When the War Ends

When World War II ends, it will not have ended the dislocations of the modern world. It did not begin, as did World War I, with a passionate conviction on both sides that victory would automatically end the evils that led to war. It is not likely to end in the mood of the Armistice of 1918, when millions believed that peace terms alone could bring into existence a new, warless and equitable world order.

But World War II will end, and last week President Roosevelt and the U. S. State Department set citizens to pondering on what the world will be like when it does. No spectacular moves led to the pondering. But in a week marked by a ferocious arithmetical dispute between Republicans and Democrats about the national debt (see p. 1 6), and by President Roosevelt's stern condemnation of Russia (see p. 77), a series of Presidential and State Department moves clarified U. S. foreign policy more sharply than at any time since the war began.

> Hard-working Ambassador William Bullitt got off the transatlantic Clipper at Baltimore but, unlike returning Ambassadors Kennedy and Davies, did not come out swinging for the third term. He rushed to the State Department, conferred with Secretary Hull, stopped at the White House. To reporters he would say only that he had 50 to 75 things to discuss with officials, made some inconsequential remarks look more important by making them off the record.

> A couple of hours before Ambassador Bullitt landed, President Roosevelt an nounced that Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles would "proceed shortly to Europe to visit Italy, France, Germany and Great Britain." The reason: "This visit is solely for the purpose of advising the President and the Secretary of State as to present conditions in Europe. Mr. Welles will, of course, be authorized to make no proposals or commitments. . . ."

> An hour after the President's announcement, Secretary Hull made a homespun statement of his own. Because of the war, he said, and its effects on neutrals, the U. S. had begun informal diplomatic conversations with neutral governments. He made it clear that these conversations involved no world plan for peace. But they were preliminary inquiries looking toward the establishment of a sound inter national economic system, a world-wide reduction of arms. Their chief aim: to provide economic stability after the war.

Discretion. These were the moves that launched a thousand rumors. Radiorators and columnists did not hesitate to announce as fact (each had it on unimpeachable authority) a dozen conflicting guesses. Most of them focused on the lean and elegant figure of Sumner Welles. A career diplomat, 47, educated at Groton, Harvard, and the embassies at Tokyo, Buenos Aires and Havana, Sumner Welles is a casting director's dream of a diplomat, except for his thinning hair. His diplomatic experience has ranged from mediating in the Dominican Republic at 30 to seeing him self hanged in effigy in Cuba in 1933 and hearing mobs shout "Down with Welles."

Principal Welles rumor was that the President's long-discussed peace plan was coming before anybody expected it. From Rome came expressions of skeptical interest ; from Berlin, where no word of the impending visit appeared in the press, came expressions of wonder as to what Welles wanted. Paris jumped at the chance to say again that France could not discuss peace with Germany's present ruler; British spokesmen hinted that U. S. politics and an approaching election were sending Sumner Welles abroad. Discouraging speculation and false hopes, President Roosevelt insisted that all he wanted was news, that an covering all capitals could return with an over-all report.

But if he had a secret, Sumner Welles the man to keep it. An accomplished he can hold his tongue in English, French, Italian and German. To he would not say where he was or how long he had known of the plan. Said he, in a burst of "I will not have one word to say the time I leave Washington until I Developments. But the week's devel made it clear that one of the diplomatic dramas of U. S. history beginning. It was no happenchance heavy, sombre-visaged Myron Taylor, to take up his listening post in the (TIME, Jan. 1), was to be Am Welles's shipmate. It was no that U. S. diplomatic moves to look purposeful. What made the great was that its stakes were high. At no point did last week's developments, appointments, run counter to stated U. S. foreign policy. Nor did they add up to confirmation of rumors that a U. S. peace move was impending, or romantic legends that the U. S. had begun to practice secret diplomacy. They confirmed an oft-stated State Department conviction: that in a world crisis of immeasurable magnitude and intensity, international relations are bound to deteriorate, that the obvious U. S. role is to prepare for post-war economic reconstruction, try in all ways to keep channels of trade and cultural interchange open until that time.

Directions. Last week Washington bystanders were belatedly studying the boldest statement yet made by a State Department official on the perspectives of U. S. foreign policy. At Yale a fortnight ago brilliant, Boston-born Adolf Augustus Berle Jr., Assistant Secretary of State, told students of some of the things their generation would face: grave physical distress in great areas of Europe, normal avenues of trade blocked; populations in many places "starving, naked and perhaps homeless"; economic turmoil at the demobilization of millions and the ending of the arms industry; a great movement of social unrest. "Practically every population has been led ... into a blank impasse. . . . You will find great masses of men, without illusions, seeking and struggling for an idea of life which gives them hope; for an organization of peace which lets them work toward that end; and for a freedom of life which permits them to walk in the land of the living without fear."

There will be no clear guide post to reconstruction. The governments that claimed to be revolutionary will have failed as much as they insist that the older forms of government failed. "I do not believe that new appeals to hatred stand the slightest chance. . . . There is disillusionment even with hatred. . . . We were taught to hate autocracy and militarism; and the hatred proved sterile ... in the name of social reform, we were asked to indulge class hatred . . . underneath the whole tangle of forces which has produced the present disaster, there is beginning to be a complete rejection of the whole thesis of hatred."

U. S. contribution has been to try to free choked channels of trade, "keep the lines of peace open," prepare for post-war dislocation. U. S. strength: the "tremendous picture of the possibilities of peaceful life" that the U. S. offers. U. S. weakness : that U. S. economy, if not readjusted internationally, will no longer mesh with war-created economics overseas. The answer: "To you all things are possible; all questions have answers; all wrongs can be righted; all hopes can be fulfilled." Specific Berle prods to youthful imaginations: international health units working together in devastated areas; international transport pools moving goods where they are needed; bankers pooling resources to make goods available; perhaps the free distribution of some of the U. S. gold hoard to re-establish international currency.

Because Assistant Secretary Berle's speech passed almost unnoticed when it was made, because he has been as frequent a White House visitor as any, and because last week's diplomatic news moved along the lines of his statement, dopesters in Washington last week were paying premiums for dog-eared, mimeographed copies.

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