The Great Blueprint-More

THE PRESIDENCY

The most remarkable thing about Franklin Roosevelt's plan for world peace was the extraordinarily casual way in which it was announced. To newsmen, who recalled the dramatic sea scene of the Atlantic Charter, and the international rumors which preceded Teheran, it seemed almost as if the President were deliberately dodging a headline. For one thing, the President's announcement was submerged in the wave of exciting war news.

But there was a further reason: the first written statement of the President's plan for postwar peace contained nothing new beyond the dope stories inspired fortnight ago (TIME, June 12).

The regular corporal's guard of a half-dozen reporters were lounging in the White House lobby when Presidential Secretary Steve Early called them to his office. He merely handed them a mimeographed sheet of paper. "I think this is a pretty good story," he said in an offhand manner. That was all there was to it.

The plan put Franklin Roosevelt on record as favoring: 1) a new League of Nations composed of all peace-loving nations; 2) on top of that, a World Council, dominated by the Big Four; 3) a World Court. He is against: 1) a "superstate"; 2) an international police force. Beyond that, in the words of his statement, his hope for a peaceful world rests "upon the willingness and ability of the peace-loving nations, large and small, to work together for the maintenance of peace."

Even such admirers of the President's foreign policy as the New York Times admitted that the program was minimal; and to some it seemed as minimal as could be devised without being nationalist, rather than internationalist. Most Americans found the program unexceptionable--what there was of it. And there was nothing in it that most Republican leaders had not already endorsed. But a loud denunciation came from Bridge Expert Ely Culbertson, who has his own, mathematically rigid plan for world peace. Said he: "The plan will prove a bitter disappointment to the internationalists, who are determined that this time the U.S. shall not cheat the world; and to the nationalists, who are equally determined that this time the world shall not cheat the U.S." Historian Dr. Charles A. Beard added dryly: "Given the state of the world at the present moment, a discussion of the organization of the world at some indefinite time in the future seems to me a work of supererogation."

Franklin Roosevelt, just two weeks before the Republican convention, was on the safest possible middle ground on internationalism--whatever that net-to-catch-the-wind may mean. He had gained a point: his critics can no longer say he has no international program.

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