7 The 100 Most Influential World Leaders of All Time 7

After President Roosevelt’s death in 1945, President

Harry S. Truman appointed Eleanor a delegate to the

United Nations (UN), where she served as chairman of

the Commission on Human Rights from 1946 to 1951 and

played a major role in the drafting and adoption of the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). In the last

decade of her life, Eleanor continued to play an active part

in the Democratic Party.

In 1961 President John F. Kennedy appointed her chair

of his Commission on the Status of Women, and she con-

tinued with that work until shortly before her death. She

had not initially favoured the Equal Rights Amendment

(ERA), saying it would take from women the valuable pro-

tective legislation that they had fought to win and still

needed, but she gradually embraced it.

An indefatigable traveler, Eleanor Roosevelt circled

the globe several times, visiting scores of countries and

meeting with most of the world’s leaders. She continued

to write books and articles, and the last of her “My Day”

columns appeared just weeks before her death, from a rare

form of tuberculosis, in 1962.

David Ben-Gurion

(b. Oct. 16, 1886, Płońsk, Pol., Russian Empire [now in Poland]—d.

Dec. 1, 1973, Tel Aviv–Yafo, Israel)

D

avid Ben-Gurion was a Zionist statesman and politi-

cal leader who was the first prime minister and

defense minister of Israel. It was Ben-Gurion who, on May

14, 1948, at Tel Aviv, delivered Israel’s declaration of inde-

pendence. He was revered as the father of the nation.

Ben-Gurion, born David Gruen, was the son of Victor

Gruen, one of the leaders in Płońsk of the “Lovers of

Zion,” a movement that was disseminating among the