Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  “Marion has gone,” Hick wrote Eleanor, “after a pretty stormy visit.” Hick attributed Marion’s flare-up to “change of life,” which put her in a “nervous and emotional state very similar to mine at her age.” It was what happened to “spinsters” when they were in their forties. “At least, that was my experience, and Marion seems to be going through the same thing. I feel terribly sorry for her, but there isn’t much I can do except tell her that I probably understand a lot better than she thinks I do.” She added that Marion was “a very dear, warm, generous person,” of whom she was “terribly fond.” Marion would not have been happy with that description of the relationship.

  Although she saw Eleanor fairly often at Val-Kill and in New York, Hick was retreating more and more to the Little House and a life of solitude. The dietary requirements of her diabetes made it difficult, or so she claimed, to spend time in other people’s houses. They didn’t understand what she could and couldn’t eat; one host bought her cheesecake because she told them she could eat cheese. She still saw her neighbors on occasion. Howard Haycraft, her former housemate, had his own house on the Dana property now, and he and his wife sometimes invited her to dinner. Hick’s sister Ruby Claff and husband, Julian Claff, whom she had helped out when they were desperate for work during the Depression, now were prosperous enough to afford a weekend place near hers. Hick relied on Ruby, a trained nurse, to watch over her when she was trying to get her diabetes under control. But Ruby was an incessant talker and got on her nerves.

  Hick’s favorite companion was, as always, her dog. She had lost Prinz, after a long life, in the summer of 1943. She couldn’t get back to Long Island in time to say a final goodbye, but her friends buried him, wrapped in one of her raincoats, in his favorite place, on a path they had often walked. Prinz was “an old, loyal and very dear friend,” Hick wrote Eleanor, and she would miss him “all the rest of my life.”

  Very soon after Prinz died, an English setter puppy named “Mr. Choate” was delivered to the White House, thanks to Eleanor, to serve as a replacement. Mr. Choate was fluffy and caramel brown. Once he arrived in the country and got out of his box, he jumped up and down, Hick reported, like a bouncing cornflake.

  While Eleanor couldn’t seem to get enough of her friends, Hick’s tolerance for company of any kind was increasingly limited. When the Haycrafts and the Claffs approached her porch one weekend to pay a courtesy call, they heard her muttering to someone else on the porch, “God damn it, here they come.” Her refusal to go on a picnic with the Haycrafts because she had to “iron her dishtowels” became a shorthand explanation among friends for Hick’s reclusive ways.

  —

  IN NOVEMBER 1947, Eleanor flew to Geneva to continue her human rights work, this time as chairman of the committee charged with drafting a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It would turn out to be a yearlong project full of difficult, often tedious negotiation. But the tedium was offset by the pleasure of an unexpected new relationship with a tall, handsome forty-six-year-old physician named David Gurewitsch. Gurewitsch was an appealing combination of warmth and reserve, well educated and worldly without being a snob. Many women found him attractive. Eleanor, at age sixty-four, was one of them.

  Gurewitsch was a specialist in rehabilitative medicine and had worked often with polio patients. He understood much better than most what FDR had overcome with his wife’s help. But Eleanor first observed him in his role as general practitioner, treating Joe Lash’s wife, Trude. Eleanor was so impressed that she asked him to be her physician too. There wouldn’t be much to do, she assured him, since she was rarely ill.

  In truth, Eleanor was no longer as invulnerable as she claimed—she had suffered several bouts of illness, including shingles. Gurewitsch first treated her in the summer of 1946, following a car accident. She had fallen asleep at the wheel, bruised her face badly, and broken her two front teeth. “Now I shall have two lovely porcelain ones,” she wrote in “My Day” with her usual bravado, “which will look far better than the rather protruding ones most of the Roosevelts have.”

  Doctor and patient didn’t become really close, however, until their roles were reversed. When Gurewitsch became ill with tuberculosis and needed to travel to Davos, Switzerland, for treatment, Eleanor arranged for him to travel there on the same plane she was taking to the Geneva conference. On their way, they were grounded by fog for three days at the airport in Shannon, Ireland. Eleanor became David’s caregiver, bringing food to the barracks where they stayed during the layover, a mile away from the airport. The barracks were clean and the beds were comfortable, but there was no heat. “I was worried about his condition,” Eleanor remembered.

  In some ways, Eleanor’s new interest in David Gurewitsch resembled her earlier attraction to the young radical Joe Lash. Like Lash, Gurewitsch was at an emotional turning point in his life—not just because of his illness, but also because he was in the process of ending a ten-year marriage to a beautiful professional singer named Nemone, whom he met around the time he first came to America. He and Nemone had a daughter, further complicating what had turned out to be an unfortunate marriage for both of them. Eleanor always liked to be needed. And David, like Joe, welcomed Eleanor’s attention and warmth at a difficult time in his life.

  There are only rare glimpses of David’s feelings about Eleanor. But one letter suggests the great comfort he found in her company. After a rendezvous in Zurich some months later, he wrote, “It was so much more than I had anticipated. It was more intense and more intimate, it has brought you closer. I did not know that just accepting, taking, without another return except for gratitude and warmth could be as simple. You have done nothing but giving and I nothing but accepting, taking . . . and still I am not ashamed, not even shy about it, just grateful and much closer.”

