The U. S. & the War

The U. S. cannot go to war except by vote of Congress. It cannot make treaties without the consent of the Senate. These are the ultimate decisions of foreign policy, well known to the public. Also it is the duty of the President and his Secretary of State to look after the interests of the U. S. in international affairs. Except for the ultimate decisions, theirs is the whole of foreign policy.

To millions of U. S. citizens who have long clung to the unhistoric legend that U. S. diplomacy has been uniformly unsuccessful and U. S. foreign policy equally nonexistent, a pamphlet published this week will come as a great jolt. For it describes succinctly and with circumstantial detail how Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, in the few brief months leading up to World War II, went about their job of making decisions in U. S. foreign policy. Its name is American White Paper (Simon & Schuster; St). Its authors are Columnists Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner.

It tells how a quadrumvirate--Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, Sumner Welles, Adolf Augustus Berle Jr.--hammered out in the heat of the Munich crisis a U. S. foreign policy in the belief that war was coming. This policy was: 1) to prevent war if possible; 2) if war proved inevitable, to use every method short of war to assure victory for the democracies; 3) to recognize in their policy that "neutrals are parties at interest in a modern war, and particularly in the post-war settlement"; 4) to gain U. S. ends, political commitments in the western hemisphere, and possibly economic commitments toward a stable economy of the whole world; 5) "Whatever happens, we won't send troops abroad" (Franklin Roosevelt).

Messrs. Kintner & Alsop, reporting history within a few months of its making, do an extraordinary job. The explicit point from which their narrative starts, and to which it returns, implicitly, again & again, is that the U. S. is a member of the community of democratic nations, aware, and willing to act on its awareness, that what threatens that community also threatens the U. S.

American White Paper tells how U. S. policy-makers long foresaw World War II, pondered in advance each complex consequence. At best (Allied victory) the quadrumvirate foresaw worldwide eco nomic chaos; at worst (German victory) the U. S. would be, in Phrasemaker Berle's words, "in the unfortunate position of an old-fashioned general store in a town full of hard-bitten chains."

Scenes. All this Authors Alsop & Kintner tell in a series of scenes whose detail is almost eyewitness in effect: the President undressing for bed, tossing remarks over his shoulder to Berle in the next room; Hull and Welles in an early-morning call at the White House, the President propped against pillows, amid a litter of breakfast tray, morning papers, cables from abroad, wearing "a peculiar small cape of blue flannel trimmed and monogrammed with red braid, like an expensive summer horse-blanket."

The authors quote the President directly (and probably on good authority)--even in two-person telephone conversations. Hull, Welles and Berle are pictured working, with the desperate unison of oarsmen, in Hull's gloomy, black-leather, paper-piled office; in the easy, pleasant, chintz-and-prints upstairs study of the White House; hurrying through the empty, echoing streets of Washington at dawn; walking, tired and despairing, in a star-sprinkled, late-summer evening, back to the baroque rookery that is the State Department.

The Cables. American White Paper does not neglect the cables. The long, mimeographed, decoded messages, stamped Secret and Confidential, pour through the State Department's wire room day & night, month after month, from Chungking, Rome, Moscow, Madrid, Calcutta, Bucharest. To those who read them, Europe and Asia are imminent and ever-present realities. Things that to Congress and the U. S. at large are vague, insubstantial and far away across insulating oceans, to the cable-reading policy-makers are alive and real. Too often, when the policy-makers try to hint at the real shape of international affairs, they are not believed.

A crucial scene occurred one night last summer when, at a conference between the President and Congressmen, Idaho's late Senator William Edgar Borah insisted he had better sources of information than the State Department: that there would be no war in Europe. Once before, the President, misjudging his audience, had tried telling a group of Senators what was going on abroad: they had departed muttering that Mr. Roosevelt had said the U. S. frontier was on the Rhine. This time he refrained from lifting the veil; Cordell Hull tried to convince the Senators that war would come by late summer, that the arms embargo must be repealed as a blunt warning to Hitler. When Borah spoke, tears came to Mr. Hull's eyes. Embargo repeal was set aside, and World War II came on schedule.

In another flashback, to last spring, Mr. Hull was shown cussing purple passages in private efforts to convince Congressmen that the oncoming conflict was not just "another goddam piddling dispute over a boundary line"; that in place of international law the U. S. had "substituted a wretched little bobtailed, sawed-off domestic statute."

Implicit on many a page of American White Paper, although not explicitly pointed out, is the size of the mistake made by Franklin Roosevelt in not being candid with his country. Again & again & again he avoided starting a great national debate, avoided it by not presenting the issues squarely to the nation. Throughout the 18 months covered in the book the President is pictured as bound & gagged by laggard public opinion. But he took no real steps to let non-cable-readers, in effect, see the cables.

Possibly some of the President's advisers consulted by Messrs. Alsop & Kintner loosened their tongues so that American White Paper could belatedly tell the public some of that background of events which was in Franklin Roosevelt's mind at 2:40 one morning when a telephone call came through from Paris. The sharp, distance-harshened tones of U. S. Ambassador to France William Christian Bullitt came through the receiver. The calm, sleepy voice of a light-sleeping President replied. Mr. Bullitt reported that several German divisions were deep in Polish territory, bombers over Warsaw. Said Mr. Roosevelt, "Well, Bill, it's come at last. God help us all."

