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It Is Wonderful to Feel Free
In late 1945, President Truman asked Mrs. Roosevelt to be a delegate to the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in London. Before disembarking, she held a press conference. “For the first time in my life,” she told reporters, “I can say just what I want. For your information it is wonderful to feel free.” Then, she asked that those words be kept off the record.
Her fellow delegates included two Republicans who had actively opposed her husband’s foreign policy—Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, and the veteran diplomat John Foster Dulles. Both thought her a naive do-gooder, appointed purely for political and sentimental reasons. She didn’t think much of them, either: Vandenberg was “hard to get along with” and secretive, she told an old friend, and “J. Foster Dulles I like not at all.”
She astonished them both. Perhaps a million displaced persons from eastern Europe refused to return to territories now under Russian rule. Mrs. Roosevelt’s committee agreed they should be given the right of asylum.
Andrey Vyshinsky, who had been the merciless Soviet prosecutor during the purge trials of the 1930s, demanded their immediate, forced return, equating giving in to their demands to appeasing Hitler.
Mrs. Roosevelt was asked to respond: The United Nations was created to safeguard the rights of individual human beings, she said, not the prerogatives of governments. Refugees should be allowed to live where they liked.
The Russians lost the vote that followed. Mrs. Roosevelt won the admiration of her colleagues. Senator Vandenberg told the press her performance had made him want to “take back everything I ever said about her, and believe me it’s been plenty.”
She was unanimously elected chair of a committee to draw up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, history’s first attempt at laying out the principles under which all nations should behave toward their own citizens as well as toward one another. It would not be easy. Her committee included Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, the representatives of democracies and dictatorships, colonial powers and once-colonized peoples. And she had to deal with a State Department constantly worried she would promise too much.
She was as tough as she was tactful and drove her fellow delegates so hard that one felt called upon to remind her that they had human rights, too. If they wanted shorter days, Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite niece answered, they should make shorter speeches.
Thanks largely to what one admirer called her distinctive blend of “naiveté” and “cunning,” they fell into line, one by one. At three in the morning on December 10, 1948, the declaration was adopted without a single dissenting vote. Afterward, the entire General Assembly did something it had never done before and has never done since: it rose to give a standing ovation to a single delegate.
All her life, Eleanor Roosevelt said, she’d wanted to “take on a job and see it through to a conclusion.” She had done it—and she had triumphed.
She was characteristically modest about her achievement. The declaration was not self-enforcing. The challenge, she said, was one of “actually living and working in our countries for freedom and justice for each human being.”
Eleanor Roosevelt escorts President Truman from FDR’s gravesite at Springwood on the first anniversary of her husband’s death, April 12, 1946. She would feel free to offer the new president advice on policy, just as she had felt free to provide it for her husband.
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Eleanor in London, about to take up her duties as a member of the first American delegation to the United Nations, 1946. At her throat is a gold pin with the three feathers of the Roosevelt crest worked out in diamonds, a gift from her husband on their wedding day. She had high hopes for the new organization but was unsentimental about her fellow delegates from around the world: “There are too many old League [of Nations] people here,” she told a friend, “and too many elderly public men. Young blood is badly needed.”
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Refugees struggle across a bomb-damaged bridge spanning the Elbe River, in flight from the advancing Red Army, May 1945. At the war’s end there were at least a million displaced people in Europe, many of them frightened to return to the countries from which they had fled.
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ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES Eleanor Roosevelt at work as chair of the Commission on Human Rights; and at a meeting of the UN General Assembly. Despite the difficulties of dealing both with the diverse demands of different countries and the strictures of her own State Department, she considered her seven years at the United Nations the most satisfying of a lifetime of public service. “There,” she would remember, “I was part of the second great experiment to bring countries together and to get them to work for a peaceful atmosphere in the world, and I still feel it important to strengthen this organization in every way.”
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A Girl He Never Knew
Throughout her public life, Eleanor Roosevelt had always had a small circle of friends in whom she could confide her private thoughts and feelings: Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, Earl Miller, Lorena Hickok, Joseph Lash and his wife, Trude.
Now, a new friend was often at her side, her New York physician, an expert on polio, eighteen years younger than she, named David Gurewitsch.
He became her confidant and constant companion as well as her doctor. Her friend Esther Lape, who had known her since her first forays into reform, believed he was “dearer to [her] than anyone else in the world.” “I love you,” Eleanor once wrote him, “as I love and have never loved anyone else.”
When Dr. Gurewitsch became engaged to a young woman named Edna Perkel, it took both women a little time to adjust. Mrs. Roosevelt and the Gurewitsches eventually bought a house together at 55 East Seventy-fourth Street, just nine blocks from the twin brownstones Sara Delano Roosevelt had built for herself, Eleanor, and Franklin more than half a century before.
