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The authors quote the President directly (and probably on good authority)—even in two-person telephone conversations. Hull, Welles and Berle are pictured working, with the desperate unison of oarsmen, in Hull's gloomy, black-leather, paper-piled office; in the easy, pleasant, chintz-and-prints upstairs study of the White House; hurrying through the empty, echoing streets of Washington at dawn; walking, tired and despairing, in a star-sprinkled, late-summer evening, back to the baroque rookery that is the State Department.
The Cables. American White Paper does not neglect the cables. The long, mimeographed, decoded messages, stamped Secret and Confidential, pour through the State Department's wire room day & night, month after month, from Chungking, Rome, Moscow, Madrid, Calcutta, Bucharest. To those who read them, Europe and Asia are imminent and ever-present realities. Things that to Congress and the U. S. at large are vague, insubstantial and far away across insulating oceans, to the cable-reading policy-makers are alive and real. Too often, when the policy-makers try to hint at the real shape of international affairs, they are not believed.
A crucial scene occurred one night last summer when, at a conference between the President and Congressmen, Idaho's late Senator William Edgar Borah insisted he had better sources of information than the State Department: that there would be no war in Europe. Once before, the President, misjudging his audience, had tried telling a group of Senators what was going on abroad: they had departed muttering that Mr. Roosevelt had said the U. S. frontier was on the Rhine. This time he refrained from lifting the veil; Cordell Hull tried to convince the Senators that war would come by late summer, that the arms embargo must be repealed as a blunt warning to Hitler. When Borah spoke, tears came to Mr. Hull's eyes. Embargo repeal was set aside, and World War II came on schedule.
In another flashback, to last spring, Mr. Hull was shown cussing purple passages in private efforts to convince Congressmen that the oncoming conflict was not just "another goddam piddling dispute over a boundary line"; that in place of international law the U. S. had "substituted a wretched little bobtailed, sawed-off domestic statute."
Implicit on many a page of American White Paper, although not explicitly pointed out, is the size of the mistake made by Franklin Roosevelt in not being candid with his country. Again & again & again he avoided starting a great national debate, avoided it by not presenting the issues squarely to the nation. Throughout the 18 months covered in the book the President is pictured as bound & gagged by laggard public opinion. But he took no real steps to let non-cable-readers, in effect, see the cables.