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Fishing done and seas roughening, at week's end the Potomac put in at Port Everglades, Fla., where the President polished up a short speech, broadcast it that night to the postponed national Jackson Day dinners of the Democrats. The most unpolitical Jackson Day address in history, the speech was a homely little essay on national unity. Said the President: "Ladies and gentlemen, I am sitting in the little cabin of the little ship Potomac, in the harbor of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., after a day of sunshine out in the Gulf Stream. ... In Washington, as you know, the working day of the Presidency in these times averages about 15 hours. . . . But at sea the radio messages and the occasional pouch of mail reduce official work to not more than two or three hours a day." " there is a chance for a bit of sunshine or a wetted line, or a biography or a detective story or even a nap after lunch. Above all, there is the opportunity for thinking things through. . . . That means that if today the fellow next to you catches a bigger fish than you do, or vice versa, as sometimes happens, you don't lie awake at night thinking about it. ... "You still seek peace of mind and peace of spirit—but you come to realize that you have to work overtime nowadays, and work harder than ever before in your life to make that kind of peace possible later on. It is a fact that we all recognize, that if we sit down now we may get run over later. . . . "And so that is why ... I have become more than ever clear that the time calls for courage and more courage—calls for action and more action." After a dutiful reference to Andrew Jackson, the President repeated the U. S. determination to "help those who block the dictators in their march toward domination of the world," paid high compliment to Republican Wendell Willkie for "rising above partisanship" (his first public mention of the defeated GOPresidential candidate), and denounced the agents and dupes of Naziism who "have represented themselves as pacifists when actually they are serving the most brutal warmongers of all time." Next day the President went ashore, headed north for inspections of Fort Jackson, S. C. and Fort Bragg, N. C., then back to resume his burden at the nerve centre of the world's diplomatic headquarters.
Spring had come while he was away; spring and the hour for action.