When Anna Rosenberg died in May 1983, the New York Times obituary called her “one of the most influential women in the country’s public affairs for a quarter century.” The obituary came 66 years after Rosenberg first appeared in the Times as teenager Anna Lederer, an immigrant from Budapest who mediated a solution to a student strike. Over the next seven decades, Rosenberg became a trusted adviser to Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson. She was a presidential problem-solver whose fingerprints were on everything from the Manhattan Project to the GI Bill to the desegregation of the military.
The apex of her career was a 26-month span when she was an assistant secretary of defense and the top woman in the Truman administration. Life magazine called her “far and away the most important woman in American government.”
Though Rosenberg has been mostly forgotten, her career reminds us of the importance of the behind-the-scenes players who shape much of what government achieves. Plus, it demonstrates the sharp contrast between Rosenberg’s subtle style and today’s performative — and frequently ineffectual — manner of governing.
For a time in the early 20th century, Rosenberg was, according to one contemporary account, “the busiest woman in New York.” She began her career in the 1920s as a young labor mediator in New York City. She moved into managing political campaigns, even catching the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt with her work on Franklin Roosevelt’s gubernatorial campaign. When Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, he entrusted massive, dynamic New Deal programs in his home state to Rosenberg; she was the only female regional director for the National Recovery Administration and for Social Security.
In the summer of 1941, as the United States began preparations for entry into World War II, Roosevelt brought Rosenberg to Washington, where he employed her mediation skills to break the impasse between the White House and A. Philip Randolph, a Black leader who was planning a March on Washington. Randolph aimed to push the administration to mandate the hiring of Black Americans for the good-paying defense jobs from which they’d been systematically shut out. Rosenberg helped broker an agreement, which became Executive Order 8802, the first federal action in support of civil rights since Reconstruction.
By 1942, Rosenberg was well established in high Washington circles. She met one-on-one with Roosevelt more than most of his Cabinet members, and the president called her his “Mrs. Fix-It.”
When labor piracy and worker shortages in Buffalo threatened defense contracts and, thus, the prosecution of the war, Roosevelt dispatched Rosenberg as labor czar to put out that fire. Her solution — the Buffalo Plan — became the nationwide model for labor agreements throughout the war. When a unionization effort threatened the vital secrecy of the Manhattan Project, Roosevelt dispatched Rosenberg to persuade the union leaders to stand down.
“Outside the president’s personal secretary,” Gen. Walter Bedell Smith observed, “Roosevelt relied more upon Mrs. Rosenberg than any other single individual.”
With the war effort going full-bore on the home front, Roosevelt sent Rosenberg to war-torn Europe as his personal emissary. Her mission was to find out from the GIs themselves what they hoped for when they returned home. They wanted a college education, Rosenberg reported to Roosevelt, a pathway to the American Dream that had long been out of reach for them. “He lit up,” she recalled decades later to journalist Diane Sawyer. Rosenberg’s mission led to the educational thrust of the GI Bill, which would provide veterans with up to four years of free college education and help elevate millions into the middle class.
In 1945, shortly before Roosevelt’s death, the president dispatched Rosenberg to Europe again. She became one of the first women from an Allied country to see a liberated concentration camp. She remained in Europe at war’s end to make sure former assailants and their Jewish victims were not housed together among the millions in displaced-persons camps. After the war, Truman, now president, made Rosenberg the first recipient of the Medal of Freedom.
In 1950, Rosenberg began the second act of her public life when Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall persuaded her to become an assistant secretary. Her expertise in running large programs, her comfort lobbying members of Congress, and her good relations with Truman made her the ideal choice to rebuild the size and strength of the armed forces in the desperate early days of the Korean War.
Before assuming this position, Rosenberg overcame a scurrilous smear campaign orchestrated by right-wing radio host Fulton Lewis Jr. and Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.). The latter accused her of being “a communist agent,” and Rep. Clare Hoffman (R-Mich.) called her a “Budapest Jewess.” The ordeal scarred Rosenberg. “Not only do we have enemies without,” she wrote Eleanor Roosevelt, “but very dangerous ones within.”
Despite her enemies, the press was captivated by this stylish civilian woman in a top Pentagon post. Rosenberg was a popular subject in the pages of the New York Times, Time, Newsweek and the Saturday Evening Post. She was a featured guest on New York City radio broadcasts and television’s “Meet the Press.” She was variously described as “Tabasco sauce,’” a “half-pint of dynamite,” and “a sparrow of a woman” who could out-curse labor leaders and outwit business executives.
Rosenberg remained influential even after leaving official government service. She co-hosted President John F. Kennedy’s birthday gala at Madison Square Garden, and even attended the after-party with Marilyn Monroe. After Kennedy’s assassination, she gave Johnson, an old friend, a pep talk over the phone and secured a White House meeting to urge him to hire more women in government. He listened.
Rosenberg also wrote to Johnson after his March 1965 speech about Selma, Ala., in which he called for a voting rights act. That elicited an uncommonly emotional response from the president — one that revealed Rosenberg’s enduring importance. “We have worked through many causes together,” he told her, “and there is no judgment I value more highly than yours.”
Even when Republican Richard M. Nixon assumed the presidency, Rosenberg helped deliver the War on Cancer.
After 1974, Rosenberg no longer worked with government leaders to shape national policy. Yet, she remained a feisty defender of the pro-labor legacies of the New Deal. For instance, when President Ronald Reagan fired air traffic controllers in 1981, Rosenberg criticized his lack of “compassion and understanding.” He could have taken away some benefits, she argued, but “you don’t just say ‘You’re fired.’”
The turn away from New Deal idealism toward conservatism was not the only thing that dismayed Rosenberg. She also expressed disappointment that the doorways to opportunities for women “are still shut tight in most places.”
Since her death in 1983, Rosenberg has been largely forgotten, despite her long record of achievement.
Rosenberg herself seems to have wanted it that way. When Eleanor Roosevelt sought to put her in touch with a biographer, Rosenberg demurred. When Henry Luce of Time-Life and other publishers offered her a deal for her memoirs, she declined. When journalist Edward R. Murrow told her, “Anna, you have quite a book to write someday,” she responded, “Ed, that’s a book that will never be written.”
Though she enjoyed press attention during her time in government, it was always in service of advancing policy goals. She had found the avalanche of me-and-Roosevelt memoirs distasteful. The president had told her things in confidence that she intended never to betray. “I burned his letters,” she confided to Sawyer in 1982.
While some of Rosenberg’s erasure was the result of her choice not to document her life, her story has been lost for other reasons as well. She was a Jewish woman operating in spheres dominated (and chronicled) by men, and she regularly faced the head winds of sexism and antisemitism. Her influence often came without official power, which made her impact harder to quantify.
Yet, it’s important to recover Rosenberg’s story. She was one the most influential women in modern American history, a power behind policies that achieved victory in war and prosperity in peace.
At a time when the United States is confronting major challenges, including threats to democracy, her example teaches us that it’s not only elected officials who will have an outsize impact on what happens next. “I’m not a crusader or reformer,” Rosenberg said, “but there are a lot of things happening you cannot just sit by watching idly.” Rosenberg moved to do something about them.
Her desire not to tout her achievements made Rosenberg more effective, but it did keep her from assuming her rightful place in history. And returning her to that spot reminds us of the value of diligent behind-the-scenes players, focused on addressing problems, not stealing the spotlight.