I gave this talk to the United Nations Association of San Francisco on Human Rights Day, December 10, 2018.
Remembering Eleanor Roosevelt
and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
John Roosevelt Boettiger
San Francisco, December 10, 2018
Good afternoon. Thank you for the privilege of talking with you about a subject that is simultaneously very dear to my heart and also a little daunting. That’s always been so, as long as I can remember, not only on special occasions like today’s celebration. Junior high and high school, college and graduate school years; whenever. Anticipating a visit from my grandmother subtly changed the normal emotional tones of my family. We were excited but—what? — a bit less relaxed? a tad anxious? She was “Mummy” to my mother, “Mother” or “LL” to my father (the initials stood for “Lovely Lady,” dreamed up by a small group of admiring newspaper reporters, including my father, well before my parents had met), and she was “Grandmère” to us kids, my sister, my brother and me. But we all knew that she was also Eleanor Roosevelt. Thus the frisson, the small undercurrent of anxiety, perhaps that she would hold us as she held herself, to a high bar….Thankfully that frisson dissipated with the hugs of greeting.
My grandmother has been gone now for over half a century. I’m more deeply knowing and just as grateful today as I was as a child for her presence in my life. I lived and traveled with her in the still formative years of my late teens and early twenties. She was my loving, compassionate and indefatigable Grandmère. She was bilingual virtually from her first words. She was Grandmère to my sister and brother when she held my mother’s hand during my birth in March 1939. About 20 years later she and I looked at each other across the boardroom table of the American Association for the United Nations in New York. Time and again over those years she taught me, not so much with words as by example, her devotion to peace, reconciliation and love, in our homes, with our families and friends, our churches and synagogues, communities of fellowship, our relations with other nations, and, of course, the UN. She has been and remains, far and away, my first and best mentor. I had to remind you, my sister said, she wasn’t a saint. Like the rest of us, she had her share of impatience, anger, dismay, suffering, loss—more than her share of loss, I say.
Remembering the two of us sitting across from each other at the AAUN’s boardroom table, I also recall another of her practices for which I’ve been grateful. It was one of the secret sources of her virtually superhuman energy: her mastery of the short and restorative power nap. I can still see her in my mind’s eye. She would nod her head slightly and close her eyes as if she were thinking carefully about the agenda being discussed. A minute or two later, she would raise her head. To the other board members at that table, she never missed a beat. I don’t think anyone but me knew she was briefly, restoratively and thoroughly asleep.
During the years of World War II, when I was very young and my father had left for combat, my grandfather Franklin — PaPa, as I knew him — invited my mother and me to leave our home near Seattle and come to live in The White House. Those White House years were extraordinary personally, but my memories of FDR at that time were more vivid than those of Grandmère; I imagine because she was so often traveling, alone and with friends, in the States and visiting our troops abroad. She was always learning, following her purposes as well as those of her husband, as “his eyes and ears.” Some of you may remember a New Yorker cartoon from that time: two coal-grimed miners deep underground, one looking up, startled, and saying to the other, “My gosh, it’s Mrs. Roosevelt!”
My time living and traveling with her more consciously and intimately was later, when naturally I came to share her devotion to the United Nations. I sat at that AAUN boardroom table with her because there was a seat on the board for one student, the president of the Collegiate Council for the United Nations. So while I was too young to accompany her during the years of crafting the Declaration we celebrate today, I’ve always felt her presence palpably on the 10th of December each year, the anniversary of that day in 1948 when she presented the Declaration to the General Assembly; and the entire Assembly, for its first and perhaps still its only time, stood as one to applaud: applaud the Declaration, which was adopted without a single dissenting vote, and applaud her and the fruits of her labor.
And labor it was. She said of that work at the time, "I drive hard, and when I get home, I will be tired! The men on the Commission will be also!" She was appointed to the US delegation to the United Nations by President Truman in 1945. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson said to the General Assembly two days after she died in 1962, “I have lost more than a friend; I have lost an inspiration…The United Nations itself is in no small way a memorial to her and her aspirations. To it, she gave the last fifteen years of her restless spirit…,” her labors, her love, her ideals—“ideals that made her,” he said, “only weeks after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, put aside all thoughts of peace and quiet after the tumult of their lives to serve as one of this nation’s delegates [to the UN]…Her duty then as always,” said Stevenson, “was to the living, the world, to peace.” It was her leadership, he added, that helped give the world “after years of painstaking and patient travail one of the most noble documents of humankind, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
She soon dispatched the skepticism and won the admiration of the men who were her fellow American delegates. So it was natural, to them and to the representatives of other countries, that early in 1947 she was elected to chair the commission that worked to give birth to what I’ve come to think of as a humane cross-cultural embodiment of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature,” and the living circumstances that allow those angels to flourish. In her own estimation and in the historical record, the Declaration was her greatest single achievement. Its accomplishment also demonstrated and required her supple political savvy, especially in her skillful, determined negotiations with Andrey Vyshinsky and Alexei Pavlov of the Soviet Union. She made ingenious alliance with the able Canadian representative John Humphrey, the Lebanese philosopher turned master diplomat Charles Malik, and especially the legal genius and yet-to-be Nobel Peace Prize winner René Cassin of France. It was Cassin’s contribution, it’s been said, that “transformed what might have been a list or ‘bill’ of rights into ‘a geodesic dome of interlocking principles.’”
She knew, of course, that the Declaration was aspirational, a source of guidance intended to clarify the character of the human adventure and the crafts of government at their best. The covenants that would have given it more legal clout died on a vine not yet dug deeply enough into our humus, or human soil. That said, she was as devoted to the completion of the Declaration as to anything in her lifetime. She believed it set a standard to assess our accomplishments as individuals, families, villages and cities, businesses and nations.
In her address to the General Assembly exactly 70 years ago today she said, "We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind. This declaration may well become the international Magna Carta for all men, [women and children] everywhere.”
But she also wisely, realistically, said that documents expressing ideals “carry no weight unless the people know them, unless the people understand them, unless the people demand that they be lived.” [italics added].
So I think the most revealing, deeply felt, enduring and well-known remark she made about human rights was this: "Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."
Hers was an inspired, I think deeply grounded, blend of contemplative and active living. I treasure her wisdom and courage, her humor, her accomplishments, her truth-telling, and my memories.