Back to Darkest Washington

Like any returning traveler, Franklin Roosevelt found the mailbox jammed, a desk littered with unanswered memos, a row of soured milk bottles on his doorstep. In his three-week absence from the White House the work had piled up--and oversights had taken their toll. To catch up he would now have to work overtime.

The President's appointment of Bronx Boss Ed Flynn as Ambassador to Australia had turned out, during his absence, to be the worst political boomerang he had tossed since the Supreme Court fight. It was too late to repair the damage: the President would be busy for months erasing the memory of the mistake.

On the domestic front a new crisis brewed in the battle against inflation. The fight over the Army's size still awaited his decision. All these problems the President tackled with the verve of a man to whom travel is a tonic and a Clipper berth as restful as a feather bed.

Stopover Privilege. The President had been in no hurry to return home from Casablanca. After the ten-day conference was over he and Prime Minister Winston Churchill drove 150 miles to the ancient city of Marrakech, with its grove of palm trees at the foot of the snow-topped Atlas Mountains, with its musty 16th-Century tombs and its square, where snake charmers, jugglers and native dancers perform in the afternoons.

Next day two four-motored planes of the Army Air Force Transport Command carried the President and his party 2,000 miles to Liberia, only republic in Africa, founded in 1822 as a colony for freed U.S. slaves. There Franklin Roosevelt lunched with chocolate-hued President Edwin James Barclay, toured part of the million-acre Firestone rubber plantation, rode with his Liberian confrere in a jeep to review U.S. Negro troops.

One day and 1,900 air miles from Liberia the President turned up aboard a U.S. destroyer anchored in Brazil's winding Po-tengy River at Natal. There he conferred with round, determined little President Getulio Dornelles Vargas, an "old friend." After long conversations, sometimes in Franklin Roosevelt's schoolboy French, sometimes through an interpreter, the two Presidents announced that they were determined to keep the Atlantic Ocean "safe for all," that Africa's Dakar must never again become "a blockade or an invasion threat against the two Americas." And once more the President rode in a jeep--with his Brazilian confrere--this time to review U.S. troops at the Natal air base.

Last Lap. The next and final stop was Port-au-Spain, capital of hilly, verdant, sun-drenched Trinidad. There the President inspected the new U.S. naval base, had tea with Governor and Lady Bede Edmund Clifford. He also picked up his personal Chief of Staff, Admiral William D. Leahy, forced to stop off at Port-au-Spain on the trip to Casablanca by one of the most untimely cases of influenza in recent history.

The trip was over. The President's Clipper returned to Miami; a special train took him back to the White House, the day after his birthday.

Commented the New York Times:

"President Roosevelt celebrates his 61st birthday ... at the close of one of the most brilliant episodes of his career: a journey which brought the breath of his democratic enthusiasm into three continents; a conference which, however little we may know about its strategic decisions, dramatized the fact that the psychological initiative in this war has passed to the United Nations. . . .

"On a man's birthday we are likely to think of personal things, even when the man is a public figure. Mr. Roosevelt's gaiety and humor, as well as his earnestness, have helped him in his battle. He is a friendly man, at ease equally with a British Premier, the President of Brazil and an American soldier from Kansas or Vermont. He personifies in manner some of democracy's best qualities. The thanks and the prayers of the nation are with him."

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