by Anne Edwards
Congressman Fascell states that he “appreciated her strong stand and determination with regard to issues which she supported and which were in conflict with conventional wisdom (and even official policy) at the time. Mrs. Black, for instance, believed that the U.S. had to move away from our policy of opposing the admission of Red China to the U.N., which she recognized as unrealistic. . . . I recall that it seemed to Mrs. Black that by opposing the entry of the People’s Republic of China, we were in fact helping the Soviet Union, since the Soviets were very unenthusiastic about the PRC being admitted. Subsequent events proved Mrs. Black’s instincts were on the mark.”
“Everybody has the impression that I’m such a right wing conservative,” she told one reporter. “I am a conservative . . . when it comes to fiscal planning and the use of taxpayers’ money. But I’m very liberal on international affairs.”
In view of her stand on Vietnam and her get-tough attitude toward the Soviets, this statement was open to debate. However, Shirley was genuinely dedicated to, and conversant with, environmental problems, and she took the lead within her delegation in this area, as well as in youth-related conferences. Her first statement before the General Assembly dealing with world problems of young people was delivered from her seat on Tuesday, September 30, just two weeks into the session. Usually, it is difficult to spot a seated speaker among the sprawling concentric horseshoes of UN desks (the speech itself is carried throughout the assembly hall via a powerful public-address system.) But on this occasion, almost everyone turned around to look at Shirley, dressed in a vivid green suit and banked by the American delegation positioned in the very back row.
“I had never seen that happen,” a veteran Swiss journalist commented.
She had written the address herself, and her audience could feel her pride in her own words. The style was journalistic—short, snappy sentences delivered in a punchy manner “and a kind of housewifely enthusiasm for genuinely worthy causes.” Eyebrows may have been raised among her American colleagues, but in a world assembly reeling under the weight of hundreds of speeches and documents every day, the absence of “governmentese” in her language and her unorthodox simplicity won the admiration of the assembly hall. She spoke dramatically, her text almost entirely committed to memory, and she employed some colorful metaphors.
“In Ancient Rome, the two-faced god Janus stood at the door of time. One face was of an old man looking to the past, the other of a young man with visions of the future,” she began. Her view was that youth would be better served if it had a say in the work of the United Nations, and she made six proposals for the participation of young people:
1. The formation of an International Voluntary Service Corps to collaborate “with a country’s own national service corps in development projects.”
2. The formation of an International Youth Assembly.
3. The appointment of young delegates to the 25th General Assembly in 1970.
4. The recruitment and placement of promising young people on the staff of the U.N.
5. The formation of a U.N. Information Center on Youth Programs.
6. The formation of a Conference on Youth and the Second Development Decade [youth aged ten to twenty] in 1971.
She also urged that the age of majority be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen, a request that drew “a barrage of irate letters” when it was reported in the press.
After she had finished her speech, Saudi Arabia’s garrulous sage and longtime ambassador, Jamil Baroody, crossed the auditorium and congratulated her. This admiration coming from such an unlikely source set the tone for the rest of the assembly. Like Myrna Loy, Shirley had been accepted. Socially, she had no problem. Entertainers had always been an integral part of the UN social scene. Many international movie, stage and recording stars were regular guests at parties given for delegates during the session. The official residence for American ambassadors returned home for the assembly was a tremendous suite on the 42nd floor in the Waldorf Towers. Here, the ambassadors would bring together diplomats, Broadway stars, movie idols and assorted intellectuals for late-night gatherings, usually buffet suppers that ended with “the guests sitting on the floor clapping to a singing group.” During the period of Shirley’s appointment, Peter Ustinov (goodwill ambassador to UNESCO in 1969) would appear in the delegates’ lounge “telling stories and studying the inexhaustible store of national accents to add to his repertoire of mimicry.”
Shirley swiftly became the ranking celebrity of the UN social scene. (“Do you realize that Shirley Temple films have just come to Bulgaria?” a member of the delegation reported.) Before any reception or party, there was a great deal of “buzzing” as to whether she would attend. She was very selective, not out of snobbishness, but because the work ethic had always been strong in her. There were difficult briefs and transcripts to study at night, as well as speeches to write. To her surprise, when she did attend these UN affairs, foreign delegates asked for her autograph. Visitors to the United Nations stared and pointed at her from the spectators’ galleries when she was sitting in committee meetings. (If she observed them, she flashed the younger ones the V-for-Victory sign.) United Nations employees stopped her as she came on and off escalators or walked along the marble corridors, introduced their children and snapped pictures of her with them. At first, she resented this celebrity, although she took it graciously and in her stride.
Her penchant for brightly colored clothes and her exaggerated high heels, which seemed only to emphasize her diminutive size, became her UN trademarks. Her round face had remained “remarkably youthful, except for a few tiny lines that crop up around her eyes whenever she smiles. And she is almost always smiling.” For most people, the fact that Shirley Temple was little more than forty was a shock, since they considered her films so far back in their own pasts.
