THE OTHER DEBATE

...In the one are the "revisionists," composed largely of former anti-interventionists, a variety of political dissidents with anti-Roosevelt axes to grind, and a handful of pacifists...

...Although the second debate deals with the past and the former with the future, both raise the same question: the nature and urgency of an alien threat to American security and the best tactics for meeting that threat...

...Design For War should be read as a vigorous statement of a revisionist point of view...

...Tansill based on research in the State Department archives...

...Until late in 1937, Sanborn ascribes to Roosevelt strong and genuine leanings toward isolationism...

...There are other key issues which Sanborn deals with largely by imf$| cation...

...The President's cultural affiliations with Britain, his enthusiasm for a big Navy, his interventionist sentiments in World War I, and his early support for the Stimson program in the Sino-Japanese conflict were all factors which shaped his thinking as the crisis in Europe and Asia was intensified in the late thirties...

...It is the Story of Roosevelt's "secret actions" aimed to take the U. S. into war, unwittingly and contrary to the will of a majority of the people...

...Subsequently, a dozen or more books have devoted themselves to the pros and cons of the President's decisions following his historic "Quarantine the Aggressors" speech in October 1937...

...Samuel E. Morison, reformed World War I revisionists like Walter Millis, and ardent defenders of Rooseveltian "internationalism" like Prof...

...Design for War, with its subtitle, "A Study of Secret Power Politics, 1937-1941," has a thesis...

...Since Roosevelt's defenders are also incapable of producing impartial studies of this period, the inquiring reader must take his history as it is written, marred by much of the emotionalism and prejudice which characterized the debate over foreign policy in the pre-Pearl Harbor years...

...The historical controversy grew out of the Congressional hearings in 1945-46 on the Pearl Harbor disaster and from Charles Beard's two critical volumes on the foreign policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...The author is, however, a practicing lawyer and his book has more resemblance to a brief for the prosecution than a successful attempt at unbiased history...

...Beginning in 1937 and working down to Pearl Harbor, Sanborn assembles the public statements of the President on foreign policy and contrasts them with his actions...

...Revisionists" assume that neutrality was a practical policy during World War II and that the consequences of a German victory, or of a stalemate and negotiated peace, could not have created any greater threat to national security than did American intervention and Soviet victory...

...But what remains to be debated is whether or not the President was justified in his tactics by the urgency of the German and Japanese threat to American security and by what he viewed as the suicidal pacifist sentiment of the American people...

...For new light the reader will have to await the forthcoming volume of Prof...

...Roosevelt's change of attitude is explained by the economic slump of late 1937 which demonstrated, Sanborn believes, that four years of recovery legislation had failed and that only a program of rearmament and war could stave off further unemployment...

...With these limitations in mind...

...Sanborn in this new study of Roosevelt's foreign policy gives his unrestrained allegiance to the "revisionists...

...Their opponents must hold that American involvement was either inevitable or desirable and that it was the responsibility of the President to choose the time and place best suited to American interests...

...Since only published materials were available to him, Sanborn is able to add few new facts to the collections made by Charles Beard and Basil Rauch in reaching such contradictory conclusions...

...At the same time Sanborn claims freedom from anti-Roosevelt bias and promises to pass no moral judgments on the President's actions...

...Such an interpretation, however, ignores other aspects of Roosevelt's character as well as the developments in Europe...

...At the other extreme is the Roosevelt - could - do - no - wrong camp made up of official historians like Capt...

...This question involves more profound issues: the role of a democratic national leader in a time of crisis and the place of morality in political decision-making...

...One centers on the role of the United States in the world of 1951, the other concerns the American role in the final years before Pearl Harbor...

...As a result, Design For War will strengthen the verdict of the "revisionists" and only infuriate their opponents...

...Basil Rauch...

...The outcome of the present international conflict, however, may give some indication whether American entrance in World War II was the initial step in a national tragedy or whether this was merely the first of two great military efforts which were to end in American domination of the world...

...Only a few will also dispute the view of Frances Perkins that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came as a relief to the President since it resolved for him a difficult moral and political problem...

...Sanborn's answer is that Roosevelt's acts removed the constitutional restraints against one-man rule and made it possible for President Truman to make decisions involving war and peace without consulting Congress or the American people...

...Some of Sanborn's critics will concede that Roosevelt was not honest in stating his intentions and that he did not take the American people into his confidence after he decided that it was necessary for the U. S. to intervene militarily in Warld War II...

...With few exceptions the debaters fall into two camps...

...Dealing as it does with untestable hypotheses, this question must remain a matter of individual judgment...