OPINION: Mrs. Roosevelt Speaks Out

For the first time since Franklin Roosevelt's death, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt last week broke her silence on what she thinks of his successor's foreign policies. Items: she does not like President Truman's thinking about the atomic bomb secret, thinks that Secretary of State James F. Byrnes used inept tactics at the Council of Foreign Ministers.

To a large bipartisan audience of women (and a few men) at New Haven, Conn., Mrs. Roosevelt delivered an outspoken blast at the President's policy of keeping U.S. detailed knowledge of the atomic bomb a secret. Her conclusion: this was an implication that the U.S. could not trust its former allies. But would the secret hold? Said she: "Even those most hopeful that we can hold this secret expect others to trust us when we, apparently, do not trust anyone else. . . . I wonder if President Truman is not forgetting that the atomic bomb became important to us only when we realized that an enemy nation was trying to develop it?"

She added: "We let ourselves indulge in suspicions of the motives of other peoples of the world. With fear you never arrive at an understanding or real cooperation. If we trust others, we may come out with a compromise, and that wall be a step forward. I hope that we . . . are going to make fundamental changes in our-thinking and acting, which alone can bring us peace."

Mrs. Roosevelt was asked if she was discouraged by the failure of the London conference. Her reply: "No. I don't think it surprising that men who knew each other so little as they did could not arrive at the answers to all the questions they considered. Mr. Bevin and Mr. Byrnes were entirely new, and we should have known from his background that Mr. Bevin would be difficult. Mr. Byrnes was put in the position of mediator and he was not prepared."