  David Gurewitsch’s childhood had been scarred by personal tragedy and war. He was born in Switzerland, the second child of Russian Jewish refugees. Three months before his birth, his father drowned in what may have been a suicide. When David was two, his mother deposited him, along with his three-year-old brother, at the home of his grandparents back in Russia and went off to England to study medicine, returning after five long years. When she did reenter his life, his mother was a commanding and judgmental presence. Eleanor, who expressed only love and admiration, was a welcome alternative.

  It was natural for Eleanor, at a time when she was deeply engaged in international issues, to be attracted to a man whose life was profoundly shaped by the turmoil of the twentieth century. David had first studied medicine at Freiburg, in Germany. In 1927, fearing rising anti-Semitism, he left Germany for Switzerland, where he finished his medical training. Like many other young Jews in Europe at that time, he was enthralled by the Zionist idea of a Jewish homeland; after he graduated, he settled first in Palestine, before traveling to the United States to continue his training. Eleanor was drawn to David, as she had been to Joe Lash, at a time when his world gave deeper meaning to hers.

  Yet in one important way, this relationship was different. Eleanor was now a widow—still full of energy and free to commit herself. She was well aware that David had other women in his life. But some of her letters suggest that she would have liked to have been his one and only. She was deeply hurt when he didn’t show up for an evening date, and she scolded him for his tendency to passively go along with women who pursued him. “From all you tell me,” she wrote him, “you have always been pursued and I think it is time for you to do the pursuing if any real good is to come to you.” She noted that “happy marriages develop when the man shows his desire to the woman and she responds fully and happily.” But then she added, “Tho’ some physical satisfaction is essential, you must be even surer of mental interests and sympathetic understanding.” It would be another ten years before David Gurewitsch decided to remarry. In the interim, and indeed for the rest of her life, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote or called him almost every single day. She kept hi
s photograph on her bedside table, and she insisted that he was “the love of her life.”

  Eleanor’s regular connection to David began at the time of the Geneva conference—a day didn’t go by without a letter or a phone conversation. Despite her challenging schedule, Eleanor managed to send him thoughtful gifts: a radio, food, and parts of the manuscript of her new book, This I Remember, for his opinion.

  The meetings of the Human Rights Commission were being held in the Palais des Nations, a very beautiful building in Geneva constructed after the First World War, when there was hope that a League of Nations could prevent a second conflagration. “At first,” Eleanor wrote Gurewitsch, “it seemed sad to me to go into that beautiful building built with love and hope.” But she came to feel that it was a good place to meet since it showed that “man’s spirit, his striving, is indestructible.” She added a question: “Do you think I’m being too optimistic?”

  When she entered the historic building for the first time, Eleanor confessed to her State Department colleague, Jim Hendrick, that she would have loved to slide on the marble floors. When the commission, after many days of hard work, finally agreed, on December 10, 1947, on a declaration, Hendrick told her, “Now you can take your slide.” Eleanor Roosevelt, chairman of the Commission on Human Rights, took a few running steps, followed by a satisfying slide along the marble floor of the Palais des Nations.

  —

  “IT REALLY ISN’T NECESSARY for me to go to the [Democratic] Convention” Eleanor told her “My Day” readers in July of 1948. “I can picture it in my mind’s eye.”

  Eleanor was at Hyde Park, hosting her annual picnic for the boys of the Wiltwyck School, when the Democrats convened in Philadelphia to choose their nominee. The Wiltwyck School was just across the river from Val-Kill, and she felt a special bond with the boys there, most of whom were black and who had been sent to the school, a project of the Episcopal Church, because they had gotten in some sort of trouble back in the city. After they consumed hot dogs and prodigious amounts of milk, the boys gathered around her on the floor at Val-Kill to hear her read “Toomai of the Elephants” from Kipling’s Jungle Book. The boys loved it, she reported, although they had probably never seen an elephant unless they had been lucky enough to go to a zoo.

  Eleanor was staying away from the convention—partly, she claimed, because of her position on the Human Rights Commission, but also because she wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the interim president’s becoming the likely Democratic nominee. Hick, on the other hand, rather liked Truman. He was familiar to her: a plainspoken midwesterner from the farm who had gone through hard times. Perhaps she also had sympathy for him because he was struggling to get out from under the shadow of the Roosevelts. Hick understood what that was like, after all.

  Though she stuck close to home much of the time, Hick decided to join her many Democratic friends in Philadelphia for the convention. Unlike Eleanor, she enjoyed the political maneuvering, the horse trading, the last-minute surprises. And the Democratic convention, in the summer of 1948, had it all. It was the first party convention in American history to take place under the hot glare of television lights. The elite who owned a TV set could watch, in grainy black and white, as a historic civil rights battle played out on the convention floor. The majority civil rights plank made all the right promises, but vaguely. The minority plank laid out specifics: opposition to the poll tax, antilynching legislation, an end to segregation in the armed forces—in short, all the changes Eleanor had been advocating for years. When Hubert Humphrey, then mayor of Minneapolis, presented the minority plank to the convention, urging the Democratic Party to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights,” the great majority of delegates roared their approval. Only the southern Democrats sat on their hands. Later, as Truman was riding north to accept the nomination, delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out to protest the civil rights plank.

