THE PRESIDENCY: On the Job

An orange half-moon hung low over the Hudson highlands and the broad, dark Hudson River. A few villagers who had been fishing for white perch pulled up their lines, strolled across the New York Central tracks to the little concrete platform of the Hyde Park railroad station. When the President’s special train slid around the bend from Poughkeepsie, a cluster of 50 townfolk in light dresses, in shirt sleeves and slacks toed the edge of the platform. They left the graveled parking space free for Franklin Roosevelt. “We know where we’re supposed to stand,” chirped one cheerful gaffer.

Thousands of moths whirred dizzily around the floodlights, and the heavy dew of midsummer was in the air when a portable ramp was lifted from the baggage car, fitted to the President’s Pullman (the Roald Amundsen) and tested. Then a big Secret Service car (District of Columbia license 104) rolled down the cindery hill road from the village, heading a small procession. The villagers, mostly Republicans (they were saying so all evening) rattled a few handclaps as Eleanor Roosevelt, in a loose, flowered green dress, stepped out first and walked around to stand beside the ramp; rattled again as the hatless President emerged, got his footing, clapped a straw hat on his head with one hand and moved up the ramp. At the top he turned and waved his hat in response to another little clatter of handclaps. Thus the President set off last week on his second tour of the Eastern seacoast. In a week in which the long-threatened Battle of Britain had reached a new pitch (see p. 21), he was going to look at the budding evidences of budding U. S. Defense.

With him went his military and naval aides. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, omnipresent Harry Hopkins. Overnight by train they went to Portsmouth. N. H. At the Navy’s great base across the river at Kittery, Me. the President saw three new submarines on the ways, two more keels laid down, more men (6,000) at work than were there during World War I. Awaiting the party was the President’s yacht Potomac. At Nahant, Mass, they paused for the President’s first look at his newest (tenth) grandchild, two-month-old Haven Roosevelt (who declined to smile for Father John and Grandfather Franklin). At Boston Navy Yard Mr. Roosevelt saw eight destroyers under construction. At the Watertown Arsenal there was the Army’s new 90-mm. antiaircraft gun. He saw the torpedo station, Navy Training Station and War College at Newport, R. I., the new naval air base at Quonset Point, submarines at New London. Conn. All these he judged to be proof that U. S. Defense was well along, would be still further along by late fall.

The President petulantly asked reporters why they persisted in asking political questions. (For news of Candidate Roosevelt, see p. 75.) Mr. Roosevelt asked the U. S., in the third week of his Third Term candidacy, to believe that he was tending strictly to his job as President. Defense was of course part of that job. So was Foreign Policy.

> Sternly rebuked was Ambassador John Cudahy, for suggesting that Great Britain relax her blockade, let the U. S. feed Hitler’s Europe (see col. 3). Less pointed, but clear, was the rebuke administered to Ambassador to France William Christian Bullitt, who returned last month with words of comfort for the tottery Pétain regime (see p. 27). Mr. Roosevelt’s trusted Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau last week indicated that Hitler’s France can expect no comfort from the U. S. More for emphasis than as a practical consideration, Mr. Morgenthau went so far as to suggest that impounded French gold and credits (total value: $1,350,000,000) might be applied to pre-Hitler France’s unpaid World War I debts (balance and interest due as of last July 1: $4,220,063,473).

> Correspondents asked Mr. Roosevelt whether he had abandoned the heralded, ambitious U. S. plan for a Latin-American trade cartel, to fend off Nazi-Fascist penetration. The President carefully replied that only the objective had not been discarded; instead of an inclusive (some said unpractical) arrangement with all Latin America, the U. S. would depend on loans and separate trade negotiation with each country to raise Hemisphere fences against Hitler.

> To London the President dispatched brilliant Rear Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, who until recently was Assistant Chief of Naval Operations in charge of war plans. Rear Admiral Ghormley’s talents fit him to watch British naval warfare, post the President on developments which affect U. S. naval strategy.

> Renewed was Soviet Russia’s annual U. S. trade agreement, which since 1937 has bound the U. S. S. R. to buy at least $40,000,000 worth of U. S. goods each year (purchased last year: $68,000,000).* There were other signs last week that the U. S. and Russia, both leery of Japan, were mutually interested in closer relations. Two weeks after he damned the Soviet conquests of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Acting Secretary of State Welles had two friendly talks with the U. S. S. R.’s witty, chubby Ambassador Constantine Oumansky. The U. S. Maritime Commission meanwhile sanctioned the charter of two U. S. tankers to carry gasoline to Russia, simultaneously refused to let two other ships sail with oil and steel for Japan.

* In the new agreement. Russia stipulated that its purchases may fall below $40,000,000 if the U. S. further restricts exports of materials needed for U. S. Defense.