Books: Irreverent Details

THE AMERICAN DIPLOMATIC GAME— Drew Pearson and Constantine Brown—Doubleday, Doran ($3).

“From the Kellogg Pact to the Next World War,” might well be the subtitle of this knockabout, irreverent story of U. S. foreign policy over the past eight years. From the time of Calvin Coolidge’s troubles with an oil-seeking Great Britain to the days of Cordell Hull’s headache over the tariff, much of what Messrs. Pearson & Brown have to tell is the common property of assiduous newsreaders. But many of the details have not been divulged until now. Some of the more sardonic ones:

1) When a treaty to “outlaw war” as an instrument of national policy was proposed to Secretary of State Frank B. (“Nervous Nellie”) Kellogg, he scoffed the idea as just another dream of the professors.

2) The Kellogg Pact never would have become a reality if Professor James T. Shotwell of Columbia University and the Carnegie Endowment and Salmon 0. Levinson, a Chicago lawyer, had not manipulated the wires behind the scenes for years. This manipulation was often accompanied by hearty dislike for each other, for Shotwell wanted to pull the U. S. into the League of Nations whereas Levinson wanted to keep the country out. Shotwell, say Brown & Pearson, persuaded Nicholas Murray Butler to persuade the editors of the New York Times to whoop it up editorially for a Pact. Without this superinduced publicity, they say, the idea would never have got where it did.

3) Herbert Hoover, although he had been Secretary of Commerce through two administrations, was unaware of the extent of Anglo-U. S. commercial conflict in South America until he went on his pre-inaugural cruise below the equator.

4) When Charles Gates Dawes went to London as U. S. Ambassador, he forgot to confirm the invitation to Ramsay MacDonald to visit the U. S. for a talk with President Hoover. Edward Price Bell, a Chicago Daily News correspondent, had previously been sent by the President to sound out the Prime Minister unofficially on the project of a visit, and MacDonald had already accepted.

5) President Hoover and Secretary of State Stimson held up the MacDonald trip until a tentative agreement on naval armaments had been reached with Britain. Inasmuch as MacDonald badly needed the trip for political capital, it had the British Prime Minister dancing on pins and needles.

6) Mr. MacDonald so far forgot himself when he finally saw President Hoover on the logover the Rapidan that he offered to dismantle the British naval bases in American waters. The offer was retracted in great alarm when London heard of it.