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There, in his study of politics, he marked well one priceless maxim: always ask for more than you can get, then compromise for half. Thus he could appreciate last week Franklin Roosevelt's stratagem in asking absolute repeal of the Neutrality law and a return to the vague vagaries of international law, in order that a compromise on cash-and-carry would seem to anti-repeal forces like a victory.
As he sat slumped in a front-row black-leather seat in the House last week, chin cupped in hand, listening to a pale, grave, calm President (see p. 11), possible attacks on that aggressive defense went through his mind. By week's end one thing was clear about the isolationist strategy: the old bogey of the House of Morgan was to be hung like an albatross around Franklin Roosevelt's neck.
For the men who sat on the old Senate Munitions committee in 1934-35—Nye, Bone, Clark, Vandenberg, Pope, George, Barbour—implicitly believe that World War I was engineered by and run for the benefit of J. P. Morgan & Co., and the munitions-makers whom they dubbed "merchants of death." And last week, on an unguarded flank of the Roosevelt Administration, whose big guns for six years have boomed denunciations of "princes of privilege," "entrenched greed," "wolves of Wall Street," "money-barons," etc., etc., they found a rich ammunition dump: at the head of the all-important War Resources Board, Edward Stettinius Jr. Morgan-man, head of U. S. Steel; as a member of the Board, Morgan-man John Lee Pratt of General Motors; in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's new, powerful financial advisory committee, Morgan-men William C. Potter, Leon Eraser, and Henry Morgan, J. P.'s son.
Temporarily throttled while the national focus was on the Senate, the House watched carefully, dug out from their mail only to recess again. But while nothing has ever hurried the tempo of the Senate, the Administration was ready to try. Key Pittman convened the pro-repealers among his Foreign Relations Committee steadily over the weekend, came to a full committee meeting Monday with a tightly knitted bill sharply defining U. S. neutrality, generally limiting the President's powers, but re-establishing the cash-and-carry system for trade with belligerents, except that go-day credit supplanted the cash phrase. With this before them, Vandenberg and the Opposition groomed for the latest Battle of a Century of many battles. On strategies, Vandenberg constantly counseled with aging, astute Jay Hayden, of the Detroit News, who often shifts his tobacco-quid disgustedly as he blue-pencils the reek from Vandenberg's rhetoric; constantly he saw Borah and McNary; constantly he smiled his Kewpie smile with the air of a cat set for cream. La Follette's crisp battle-slogan: "We'll fight this thing from Hell to breakfast" he contentedly adopted as his own policy.
Ahead of him, in the swirling, unpredictable future, loomed the mirage of the job that goes with the house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N. W., in Washington, the job he once described: "Why anybody should want to shoulder that crucifixion down the street I don't know."