The United Nations Ball given that year on October 16 was the social highlight of the season.* The previous Saturday, Shirley had escorted some children of delegates to an ice-skating rink, taken a nasty fall and broken her left hand, which had to be set in plaster. The injury did not deter her from attending the gala. With Charles, suntanned and handsome, by her side, she entered the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria, wearing an eye-catching pink and green halter-top satin gown “that emphasized her . . . curves,” sporting her cast on the injured hand. Her reddish-brown hair was drawn back into a French-twist hairdo. Together, she and Charles “looked like [the famous dance team] Marge and Gower Champion as they dipped and twirled their way through bouncy fox-trots and bumpy rumbas,” her cast nestled safely on Charles’s shoulder. After one such set, Merle Oberon, looking spectacular in emerald green with matching jewels, applauded loudly as the Blacks came off the dance floor.
“A party such as this gives us a possibility to change the environment,” said Yakov A. Malik, head of the Soviet mission to the United Nations. “Here we meet our friends in another place . . . and we laugh and we talk.”
Yakov Malik had already sat across from Shirley at dinner at a party given by the Jordanian delegation. “I presented to him what I call ‘my jovial idea’,” Shirley remembered. “I suggested that there be only women on the Security Council. So far he hasn’t expressed himself on that idea.” At the same dinner, Shirley almost faced sudden disaster when a pine nut in a rice dish lodged in her throat. “I started to black out,” she recalled. “But then I thought to myself, ‘I’m a representative of the United States, and I’m the only one here, and I can’t die. If I do, nobody will believe that somebody didn’t do something to me on purpose.’ Finally, the nut went down.”
During her baptism into the world of diplomacy, Shirley did make “a few faux pas—impetuously speaking out without consultation with allied governments, sitting stubbornly, arms folded, through a vote, contrary to her government’s instructions, overstepping and having to improvise a filibuster on disarmament.” Ambassador Glen Olds, the number-two man at the mission, eventually dubbed her “the U.S.’s Secret Weapon. ” In relat
ions with delegates and at UN social affairs, “where personal impressions directly influence policy decisions,” she excelled as “a genuinely well-informed negotiator.”
“People were surprised at the toughness of her position,” Ambassador Olds confirmed, “but she prepared; that’s what made her tough-minded.” He added, “She’d take home some of my books [on current international politics] in the evening and the next morning say, ‘I’ve outlined these, do you have anything else?’”
As the session progressed, Shirley’s familiar voice was more frequently heard. Her refreshing frankness impressed her audience. On the occasion of a speech on refugees, she opened in Zane Grey-ish fashion, “In the autumn of 1830 a contingent of blue-clad American Cavalry galloped into an isolated Cherokee Indian village.” What followed was “an indictment of her own country’s record in expelling the original inhabitants from their land and making them refugees.” When complimented later on her defense of the Indians, she was quick to reply that she believed “deeply in social justice [and her own] children had Indian blood in their veins,” a reference to a distant ancestor of Charles’s, General John Sevier, the first governor of Tennessee (1796–1810), who married a Cherokee princess, one of the great romantic episodes in the Black family history.
Many visitors found their way to her mission office. Always one of the earliest to arrive, she was usually at her desk by half-past eight in the morning. But it was in her committee work rather than in her public addresses that her abilities were tested and proved.
Her admiration for Angie Brooks developed into a meaningful friendship and a desire to learn more about the African countries. Coming so soon after Prague, the UN experience and her meeting with Brooks would leave an indelible mark. Her vision had widened, sharpened. Her tolerance for people and ideas outside her ken had expanded. One day, as she left the mission, she was confronted by a group of “agitating” Black Panthers. “I’m not afraid to extend my hand to anybody,” she boasted, “although sometimes it hangs there for a long time. So I put my hand out and said, ‘Hello, I’m Shirley Temple Black,’ and the fellow said, ‘Hello, I am a Black Panther.’ And the very brutal-looking man got tears in his eyes and said, ‘Oh, I remember.’”
During the last week of the session, Shirley flew to Washington to address the National Conference on World Refugee Problems. Because of a severe rainstorm, her plane was delayed several hours. On arrival, she went directly to the East Room of the Mayflower Hotel, where her anxious audience had remained waiting for her. “I’m sorry I’m still in my work-day outfit [the familiar bright red suit she wore frequently at the UN] and wearing boots,” she apologized. “I did bring a pretty dress, but it’s still at the airport.”
On the dais with her were Prince Sadruddin Aga Kahn, United Nations high commissioner for refugees, and Graham Martin, U.S. ambassador to Italy. “Cherokee Indian blood flows proudly in the veins of my son and daughter” she once again announced, and then in “a down-to-earth manner . . . plunged into the issue at hand: the world’s eighteen million refugees.” Knowledgeably, she rattled off the alarming increase in the world’s refugees in the last decade. The major point she made was that “refugees are people and not just statistics. . . . The situation we face is not only of empty stomachs or vengeful hearts; it is a witches’ broth of degradation, destruction, and death.”
