News among Newsmen

The news was brought to the President as he sat in the long ballroom of the Willard Hotel, surrounded by newspaper veterans, bigwigs from all over the U.S., Washington officialdom, the diplomatic corps and all the quasi-humorous paraphernalia of the semiannual Gridiron dinner. The dinner had been the same, the entertainment duller than usual. Massachusetts' tall young Republican Senator, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., had spoken for the Loyal Opposition.

Then came the first news, only an appetizer. At the far end of the hall a New York Times office boy came to the door, handed a torn-off news-ticker scrap to a Secret Service guard. The guard delivered the scrap to Times Bureau Chief Arthur Krock. Pundit Krock glanced at it, reached the scrap up to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who adjusted his pince-nez, read that Soviet Russia and Yugoslavia signed a non-aggression pact. Impassively he handed the news to Franklin Roosevelt.

The dinner went on. The President made a 15-minute off-the-record speech, not a funny speech. While he was speaking, another message reached Mr. Krock. When the President had finished speaking, it was handed to him. Soon the President rose and left for the White House.

The time was a little past midnight; the young moon had gone down; Hitler had invaded Yugoslavia and Greece.

Strategy. The headlines pounded with the rich, twisty Balkan names: Zagreb, Cattaro, Salonika, Ljubljana. But the President and his counselors had to watch the whole enormous scene in a world where the U.S. was a fulcrum, balancing Britain in the Western scale with Chungking in the East.

Japan must be kept off balance. Out of Brisbane, Australia into the South Pacific steamed a flotilla of seven U.S. warships--two heavy cruisers, five destroyers. Out of Auckland, New Zealand into the Tasman Sea steamed a flotilla of six U.S. warships--two light cruisers, four destroyers.

In Manila, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, Commander in Chief of the British forces in East Asia, arrived for military conference with boot-tough U.S. Admiral Thomas C. Hart, chief of the Asiatic Fleet; elegant General Douglas MacArthur, Field Marshal of the Philippine Army; and High Commissioner Francis B. Sayre. On a Pacific Clipper, Manila-bound over the Midway-Wake-Guam steppingstone islands, flew Dr. E. N. van Kleffens, The Netherlands' Foreign Minister, to confer on the defense of the East Indies.

Ships. The whole great problem, and all the little problems, were bound up in ships. To supply even itself the U.S. must have more ships than it now has afloat. Washington studied and buzzed and figured. To supply Great Britain, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, China, the U.S. must have ships. Navy Adviser William ("Wild Bill") Donovan had said fort night ago: "Are we going to deliver the goods? . . . Are we prepared to take the chance?"

Many a Washington mind was made up, one way or another, about convoys. New Hampshire's funnel-mouthed Senator Charles W. Tobey introduced a resolution absolutely forbidding the U.S. to convoy materials to England. But he had few backers: informal polls of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee showed only eight of 23 for his bill. Navy Secretary Frank Knox, who had been violent against convoying, now seemed to favor convoys if the work was done by U.S. warships; he bucked at the idea of transferring more U.S. ships to the British.

How did the President stand on the convoy question? Had he changed his mind? He had repeatedly given the U.S. reason to believe he had no intention of using U.S. ships to convoy; recently he had remarked to a visitor: "But convoys mean shooting and shooting means war."

The Sparrow. Last week a new British face appeared in Washington. A shrewd, wary, grim little man, a firm believer in the hunch school of statesmanship, a man once described as a "busy and humorous sparrow in large round spectacles" is Sir Arthur Salter, an Oxford professor of political theory and institutions, swimmer, author, and for years the worst-dressed man in Geneva, Switzerland.

"When Sir Arthur gets here the fur will fly," Britishers told Washington. Sir Arthur arrived like a medium tank through underbrush. The little Briton (5 ft. 4 in.), who worked in the Admiralty in World War I--his clothes always bulging with Xenophon or Sallust's Jugurthine War--whose family built the boats in which Oxford's young gentlemen bump each other on the Thames, came to town with a hatful of plans for shipping. He told newsmen that the war may depend on U.S. shipyards. He asked for another "miracle of 1918," when 4,000,000 gross tons of shipping were produced, recalled Hog Island as a paunchy businessman might sigh about a brief, completely satisfactory love affair of his youth.

