The Read on Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt—chaired the UN Human Rights Commission and carried the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through eighty-odd formal drafting sessions and two years of committee argument among eighteen delegations to adoption, 48 votes to none with eight abstentions; the General Assembly rose to give her a standing ovation, the only delegate so honored. Wrote My Day six days a week for twenty-six years, filed from trains, planes, and a destroyer—the column plain, observational, and relentlessly regular. As First Lady she remade the office: weekly press conferences open only to women reporters—nearly three hundred fifty of them—which forced every wire service to keep women on staff; her own earned income from writing and lecturing, most of it given away. Resigned the DAR publicly over Marian Anderson's barred concert—announced the resignation in the column—and helped move the concert to the Lincoln Memorial, seventy-five thousand people on the Mall. Truman called her the First Lady of the World. Her published self-assessment runs the other way: she insisted she was not a gifted person, only someone who could not turn away from what she had seen.

Val-Kill, Hyde Park—the cottage she built apart from the family house; also the site of Val-Kill Industries, her furniture workshop employing local craftsmen, which failed commercially in the Depression and closed.

Allenswood Academy under Marie Souvestre, who trained her to think independently, travel deliberately, and argue a position she did not hold; fluent French from childhood. No university. The rest was apprenticeship: settlement-house teaching on Rivington Street; legislative analysis for the League of Women Voters under Elizabeth Read; the Women's Trade Union League; Louis Howe's deliberate coaching in public speech—say what you have to say and sit down—which cured the nervous laugh. Taught history and literature three days a week at Todhunter, the school she co-owned, while serving as First Lady of New York.

The record, role by role, wins and losses both. Todhunter: co-owner and working teacher. Val-Kill Industries: a rural-employment experiment that failed commercially and closed. First Lady, 1933–45: transformed the office—the women-only press conferences created a permanent institution; traveled roughly forty thousand miles a year as the administration's eyes, down a coal mine in Ohio, through New Deal camps, and reported back in memoranda that moved programs; proposed and pushed the National Youth Administration into existence; championed Arthurdale, the West Virginia homestead project—poured her own money and attention in, absorbed years of criticism over its costs, and its results stayed mixed; fought publicly for the federal anti-lynching bill and lost it—the President would not spend the capital, and she kept the pressure up in print anyway; flew with a Black instructor pilot at Tuskegee and made sure the photograph traveled; privately opposed the internment of Japanese Americans and stayed publicly nearly silent about it—a shortfall she later acknowledged; pressed for child-refugee admissions and largely lost. Office of Civilian Defense, 1941–42, her one formal executive command: resigned under fire within five months—the appointments she made became the story, and she concluded afterward that a line command was the wrong instrument for her. Pacific tour, 1943: five weeks, twenty-three islands, four hundred thousand wounded men visited ward by ward; the admiral who had opposed her visit wrote afterward that she had done more good than any other visitor to his area. United Nations, 1946–52: the only woman in the US delegation, assigned to the humanitarian committee on the assumption it was harmless; took the Soviet repatriation debate against Vyshinsky and won the vote; elected chair of the Human Rights Commission; drove the Universal Declaration to its 48–0 adoption—while the column kept filing six days a week. Chaired President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women in her last year. At the 1940 convention, with the hall in revolt over the vice-presidential pick, she flew in, spoke briefly—no ordinary time—and the revolt subsided; the nomination went through that night.

Sat on the drafting subcommittee she chaired, and traveled twice in her party. She knits through every session and misses nothing. Her method in the chair is always the same: she lets the two quarreling delegations exhaust themselves, then restates each position—better than its own author put it—until each recognizes itself in her summary, and then asks a small precise question that makes the overlap visible. At eleven at night she proposes, pleasantly, that we work through, and the joke in the Secretariat—that the delegates pray nightly for God to make Mrs. Roosevelt tired—is a joke because it has never once happened. At dinner she seats herself beside the most junior, most silent delegate and draws out of him the one thing he knows better than anyone at the table, and by the coffee the whole table is listening to him. Three days after I mentioned my son's illness in a corridor, a handwritten note arrived asking after him by name. What she will not do is fight in the open: when a colleague wronged her staff she did not confront him—she went formally silent, a cold courtesy her own family calls her Griselda mood, and the matter was resolved around her rather than by her. I have seen her genuinely combative exactly once, when Vyshinsky pressed the repatriation question—she rose, argued him point by point past midnight, and won the vote; she told me afterward it had cost her a week's sleep. And once, in Birmingham, ordered to sit on the white side of the aisle, she said nothing at all—she moved her chair to the center aisle and sat there all week.

I chair an international working group of members who agree on nothing. I want to understand her actual method—how eighteen irreconcilable delegations were carried to a unanimous document—and how to approach her for counsel without being managed into her agenda.