The same week, she was presented with the Sarah Coventry “Woman of the Year” Award, honoring her for “dedicated public service to the world community.” Her humanitarian work did not diminish her political fervor. Before leaving Washington, she was interviewed on Meet the Press, a national TV program geared to Capitol matters. In the closing minutes, she urged Americans to ask their U.S. senators to restore cuts made by the House of Representatives in President Nixon’s foreign-aid bill. “The American foreign aid program is not a give-away, it is a partnership. Contact the U.S. Senate not to allow this cut to happen,” she entreated.
Her last speech, delivered on December 15, centered on one of her favorite topics—the human environment. “As Apollo 12 was half way back to Earth,” she began in her characteristic storytelling style, “one of the astronauts peered out the window and saw the planet Earth. Millions of us heard him say, ‘It’s a beautiful world.’
“From his perspective it’s true. Down here on earth we are not so sure.”
She presented an eloquent plea for the need of a UN Conference on Problems of the Human Environment, one in which she wanted very much to be a participant. She now hoped that Nixon would reappoint her to the next session, deemed—because it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the United Nations—to be an especially important year. “I’d like to come back,” she told reporters as she sorted through papers in her mission office for the last time. “I’m going to recommend to the State Department that appointments to the Delegation be made for at least two years—with the appointee the President has in mind for the third year entitled to sit behind the delegate during the second year in preparation for his job. . . . We need more continuity.”
Although other nations often reappointed nonprofessional diplomats several years in a row, the precedent was, and remains, for American presidents to name a different set of non-professionals (along with career diplomats) to the UN delegation each year. This policy offers a president more chances to pay political debts and reward distinguished citizens with a seat.
She joined her family in Woodside for the Christmas holidays. “My children told me when I got home that I seemed much more serious than when I left in September,” she commented. “I think it’s because I got used to giving thoughtful answers all the time.” She added with a big smile, “Oh yes, and something else. If you want to make a statement at the U.N. you say, ‘I want to make an intervention.’ That’s gone over very big at the [family] dinner table.” She was not home long. Early in February 1970, she traveled to Iran and the Mideast. On February 26, she was a witness before a Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements in the House of Representatives, where an attempt was being made to appraise the United Nations’ place in the field of social programs and of human rights.
In welcoming her to the subcommittee, one of its permanent members, Columbia University Professor Felix Frelinghuysen, commented, “I note we have a very large, and I would say predominantly youthful audience, so it is quite obvious that you have a fan club. I am sure it is not the nature of our hearings that brings out this crowd. It is encouraging as one of the older members here to realize that fame has a continuing effect, at least in your case.” Whereupon the subcommittee chairman, Congressman Cornelius E. Gallagher of New Jersey, quipped, “I hope it doesn’t get back to Ambassador Yost that you outdrew him.” The remark brought stilted laughter.
Shirley gave an impassioned, well-received address that emphasized “the potential” of the environment and pleaded that we not “wring our hands at the shortcomings.” Looking poised and confident in a knee-length navy and white dress, her long hair swept up in the back, she answered questions fully and without hesitation on the UN’s progress on issues in which she had been involved. Nonetheless, the subcommittee seemed incapable of letting go of their own past where she was concerned.
“Mrs. Black, I want to welcome you here,” Congressman J. Herbert Burke of Florida added to the welcoming statement by his colleague. “I feel that you are the type of person that just never does grow old. You grow more beautiful [this before about one hundred House spectators and to be recorded in a government document] and while this sounds flattering, I think most of us here have seen you grow to be a very beautiful woman. For instance, I think my younger daughter still believes you are a very beautiful little girl, and while this might embarrass you, I would like to say that I have probably seen The Littlest Colonel [sic] so many times that I expected to see you walk in with the military uniform of the Old South.” This statement met with open laughter, and Shirley replied, “Mr. Congressman, [even in movies] I did grow a bit more than that.”
MRS. BLACK: Mr. Congressman, when I spoke of nationalism, I was speaking . . . of the developing countries. CONGRESSMAN BURKE: Yes, I know, but that is what bothers me. . . . We [have] found every nation getting more nationalistic and yet we in our country find people from various organizations telling us that we are imperialistic . . . I ask [another] question . . . with regard to the refugee problem . . . What would you think would be our contribution to . . . the smaller countries looking to the more wealthy countries to do the job for them?
MRS. BLACK: Mr. Congressman, . . . I don’t think the nations of the world want to be told by any individual country how they are to live, how much money they are to be given. I think those days are past. In the refugee camps . . . I feel it is most important that we help in education and training, because 18 million people need our help, need our assistance, and if I may interject something, I would like to mention that I think we must do a lot more about our own American Indians.
