FOREIGN RELATIONS: Greatest Opportunity

The President called for his good right arm, and in Washington appeared swart Herbert H. Lehman to start work on the biggest civilian assignment of World War II. No more breathtaking than the title was the job—Director of Foreign Relief & Rehabilitation (TIME, Nov. 30).

Herbert Lehman’s mission was to follow up each Allied victory with food, clothing, medicine and more—tools for conquered peoples to build a new life out of Axis desolation. He would use food to relieve the starving, as Herbert Hoover did in World War I. But Lehman also would use it as psychological ammunition to help win the war. To subject nations the world over would go the word that bread and meat were on the way, once the Axis yoke was cast off. His job was not to stop with victory, but to advance behind United Nations troops with blueprints for the economic reconstruction of Europe’s some-day-to-be-unshackled millions. Food, clothes and shelter, Lehman knew, would not alone build a lasting peace. Whole societies would have to be put back on their feet as free-functioning economic units.

This was no mere war philanthropy. Liberated North and West Africa are rich in palm oils, some foodstuffs, but short of cloth and other manufactured goods. Here the U.S. may trade resources. Across the Mediterranean, unliberated Italy is hungry, war-weary. Here the promise of food and a peace with security might help open a beach head for Allied occupation. Around the world, as the Axis conquerors are rolled back, the plan is to supply every nation with its needs, toward an economic stability more permanent than the ruins of the peace that followed World War I.

For the moment Lehman’s task is to plan in liaison with Army, Navy, State Department, Treasury, Lend-Lease Administration, Board of Economic Warfare, War Shipping Administration and inter-Allied committees now functioning. The world is their workshop—and the U.S. is cast for the dominant post-war role.

Said Herbert Lehman, turned 64, “I consider this the greatest opportunity for service ever offered to me or to any man. … I expect to be criticized. . . . Come back and see me a year from today.”