THE PRESIDENCY: Will to Peace

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Newsmen who massed before Franklin Roosevelt at his Tuesday press conference in the White House last week found him singularly reticent, especially on the all-consuming subject of what he had meant by saying on Easter: ". . . If we don't have a war" (TIME, April 17). One inspired correspondent at last asked what the President thought about an editorial in the Washington Post entitled "The Collective Pronoun."* With startling alacrity the President replied that that editorial precisely, clearly, honestly expressed his views. It became therefore a blueprint for understanding the words and acts of Franklin Roosevelt in foreign affairs. Essential excerpts:

"By 'we' he undoubtedly meant western civilization. A war affecting its foundations would immediately affect us vitally, whether or not the United States was at the outset physically involved. . . .

"Until it has actually started, another world war is not inevitable. It can still be averted if the free nations are willing to show that they will take a stand before it is too late. . . .

"Nothing less than the show of preponderant force will stop them [Rome-Berlin axis], for force is the only language which they understand. But, like less exalted bullies, force is to them a real deterrent.

"In using the collective 'we' the President told Hitler and Mussolini, far more impressively than he told Warm Springs, that the tremendous force of the United States must be a factor in their current thinking. . . .

"To make that plain at this crucial time is to help in preventing war. . . ."

Two days passed. A few Senators (Georgia's George, New Hampshire's Bridges, North Carolina's Reynolds, Idaho's Borah) fulminated against Mr. Roosevelt's disturbance of men's peace of mind, but 130,000,000 Americans stayed remarkably quiet. Then Franklin Roosevelt addressed to the Dictators, over the heads of the governing board of the Pan American Union (see cut), his second warning of the week. Said he:

"The American peace which we celebrate today has no quality of weakness in it. We are prepared to ... defend it to the fullest extent of our strength, matching force to force if any attempt is made to subvert our institutions. . . .

"Should the method of attack be that of economic pressure, I pledge that my own country will also give economic support, so that no American nation need surrender any fraction of its sovereign freedom to maintain its economic welfare."

Mr. Roosevelt ridiculed the Dictators' complaint that the Democracies were "encircling" them. He ridiculed their "dreams of conquest," their "methods . . . used by the Huns and Vandals 1,500 years ago." And over the heads of the Dictators he seemed to speak to their peoples, urging them to revolt. "Men are not prisoners of fate," said Franklin Roosevelt, "but only prisoners of their own minds. They have within themselves the power to become free at any moment. . . . "The truest defense of the peace of our hemisphere must always lie in the hope that our sister nations beyond the seas will break the bonds of the ideas which constrain them toward perpetual warfare.