“Mrs. Roosevelt never had dinner alone if she could help it,” Edna Gurewitsch remembered, “because she was, as David said, ‘A chronically lonely person.’ ” One evening, early in their time together, she continued, “Mrs. Roosevelt came upstairs, she marched into the kitchen and said, ‘May I help you, dear?’ And my heart sank because Mrs. Roosevelt had no clue about what happens in a kitchen. So I thought she could do the least harm if I asked her to wash the lettuce. And so she stood beside me at the sink washing lettuce. And I said after a few moments, ‘Would you excuse me, Mrs. Roosevelt?’ I went in to my husband and I said to David, ‘Find an excuse to get her out of the kitchen because we’re standing in water up to our ankles.’ And she never helped me in the kitchen again.”
A photograph of Eleanor at fourteen, given by her to David Gurewitsch with the inscription, “To David from a girl he never knew. Eleanor Roosevelt”
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A photograph of David Gurewitsch, which she carried with her wherever she went. “Above all others,” she once told him, “you are the one to whom my heart is tied.”
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The East Side townhouse Eleanor Roosevelt shared with David and Edna Gurewitsch from 1959 until her death
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We Will Have to Talk
The constant travel that had won Eleanor Roosevelt both admiration and criticism during her time in the White House only accelerated after she left it. She was often away from home two weeks out of every month, delivered some 150 speeches each year, and undertaking journey after fact-finding journey overseas, serving as an unofficial ambassador for her country. Israel, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Japan, Morocco, the Soviet Union—she seemed to be everywhere, taking note of everything, asking what she could do to help. She was an American phenomenon, said one admiring Indian diplomat, “comparable to Niagara Falls.”
She had few illusions about the Soviet government or about American communists: in 1947, she’d helped found the liberal Americans for Democratic Action
, which specifically barred them from membership, and she opposed her old friend Henry Wallace’s third-party bid for the presidency the following year in part because she believed communists had too great an influence on his campaign.
But she was a reluctant Cold Warrior and continued to share her husband’s hope that a way could be found to build a lasting peace. She championed economic rather than military aid to the Third World, pleaded for greater understanding of the needs and wishes of people newly freed from colonialism, and urged Washington to do less reacting to Soviet actions and undertake more initiatives of its own.
And through it all, she sought to remind the American people that one could oppose communism without demonizing communists or undermining the civil liberties that were the hallmark of American democracy. If Americans grew to fear one another, she said at her seventieth birthday party, they would never succeed: “I would like to see us take hold of ourselves, look at ourselves and cease being afraid.”
When criticized for continuing to urge dialogue with Moscow when relations with Washington were especially tense, she was unrepentant: “We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we will have to talk.”
Mrs. Roosevelt gazes at the Taj Mahal by moonlight, 1952. When she was a small girl, her errant father had promised he would take her there one day so that she could experience the wonder he had seen. “She had prepared herself to be disappointed by the sight, thinking it could not possibly live up to her father’s excited reaction to it,” David Gurewitsch remembered. “She was wonderfully surprised [and] sat contemplatively on the bench described by her father, seemingly lost in memories.”
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Outside the mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square in 1957, Eleanor Roosevelt insists on waiting in line with ordinary Soviet citizens to view the bodies of Lenin and Stalin.
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Mrs. Roosevelt interviews Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev on the porch of his summer house in Yalta. Afterward, Khrushchev asked his visitor if he could tell the press they’d had “a friendly conversation.” She answered, “You can say that we had a friendly conversation but that we differed.” The premier smiled. “At least we didn’t shoot each other,” he said.
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The canvas suitcase, marked with the initials “E.R.,” that accompanied Eleanor Roosevelt wherever she went.
A Liberal Conscience
Eleanor Roosevelt had been her husband’s liberal conscience, always urging him to do what she saw as the right thing. During her last years, she served her party—and her country—in the same role.
Over the next decade she continued her work on behalf of civil rights—championing integration of the armed forces, applauding the integration of the schools, publicizing instances of discrimination, supporting the Freedom Riders, and ignoring the death threats that never stopped coming her way.
In 1949, Mrs. Roosevelt had found herself in conflict with Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York. She backed a bill—on constitutional grounds—that barred parochial schools from receiving direct aid from the federal government. The cardinal denounced her as anti-Catholic, and went on to accuse her of actions “unworthy of an American mother.” Her friends were furious on her behalf. She remained cool in her response. “The final judgment, my dear cardinal, of the worthiness of all human beings is in the hands of God.” In the end, the cardinal had to call upon her at Val-Kill to make his peace.
She was not intimidated by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade, either. “The day I’m afraid to sit down with people I do not know,” she said, “because five years from now someone will say five of those people were Communists and therefore [I am] a Communist—that will be a bad day.”