Experts. Joseph Wright Alsop Jr. is 29, the son of a well-to-do tobacco-grower and a mother prominent in the Connecticut G. O. P., a distant cousin of Franklin Roosevelt, a cousin and friend of Alice Longworth. Educated at Groton, Harvard and the New York Herald Tribune, with an edged wit but a tendency to preciosity, short, voluble, Lucullan in tastes, Bond St. in dress, Alsop writes in a style that at its worst is like Oscar Wilde sniping at a lady poet, at its best like marmorean inscriptions.

Robert Edmonds Kintner, 30, of Stroudsburg, Pa., Swarthmore-educated, started covering Wall Street for the New York Herald Tribune. Some financial reporters who had previously spent their time playing the market found they had to go to work or be shown up. To Washington, where he met Alsop, Kintner brought the same boring-in tactics, the same suspicious nose for news. Casual, hatless, slender, boyish, he believes that news is what will happen, not what has happened. In 1937 the two started a Washington column, "The Capital Parade" (now in 95 papers). For American White Paper they interviewed about 100 people, took 500 pages of notes, filled a filing case with documents.

The Future. One of the quietly dramatic aspects of the picture drawn by Authors Alsop & Kintner is how, in the face of the facts told by the cables, the quadrumvirate of policy-makers moved with virtual unanimity. The authors dispel the illusion that Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Hull do not see eye-to-eye. They show Mr. Hull and Mr. Welles and Mr. Berle, whose differences are all too obvious, agreeing without difference on what steps U. S. interests demanded.

Before they get done, the authors suggest the future for which the policy-making partners have already prepared. Authors Alsop & Kintner see three alternatives:

> That the democracies will win World War II without active U. S. aid--in which case the U. S. will try to claim a seat at the conference table, there to enunciate the President's oft-repeated aphorism: "Only by disarmament and an opening of trade can the world return to common sense."

> That World War II will become a prolonged stalemate, which would intensify U. S. efforts to make the Western Hemisphere an island of peace and trade in a disordered world, while in event of eco nomic exhaustion, neutrals might intervene for a negotiated peace.

> That the democracies will be threatened with defeat by the dictatorships. Said the authors: "Should they [the democracies] be on the eve of defeat, the square question would be presented, whether to aid them by methods no longer short of war, using them as our outlying defense posts; or whether to let them be beaten, treble our navy, radically alter our economic system, and meet the ultimate issue between us and the dictatorships bent on dominating the world.'' While Franklin Roosevelt has vowed to send abroad no U. S. troops--for which there is no military need--he has said nothing about sending the U. S. Navy and Air Force.

When will this "square question" be presented? If the war should go on two years or more (which the authors seem to assume it will)--when the English and French liquid assets are gone; when the U. S. must choose between giving the Allies credit, supplies, gold and taking the consequences of Nazi triumph.

"In this case, however," say Alsop & Kintner, "far more than in any other, the ultimate decision must rest wholly with public opinion. If our history has a lesson, it is that in these times one must pray, above all things, that public opinion will be wise and well-informed."

Over Hull's Shoulder. The week's diplomatic news made significant footnotes to American White Paper. When Japanese Foreign Minister Hachiro Arita made a verbal pass at The Netherlands East Indies, it was significant that Cordell Hull gravely, politely, promptly warned Japan against intervention--warned beforehand instead of protesting afterwards, as the U. S. has often done.

To many observers, a U. S. war with Japan seemed far in the distance. The U. S. Navy was not so sure about that. Rear Admiral Joseph Knetler Taussig this week told Congress that in present circumstances he regards war with Japan as inevitable eventually. Some sources, bluntly assuming that Hitler will invade The Netherlands before the end of June, further expect that Japan will seize the moment to move in on the Indies. It would therefore not be surprising if the tag end of U. S. Fleet maneuvers now in progress found a squadron near Manila. Well Cordell Hull knows that Japanese Ambassador Kensuke Horinouchi, visiting him, sees over Mr. Hull's shoulder the U. S. Pacific Fleet. But it is still a secret whether Mr. Hull himself sees the Fleet when he looks around.

Last week the Senate passed a Navy appropriation bill, 63-to-4, providing $963,797,478 to start building two 45,000-ton battleships, two cruisers, one aircraft carrier, eight destroyers, six submarines, five auxiliary vessels, to complete four cruisers, seven destroyers, seven submarines, and to purchase 471 airplanes. Before the Senate Naval Committee came Admiral Harold H. ("Betty") Stark to ask that another bill, authorizing an 11%, $655,000,000 naval expansion, be made a 25%, $3,486,000,000 expansion; and that an immediate $45,400,000 be voted in order to begin work at once. But ships still to be laid down will probably not be finished before the present crisis is passed.

However, the U. S. Navy now has building: eight battleships, two aircraft carriers, six light cruisers, 29 destroyers, 14 submarines. Still seeking a Guam base (needed only for war in the Pacific), the Navy last week was certain its naval air force was still the world's best.

Observers, noting gargantuan national defense bills being swallowed by the U. S. almost without a murmur, wondered whether the policymakers, the cable-readers, had not misinterpreted the national will for isolationism as a wish for peace at any price. Popular reaction to American White Paper may tell much. But gone were the days when Calvin Coolidge spoke for the nation in saying "The business of America is business." Senator Key Pittman last week seemed almost as out-of-date when he said: "Let the mothers and fathers of America sleep in peace."

Old words which had a more timely ring were Woodrow Wilson's: "There is, therefore, but one response possible from us: Force, Force, to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world. . . ." Was there not an echo from Franklin Roosevelt, last week: "We shall be able to keep that way [of peace] open only if we are prepared to meet force with force if challenge is ever made."

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