The Time Has Come

In a White House week of holiday quiet, Franklin Roosevelt worked overtime at his 1945-46 budget and his state-of-the-nation speech, so that he could be ready for the No. 1 date on his New Year's calendar: a "tea for three" meeting with Messrs. Churchill and Stalin. The Washington word was that the Big Three would get together soon after Mr. Roosevelt's Term IV inauguration on Jan. 20. It would not be too soon. During the past fortnight, a clamor of criticism against U.S. diplomacy has swelled into an outraged chorus. Its theme: the U.S. has been following a wavering diplomatic course with its allies, now burning its fingers with well-meant advice, now dusting its hands of Europe's problems.

The loudest, most pained outbursts came from the President's own most ardent supporters. Those who had campaigned vigorously for Term IV on the basis of Roosevelt's foreign policy were suddenly ready to concede his fallibility. Cried the New Dealing New York Post's Edgar Ansel Mowrer: "Mr. Roosevelt's expediencies and compromises, his postponements of questions and evasions of issues are coming home to plague him from a dozen places--Britain, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, etc. Yet still unrepentantly he wisecracks, he postures, he ducks, he does everything but come clean and tell the country what he is up to. . . ."

Manhattan leftists scheduled a Madison Square Garden rally, with the wholehearted endorsement of the P.A.C.'s Sidney Hillman, to protest further U.S. appeasement of Spain's Dictator Francisco Franco. In Congress, Senators Ball, Burton, Hill and Hatch--whose bipartisan B^2H^2 Resolution helped put the Senate on record for international cooperation--revived their demands for a precise definition of foreign policy. Their worthy object: to tell the world in advance just what sort of postwar treaties the new senate will or will not approve, thus removing one cause of intra-Allied distrust. New York's Liberal Party, whose 329,235 Term IV votes made possible a 316,591 Roosevelt majority in the State of New York, sent a strong protest to the President on the general course of the nation's diplomatic drifting. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which boomed Term IV summed up: "Surely the time has come for a fresh laying of the cards on the table. Surely the time has come for a new statement of war aims to reassure a world that is now perplexed and bewildered."

"We Have Simply Evaded." Ex-Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles deplored the "wide and growing rift in the basic political understanding between the three major Allies." He urged the U.S. to assert bold leadership, to hurry up a Big Three meeting, to call the United Nations together and place all political problems in the lap of a Security Council.

His columnist colleague on the New York Herald Tribune, Pundit Walter Lippmann, tartly observed that the President's predilection for postponing world political decisions until after the war was the root of the trouble. Officially, the U.S. favors only democratically elected governments in liberated countries. This principle, said Mr. Lippmann, is "an excellent principle [but] totally irrelevant to the real problem" of setting up an interim government until the country is ready to hold elections.

All who lambasted the chaos in the nation's foreign policy agreed on one thing last week: a Big Three meeting might help. But the suspicion persisted that even more necessary was a basic shift in the Administration's thinking. A "tea for three" meeting now had little meaning so long as the U.S. continued to label all political problems: "Do Not Open Until Peace." The news of Poland and Greece was that Britain and Russia each had specific, immediate, well-planned aims in Europe. It was high time for the U.S. to abandon finger-shaking at what it did not like about the ideas of other nations, and to come up with some of its own.

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