THE CONGRESS: Tobey’s Nose

Senatorial cynics dryly agreed last week that the world was safe, because New Hampshire’s Charles William Tobey had it on his shoulders again. Senator Tobey, a somewhat skinny Atlas, is a rumpled, furious man with a vivid imagination and a hound-keen nose for trouble—a word indissolubly connected in Mr. Tobey’s mind with Franklin Roosevelt.

Mr. Tobey’s constant sniffing in the bushes for the Big Bad Roosevelt does not endear him to the Senate, which is a body of men who hate to keep jumping up all the time, and who prefer to take even their own wolf-halloos with plenty of salt, and maybe just a dash of bitters. Last week rancorous, cantankerous Mr. Tobey was out front again for his first real headlines since his passion for picayune causes led him to denounce the U.S. Census last year as regimentation. Three weeks ago his sensitive neb caught the scent of convoys. Quick as a mink he came out with an anti-convoy resolution. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee quietly interred the resolution in a pigeonhole. Last week his suspicions that the President planned to convoy had passed into certainty. He decided that the President had already secretly ordered convoys.

This opinion was enough for one veteran Roosevelt-hater, flashy, pompous Correspondent John O’Donnell of the New York Daily News, who wrote a dispatch that certain “Senators” (he meant Mr. Tobey) now knew that the President had permitted the “escorting” of British ships to convoy rendezvous, using the Neutrality Patrol of Navy and Coast Guard boats. Next morning Mr. Roosevelt authorized Secretary Stephen T. Early to announce: “The President . . . thought the author of the story had very cleverly woven the longtime historic policy of the United States into a story which is a deliberate lie.”*

This was a challenge to put up or shut up. The New Hampshireman produced his “proof”: two letters from unnamed persons—one a relative of a boy allegedly in the Navy who had said he had been on convoy duty, another a man who said he knew of a young girl whose fiance had told her he was leaving on convoy duty. Senator Barkley said with measured deliberation that Navy Secretary Frank Knox and Admiral Harold R. Stark had authorized him to say that “not a single ship, American or foreign, carrying any war materials from any place to any other place, had been convoyed or was being convoyed from any place to any other place and that no orders had been received from anybody in authority to give such orders for convoying any ship of any kind from any place to any other place anywhere in the world.”

Mr. Tobey went on clamoring. If his “proof” was thin, nevertheless convoying was probably the next great decision the U.S. must make. The President, whether he had or had not decided, kept mum.

*Still stronger language was used by Publisher J. David Stern in an editorial in the Philadelphia Record: “John O’Donnell is a Naziphile. He makes no secret of it. On numerous occasions, to all friends and barflies within hearing, he has broadcast his sympathy with most of Hitler’s aims—such as destruction of the British Empire, suppression of labor unions and liquidation of Jews.”