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But Welles had little time to look toward such far horizons last week. He was busy. He denounced the Vichy Government for giving up territory unctuously to the Japanese but defending it bloodily against the British. He repudiated a suggestion by provincial-minded Isolationist Senator D. Worth Clark of Idaho that the U.S. should seize by military aggression all nations in this Hemisphere (see p. 24). He helped the President tighten the screws on the Japanese by banning oil shipments to Japan. He accepted from the Japanese apologies and the offer of indemnity for the apparently accidental bombing of the 14-year-old gunboat Tutuila, a 370-ton tub which the Navy has stationed on the Yangtze River at Chungking. He recognized for the U.S. the exiled London Government of Czechoslovakia. He accused the German Government of barefaced impudence in its note to Mexico threatening reprisals unless the Mexicans protested the U.S. economic black list of the Axis firms in Latin America. He formally advised Russian Ambassador Oumansky that the U.S. would supply the Soviet Union with military weapons "in its struggle against armed aggression." As usual, he worked extremely hard and long hours, plowing his way through the plunging masses of cables from abroad.
Nine o'clock came each night before his car swung through Washington's jammed traffic, crossed into Maryland to Oxon Hill, where the Secretary could enter the cool magnificence of his home. In the great Georgian house Welles dined briefly, buckled into his homework. Even in the thick, still heat of a Maryland summer night on the Potomac, Sumner Welles seemed cool. War or peace, he will remain so.