THE PRESIDENCY: Incidents

President Roosevelt got his incident last week—the incident he has been expecting ever since he stretched the Hemisphere patrol to Iceland. This week he got the incident he has been waiting for since he stretched the shipment of U.S. war materials to the Red Sea.

The public took the Greer incident (see col. 3) fatalistically. Something like this had long been expected, and it might have passed as a one-day sensation, as easily forgotten as the sinking of the Robin Moor. Said Isolationist Senator Bob Reynolds: “It was a very simple incident. … It seems there was no damage to the Greer.”

The public was calm, but not the President. For at least a fortnight he had been pondering (TIME, Sept. 1) an order to fire on Nazi submarines or bombers in the area between Halifax and Iceland. Now the Germans had fired first, before his warning. The Germans seemed clearly in the wrong. When reporters filed in for press conference next day he did not even wait for questions.

The unconcerned attitude of the public reminded him of an allegory, he said. Once upon a time a group of little children in the country were on their way to school. Suddenly several shots were fired at them from the bushes, but no one was hit. The father came along, decided that since no child was hurt there was nothing to be done, not even to search the bushes.

The President obviously thought the failure of the submarine to hit the Greer should not keep the U.S. from acting vigorously. In this case, he added, the schoolteacher is searching the bushes even if the father wouldn’t, and if the teacher finds the marauder the teacher will “eliminate” it. Eliminate is a fighting word—and the President gave the reporters specific permission to quote it.

Next afternoon at Hyde Park the President announced his decision to broadcast to the nation and the world an address of “major importance” on Monday night. The 15-minute talk was to be rebroadcast by short wave in 14 foreign languages.

What the President would have said Monday the world may never know, for on Sunday his mother died and the talk was postponed until Thursday. As of last week this much seemed certain: he was disappointed in the fatalistic attitude of the country. But he had no intention of letting the incident pass.

This week an “unidentified” airplane attacked and sank the 3471-ton, 424-foot U.S. freighter Steel Seafarer, second U.S. merchantman to go to the bottom since War II began. (The Robin Moor was torpedoed by a Nazi submarine on May 21.)

The Steel Seafarer was one of the string of U.S. ships—now almost one-a-day—which have been carrying war materials to the British in the Middle East via the Red Sea for four-plus months. U.S. citizens could safely assume that the President would not let Incident No. 3 pass, either.