Her Week

OeNEW YORK

Eleanor Roosevelt, noting that German Pastor Martin Niemoller had arrived in the U.S. on a lecture tour (see RELIGION), promptly piped: "I understand that Dr. Niemoller . . . was against the Nazis because of what they did to the church, but that he had no quarrel with them politically. ... I cannot quite see why we should be asked to listen to his lectures." Blurted the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, sponsor of Pastor NiemOeller's tour: "The record clearly shows that he repeatedly spoke against political aims of the Nazis as early as 1933."*

Mrs. Roosevelt said nothing more on the subject. She had lots of other things to do and talk about: at 62 she was still in midseason form. During the week, besides sitting as a delegate to the U.N. General Assembly, she became a grandmother for the 15th and 16th times, when Son John's wife Anne and Son James's wife Romelle had babies a day apart (see MILESTONES). Then the Advertising Research Foundation reported that she is the columnist with most reader appeal to U.S. women. My Day, according to the survey, is read by 37% of women newspaper readers. (Then come George Sokolsky, Dorothy Thompson and Westbrook Pegler.)

Meanwhile, people were inquiring solicitously about her health. "Naturally," she chirped in her column, "I felt rather flattered. . . . Then some kind friends enlightened me. . . . The gossip in Washington had been that 1) I was having a nervous breakdown, 2) I was dying of cancer and 3) I was about to get married! Somehow or other these things do not go very well together, and though I realize that my age might give rise to the first two, it certainly should preclude the last."

*The confusing record shows that Pastor NiemOeller: 1) approved of Hitler from 1924 to 1933; 2) volunteered, but was turned down, for the German Navy in World War II; 3) spent eight years in concentration camps for anti-Nazi activities.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.