THE PRESIDENCY: Mankind Invited

A picture of Franklin Roosevelt sitting at a table aboard ship in the Azores or some equally remote anchorage, settling the world's hash personally with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, was drawn in calm, confident words last week on the front page of the New York Times by its Washington correspondent, Arthur Krock. Some time last summer, said Mr. Krock, Mr. Roosevelt asked the Dictators to slip away and meet him at sea, but they declined.

Franklin Roosevelt read this latest Krock "scoop" the same morning that Adolf Hitler replied to his peace message, and he swiftly denied it.* Said he affably: "It is not true, but otherwise it is interesting and well written."

Replied Arthur Krock: "It was related separately and uniformly at different times to this correspondent by men of high repute and clear minds who have the White House entree."

Fellow newsmen felt confident that the Krock story was accurate in direction if not detail. Certainly it did not exaggerate the might & main which Franklin Roosevelt has been exerting to save the peace of the world. Last week Raymond Leslie Buell, research director of the Foreign Policy Association, went so far as to give Mr. Roosevelt full credit for averting war at least twice: last month and just before Munich (September).

Since then, Franklin Roosevelt has been engaged in an oratorical struggle with Adolf Hitler. In his last two sallies, he tried Woodrow Wilson's tactics of talking past Germany's leader to its people. Orator Hitler in his reply last week (see p. 18) did the same, seeking to widen the split in U. S. public opinion behind the U. S. President, to bolster isolationist sentiment in the U. S. by twitting Mr. Roosevelt unmercifully for Woodrow Wilson's failure at world intervention.

Herr Hitler who has his press and polls under Nazi lock & key, made the error, so far as his U. S. audience was concerned, of caricaturing the free press of the U. S. and calling it a liar. The U. S. press and people, if they credited Herr Hitler with some hits, seemed still to believe that Mr. Roosevelt's search for world peace with relative justice was a search more honest than Hitler's reply; and that, although the U. S. may not have a perfect moral record in history, the only hope for men of good will now is in a moral future.

>Mr. Roosevelt made a point of sleeping through Herr Hitler's speech at 6 a. m. E. S. T. So far as he was concerned, Hitler was "stopped" for the time being and the President of the U. S. was busy at home. He had a World's Fair to open, visiting royalty to entertain.

No role suits the Squire of Hyde Park better than that of well-born man-of-the-world hobnobbing with distinguished visitors. He drove down to the Poughkeepsie lumber yard where the Potomac docks when it is there, got out of his car to handshake handsome Crown Prince Olav & Crown Princess Martha of Norway. Mr. Roosevelt, though fluent in French, speaks no Scandinavian tongues, but he did not need to. The royal Norwegians speak Mayfair English.