Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, march 28, 1954
“We have shown the free world that we can lead in military and economic matters, but the areas of spiritual and moral leadership we have found far more difficult to encompass.
“The Soviet Union does a better propaganda job throughout the world than we do. Their promises are made very alluring.
“In areas of the world where starvation has always been imminent and where the mass of people have suffered for the benefit of the privileged few, it is highly effective for the Soviet Union to say, “We believe all men are borthers” and “We will see to it that we share and share alike.”
“We must remember that the Soviet Union does not reveal its doings and that most Asiatics have no knowledge whatever of the physical and mental slavery created by Lenin and Stalin. To them communism is simply an economic theory of Marxism. And since their condition is often more than desperate, that is often a very attractive theory.
“In India in 1952 people were dying of hunger in great numbers. We voted to give them some of our surplus wheat but our congressmen argued for six months about who was to pay for the ships to take it there. The obvious question of the Indians was, ‘Didn’t your people know that we were dying? Didn’t they care enough to get the wheat to us when we needed it?”
“We have done about two-thirds of our job of leading the world. We still must prove to the people of the world that we have the vision, that we can do the work, and that we can learn from them as well as give to them, so that we can build an atmosphere in which every nation will be able to strive toward peace together.”
