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She was 57 when her mother-in-law died. She was 60 when the bleak news of Franklin Roosevelt's death came from Warm Springs. For 40 years—years she could not have imagined as a bride—her life had been irrevocably part of theirs. She was a lonely widow. But the 40 years had pushed her far out into the rushing stream of events. Harry Truman asked her, as custodian of the Roosevelt name, to serve the U.S. in the United Nations.
The years since have made Mrs. Roosevelt (to the U.S. delegation she is simply "Mrs. R.") a sagacious and useful member in U.N. struggles. When she feels called upon to chide the Russians, she never treats them as baleful bogeymen but simply as naughty—and rather ignorant—boys. She does not hide her amusement at the fact that the most exalted Soviet official dares not speak privately with a Westerner without another Russian beside him to eavesdrop.
"The most intimate thing [Russian U.N. Delegate Alexei Pavlov] ever said to me," she says, "was this year in Paris at my apartment in the Crillon. He brought Mr. Borsilov along, and as they were leaving, Mr. Borsilov lost his hat behind a chair. We walked to the door as he was searching for it, and Mr. Pavlov whispered quickly to me: "Do you like Tchaikovsky? I do!"
Does Mrs. Roosevelt, at last, understand more about the Russians than the hopeful fact that some of them have a secret and subversive passion for Tchaikovsky? Does she really understand what they are up to? Does she know, with her feelings as well as with her mind, that Russia is a terrible and terrorized police state, ruled with complete cynicism by "a gang of ruthless and bloody-minded professors"?*That is a question which still troubles those who find it not difficult to resist her charm.
Yet, just because she is as she is, Mrs. Roosevelt is highly effective in U.N. debates. Her Republican partners in the U.N. are the first to acknowledge that she can often be more effective than they—not simply in answering a Malik or a Pavlov with the right arguments, but in winning the sympathy and the support of the Indians or the Arabs or the Indonesians.
Before lunching recently with Iraq's Mrs. Bedia Afnan, a woman often stiffly opposed to the U.S. position on human rights, Mrs. Roosevelt said: "She will not trust me, or believe what I say. But she will turn it over in her mind, and, perhaps in time . . ."
Not the least of Mrs. Roosevelt's effectiveness in the U.S. cause stems from the simple fact that she is a linguist. She has broadcast in German, Spanish and Italian. She speaks facile though slightly accented French; at the behest of the State Department last winter she not only delivered a weekly Sunday radio talk from Paris to audiences in France, Belgium and Switzerland, but was able to make the audience respond with a surprising volume of mail.
She is almost constitutionally unable to resist friends or acquaintances who plead for her time or her help. When the late Serge Koussevitsky urged her to do a recorded version of the musical fairy tale, Peter and the Wolf, she hesitated only long enough to be sure he was serious before hustling obediently off to Tanglewood to synchronize herself with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.