THE PRESIDENCY: If & When

Ominous was the atmosphere of official Washington on the evening last week when President Roosevelt’s train rolled into Union Station from the West. Secretary of State Hull, looking grave as granite, stepped aboard before it had stopped rolling. Behind the Secretary of State followed the Secretary of War.

After 20 minutes, Franklin Roosevelt left the train. Photographers recorded the solemn occasion (see cut). It was announced that next day’s White House press conference was cancelled lest anything the President might say be misunderstood in war-frightened Europe. The impression was that Washington expected the worst hourly, that Peace hung by a heartstring.

These circumstances were somewhat misleading. With Prime Minister Chamberlain dramatically seeking peace from Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden (see p. 75), tension was less that evening than it had been for several days. Mr. Hull met the President’s train mostly as a favor to the press. Otherwise reporters would have had to wait through a wet evening before filing accounts of the President’s conference with his top diplomat. Similarly, the President’s press conference was really canceled because he needed time to read reports. And Secretary Woodring had gone to the station for no reason more pressing than courtesy to his chief and love of limelight.

But if outward signs were false, there was no lack of apprehension in the Administration. Most Departments of the Government were hard at work behind closed doors cogitating, calculating, planning—to buffer the shock if & when war came. Under the Neutrality Act and various New Deal laws vesting power in the Chief Executive, the prospect was for more one-man government than the U. S. has yet seen when not at war itself. The job of all executive branches was to compile data and memoranda to guide Franklin Roosevelt should bombs and shells start flying in Czechoslovakia.

In the case of Japan-China, Mr. Roosevelt has so far been able to preserve the fiction that a “state of war” does not exist because it has never been “declared.” He has been able to do so, without threat of impeachment, because the sentiment in Congress which rammed through the Neutrality Act is on the side of the party which the Act, if enforced, would hurt most. Unless war between Czechoslovakia, Germany and other powers were formally declared, the President could again preserve the fiction and all U. S. hands would be free from the Neutrality Act’s rigid restrictions.

But war by any other name is just as grim and costly. The State Department’s policy was “Play it down,” but reports persisted that U. S. consuls were quietly advising U. S. tourists (but not 88,000 U. S. residents abroad) to get out of Europe. Ambassadors Joe Kennedy (London), Bill Bullitt (Paris), Hugh Wil son (Berlin) and Wilbur Carr (Prague) were as busy as Walter Hines Page, Myron Herrick, James Gerard and Brand Whitlock in 1914. Among these men, in case of lasting trouble abroad, Francophile “Bill” Bullitt would be Mr. Roosevelt’s most trusted adviser. Tied to the State Department, however, by modern overseas telephones, Roosevelt II’s diplomats did not have the independence of Wilson’s men in shaping their courses of action. In Washington, able, experienced Assistant Secretary George Messersmith rose at 4 a. m. daily to receive their telephone calls. At Mr. Hull’s elbow most often—because from his long experience as Ambassador-at-Large he knows well how Europeans tick—was Mr. Hull’s fellow-Tennessean, Norman Hezekiah Davis, now nominally only President of the Red Cross.

To editorial entreaties from Canada and Paris that President Roosevelt use his vast neutral prestige to avert war—and also to U. S. isolationist clamor against any kind of entanglement—the State Department turned its deafest ear, its stoniest silence.

While the State Department was thus trying to do little except keep informed and be helpful, the Treasury Department’s job was more complex and realistic. The flight of foreign capital to the U. S., if unchecked, might have had the effect of depreciating foreign currencies to the point of ruining U. S. export trade. To prevent this the Treasury’s stabilization fund was busy buying pounds and francs (see p. 57), and gold flowed into the U. S.

at a record rate. Mr. Morgenthau called the European gold migration “a very pleasant worry to worry about”—for the time being. To advise him came California’s Senator-reject William Gibbs McAdoo, who ran the Treasury during Europe’s last big war.

The Navy Department, whose new Atlantic Squadron (TIME, Sept. 12) consists so far of one ship (the other 13 are not ready for active service), ordered the cruisers Nashville and Honolulu to stand by at Gravesend, England. Object: not to “evacuate U. S. citizens” (ordinary passenger ships could carry them home) but to take aboard, if necessary, more war-scared gold consigned to the U. S. In the event of war, the Navy said its remaining ships in European waters—the cruiser Omaha and destroyers Manley and Claxton —would be hustled out of the Mediterranean to safer waters. The Navy will not discuss it officially but everyone knows that the main U. S. fleet would be kept watchfully in the Pacific if Britain had to move sea power from Singapore to home waters.

If formal war is recognized, the Maritime Commission must see to it that no U.S. bottoms carry munitions, or any other forbidden cargoes, to ports of belligerents. Other agencies prepared for possible emergencies, each in its own domain. SEC, fearful of a stockmarket crisis, conferred with officers of the New York Stock Exchange. The Departments of Agriculture and Commerce, fearful of the effects of war and the Neutrality Act on crops and prices,* studied 1914 precedents and the current state of crops and industry.

Should declared instead of undeclared war come to Europe, Washington opinion last week rated 50-50 the chance of President Roosevelt’s calling a special session of Congress to repeal or amend the Neutrality Act, which expires anyway next May 1. If he should call Congress, he would probably be embarrassed by revival of the movement for a Constitutional Amendment to require that the nation be polled before entering a foreign war. To oppose such a movement would argue—as loud Representative Hamilton Fish Jr. was already shouting last week—that the Roosevelt Administration is war-minded. To let it pass would tie down the Government so tight that not even its moral weight could quickly be thrown into the lists to preserve world peace.

¶ To stay at the nation’s controls, the President canceled speaking engagements last week at Poughkeepsie, N. Y. and Chattanooga, Tenn.

¶ President Roosevelt designated Sept. 25 as Gold Star Mother’s Day.

* Under the Neutrality Act, the President has wide discretion in embargoing commodities of secondary but basic importance in war (examples: cotton, shoes).