(See Cover)
Last week an undercurrent of tension rippled the sunny surface of Washington. Outwardly the city was calm. The crowds were in Philadelphia, the political writers were at the Republican National Convention, writing incorrect prophecies. The midsummer tourists wandered before the monuments on the eve of the Fourth of July; the green parks of Washington dozed in the bureaucratic sun; the same great crowds of office workers swarmed from the Government buildings at 4:30 p.m.; the same old familiar groups of spies and gossipers met for cocktails at sundown; New Dealers and newly drafted industrialists were alike caught in traffic jams when sudden summer storms drenched the cab-filled streets.
But at night lighted windows spotted the dark buildings of Washington, like outward and visible signs of the tension within. There was a sense of strain around the White House, where the President issued a proclamation broadening his emergency powers (see p. 9); around the State Department, as rumors of peace moves came from Europe (see p. 25); around the War Department, where the Army's mechanization program was intensified (see p. 19); in the Navy Department, where tight-lipped officers turned aside questions about the movements of the U. S. Fleet.
But nowhere in Washington was the tension more concentrated than in the pinkish-brick British Embassy that stood on its hill below the Naval Observatory. And it was concentrated there on the calm, portly, six-foot figure of the British Ambassador, Philip Henry Kerr (pronounced Karr), Marquess of Lothian, Baron Ker of Newbottle, and holder of five other hereditary titles which, come British victory or British defeat, were not likely to mean much in the future.
Late last summer Lord Lothian arrived in Washington. Last week even professional Anglophobes were compelled to admit that if the U. S. had not understood the British case—and its meaning to the U. S. —it had not been because Lord Lothian had fallen down as an Ambassador. Pacing his littered study in the Embassy he was saying (between transatlantic phone calls and visits to the State Department) what he had said when he arrived: that the prize for which Hitler was contending was command of the sea. The only difference was that he now said it more forcefully, and his eyes behind his plastic-rimmed glasses were more challenging, less genial.
U. S. public opinion, which last year was unwilling to face the savage reality of war, last week was prepared to admit that it had a decisive, selfish, personal interest in what happened to the British Fleet. In its own way it had come to translate into blunt language what Lord Lothian had said indirectly from the start. And signs were accumulating that the world's greatest problem in statecraft—British and U. S. relations—was approaching a critical phase: