This is the second in the series of rewritten articles I am refreshing in the lead up to UNICEF@80.
If the title misled you into expecting some juicy gossip about Maurice Pate and an actress, I am sorry to disappoint you. Instead, the article simply introduces one more key figure who played a significant role in the early days of UNICEF.
The earlier version of this article appeared in News & Views on April 29, 2021.
As always, I will appreciate any additions, corrections, or comments from readers.
Tom
An Actress Takes Maurice Fishing at Lake Success
Tom McDermott
Helenka
Few people in UNICEF or XUNICEF today would recognize (or even pronounce) the name Helenka Adamowska Pantaleoni. Yet throughout UNICEF's turbulent early years, Helenka played crucial roles in shaping the organization's development and in managing often-rocky relations with the U.S. government, which remained skeptical of proposals for creation of a UN agency for children.
While Helenka's association with UNICEF would continue for 32 years, this article tells the story of one September evening in 1946 when Helenka quietly brought together two men whose partnership would shape UNICEF for the next two decades.
The Adamowski Family
Helenka was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1900, into a family highly acclaimed in music and deeply committed to the cause of Polish nationalism. Her mother was Antonina Szumowska (1868–1938), born in Lublin, Poland. After studying piano in Warsaw, she moved to Paris at age 22 and became the only female pupil of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Poland's greatest musician and national symbol. Helenka's father was Józef Adamowski (1862–1930), a cellist who had studied under Tchaikovsky himself at the Moscow Conservatory before joining the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he performed from 1889 to 1907.
When Jan Paderewski came to Boston in 1917 in connection with Polish war relief efforts, the seventeen-year-old Helenka appeared in a specially written play entitled The Spirit of Poland. This was no minor debut—it was a public declaration of her family's allegiance to Poland's cause, performed in the presence of the man who embodied Polish national identity.
In Film and on Broadway
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| Helenka Adamowska in the 1920s |
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| In the silent films Grit and Second Fiddle, Helenka played opposite Mary Astor |
Helenka's theatre career took off rapidly. In the 1920s, she appeared on the stage in Broadway productions, including Sandro Botticelli (1923), Sweet Nell of Old Drury (1923), The Pilgrimage (1925), and The Half-Caste (1926). She also appeared in silent films: Grit (1924) and Second Fiddle (1923), playing opposite famous figures of the silent film era like Mary Astor. By the 1930s, she had transitioned from acting to organising, becoming head of the Children's Theatre Department of the Junior League of New York.
By this point Helenka was well-established in high society circles in New York and Boston.
Marriage and Tragedy
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| Guido Pantaleoni |
In 1935, Helenka married Guido Pantaleoni Jr., a prominent New York lawyer. His father, Guido Pantaleoni Sr., was a founder of Westinghouse Electric Company. At the time of their marriage, Guido Jr. was a widower with three children. Their marriage produced two more children, giving Helenka a blended family of five.
When World War II broke out, Guido Jr. joined the US Army and became a Lieutenant Colonel. Less known was that Guido had been assigned by the army to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS—the forerunner of today's CIA). Given his Sicilian heritage, it is no surprise to learn that he was secretly assigned to operations in Sicily. In December 1943, he went missing near Palermo. Of course, none of this was known to Helenka beyond a news report that Lt. Colonel Pantaleoni was "missing in action."
Helenka at the time was working with Maurice Pate, who was responsible in the Red Cross for tracing POWs and trying to connect them with their families. Pate tried to find more information about Guido, but could find nothing.
With her husband "missing in action," Helenka was now alone and raising five children. Yet she did not withdraw from public life. She continued her work with the Red Cross and various humanitarian organisations—work now informed by an intimate understanding of what war did to families, and to children in particular.
Helenka learned the rest of Guido's story only a couple years after the war, when a German former army sergeant traveled to New York and met her. He told her how his unit had captured Guido and others and he ended up spending a few days with him while awaiting Guido's transfer to a POW camp. The sergeant called Guido "one of the most remarkable people he had ever met."
This impression was reinforced by a handwritten note the sergeant now gave Helenka. Guido had written the note for the sergeant in case he himself were captured, asking any Allied troops to accord the sergeant the same courtesy and compassion that he had received from Guido. Shortly later the sergeant learned that the transport taking Guido and others to another unit had hit a landmine, killing Guido and the others.
Maurice Pate
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| Maurice Pate, 1960 |
Pate began his relief work in Belgium in 1916, managing operations under the first of several relief agencies established and financed by future US president Herbert Hoover. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Pate joined the US Army and served in France. After the armistice, Hoover—now a towering figure in international relief and soon to become a major force in American politics—asked Pate to manage food and relief operations in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Hoover would later describe Pate as "the most efficient human angel I have ever known."
When relief operations wrapped up in 1921, Pate stayed on in Warsaw, running an import-export firm and becoming deeply embedded in Polish society. In 1927, he met and married Jadwiga Monkowska, a Polish socialite. The marriage lasted a decade. When his work eventually required the family to return to the United States, Jadwiga could not adapt to life in New York. They divorced in 1937, and she returned to Warsaw. Yet they remained close friends until her death in 1960.
Meanwhile, Herbert Hoover had risen from directing wartime relief to become Secretary of Commerce and eventually President of the United States. Although his presidency had ended more than a decade earlier, by 1946 he still commanded enormous respect on humanitarian and relief issues.
In the spring of 1946, President Truman asked Hoover to survey relief needs in Europe and Asia. Hoover chose Maurice Pate to accompany him, specifically to assess the needs of children. Their mission—38 countries in 76 days—not only confirmed Pate's exceptional experience in international relief, but also placed Hoover's public confidence squarely behind him.
The Political Moment
By 1946, opposition to UNRRA had grown fierce in American government and Congress. The United States had funded the organisation generously—over 70 per cent of its total budget—yet American officials and lawmakers increasingly objected that U.S. dollars were supporting countries sliding under Soviet communist control.
"Why should the taxpayers of the United States pour millions of dollars of food and clothing into Poland, Yugoslavia, or any other country behind the 'Iron Curtain' when those same countries refuse to let American newsmen see how that aid is being used? If they lock the door to our reporters, we should lock the vault to our money."
—Representative Everett Dirksen
In Washington, officials were blunt in saying that US support to countries whose governments were not supporting the US was over.
"The United States will not participate in any international relief agency which allocates supplies on a political basis or where the distribution cannot be checked by our own representatives. The period of emergency is over... Future relief needs are not of a character to require international operational machinery."
—William Clayton, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs
This was the atmosphere into which Rajchman's proposal had to survive. A children's fund, by definition, would have to serve children in all affected nations—including those now behind the Iron Curtain. In the hardening Cold War climate, the proposal was vulnerable to the same attacks destroying UNRRA.
Rajchman himself presented another vulnerability. A Polish national representing a communist-dominated nation, he was precisely the kind of figure attracting suspicion as the Cold War hardened. The United States had already pushed to exclude him from any role in planning the World Health Organization, viewing him as a security risk. He had the vision and expertise, but he lacked the political cover that only an American administrator with unassailable credentials could provide.
The Matchmaker
By September 1946, Helenka Adamowska Pantaleoni was a familiar figure in New York's philanthropic and diplomatic circles—a well-connected society woman with deep humanitarian commitments. Her acting career was behind her, but she had become adept at directing events from the wings rather than performing on the stage. She had founded the Paderewski Fund for Polish Relief in 1941 and worked tirelessly in Red Cross circles during the war. She was one of those people who seemed to know everyone: the diplomats, the philanthropists, the foundation trustees. More importantly, she understood the political landscape.
She had been closely tracking developments from Geneva. Just a week earlier, in August 1946, Rajchman had won acceptance for his children's fund proposal at the final UNRRA Council meeting. She understood the gulf between a proposal accepted in Geneva and one that could survive the political crossfire in Washington.
She knew the risks Rajchman faced—and she knew the solution.
She had worked alongside both Rajchman and Maurice Pate during the war years in Polish Relief circles. She knew Pate's gifts: his administrative mastery, his network in American philanthropic and political circles, his unshakeable commitment to humanitarian work. Helenka also knew that he had something few people could match: he had just returned from Hoover's worldwide survey of global relief needs, commissioned by President Truman. He brought with him not only unrivalled experience in children's relief but also the confidence of the one American statesman whose humanitarian judgment carried immense weight in Washington.
So that September, when Pate came to her Manhattan apartment for dinner, Helenka had something consequential in mind. She picked up the keys to her convertible and took him for a drive out to Lake Success on Long Island, where the newly-formed UN was temporarily headquartered whilst its East River headquarters was under construction. The invitation seemed casual, almost spontaneous. But Helenka never left such moments to chance. She knew that the UN's Third Committee was meeting that day, that Eleanor Roosevelt was in the room, and that Ludwik Rajchman might be persuaded to step out for a word with Maurice Pate.
Lake Success
Here is Helenka's own account, from a 1977 Columbia University oral history:
"Maurice Pate was a man who was never really quite happy unless he was saving humanity by the millions. He went with Hoover into Belgian relief and Polish relief. In 1945 I was asked to organise something called Women United for the United Nations, a loose assembly of sixty or seventy of the large women's organisations that accredited themselves at the UN to see how we could interpret the work of the United Nations to our respective constituencies.
"When UNRRA was expiring in the spring of 1946 there was some talk about efforts to start an action on behalf of child victims of the war. There were several persons prominent in public life who recommended that an action be started on behalf of child victims of the second world war. One of these was Mayor LaGuardia who was then the head of UNRRA. Another was President Hoover who in a speech in Toronto called for an international organisation on behalf of children to be formed.
