation, and considering that annual immigration amounted to less than 10 percent of the quotas.

  That November, Morgenthau also tried to save more Jewish children in France. Four thousand had already been deported “to gas chambers, probably,” as he noted, and another six thousand were in peril. The French police, under German orders, were conducting a “census” to pursue these children, who were mostly “hidden in private homes.” Relief agencies, including the Quakers and the YMCA, needed funds but could do nothing until dollars were converted into francs. Morgenthau approved a plan for foreign exchange and involvement.

  Once again the State Department stalled. In December, Morgenthau discovered that State had entirely obstructed the Romanian plan. He no longer trusted State and concluded that an independent agency was needed to conduct rescue efforts. To that end, he asked his three closest aides in Treasury—Josiah E. DuBois, General Counsel John Pehle, and the head of Foreign Funds Control, Randolph Paul—to prepare a report exposing the State Department’s obstructionism. They went to work, researching and drafting vivid memos. “The British say condemn them to death,” wrote DuBois, “and we say they should get out. . . . Their position is, ‘What could we do with them if [they] get out.’ . . . Amazing, most amazing.” Paul wrote: “I don’t know how we can blame the Germans. . . . The law calls [this] para-delicto, of equal guilt.” Pehle observed that when the British turned away, the real “enormous issues [were finally] flushed out.”