U.S. At War: Not-So-White Paper

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Washington Newshawks Forrest Davis and Ernest K. Lindley unloosed a fat scoop last week. In the first of two articles in the Ladies' Home Journal, they reported the inside details of how war came to the U.S,, Some of the things Davis and Lindley had to tell:

> January 1941, Sumner Welles informed Soviet Ambassador Oumansky "that Hitler has marked Russia for slaughter in the following June." The Under Secretary's declaration was based not on ordinary military intelligence but on an "amazingly interesting foundation which cannot, at this time, be disclosed."

> In August 1941, off the Atlantic coast, Winston Churchill urged Franklin Roosevelt to hand Japan an ultimatum against further aggression, but the President said he thought he could "baby" the Japs three months more to gain time to rearm.

> In November 1941, Cordell Hull strongly warned Army & Navy chiefs that the Far Eastern crisis had outstripped the bounds of diplomacy. Two weeks before Pearl Harbor he suggested that all hands in the Pacific be alert against a big-scale attack that would "stampede the hell out of our scattered forces."

> The first word of Pearl Harbor reached Washington at 1:45 p.m., Dec. 7. Navy Secretary Knox, the color gone from his ruddy features, called Franklin Roosevelt, who sat at lunch in the White House Oval Study, eating from a desk tray, tieless, shirt-sleeved. Said Knox: "Mr. President, it looks like the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor. . . ."

"No!" the President interrupted unbelievingly.

"This is it," said Harry Hopkins.

This was all very interesting, although much of it was not particularly new, but what interested journalists was an ethical problem: Why should Davis and Lindley, or anyone else, be favored with such a juicy, exclusive, privately profitable, official handout? Washington writers were still sore over the "American White Paper" by Joseph W. Alsop Jr. and Robert Kintner, an inside Roosevelt-aided story of prewar U.S. diplomacy which had netted its authors a fat sum.

One of the loudest complainers was Columnist Arthur Krock, who used to be a White House favorite himself, won a Pulitzer Prize (1938) for an exclusive interview with President Roosevelt. Though Mr. Krock's words might be a cluster of sour grapes, they were filled with the seeds of righteousness. Said Krock: "An administration which is operating under the most democratic form of Government in the world has once again told its story through unofficial spokesmen instead of telling the story itself."