She had bad days of her own, most often connected with her troubled children, whose continuing problems she was unable to solve. Sometimes, she confided to David Gurewitsch, they brought her close to suicide.
As always, her work was her salvation.
At a Val-Kill picnic, Mrs. Roosevelt speaks with one of the boys from the Wiltwyck School, an interracial home for troubled youth located across the Hudson in Esopus, New York, for which she helped raise funds for many years.
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A “Saralee Doll,” created in the early 1950s so that black children could have a doll to play with that looked like themselves, and enthusiastically promoted by Mrs. Roosevelt as “a lesson in equality for little children, … [and a contribution] to race pride without condescension.”
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The pistol permit Mrs. Roosevelt carried in her wallet and presumably had renewed annually after 1933, when the Secret Service insisted that she carry a revolver whenever she was not under their protection.
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Mrs. Roosevelt works on her correspondence with her last secretary, Maureen Corr. Every letter was answered no matter how late it got: “Usefulness, whatever form it may take,” she once wrote, “is the price we should pay for … the privilege of being alive.”
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I Know Nothing of Politics
When Eleanor Roosevelt was asked a political question she didn’t want to answer, she liked to say, “I know nothing of politics.” In fact, she could be as politically shrewd—and as unforgiving—as her old friend and political mentor Louis Howe had been.
In 1954, when her son Franklin was denied the Democratic nomination for governor of New York by the boss of Tammany Hall, Carmine De Sapio, she vowed to get even. In order to get ahead more than forty years earlier, her husband had made peace with the Tammany boss of his era. This time, his widow had other ideas. It took her six years, but she helped establish a reform organization to combat boss rule, campaigned from the roofs of sound trucks in the summer heat, and eventually ended the career of the man who’d double-crossed her son. “I told Carmine I would get him for what he did to Franklin,” she told a reporter on election night, “and get him I did.”
In 1956, she helped the worldly, well-traveled governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson, win the Democratic presidential nomination for the second time.
It was imperative that the Democrats return to power, she said, “but they must come back with the right leaders.” For her, even though Dwight Eisenhower had already beaten Stevenson once back in 1952, he was that leader, and during the campaign that followed she offered him practical advice on how to reach the voters: get to know more ordinary people, she told him, speak as if you’re talking to one person; every speech need not be the Gettysburg Address.
Eisenhower crushed Stevenson again, but four years later, Eleanor was still for him—and against the front-runner, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. She thought Kennedy too inexperienced, too willing to cut corners, too close to his father, Joseph, her husband’s pre-war ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, whose defeatism she had not forgotten—and she said all of this and more on television. When Kennedy complained that she was being unfair, she wired him right back. “My dear boy,” she wrote. “I only say these things for your own good. I have found in [a] lifetime of adversity that when blows are rained on one, it is advisable to turn the other profile.”
Stevenson proved a disappointingly tentative candidate in 1960 but Mrs. Roosevelt went to the convention in Los Angeles on his behalf anyway, hoping somehow to stop the Kennedy bandwagon. When the delegates spotted her entering the hall they stood and cheered for seven minutes. She pretended not to notice for as long as she could, because, she said, it would have been impolite to the speaker to acknowledge the applause. She later wrote him a letter of apology.
In the end, despite her efforts, Kennedy was nominated on the first ballot.
A few weeks later, the nominee arranged to call upon Mrs. Roosevelt at Val-Kill, hoping for her political blessing. The day before he was to appear, one of her granddaughters fell from a horse and was killed. Kennedy offered to cancel the meeting. She said to come
ahead; she understood how difficult it was to alter a campaign schedule.
Kennedy left their lunch “absolutely smitten by this woman,” a friend remembered, and she agreed to support his candidacy.
On election night, she watched the returns at her New York home. Guests came and went. When they cheered at good news from one Democratic stronghold or another she remained unmoved: “Why are they applauding?” she asked Edna Gurewitsch. “What do they expect?”
She was glad Kennedy won. But she did not hesitate to urge him on to greater efforts on behalf of peace, progress for women, and equal rights for all Americans—just as she had urged her husband on. And when she thought him wrong, she did not hesitate to criticize him, either. That, too, was what she had always done.
At a Memorial Day service at Springwood, Adlai Stevenson gets a little last-minute help with his prose.
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Mrs. Roosevelt in 1960. “We cannot exist as a little island of well-being in a world where two-thirds of the people go to bed hungry every night,” she said just before the Democratic convention that year. “I want unity but above everything else I want a party that will fight for the things that we know to be right at home and abroad.”
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Mrs. Roosevelt was warmly received in 1960 by the Democratic delegates in Miami as “the First Lady of the World,” but her hopes that Adlai Stevenson would be nominated for a third time were dashed. The smiling man to her left is the convention chairman, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida.
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