Waterline

At press conference in the President's oval office, a correspondent asked how far U. S. territorial waters (i, e., maritime frontiers) extend toward Europe. Hot off the bat Franklin Roosevelt answered: as far as U. S. interests require them to go. "Does that reach the Rhine, Mr. President?" Franklin Roosevelt tossed his head and laughed. He was, said he, talking only about salt water.

Within the vague waterline thus laid down last week, British blockaders and German submarines presumably may not venture without trouble from the U. S. Navy and Coast Guard on peace patrol. But then Franklin Roosevelt, apostle of aggressive, anti-fascist neutrality, intimated that he had no desire to risk getting the U. S. into war by explosive insistence upon classical neutral rights.

Unlike fortnight ago, when he was all tensity and action, last week his tone was quiet, jovial, as if to let the U. S. people in their own good time draw their own inferences from the fact of his proclaimed national emergency, the larger fact of war on the loose, the plight of the warring democracies and the widening sphere of the dictatorships (see p. 28). Casually, as though he were stating familiar trivia, he reaffirmed what he said last year: that the U. S. will not stand idly by if any expanding foreign power attempts to muscle in on Canada on the north or--he added last week--France's possessions in the Caribbean and South America.

It was a purposeful quietude. Having called Congress into special session (see p. 12), Franklin Roosevelt had no wish prematurely to provoke the mobilizing forces of Isolation. Idaho's formidable Borah was no adversary to be wantonly aroused. The President stepped as delicately as Agag. Meanwhile, he tried to prevent Republicans from forming a solid front against his foreign policy: to his councils this week he summoned Alf M. Landon and his 1936 running mate, Publisher Frank Knox, as earnest that the White House was prepared to practice national unity, whatever isolationist Republicans in the Senate might do.

P:The President took notice of, but did nothing about a war brewing within his wartime official family. When a journalistic storm blew up after Secretary Steve Early announced that the Brain Trust was "out the window," the President declared abruptly that Janizaries Benjamin Cohen and Thomas G. Corcoran still had their jobs and his confidence.

P:ToPoland's President Ignacy Moscicki, Franklin Roosevelt telegraphed that he was "deeply shocked" by German bombings, for the moment withheld reply to Poland's suggestion that the U. S. extend its arms embargo to aggressive Soviet Russia.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.