The U. S. cannot go to war except by vote of Congress. It cannot make treaties without the consent of the Senate. These are the ultimate decisions of foreign policy, well known to the public. Also it is the duty of the President and his Secretary of State to look after the interests of the U. S. in international affairs. Except for the ultimate decisions, theirs is the whole of foreign policy.
To millions of U. S. citizens who have long clung to the unhistoric legend that U. S. diplomacy has been uniformly unsuccessful and U. S. foreign policy equally nonexistent, a pamphlet published this week will come as a great jolt. For it describes succinctly and with circumstantial detail how Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, in the few brief months leading up to World War II, went about their job of making decisions in U. S. foreign policy. Its name is American White Paper (Simon & Schuster; St). Its authors are Columnists Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner.
It tells how a quadrumvirate—Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, Sumner Welles, Adolf Augustus Berle Jr.—hammered out in the heat of the Munich crisis a U. S. foreign policy in the belief that war was coming. This policy was: 1) to prevent war if possible; 2) if war proved inevitable, to use every method short of war to assure victory for the democracies; 3) to recognize in their policy that "neutrals are parties at interest in a modern war, and particularly in the post-war settlement"; 4) to gain U. S. ends, political commitments in the western hemisphere, and possibly economic commitments toward a stable economy of the whole world; 5) "Whatever happens, we won't send troops abroad" (Franklin Roosevelt).
Messrs. Kintner & Alsop, reporting history within a few months of its making, do an extraordinary job. The explicit point from which their narrative starts, and to which it returns, implicitly, again & again, is that the U. S. is a member of the community of democratic nations, aware, and willing to act on its awareness, that what threatens that community also threatens the U. S.
American White Paper tells how U. S. policy-makers long foresaw World War II, pondered in advance each complex consequence. At best (Allied victory) the quadrumvirate foresaw worldwide eco nomic chaos; at worst (German victory) the U. S. would be, in Phrasemaker Berle's words, "in the unfortunate position of an old-fashioned general store in a town full of hard-bitten chains."
Scenes. All this Authors Alsop & Kintner tell in a series of scenes whose detail is almost eyewitness in effect: the President undressing for bed, tossing remarks over his shoulder to Berle in the next room; Hull and Welles in an early-morning call at the White House, the President propped against pillows, amid a litter of breakfast tray, morning papers, cables from abroad, wearing "a peculiar small cape of blue flannel trimmed and monogrammed with red braid, like an expensive summer horse-blanket."