PRESIDENCY: The Deductive Method

At first glance, few people would think of Walter Lippmann as a great detective. Courteous, well-read, softspoken, with a vocabulary greater than Sherlock Holmes’s (and far more normal habits), he could talk international finance with Morgan partners, politics with Presidents, and seem much more like a reassuring expounder of broad issues than a practical political dopester. But last week genteel Columnist Waiter Lippmann solved a mystery that had baffled some of the keenest political detectives in the U. S. It was the Mystery of the Third Term, or Will President Roosevelt Run Again?

What set Detective Lippmann to brooding on the mystery was a Washington rumor that after Christmas President Roosevelt will declare his intention about a third term. Arousing Amateur Lippmann’s well-bred scorn were the feverish efforts of other sleuths to solve the case by strong-arm methods. To ask that the President declare now whether he will or will not run again, said he, is as crude as the third degree; in fact, it is “no more than a blunt demand that Mr. Roosevelt give himself up and confess.” Nor did Detective Lippmann have much esteem for the political sleuths who have followed President Roosevelt’s actions, studied his speeches, questioned his associates, interviewed his followers, looked for clues at press conferences. “Mr. Roosevelt,” he observed, “is too smart to leave fingerprints and tell-tale cigaret butts around . . . too tough to be bulldozed and too smart to be tricked.” How, then, could the mystery be solved? Last week Mr. Lippman found his answer: analysis.

The Clues of the Cornerstones. While ex-Senator McAdoo in California loudly called for the third term, while pro-New Deal Columnist Raymond Clapper warned that the President would not be “playing fair with the American people in perpetuating the uncertainty regarding . . . his intentions,” while candidates Democratic and Republican tried to focus attention on the next President, President Roosevelt scattered new clues to confuse political sleuths:

> Laying the cornerstone of the $3,000,000 Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, he made a strong, simple speech, praising George Washington as “a great moderator in bringing together discordant elements in the formation of a constitutional nation”; praising Lincoln as “counsel for the underprivileged . . . foe of malice, teacher of good will”; praising Jefferson for his political philosophy and for his belief “that the average opinion of mankind is in the long run superior to the dictates of the self-chosen.” But he also said, “I hope that by January 1941 I shall be able to come to the dedication of the memorial itself.”

Since his term does not expire until Jan. 20, 1941, he could be there as President if he did not run again. But observers noted that he departed from his prepared address to make the point.

> Two days later at Hyde Park the President laughed heartily at his own remark. An unabashed lover of his own jokes, he said he had added the sentence to trap newspapermen into believing that he might seek a third term, that the effect was terrific, about as funny as a crutch, and that he had got a kick out of seeing the faces of the reporters present. Trouble with this, according to Raymond Clapper, was that few reporters had paid much attention, and that certainly few had fallen into the President’s trap.

>Laying the cornerstone of the new Franklin Roosevelt Library on his mother’s estate at Hyde Park, the President announced the library would be completed by next July, that his papers would be available there to authorized persons by July 1941. Since the Library will hold 6,000,000 documents, covering the President’s career from the time he was New York State Senator, this looked like an indication that he would not run. No U. S. President has made his correspondence accessible to students and biographers while holding office. But political sleuths pondered: cataloguing the collection will take from ten to 20 years, the collection could easily be locked up if he ran and was reelected.

Chapter XXI. These puzzles Detective Lippmann set himself to solve. Swishing-big words around like Philo Vance, he one-two-threed his argument, hauled in the suspects, pointed his finger at the guilty man at the end of Chapter XXI. Said he: Any man who has been President of the United States, “or only vice president of a barber shop,” will, when it comes time for him to go, wish to feel that no one can bear to have him leave. Therefore, “there never was a President who did not want to be elected for a second term, and never was there a President who, having served two terms, did not want to be able to refuse a third term.”

The tradition is “that a successful President is elected for two terms and then voluntarily renounces a third term. . . . The ritual calls for placing the President in a position where to the infinite regret of all concerned he voluntarily renounces a third term. . . .”

But what if the incumbent should accept? There is no need for anxiety, said the detective: the ritual requires that the President be given the opportunity to refuse a third term; practical politics makes him refuse it. “The only man who could conceivably obtain a third term is one who convinced the country he did not want it. . . . The effort to get a third term would convince the country that the man must not have it; it would be … using the power of his office to perpetuate himself in office. That would surely split his own party; it would certainly provide the opposition with the greatest of all issues. …”

Detective Lippmann’s analysis of Franklin Roosevelt’s motives: “Last year, when his party was split, his personal prestige at low ebb … I should imagine that he may have considered seriously making a fight for a third nomination. . . . But now the situation has been changed, not by the war but by Mr. Roosevelt’s reaction to the war. . . . The war is … a subject on which, because his mind is clear, his convictions are resolute. The war therefore has brought out the best that was in him, and he has become what he might always have been but was not, the President and not a factional leader. . . . The popular confidence which he has been earning since he rose to the occasion of the war will grow greater as he holds himself firmly to the line he has so wisely taken. An inevitable and necessary corollary will be a renunciation of a third term, not in ambiguous language, but in plain words like Washington’s.”

True to the ritual of the modern detective story, which holds that the sleuth must deprecate his most brilliant exploits upon solving the case, Detective Lippmann figuratively yawned: “It will be a dreary morning after, when at last he announces that he is not a candidate.”

Last week the President: >Ending his fortnight-long fumble with the proposed transfer of U. S. ships to Panama registry, gave a broad hint that he was now opposed to the plan.

>In Hyde Park, got his specially-designed Ford stuck hubdeep in Dutchess County swampland, was unstuck by Secret Service men.

>Cabled birthday greetings to one of his favorite rulers, King Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy (70).

>Conferred with Secretary of Interior Ickes on the hot oil problem of the Southwest, repeated his warning of last July that, unless the States collaborate effectively, Federal regulation was the only alternative.