Sermon on the Desert

Back to U.S. soil came pictures of American graves in French North Africa: barren crosses in endlessly shifting sand, marking the bodies of boys who did not want to die in vain. And from North Africa also came the peculiar shifting tides of political forces bigger than any man, forming patterns whose size was a frightening reminder that human events sometimes move faster than the human spirit can follow.

One swift, numbing surprise was the assassination of Admiral Jean Franc,ois Darlan, the onetime French collaborator who had become America's friend, or America's tool, or perhaps America's moral Frankenstein (see p. 24). The nation heard Franklin Roosevelt's angry reaction: ". . . first-degree murder." It listened to good grey Secretary of State Cordell Hull: ". . . an odious and cowardly act." But many Americans did not know whether to be horrified or relieved, and their not knowing was a heavy burden.

For Americans it was a troubled week. To them the holiday season had never been just a time of tinsel and gifts; it was a great golden week of home and church, of cantatas and midnight mass, of mangers on the family hearth. Now, this year, in the solemnity of a Yuletide of war, the nation felt a vague anxiety.

Anxiety & Peace. One man who recognized the anxiety, and seemed to discover its cause, was Pundit Walter Lippmann. A few hours before a bullet ended Admiral Darlan's baffling career, he wrote: "... We have been put to a very severe moral test in North Africa, and ... we are not meeting that test in a way which satisfies our consciences and keeps our spirits whole. . . .

"It is not our actions which are the cause of this anxiety--not that we maintained relations with Vichy, not that we used those relations to do espionage and to conspire, and not that we dealt with Admiral Darlan. ... It is the way so many, and some in high places, are talking about these things that does such grave injury to our course, and to our self-respect, and to our confidence in the future.

"For no one doubts that the good warrior has the right to deceive his enemies. But what is inadmissible in the war we are fighting is that we should deceive ourselves--that we should make a virtue of necessity and boast of our guile, and turn the moral world upside down by insisting that wrong is right and bad is good.

"That is a sin, and we have been guilty of it, and of this sin we must purge ourselves. . . .

"Yet there is no need to give way to anxiety, certainly no ground whatever to despair. No one is going to commit this nation to a Machiavellian philosophy just because in a splendid achievement there has been some incidental moral confusion. . . . For the greater action is so sound, and so wholesome at its core that it will transcend the rest, and it will generate a moral energy which will sweep away, like a clean wind, the dusty leaves of sophistry."

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