The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
MAY 19, 1953
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NEW YORK, Monday—Regretfully I left Hyde Park on Sunday afternoon, saying goodbye to two disconsolate little Scottie dogs which looked as depressed as I felt. I hope they will recover from their depression very soon. As I leave them for two and a half months, I can't help hoping they'll miss me just enough to be glad to see me on my return.
There is never a time when I like to leave home, and I am always happy when I return home again, but every trip I take I find deep and enduring interest. Certainly, every journey I make enriches my knowledge and enables me to understand other peoples of the world better. That seems to me one of the important things today, since our country has been thrust into a position of such high leadership.
I hope while I am on this trip that I shall learn something new to be of benefit in whatever work I do in the months to come. In working with the American Association for the United Nations I am hopeful that my own contacts with other parts of the world may add to what I have to give my own people in their struggle to understand history in the making today. In that event we can all bend our efforts to find ways in which to increase cooperation and lessen tensions and misunderstandings that might lead to war.
In the past few days some of our Senators and Congressmen in their statements about the attitude of the United Kingdom and the attitude of India, have been lacking in understanding of what the representatives of those nations really meant to convey by their statements.
It seems to me that in Congress we have a chip on our shoulder these days. We do not tolerate criticism from other people, and heaven knows we are ready enough in these bodies to give criticism.
Both Great Britain and India are fundamentally our friends and our statesmen should know that. Even among friends, differences of opinion arise, and they are not healed by hot words. Only careful consideration of others and an effort to meet and understand certain positions smooths over rough spots.
I wish that at the high levels of our legislative bodies we could have a little more desire to cooperate and show a little less hotheadedness. Senator McCarthy had no right to call Mr. Attlee "Comrade Attlee." It was a gratuitous insult for which there was absolutely no excuse, and when a gentleman of the Senator's calibre undertakes to manage international relations, we are apt to lose friends.
The European jaunt upon which Senator McCarthy sent his two bright young men doesn't seem to have enlightened him much as to the wisest way to make friends. I would suggest that instead of always being destructive, Senator McCarthy would do well to devote some of his indomitable energy toward making friends for democracy instead of giving his time to tearing down the characters of those who are not always able to defend themselves as ably as James Wechsler, for instance, has done in the past few days.
E.R.
(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1953, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART PROHIBITED.)
Names and Terms Mentioned or Referenced
Persons
- Attlee, C. R. (Clement Richard), 1883-1967 [ index ]
British politician; UK Prime Minister, 1945-1951
[ LC | ISNI | VIAF | Wikidata | SNAC | FAST | US Nat. Archives | ODNB ] - McCarthy, Joseph, 1908-1957 [ index ]
American politician; Senator from Wisconsin from 1947 to 1957
[ LC | ISNI | VIAF | Wikidata | SNAC | FAST | US Nat. Archives | ANB ] - Wechsler, James A. (James Arthur), 1915-1983 [ index ]
American journalist
[ LC | ISNI | VIAF | Wikidata | SNAC | FAST | ANB ]
Organizations
Geographic
- [ index ] New York (N.Y., United States)
Other Terms and Topics
About this document
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, May 19, 1953
Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007
Digital edition published 2008, 2017 by
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project
Available under licence from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.
Published with permission from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.
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