Awareness of Danger

In this tremendous time the American people must look to their President for leadership. They are not getting leadership from the President. They are not being treated as they deserve to be treated and as they have a right to be treated. They are not being treated as men and women but rather as if they were inquisitive children. They are not being dealt with seriously, truthfully, responsibly and nobly. They are being dealt with cleverly, directly, even condescendingly, and nervously. They are asked to put their trust the President, which indeed they must, for he is the President; but in return they must have his trust and they must have his confidence and they must have his guidance.

So, last week, wrote Columnist Walter Lippmann. Thus he expressed more aptly than anything else written or said last week the feelings of many a vigilant U.S. patriot.

Day before, President Roosevelt had made his usual excuse for lack of forthright action and decision in the world crisis: Solemnly he had announced at a press conference that the U.S. people were not sufficiently "aware" of the country's danger.

Mr. Lippmann, soundly rebuking the President for passing the buck to the public, continued: "Only the President, because he is the Chief Executive, is in a position to know all the facts. . . . Therefore, the President alone can lead the country. . . . The policy of the Government must rest on the support of the nation. But the nation must first be informed, and always it must be dealt with squarely.

"There is not the slightest reason to doubt that the American people will in the future as they have in the past do whatever they are convinced they must do to preserve their independence, their liberties and their honor. . . .

"This people is made of better stuff--is more ready to face the truth, more ready to rise to the occasion--than the President implies by his cleverness and his maneuvers and his devices and his causual comment on great issues. . . .

"That is not the way to make democracy work and prove itself in the greatest test to which it has ever been subjected. To fail to inform the people, waiting for them to lead him, is not democracy but demagogy. To act as if the people had to be manipulated is to deny the very virtues on which rests the hope of democracy; it is to think that free men will shrink from the truth and flinch in their duty. . . ."

Nor was Walter Lippmann the only one to level such an accusation against the methods used by the President in dealing with the people on war issues. Stubble-haired Frank Kent, conservative Baltimore Sun columnist, wrote in his brass-knuckled style: "The simple truth is that as yet the right kind of spirit does not exist among the people, and the reason is that the right kind of spirit does not exist among their leaders--or at least is not being displayed by them."

This was an extraordinary charge. No German doubts Hitler's intentions. No Briton doubts Churchill's intentions. But last week Americans--isolationists and interventionists alike--wallowed in doubt about Mr. Roosevelt's intentions. The isolationists liked it. Some of them began to figure they had won the argument after all.

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