THIS COUNTRY WENT FORMALLY INTO THE WAR ON DECEMBER 7, 1941 when the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor. The President could not, without Congress, launch an attack. He knew that if he asked Congress for a declaration of war he would not get it. The week before Pearl Harbor, the polls still showed 75 per cent of the people against going into the war. But the President was committed to war. And he had been carrying on an undeclared war for many months. The events leading to Pearl Harbor have been extensively investigated, though there is yet much to be obtained.

EVEN BEFORE THE WAR, THE COUNTRY HAD BECOME A BUREAUCRAT’S paradise. But with the launching of the war effort the bureaus proliferated and the bureaucrats swarmed over the land like a plague of locusts. In 1940, Roosevelt named a National Defense Commission with three horns. Edward Stettinius, of United States Steel, managed one horn on industrial materials, Sidney Hillman another on labor and Leon Henderson a third on price stabilization. It didn’t work. In January, 1941, it became the ill-fated Office of Production Management (OPM) under William S.

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IF THERE IS ONE DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN STRUGGLE WHICH THE radical revolutionist understands and loves it is the war that is waged on the mass mind; the war that is carried on with poisons distilled in the mind to produce bias and hatred. It would be strange indeed if we did not find some of the practitioners of this dark art from New York and some of the off-scourings of Europe’s battered revolutionary emigres numerously entrenched in that thoroughly un-American institution during the war which was known as the OWI—the Office of War Information.

WHEN A NATION IS AT WAR, ITS LEADERS ARE COMPELLED BY THE necessities of practical administration to use every means at hand to sell the war to the people who must fight it and pay for it. As part of that job it is usual to include the leader himself in the package. He is therefore portrayed in heroic proportions and colors in order to command for his leadership the fullest measure of unity. War, as we have seen, puts into the hands of a leader control over the instruments of propaganda and opinion on an ever-increasing scale.

WHEN ROOSEVELT RETURNED FROM TEHERAN AND CAIRO IT WAS not a return from the old world to the new; it was as if he had opened a door and put his foot upon the first step of that dim flight that leads from this world into the next. He went, as was his custom, to Hyde Park for the Christmas holidays. There he contracted an illness the precise nature of which we do not yet know. Admiral Ross T.

ON SEPTEMBER II, TEN MONTHS AFTER TEHERAN AND IN THE midst of the campaign, Roosevelt and Churchill met at Quebec. The invasion of France was launched. Allied armies approached the Rhine. The Russians had crossed the Vistula and were diving toward the Baltic and soon the race would be on between the Allies and the Russians for Berlin. Roosevelt and Churchill met to discuss the fate of Germany, lend-lease to Britain after the war and minor points.

ROOSEVELT WAS REELECTED. THE RESULTS JUSTIFIED, FROM A POLITICAL consideration, the wisdom of his alliance with Hillman and Browder. During the campaign, Roosevelt had denied vehemently that he had sought the support of Communists. Actually his name appeared as the candidate of the American Labor Party dominated by Browder and Hillman entirely. And he had accepted its nomination.

ON JANUARY 20, 1945, ROOSEVELT WAS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT of the United States for a fourth term. Three days later he left Norfolk on the heavy cruiser Quincy for what was to be his last act in the hapless drama of peace.

By this time Hitler’s hard-pressed armies had been driven from all the territories they had seized in the east, save Czechoslovakia, Austria and part of Hungary. Practically all their hard-won aggressive prizes were lost. Cordell Hull had resigned and Edward Stettinius was Secretary of State.

THE STORY OF ANY MAN’S DECLINE INTO DISEASE AND DEATH naturally excites the sympathy of the human heart. The illness which caused Roosevelt’s death was a personal misfortune. It was, in another sense, a misfortune for those who held power by virtue of his position. But it was an act of immeasurable gravity to involve the nation and, perhaps, the world, in that misfortune.

WHEN THE WAR DRUMS ROLLED A GREAT GOLDEN VEIL CAME DOWN upon the American scene through which its actors would be viewed. Behind it they postured—statesmen and generals and admirals—in the role of heroes. And lifted above them all, posing in the full glory of the stage lights, decorated by propaganda with the virtues of a national god, was the figure of the Leader. When the battlefield is so far away, war is the greatest of all shows. It is the greatest of all booms.