In the Open

Last week at his press conference President Roosevelt said his say about selective-military service. He leaned well back in his swivel chair, clamped on his pince-nez, blew his lungs empty and talked for half an hour without interruption or question. There was a story in what he said. (He was for it.) But, to correspondents who had been impressed at the time of the Chicago Convention with his nervousness and fatigue, there was another story in how he looked--at ease, rested, confident and composed, his sleeves rolled up, his hair slicked back, and his eyes sharp as he occasionally glinted at the nearby newsmen to see how they were taking it. He was in form.

He was still in form when he sailed down the Potomac with Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Harry Hopkins, Chairman Sheppard of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, Chairman Vinson of the House Committee on Naval Affairs. Twenty-one guns roared their salute when the Potomac docked at the vast Ports mouth Navy Yard--where the payroll has been upped from 7,600 to 12,000 men, where the aircraft carrier Ranger is being overhauled in the basin. The temperature soared up to 100DEG as he drove 15 miles to the naval operating base, stayed up through a sweltering afternoon as he inspected Fort Monroe at Old Point Comfort (where 3-inch anti-aircraft guns ripped the tail from a sleeve target being towed at 8,000 ft.). He stopped at Langley Field (where 6,000 men now work, where 100 warplanes demonstrated). He wound up an eight-hour day, and 100 miles of travel, at the Newport News shipbuilding yard, looked at the new battleship Indiana taking shape, pondered the 45%-finished aircraft carrier Hornet, looked at the two new ways, two new piers, the machine shop and turret shop that are now being built.

Destroyers. But though the President talked of defense, of conscription, of naval building and of the strength of U. S. defense next year, he said not a word about a question that grew bigger each day last week--the sale of U. S. World War I destroyers to Britain. From Texas came an appeal--not that the destroyers be sold, but that the President give the people the facts. The Dallas News (see p. 48) put it in an open letter: "No citizen of this country can be disinterested in the effect on our future of a defeat for Great Britain. . . . Aid--the most effective aid that the U. S. can render without impairing our own necessary defense--may be unpopular at the moment because men and women do not understand the dire necessity. But if they were told, sir, their support and their conviction would be immediate in response."

Politics. One theory had it that political considerations kept the President silent.

That same theory saw Presidential campaigning in defense inspection tours like the one to Newport News. Last week one political taboo was exorcised--from Washington popped a story that a New Deal spokesman had discussed the question with a representative of Wendell Willkie. The story: Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish got in touch with Russell Davenport of Wendell Willkie's staff, suggested that if Mr. Willkie would make no public criticism, President Roosevelt might request Congress to release aged U. S. destroyers that Britain needs.*

Said Wendell Willkie in reply--to make such a promise was virtually to urge the action on the President. He was not in a position to do so, as only the President could command the necessary information --expert Navy and State Department opinion, the actual British situation balanced against U. S. defense needs. Wendell Willkie said that he favored all aid to the defenders of democracy short of war, but could not assume responsibility for an act of government that must be measured against a background known only to the government.

General Pershing. If he was waiting for citizens to raise their voices he did not have long to wait. General John Joseph Pershing, 79, in Washington got on the radio: "I am speaking tonight because I consider it my duty. ... I say to you, solemnly, that today may be forever too late to keep war from the Americas. Today may be the last time when, by measures short of war, we can still prevent war. . . . The British Navy needs destroyers and small craft to convoy merchant ships, to escort its warships, and hunt submarines and to repel invasion. We have an immense reserve of destroyers left over from the other war, and in a few month? the British will be completing a large number of destroyers of their own. The most critical time, therefore, is the next few weeks or months. If there is anything we can do to save the British fleet during that time, we shall be failing in our duty to America if we do not do it." Nobody could say that General Pershing had failed in his. His 38 years of military service began in Indian campaigns in Arizona, spanned an epoch of U. S. history. This week he made his plea straightforwardly, believed that he was rendering the last service that he could give his country. President Roosevelt, preparing to inspect the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the arsenal at Watervliet, remained silent. One part of his foreign policy had just begun to pay dividends. After seven years of hard plugging, of patient insistence on the rights of small nations and the responsibilities of democracies to each other, the Good-Neighbor policy won a victory at Havana, the big words turned out to mean something that even scoffers could recognize (see p. 10).

*Promptly denied by Poet MacLeish, who said he talked to Russell Davenport, an old friend and onetime fellow editor of FORTUNE, as a private citizen, in the interest of aid to the Allies, and entirely without the President's knowledge.

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