A Question of Morale

Sir Hugh Dowding, British Air Chief Marshal, like most visitors emerging from a conference with President Roosevelt, was waylaid by reporters as he left the White House. He had spent an important 50 minutes going over the problems of the R. A. F. with the President and Harry Hopkins. Sir Hugh, lanky, literal-minded, and shocked, said curtly to the reporters: "I don't talk with the President and then come out and tell what was discussed." Few White House visitors do. Nobody expects them to. Most reporters would be shaken to the depths of their propriety if such a visitor should square off with an extended account of "I said to the President" and "the President said to me." Nevertheless, the emerging visitors are invariably queried; nevertheless, their dutiful cliches are carefully recorded: we had an interesting discussion . . . you can say it was an exchange of views . . . we explored the situation. . . . I am in complete agreement. . . .

But last week was a week of Presidential conferences, and last week the White House visitors were more than ordinarily reticent. Debate on the Lend-Lease Bill was coming to an end in the Senate (see p. 14). And as always in periods when the President is waiting upon Congress, rumors and speculations about his plans bubbled gaseously. There was little enough to go on. The President issued an optimistic report on U. S. steel production capacity that plunged New Dealers into deepest gloom (see p. 77). He delivered, in the course of a radio speech to the awards dinner of the National Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (see p. 38), a ringing declaration on the importance of the Lend-Lease Bill to hemispheric defense. Through most of the week he sat at his desk to work out with Cabinet and Army and Navy officers the steps that could and would be taken as soon as the Lend-Lease Bill became law.

All over the U. S., manufacturing towns were changing overnight under the impact of orders for defense; in Army camps the first 128,000 drafted men were in training; the U. S. armament program was in second gear--and only the White House knew how well or how badly it was going. Beyond U. S. borders, beyond the Western Hemisphere, events hung in the balance from Ankara to the borders of Indo-China--but only the White House knew how greatly U. S. action could affect their outcome. The President had long, since stated to the U. S. the meaning of those events--that they placed American civilization in greater peril than it had been since the days of Jamestown and Plymouth Rock. But no word followed from the President on how greatly the measures taken checked that peril; no indications came of the course of action to remove it. The conferees hurried in & out of the White House; their polite evasions were jotted down by reporters as they came out. Troubled opinions on the progress of U. S. arming ranged from 1) the view that it was going so badly that only the declaration of an emergency could save it, to 2) the belief that the U. S. was arming more swiftly, more effectively, to greater purpose than any other nation in history.

Through one long day the President held council with Secretaries Cordell Hull and Henry Stimson, Under Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, General Marshall. Admiral Stark. The conference began in the morning, broke off for lunch and new business, began again, with Secretary Morgenthau and Harry Hopkins added, in the late afternoon. It went over, point by point, the final inventories of British war needs and available U. S. supplies--the long-range bombers, ships, field guns, machine guns, ammunition (estimated total cost: $500,000,000) that could be shipped as soon as the Lend-Lease Bill was signed. Beyond this immediate act lay a bigger project, of which only the faint outlines appeared in the press: the establishment of a "defense ministry" within the Cabinet (see p. 14).

Emergency? No word came from the President last week (nor from the reticent visitors to the White House) as to how well or how badly he believed U. S. armament was going, how strongly or how weakly the U. S. had grasped the needs of the moment. But from one man close to him came a flat warning: U. S. production was worse than any man had reason to expect; the U. S. state of mind was far from reassuring. In Manhattan, to the Overseas Press Club, former Ambassador William Bullitt said: "If we cannot now get into production at war speed without the declaration of a national emergency, I, for one, favor the immediate declaration of a national emergency."

Said Mr. Bullitt: "We know that our country is not producing weapons of defense fast enough and that we are not supplying weapons in sufficient quantities to the British, the Chinese and the Greeks. . . . We . . . have not lived up to our tradition of American enterprise and industrial efficiency. . . . If we were fully awake to the danger that threatens us, we should at this hour be producing every implement of defense that we need . . . that the British, the Chinese and the Greeks need, with as great speed as though we were in war.

"We are doing nothing of the kind. We are making just the effort that it is not troublesome to make. We could double our planned output of airplanes and tanks and merchant ships and guns in 1942 if we would but buckle to the task now."

Mr. Bullitt's explanations for the apathy: U. S. unwillingness to read the meaning of the totalitarian alliance; the strength of U. S. isolationists' desire to retreat to the pre-1914 world; the exploitation by Communists and Nazis of internal U. S. weaknesses. Once, he said, Joseph Stalin had told him that there was one job no man could carry out effectively: the Presidency of the U. S. Stalin said that when he ordered something done, it was done; but that by the time a U. S. President convinced 130,000,000 people that something should be done, it was too late. Ambassador Bullitt argued back that U. S. citizens could not be judged by the people of the Soviet Union--that with a free press, free radio, free education, U. S. citizens grasped facts quickly, analyzed them right. Stalin laughed.

Last week it seemed unlikely that Stalin ("quaking in his Kremlin," said Bill Bullitt, "too weak, morally and physically, to win even a jackal's victory over corpses") was still laughing. But there were few who wanted to argue that U. S. production was flowing as well as it could, that the maximum U. S. strength was behind U. S. arming and aid to democracies, that U. S. morale was all that it should be. Sharper than most, the Bullitt speech fitted into the vast literature of warning and appeal that has filled the U. S. since World War II began--in the speeches of President Roosevelt, the writings and statements of Cabinet officers, in editorials and Congressional debates. If the U. S. effort still lacked urgency, it was not for lack of warnings. Last week, as Washington bubbled with gloomy rumors, one lesson seemed plain from these warnings of the U. S. peril--the U. S. might rise to a visible opportunity, a felt emergency, but it could not be scared into action from afar.

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