At Ease

For 20 days, as Franklin Roosevelt relaxed at Warm Springs, Ga., Washington D.C. seemed more & more like an empty stage, its emptiness spotlighted by the news from Europe. Last week, back at the White House, the President faced newsmen, who arrived full of questions and left nearly empty of answers. The New York Times's Arthur Krock was stirred to an annoyed essay on the House of Commons' success in extracting information from Winston Churchill. But the President, rested and amiable, spoke his small news with a good-humored air.

Franklin Roosevelt had gained a few pounds, and he had more color. Also he had adopted a new word--contentious--and used it freely as he fended off questions on Greece and Poland, and a request that he restate U.S. foreign policy. When the request was repeated the President said, blandly, that the foreign policy was on the record.

Elizabeth May Craig, Washington correspondent of a string of Maine newspapers, picked the word up and tossed it back at him: "I have a contentious question, Mr. President, but I would like a serious answer. Are you going to the right or to the left?"

The President said he was going down the old line, a little left of center. That was true eleven and a half years ago and it still holds. But was he going to change from Dr. Win-the-War back to Dr. New Deal when the war ended? No, no, Franklin Roosevelt said, he was just going a little left of center. Then he laughed. That wasn't much of an answer, was it? Miss Craig agreed tartly: "No."

The Christian Science Monitor's smart little Roscoe Drummond fished for information on the Big Three Conference, and was told that his question was highly speculative. He cracked back: "I'd like to eliminate the speculation, sir, and get to the highest source." The President chuckled. So, he said, would he.

Diplomatic Ectoplasm. Then a reporter touched off the week's most provocative piece of news. "Mr. President, did Mr. Churchill ever sign the Atlantic Charter?"

Nobody, said the President, had ever signed the Atlantic Charter. Then where was it now? Mr. Roosevelt's face assumed a lecturer's look. This is what comes of thinking in banal phrases and banal thoughts, he said. There isn't any copy of the Atlantic Charter. The nearest thing would be the notes given to the radio operators of the U.S.S. Augusta, and H.M.S. Prince of Wales* (aboard which Roosevelt and Churchill traveled to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in August, 1941). The agreement consisted of little scraps of handwriting. Some of it was the President's, some Mr. Churchill's, some Sir Alexander Cadogan's, some Sumner Welles's. Anyway it was signed in substance, and four and a half months later, 26 of the United Nations (including Russia) had endorsed it.

Rhymed Suspicion. This bland explanation disturbed citizens who had expected some day to see the Charter, properly signed & sealed, in a glass case like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The whole affair seemed very suspicious to such incurably suspicious journals as the Chicago Tribune. The isolationist Tribune published a frontpage color cartoon of F.D.R. fishing, with this jingle:

For three long years you let us think The famed Atlantic Charter, Inc., Was signed and sealed and guaranteed, By which all nations would be freed. . . . But now we're told the document Was just a memo of intent, An idyll written on a boat When you were fishing for our vote.

Three days later Franklin Roosevelt allowed the press to quote him: "The principles of the Atlantic Charter are as valid today as they were in 1941." He likened the charter to the Ten Commandments (of which no original document exists either). A lot of people say you can't attain an objective like that for humanity, the President said. But it is a pretty good thing to shoot for, a step, as Wilson's 14 points were.

No War News. Safely through this squall, the President tried to steer clear of further ones. He had no war news, he said, because his own dispatches from the confused Western Front were 24 hours late. He had no comment on his two-hour lunch with Vice President Wallace. He would not confirm a columnist's report that Democratic National Chairman Robert Hannegan was irked that he would not become Postmaster General.

Then the President observed expansively that newspaper columnists are an unnecessary excrescence on our civilization. "But," May Craig burst out, "you've got one in the family." The room roared. Franklin Roosevelt looked almost flustered, then fell to laughing too. He slipped in a hasty amendment--he considered his wife's column a diary.

White House newsmen, balked of any real news of the diplomatic and military crises the nation faced, could only observe that Franklin Roosevelt still had his ability to relax and seemed to have shaken off the look of strain he had worn at the end of his fourth campaign.

*The Prince of Wales was sunk off Singapore by the Japanese on December 10, 1941; most of its records went down with it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.