"That takes us to September, 1946, when the United Nations was meeting at Lake Success. Maurice Pate was coming for supper one night, and I asked him, 'Have you ever been to the UN?' He said, no he had barely heard anything about it.
"So we drove out with the top down to Lake Success and went into the Third Committee, which was the social, cultural, humanitarian, educational committee, where Eleanor Roosevelt was the United States delegate.
"We had sat there a little while when one of the delegates fished Pate out, saying he had something important to talk to him about. Well, that delegate happened to be the Polish delegate, Ludwik Rajchman, a well-known doctor in international public health. He said he had been thinking about Pate and wanting to see him, because he wanted him to organise a fund for the benefit of children—war victims chiefly. Pate had not been thinking about anything along these lines, although Mr. Hoover, who Pate called 'the Chief,' had raised it. No, Rajchman's proposal came completely out of the blue.
"Pate and Rajchman disappeared for a couple of hours. On the way home, he was thoughtful and then said, 'I just been asked to organise a fund for the benefit of children.'
"Of course I went into high G. It was the most marvelous thing, because it was like an answer to an unwritten prayer—some place where all the people could work together in an effort to ameliorate conditions for children. But he said he wanted to discuss it first with the Chief, before he gave an answer. I think he went right away to talk with Hoover who gave him his blessing."
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| Helenka in 1978 |
The Aftermath
A few days later, on September 30, 1946, the Economic and Social Council adopted Resolution 10(III), recommending that the General Assembly approve the establishment of UNICEF and directing the Secretary-General to prepare the necessary further steps. On December 11, 1946, the General Assembly approved Resolution A/RES/57(1), and UNICEF came into being. Maurice Pate took up his post as UNICEF's first Executive Director on January 1, 1947. He would serve in that position until his death in 1965.
Helenka remained closely involved through the political battles that transformed UNICEF from an emergency fund into a permanent organization. I hope to revisit one of those defining moments—the dramatic Third Committee debate of 1950—in a future article.
In 1953, President Eisenhower appointed Mary Lord, the head of the U.S. Committee for UNICEF, to succeed Eleanor Roosevelt as the U.S. representative on the UN Commission on Human Rights. Maurice Pate then turned to Helenka to lead the U.S. Committee. She accepted what she expected would be a temporary assignment and went on to serve as its unpaid volunteer head for the next 26 years.
Helenka died in January 1987 at the age of 86. Her commitment to UNICEF continued into a third generation. Her son, Anthony Pantaleoni, a lawyer, served for many years on the National Board of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, including five years as Chairman of the Board.
Helenka's granddaughter, actress Téa Leoni—best known for the television series Madam Secretary—has served as a UNICEF Ambassador since 2001 and has been a member of the UNICEF USA National Board since 2004.
There is much more to Helenka's story. In UNICEF's First Natcom, posted on April 22, 2021, I wrote about some of that story. I hope to come back to review and rewrite that article someday soon.
In the next article in this series, I plan to focus on the third member of this remarkable trio, Maurice Pate, and his patron, Herbert Hoover. I hope you'll join me.
Author's Note on Sources
It is difficult to imagine an actress who appeared four times on Broadway and twice in silent films, a society figure who founded or co-founded at least three major organizations (the Paderewski Fund for Polish Relief, Women United for the United Nations, and the US Committee for UNICEF), and a woman who exercised considerable influence over American philanthropic and diplomatic circles for nearly three decades—and yet her name appears almost nowhere in the historical record. The newspapers carried only the predictable society notices: engagements, weddings, children's marriages, and a brief obituary. No interviews. No public statements. No announcements of her accomplishments.
I can only describe her as powerful but self-effacing—as a person who knew that her strength lay in the ability to influence people and events from one step behind.
What she left us instead are two documentary traces: a slim autobiography, In Her Own Words (87 pages, published by the US Committee for UNICEF in 1994 with a foreword by James P. Grant), and a series of oral history recordings made in 1977 for Columbia University's Oral History project—not available online, and only partially transcribed.
As always, I will be grateful for any comments, additions and corrections readers may contribute.
Tom
It is fascinating for me to relive these earlier years of UNICEF. I started in 1965 at the UN, so I didn't meet Maurice Pate, but I knew and worked with Helenka, and remember attending meetings in her apartment in the Alcoa Building.
ReplyDeleteIn my early years with UNICEF I heard and read a lot about Ms. Pantaleoni in various public information materials. When I came to HQ in 1976 I met her at our offices in the. Alcoa Building…at 866 UN Plaza, since she was a good friend with the Labouisses and she lived in the same building. She often had meetings with the Executive Director and other staff.. I found her to be quite an impressive lady with a European charm.
ReplyDeleteThanks Tom for enriching our UNICEF history with all this research that coincidences are quite often part of destiny and history with a big “H”!
ReplyDeleteUmberto