Rendezvous with Destiny

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Will They Like Each Other? The range of other issues which the three (or four) leaders may discuss is as wide as the world their alliance now dominates. Should the smaller United Nations, as Wendell Willkie urged last week, be invited at once to join and share in the Moscow Declaration for the postwar world? The explosive problem of postwar boundaries may be publicly postponed to the peace conference, as was proposed at Moscow, but some private discussion can hardly be avoided. Item: not only Poles are growing anxious over the final boundaries of Poland. Should Russia's needs or the Atlantic Charter prevail? It thus at once becomes evident that at this meeting the cards, good and bad, must all be on the table.

Beyond the immediate job of victory the triumvirate confronts the task of building a lasting superstructure on the foundation laid at Moscow; of building a world in which, as Secretary Hull hopefully declared to Congress last week (see p. 21), "there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power." The hopes of millions for such a world may be shattered unless these three great personal leaders succeed in establishing among themselves a solid bond of confidence in each other's good faith and good will.

Each of the Big Three's Mister Bigs possesses enormous personal power. Each has demonstrated spectacular qualities of leadership. Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, old foe of "the foul baboonery of Bolshevism," reportedly did not hit it off too well at their meeting last year. Hence the fate of millions living and yet unborn will be deeply affected by whether —after they have looked into each other's eyes for the first time and have taken each other's measure day by day—a man named Roosevelt and a man named Stalin each decides that the other is a man to be liked, trusted and respected. If they do, a world Thanksgiving may lie ahead.

War President. Joseph Stalin will meet a calm and confident man. Behind his self-imposed veil of secrecy, President Roosevelt has grown steadily more buoyant. At times his face is lined and pouched with weariness, but he looked wearier a year ago than now. Today he is like a fighter in the tenth round of a 15-round bout. Plenty of hard punching lies ahead. But he has felt out his opponent now, and is sure he can take him.

Most Americans now 40 were still in their 20s when Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House; thousands of U.S. soldiers and sailors fighting around the world remember no other President. Yet associates still marvel at his Gargantuan appetite for work, his ability to relax in the midst of it, his endless gay optimism. As it has to everyone else, the strain of war has wrenched, strained and hacked at his basic traits of character. But in the President's case the grind has only polished what was already polished, only toughened what was already steel-strong.