The President's Week

Tuesday. Franklin Roosevelt needed a haircut. Tufts of grey hair stuck out over his ears, straggled wispily over the top of his head. Coatless, wearing a white shirt and plaid tie, he leaned back in his swivel chair and waited for some 80 reporters to shuffle into a semicircle before his cluttered desk. The familiar signal flags of weariness were up--an air of fatigued abstraction, a dark web of crow's-feet about his eyes, a deep etching of lines in the loose, sand-grey skin of his face.

But Franklin Roosevelt, often at his best when tired, fashioned one of his most newsy conferences in months. He took obvious delight in his new decision to act as war reporter to the American people--although, as it turned out, he did not have much specific military news to give out.

Commenting first on the success of U.S. submarine warfare against Jap shipping, he discussed Portugal's granting of Azores facilities to the Allies; revealed that a staggering total of 855 U.S. planes, using 1,000,000 gallons of high octane gasoline, had participated in the blasting of Bremen and Vegesack; announced that Good Neighbor Venezuela's President, General Isaias Medina Angarita, would visit the U.S. before year's end; and finally took to task the five vocal globe-touring Senators whose criticism of the Administration and the British has caused international reverberations.

Franklin Roosevelt admitted that the discussion provoked by the Senators' criticisms might produce some good, added that, while some British animosity was inevitable, most Britishers would understand that the fuss-&-feathers stirred up by the Senators was equally inevitable in a working democracy. But he nonetheless called the criticisms a damned nuisance, then went on to answer some of them. His points:

> The complaint that the U.S. had put up more than its share of oil to fight World War II ignored the fact that war cannot be fought solely on the basis of who owns what. If--before the Mediterranean was opened--the United Nations had adopted a policy of using oil according to the size and wealth of a country, far less oil would have reached the battlefronts.

> The demand (by Massachusetts' Henry Cabot Lodge) that the U.S. acquire immediate air bases in Siberia ignored the fact that bases are useless until they are equipped. And before the bases could be equipped, said the President, the Japs would be marching into Siberia. Are you and I, he asked, prepared to stand up and say, as a matter of grand military strategy, that Russia should go to war with Japan? What if the Russians say they are doing something more important?

> The charge that 30,000 trucks had been sent to Australia last year for civilian use (as against 15,000 for the U.S.) ignored simple arithmetic. Said the President: 21,135 trucks have been sent to Australia in two and a half years, as compared with 750,000 made available for the U.S. Of the trucks sent to Australia, 12,000 were taken by the Australian Army, most of the others used for military transport.

Friday. Outside it was drizzling. A few yellow-brown October leaves drifted limply to the White House lawn. But Franklin Roosevelt's oval office had a summery air. Reporters found him wearing a seersucker suit. A vase of October roses was on his desk. The President's news:

He reported a dinner at the White House in honor of Haiti's visiting President Elie Lescot, who had arrived in Washington the day before. Then he read from his remarks at the dinner. Haiti, he said, had more than justified the independence granted her in 1934, had notably helped the war effort by growing cryptostegia (which may be called rubber, said Franklin Roosevelt, because it is rubber). Then he said he hoped that after he leaves the White House the Congress will not raise tariff walls against natural rubber just to keep some synthetic plants going. "I believe in cheap tires and more of them," he said, "and the only way to get that is to use the tires that are made by nature, whether it be rubber, or guayule, or cryptostegia." These words cast a momentous shadow of the possible future struggles over the fate of war-born U.S. industries.

Then Franklin Roosevelt got tough, cracked down on Argentina for banning Jewish-language newspapers . Said he: "An action obviously anti-Semitic in nature, and of a character so closely identified with the most repugnant features of Nazi doctrine."

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