Return of Welles

Last week the Conte di Savoia brought Sumner Welles back to Manhattan from his 41-day mission to Europe. Ship-news reporters found the Under Secretary of State cold, erect, impenetrable as usual, impeccable in a double-breasted blue suit with a navy-blue tie on his soft-collared white shirt, holding a blue chesterfield overcoat and Homburg hat.

If looking and listening could do it, in those 41 days Sumner Welles had become the best-informed man in the world on the world's biggest problem--World War II. By special train, airplane and steamer he had covered 14,000 miles; he had conferred with two Kings--George VI of Britain, Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy; one Fuehrer; one Duce; two Prime Ministers--Chamberlain, Daladier (and Reynaud, successor to Daladier); with the Foreign Ministers and officialdom of all four countries, opposition party spokesmen of the Allies; with Pope Pius XII.

His job nearly done, glacial Mr. Welles melted ever so slightly; he seemed pleasantly weary, a touch debonair. He was happy to be home, and admitted it. A reporter referred to the 13-hour Gibraltar delay while British searched the Conte di Savoia for Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, once Nazi Minister of Economics. Newsman: "Was Dr. Schacht in your trunk?" Grinned Mr. Welles: "Just like Morgan's midget."

In Washington at 2:40 p.m. Mr. Welles entered the State Department, strode into the big, paper-cluttered office of his chief, Cordell Hull. Twenty-nine minutes later Mr. Welles, his face settled into its mask of boredom, Mr. Hull, with his patient, pallbearer's air, stepped along the rubber mat of the White House entrance; the gleaming glass-&-bronze doors swung wide under the hands of the blue-uniformed Negro doorman. Hats & coats taken, Messrs. Hull and Welles stepped into the whirring little elevator, creaked up to the oval second-floor study where sat Franklin Roosevelt at the huge desk carved from timbers of the Resolute. There ended Welles's trip.

At 4:20 p.m. Secretary Stephen T. Early called in reporters for a word of friendly but wet-blanket advice "not to write yourself out on the end of a limb, or to attribute what you assume the President, Mr. Hull and Mr. Welles are discussing to any allegedly authorized or unimpeachable or reliable sources or to friends close to the President or to the Secretary of State or to the Under Secretary of State; that neither the President, nor the Secretary of State nor the Under Secretary of State will have any word to say to the press or to any of their friends or to anyone anywhere following their conference." At 4:40 p.m. Messrs. Hull & Welles departed, polite, noncommittal.

At next afternoon's press conference the President announced that the Welles trip had been fact-finding, that the facts he had found would be held incommunicado, that Mr. Welles had neither made nor received any commitments or proposals. Said Mr. Roosevelt: "Finally, even though there may be scant immediate prospects* for the establishment of any just, stable and lasting peace in Europe, the information made available to this Government as a result of Mr. Welles's mission will undoubtedly be of the greatest value when the time comes for the establishment of such a peace."

Curiosity over Mr. Welles's findings fizzled out, was centred on a fresher sensation, the Nazi White Book on U. S. foreign policy.

* Mr. Roosevelt twice read & emphasized the italicized phrase.

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