THE PRESIDENCY: Home from the Sea

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In the damp, disused, musty wharf shed the 50 men stood and sat, impatient, griped, chilled: newsmen, cameramen, radiomen, technicians, bottleholders. They had been waiting a long time—two weeks at Swampscott, Mass., two days at Rockland, Me. They were angry as a bunch of bears with sore haunches. They were the reception committee for Franklin Roosevelt, returning from the greatest fishing trip that any President of the U.S. had ever undertaken.

The fog, heavy all day over the far reaches of Penobscot Bay, had gradually lifted and faded; about 3 o'clock the watchers saw the top-heavy, bulging, comfortable Presidential yacht coming around the breakwater, could see beyond it the escorting Coast Guard cutter Calypso, sleek, dangerous, moving like a loafing shark.

By now the broadcasters were babbling into microphones with their perpetual synthetic excitement; police stiffened into nervous alertness; the blue-grey Potomac slowly nosed alongside the wharf, safely home from the mysteries of the Atlantic.

Strange Fruit. President Roosevelt was back from the most momentous journey of all his 200,000-odd miles of White House travel. He had been gone from Washington 13 days. For most of that time his whereabouts had been unknown to his country. He brought back his half of the unknown fruits of a conference that had no parallel. The U.S., though not at war, had conferred through the head of its Government with Great Britain, a nation at war, on how Nazi Germany was to be defeated, had further agreed on "certain common principles" as a basis for a future peace, a better world. And fundamental to the "common principles" was one dominating new world idea: control of the post-war world by the U.S. and Great Britain.

Undoubtedly the President and the Prime Minister had discussed in the frankest terms—they are that kind of men—all the probable next moves in the world conflict.

From this great venture on hostile seas into strange diplomatic waters—this extraordinary Roosevelt coup, more dramatic than his cross-country flight in 1932 to address the Chicago Convention which first named him for the Presidency—Franklin Roosevelt returned. He returned not to wave his hat to a cheering crowd, but to face his White House press corps —including the men who usually defend him from all critics and laugh at his humor—this time hopping mad.

His great journey had all but ended in a bad press, for the newspapers of the U.S. were angry. They had been left out. Prime Minister Winston Churchill had carried along British reporters—"literary men" from the Ministry of Information—but Mr. Roosevelt had not. The first flash confirming the meeting had come from Ottawa a few minutes before the White House pressmen had been allowed to release it. Then London had blanketed the U.S. report by providing all the interesting details. The British were told more under censorship than the U.S. without it.