Truth & Consequences

One U.S. public servant who has always accepted the facts of war as facts of life is Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. In pre-Pearl Harbor days he drove isolationist Congressmen to frenzy with his blunt warnings of imminent danger. Last week he spoke out again, on the much-evaded, politically ticklish question of drafting 18-to-20 year olds.

Said Statesman Stimson: the U.S. has never yet fought a great war without drafting its youths of 18 and 19 and its younger married men.* In World War II, these classes will have to be drafted again--not within the next few months, but certainly some time. Mr. Stimson's statement was the War Department's answer to the nauseating optimism of Congressman Andrew J. May (TIME, July 20).

But Franklin Roosevelt did not let his Secretary of War have the last word. Next day the President said that no move to draft U.S. youngsters would be made at any time soon.

In short, though the nation's 18-to-20 year-olds and young married men could probably look forward to being drafted, their Government was not going to admit it, as long as it politically could.

* Only previous draft of 18-to-20 year olds was in World War I, only other major foreign war in U.S. history.

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