(See Cover) One quiet day ten years ago United Pressman Lyle Wilson burst into the press office of the State Department with a little model airplane in his hand. The State Department's genial Press Division Chief Michael McDermott was talking with a few reporters. Wilson began sailing his plane around the room.
"Hey," yelled McDermott, who is wonderfully kind to cub reporters but a bull dog to rowdy ones, "cut that out, or we'll throw you out." "I'll ask the boss about that," said Wilson in a mock huff, and walked down the hall to the office of the then Assistant Secretary of State Nelson Trusler Johnson (who had just been notified of his appointment as Minister to China). Two hours later someone put his head in the Assistant Secretary's door. Nelson Johnson and Lyle Wilson were tossing the airplane at each other, laughing like ten-year-olds.
Next day Reporter Wilson went back to the store where he had bought the plane to get some more. Told that the planes were sold out, Wilson protested that there had been a whole boxful the day before. "Yes," said the salesman, "but a big, fat guy who said his name was Johnson came in and bought all I had."
Not long afterward Nelson Johnson left for Peking and one of the most important posts in the U. S. diplomatic service. He carried with him the supply of little paper airplanes. For ten years since then, U. S. Far Eastern policy has ridden on little paper wings—unpredictable, steered by prankish winds—which Nelson Johnson, most of the time roaring with laughter, has launched.
Since the outbreak of war in Europe, the importance of Chungking and Tokyo in the U. S. Ambassadorial scale has increased tremendously—so much that only London and Paris now rank them. There are good reasons. Britain, France, Germany and, to a lesser extent, Russia have all turned Westward. Of important powers, only Japan and the U. S. are just now conspicuously active in the Orient. Masters of the East and West shores of the Pacific, they are natural opponents. One of them is big, rich, complacent, lazy, subject to delayed reflexes; the other small, inordinately ambitious, troubled with intellectual cramps and an inferiority complex. The big fellow, slow as he is, has finally begun to realize he must do one of four things about the Orient, particularly China:
1) Get out. Extreme isolationist view is that U. S. interests in China (with only two-thirds the value of the U. S. domestic barber business) and U. S. resources in the Philippines (gold, iron, chromite, manganese, tobacco, hemp, timber, sugar) are not worth holding at the risk of conflict; that the U. S. should withdraw to the Panama-Hawaii-Alaska front, strengthen defenses there.