Same day Sir Arthur arrived, Franklin Roosevelt told the press that he was considering withdrawing the war-zone ban on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The press knew what he meant: with the fall of Massaua in Eritrea, U.S. ships would begin hauling supplies to the English by a 12,000-mile route skirting Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the Indian Ocean to Aden.

Salter, as head of the British Shipping Mission, asked the U.S. to "plan your building on the largest possible scale. ..." That day the President allocated $500,000,000 from the Lend-Lease appropriation to build 212 more cargo ships, 56 more shipways (in existing yards), and to cover cost of repair of damaged vessels.

Blow The Man Down. In the State Department's musty, desk-crowded, press room two dozen newshawks gathered, waiting for Secretary Hull's daily press conference. Subject: ships again--this time the U.S. seizure of Axis ships in American waters. There was delay. One newsman growled, as the clock hands slowly scissored past noon: "Those damned Italians! They can't even scuttle a ship properly!" Laughing, the reporters filed down to the Secretary's blue-carpeted, leather-chaired reception room, watched him enter in excellent spirits. Hour and a half earlier he had released texts of his answers to the German and Italian protests, couching his Tennessee-mule-kick "No" in stilted diplomatic language. He had little to say, but his eyes twinkled: after eight years of sadness over U.S. apathy and humiliation at Axis hands, the old mountaineer was getting a little of his own back.

What he did not say--what he did not need to say--was that the hemisphere-wide seizure of Axis ships, immediately after the U.S. acted, was a demonstration of coordinated hemisphere solidarity that surpassed any precedent. Two days before, Under Secretary Sumner Welles and Mexican Ambassador Francisco Castillo Najera (Hull calls him "Nadgera") signed an agreement permitting the U.S. to use Mexican airfields. The Good Neighbor policy was bearing rich fruit after years of backbreaking cultivation.

This week, when the press met him again, Mr. Hull made two points, both again demonstrating the world range of U.S. interests: 1) the Russian-Yugoslav friendship pact was encouraging (this little bouquet was the second handed the Soviet Union by the State Department in three weeks); 2) a statement by Marshal Henri Petain, chief of France--that France's honor required that she take no action against a former ally--was important. The two diplomatic words, "encouraging" and "important," meant vastly more than they seemed to mean. Apparently U.S. diplomatic cultivation of Moscow and Vichy also was at last bearing buds, if not fruit.

Persona Non. The pale, tall old Secretary and the President made one further move connected with ships and the Axis. Back to Italy, ordered to leave the U.S. immediately, must go Admiral Alberto Lais, 58, persona non grata to the U.S. for his part in ordering Italian ships sabotaged. Portly, balding Admiral Lais (rhymes with Thais), a prominent society man whose accent is not too heavy, whose risque stories not too slight, is an affable, easygoing gentleman who twirls his mustache and pops his eyes at the sight of an attractive ankle. Last week he was sad. His U.S. wife, Signora Leonora Sutton Evans Lais, daughter of a New York City doctor, and his 19-year-old daughter, Edna, had decided to remain in the U.S. Admiral Lais packed. The U.S. had once more rebuffed the Axis.

The Approach. Something more than rebuffs would be needed to win the war. The President was studying the convoy problem. Insiders knew the answer he would find. When a situation involves divided public opinion, Franklin Roosevelt likes to edge into it; only when he thinks he is sure of the reaction does he move dramatically. Probability was strong that he would exhaust every possible means of supplying the British with ships, would devise every possible shade of diplomatic approach, would allow the whole convoy problem to simmer until public opinion was definitely behind him.

First the 113 freighters, averaging 7,000 tons, which hauled about 7,000,000 tons of freight last year between the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, would probably be handed over to England, and the freight routed over railroads. Then, under the Merchant Marine Act of 1936, the President could seize or purchase any U.S. ship, set up priorities under which ships now hauling fruit, silk and luxuries would begin moving the 19,000,000 tons of asbestos, bauxite, copper, cork, manganese, rubber, tin, sisal, nitrates, tungsten, vanadium and other strategic materials the U.S. needs for defense production. Thousands of tons of these materials are piled on foreign docks.

Later, when the Battle of the Atlantic is in a desperate stage, when the U.S. has gained even more time to arm, with more precious months added to those since Dunkirk, the President and the U.S. can face what Columnist Ray Clapper last week called "the bedrock question." Then the President could decide what he meant by the remark: "But convoys mean shooting and shooting means war."

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