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Possibly some of the President's advisers consulted by Messrs. Alsop & Kintner loosened their tongues so that American White Paper could belatedly tell the public some of that background of events which was in Franklin Roosevelt's mind at 2:40 one morning when a telephone call came through from Paris. The sharp, distance-harshened tones of U. S. Ambassador to France William Christian Bullitt came through the receiver. The calm, sleepy voice of a light-sleeping President replied. Mr. Bullitt reported that several German divisions were deep in Polish territory, bombers over Warsaw. Said Mr. Roosevelt, "Well, Bill, it's come at last. God help us all."
Experts. Joseph Wright Alsop Jr. is 29, the son of a well-to-do tobacco-grower and a mother prominent in the Connecticut G. O. P., a distant cousin of Franklin Roosevelt, a cousin and friend of Alice Longworth. Educated at Groton, Harvard and the New York Herald Tribune, with an edged wit but a tendency to preciosity, short, voluble, Lucullan in tastes, Bond St. in dress, Alsop writes in a style that at its worst is like Oscar Wilde sniping at a lady poet, at its best like marmorean inscriptions.
Robert Edmonds Kintner, 30, of Stroudsburg, Pa., Swarthmore-educated, started covering Wall Street for the New York Herald Tribune. Some financial reporters who had previously spent their time playing the market found they had to go to work or be shown up. To Washington, where he met Alsop, Kintner brought the same boring-in tactics, the same suspicious nose for news. Casual, hatless, slender, boyish, he believes that news is what will happen, not what has happened. In 1937 the two started a Washington column, "The Capital Parade" (now in 95 papers). For American White Paper they interviewed about 100 people, took 500 pages of notes, filled a filing case with documents.
The Future. One of the quietly dramatic aspects of the picture drawn by Authors Alsop & Kintner is how, in the face of the facts told by the cables, the quadrumvirate of policy-makers moved with virtual unanimity. The authors dispel the illusion that Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Hull do not see eye-to-eye. They show Mr. Hull and Mr. Welles and Mr. Berle, whose differences are all too obvious, agreeing without difference on what steps U. S. interests demanded.
Before they get done, the authors suggest the future for which the policy-making partners have already prepared. Authors Alsop & Kintner see three alternatives:
> That the democracies will win World War II without active U. S. aid—in which case the U. S. will try to claim a seat at the conference table, there to enunciate the President's oft-repeated aphorism: "Only by disarmament and an opening of trade can the world return to common sense."
> That World War II will become a prolonged stalemate, which would intensify U. S. efforts to make the Western Hemisphere an island of peace and trade in a disordered world, while in event of eco nomic exhaustion, neutrals might intervene for a negotiated peace.