The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt

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MONTEREY, Calif.—Democrats must be traveling around the country. In one place I followed President Truman and missed him by only one day. In San Francisco, Mr. Averell Harriman has been spending several days and I have heard on every side of the excellent speeches he has made.

The San Francisco papers this morning reported his proposal for revising foreign aid on a long-range basis. This is an excellent proposal, for it would mean that we would become partners with countries who were planning their development over a period of five or ten years. That would be far more constructive than what we are doing now, which never permits any nation to know whether they will have any help from us one year away from the present time.

Last night I spoke on the U. N. to rather a meager audience. As a city, San Francisco is one of the most charming in the whole U. S. But I have never found that its residents turned out with any great enthusiasm to hear me speak, and I am afraid that the Friends Legislative Committee, my sponsors, were too ambitious in putting their meeting last night in the Masonic Memorial Temple!

The Soviet Parliament, I see, has voted without dissent to approve Mr. Khrushchev's proposal of cutting the armed forces by 1,200,000 men. At the same time Khrushchev is careful to tell his people that their nuclear power is stronger, so that they have not really impaired their fighting strength. Foreign Minister Gromyko, in a speech before the parliament, added that the Western powers were not cooperating in this direction but were delaying their reduction, and hence the Soviets alone were leading in the effort to bring about a disarmed world. In reply, it might be pointed out that the Soviet reduction in the number of its armed forces probably does not bring about, percentage-wise, an equality with most of the Western nations.

Tucked away on one of the back pages of the San Francisco papers I found the good news that the last four scientists on the disintegrating ice floe in the Arctic Ocean had been flown out by the Air Force. They were all military personnel and they must have been very pleased to leave that crumbling island of ice. This means that the technical knowledge gathered by these men is safe, as well as the scientific equipment they used.

The weather in San Francisco on Friday and Saturday was perfectly beautiful. Our flight in from Sacramento, where we had a very large audience for a Thursday evening meeting, was smooth and fast, and our day in Frisco after arrival was a busy one.

E. R.

(COPYRIGHT, 1960, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC.)


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  • Monterey (Calif., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, January 18, 1960

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
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Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

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MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

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Transcription created from a photocopy of a UFS wire copy of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
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