Touchdown!

The one eye President Roosevelt keeps on domestic affairs wore a worried look last week. Congress was bucking in harness. Congressmen were as frightened over price-control legislation as local businessmen in their States were smug over rising prices. Yet the need for control was apparent; inflation was only a few hops & skips and one big jump away; already the defense program was costing the U.S. perhaps one-third more than necessary.

Defense was boggling along in a Sargasso Sea of red tape, internecine jealousies and an out-&-out struggle for control, a struggle now at the stage of daggers-at-close-range between Leon Henderson's OPACSters and the Knudsen OPMites (see p. 64). Publicly Franklin Roosevelt had scouted the idea that he wanted a single controlling head in charge of the entire defense effort; privately he went on scouting for the right man.

He had only two present prospects: Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson, who was without industrial and financial background, and inclined to rigidity of mind, but active; and Supreme Court Justice William Orville Douglas, who was tough and fast but too skeptical of U.S. businessmen's abilities, and who would not consider a top defense job unless he had absolute power to hire & fire. The President, who loves to hire but hates to fire, dislikes giving his top officers such absolute power.

And problems continued to pile up on the President's desk like a range of mountains. For months the President had delayed and stalled, trying to avoid asking Congress to extend indefinitely the draftees' one-year term of service. When time began to close in on him, he still avoided direct personal leadership. Unwilling to buck the line himself, he sent in General George Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, to carry the ball and get the lumps. Good Soldier Marshall pounded down the field, through center, off-tackle, around the ends. The watching President couldn't believe his eyes: there was, in fact, no real opposition.

Even such Isolationist ostriches as Ohio's Senator Robert Taft admitted that there could be no fight against the logic of fully training the half-trained U.S. Army. By now General Marshall had smashed all the way to the one-yard line. The President decided to go in himself, and carry the ball over for the touchdown.

But even as he prepared a message insisting on passage of the legislation, the other team walked off the field, defaulting the game: the little grey Kansas field mouse, Isolationist Alf M. Landon, came out for the bill. Then Franklin Roosevelt went in to make the touchdown.

He had put in a full week of arduous working days and brooding nights, even giving up a weekend in his beloved Hyde Park, to work on his draft-amendment message. Never before had he broadcast a message to Congress unless he delivered it in person, but this time he called the major broadcasting chains to the White House, had them record his speech for replaying as soon as his written message had gone to the Capitol.

Major points of the address: 1) failure to pass legislation holding draftees in the Army would be "a tragic error"; 2) the danger to the U.S. today is "infinitely greater" than it was a year ago; 3) a suggestion that Congress legislatively acknowledge "this national emergency." He concluded: "Time counts. Within two months disintegration, which would follow failure to take Congressional action, will commence in the armies of the United States. Time counts. The responsibility rests solely with the Congress."

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