  Though he was the presumptive nominee, Truman had had trouble finding a vice presidential candidate. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas turned him down, reportedly saying he didn’t want to be the number-two man for a number-two man. Kentucky senator Alben Barkley made a rousing speech at the convention, but he mentioned Truman in it only once and never raised the possibility of a November victory. Both Truman and Eleanor, listening to the speech from different places, concluded that Barkley wanted to be president himself. In the end the Kentuckian agreed to take the vice presidential nomination, tilting the ticket to the South.

  The final indignity occurred on the last night of the convention. Truman arrived in Philadelphia at 9:15, spotless in a white linen suit and ready to make his acceptance speech. But the seconding speeches and the balloting lasted for four hours, during which Truman and Barkley sat in stifling rooms waiting. It was nearly 2 a.m. when the pair finally stepped out onto the stage to accept their nominations.

  Before they could begin, doves of peace, cooped up all evening in a floral Liberty Bell, were released into Convention Hall and flew all over in a panic, smashing into lights and furniture and people. Truman and Barkley, to their credit, stood on the stage laughing uproariously, especially when a bird landed on Speaker Sam Rayburn’s bald head. Once the doves were corralled, Barkley made his acceptance speech. Then, at last, it was time for “the little man from Missouri,” still looking fresh in his white suit, to step up to the podium.

  Truman’s hard-hitting speech delighted Hick and everyone else in the hall. “Senator Barkley and I will win this election,” he told the crowd, “don’t you forget that.” He told farmers and laborers that if they didn’t vote Democratic they were “the most ungrateful people in the world,” and “don’t let anybody tell you anything else.” At one point he even lapsed into Missouri-speak: because of the Republican Congress, he said, the labor department “can’t hardly function.” Indeed, most of the speech was used to chastise the “do-nothing” Congress. “I wonder if they think they can fool the people of the United States with such poppycock!”

  Truman had a surprise for Congress: “On the twenty-sixth of July, which out in Missouri we call ‘Turnip Day,’ I am going to call Congress back.” He was going to ask them to pass laws to support the long list of promises in the platform—promises of better housing, aid to education, medical care, and civil rights that the Republican Congress had blocked in the past. “They can do this job in fifteen days, if they want to do it,” he proclaimed.

  “Gosh, my hat is off to the boy!” Hick wrote her journalist friend Bess Furman. “After all the throat-cutting, abuse, hysteria . . . for him to be able to make a speech like that. Wow!”

  There had been many times, Hick told her friend, when she wished she were back in the newspaper business. “But never so badly as at the time of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia. What a story!” It surely occurred to her, watching the convention, that she could have covered this story. The Roosevelts were no longer in the White House, and she knew politics as well as or better than anyone else. But at this point her health wouldn’t allow her to get back into daily newspaper work, even if she had the courage to start over again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE OPINION OF MANKIND

  THAT SEPTEMBER, while Harry Truman was campaigning for the presidency, Eleanor Roosevelt delivered a speech in the grand amphitheater of the Sorbonne before a rapt audience of thousands. She spoke without a script, as usual, but this time in her excellent French, moving easily from the weighty subject of human rights to a light aside about her family. She thought she had reached the limits of human patience, she told them, in bringing up her children, but that was before she became chairman of the Commission on Human Rights!

  Even more patience was required at the General Assembly over the coming months. Eleanor’s committee insisted on debating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “exactly as though it was all an entirely new idea,” even th
ough the same issues had been debated in Geneva. A grand total of eighty-five repetitive and tedious meetings were devoted to the subject, with the Soviets “telling us what dogs we are” before the document was finally forwarded to the larger Assembly.

  Fortunately, David Gurewitsch had joined his new friend in Paris. “In spite of the fact that Mrs. Roosevelt had lots of things to do,” he remembered, “there was still time for enjoying just Paris.” There were strolls in the Tuileries, visits to the Louvre, and delicious dinners at Left Bank restaurants.

  When David had to go back to his practice, Eleanor wrote him that she wanted him to “be on the same side of the ocean. . . . I’m glad you love me. I love you dearly and send you my most devoted thoughts.”

  Three months later, Eleanor returned to Paris for still more sessions before the final vote on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “The work is hard now and high tension,” she wrote Hick, “but it is coming to an end.” Finally, at 3 a.m. on December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Declaration. There were forty-eight yeas and eight abstentions, mostly from Soviet bloc countries. Afterward, the entire Assembly rose to give Eleanor a standing ovation.

  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a carefully worded blueprint for a hoped-for world. The subtext, however, is the real-world experience of World War II, particularly the Holocaust. The Declaration begins by recognizing “the inherent dignity of all members of the human family” as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” then goes on to note that “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” In thirty succinct articles, it addresses both what human rights should be universal—life, liberty, security, equality before the law, privacy, freedom of movement, freedom of expression—but also what is not acceptable to the community of nations: slavery, torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, denial of nationhood, political persecution.