Eleanor Roosevelt
The Eleanor Roosevelt/Wendell Willkie Forum will host, as its first speaker, Michael Meeropol, elder son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He is speaking at the Woman’s Club of Minneapolis at 410 Oak Grove St. on Tuesday, July 23, at 8 p.m. The forum is free. There will be a cash bar before and after. An earlier sit-down dinner at 6 p.m. for $150 will raise money for the forum.
The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953 for giving atomic secrets to the Soviets. But they were not guilty. The documentary “A Compassionate Spy” can be easily screened on YouTube. The film is about Ted Hall, the youngest person working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. He gave the Soviets the atomic secrets.
Adlai Stevenson wrote, “Willkie placed principles above compromise. It was this kind of selflessness, following so closely on the disappointment of a political defeat, that should keep Wendell Willkie’s memory alive for all Americans.” Michael Meeropol will ask, “Who will stand up against domestic fascism today, putting aside their own political ambitions, as Willkie did?”
Our second speaker, in October, will be Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of a three-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt published in the 1990s. It was a bestseller.
Wendell Willkie
For more information and to RSVP for the dinner, call Phil Willkie at 612-991-3582.
