SECRET DIPLOMACY
Secret Diplomacy THE FANTASTIC CONDUCT of the conferences at Cairo and Teheran has demonstrated that for all his vaunted knowledge of history and his determination to avoid the tragic errors of a...
...But #ltey are slipping into a state of Oriental arrogance regarding the interest of the democratic peoples in their activities...
...In an unusual address to the House of Representatives last week, Speaker Sam Rayburn denounced as a "dangerous trend" the widespread questioning among Americans of the motives and plans of our Allies and the direction of our own leadership...
...Until the Wyoming Senator appeared on the scene it looked as if nothing would stop the insurance steamroller...
...A House" committee and a Senate sub-committee had been bowled over in quick succession...
...O'Mahoney, who learned all about insurance companies and their political rabbit-punches from the probing of his Temporary National Economic Committee, it had met mostly pushovers...
...Up to the time that the lobby encountered Sen...
...At the birthday party for Churchill, Angley tells us, "the 33 male guests included all the top names in all three delegations and until past midnight toasts were drunk in the Russian fashion to the number of several score...
...Our government is in extreme danger of boring the American people to excruciation, if it does not irritate them into blind opposition...
...Roosevelt to be doing at this time...
...O'Mahoney raised questions about the nature of the legislation which demonstrated conclusively that committee hearings had been utterly inadequate and that Congress was totally unprepared to act on the bill...
...The London Daily Mail characterized the treatment of the press as "an unending chain of the most colossal blunders, muddles, frustrations, and insults that any group of correspondents ever had to endure...
...Joseph C. O'Mahoney...
...If this is a war of nerves, we wonder against whom it is directed...
...British commentators were even more outspoken...
...Drinks were consumed from luncheon until late at night and between meals," the Herald Tribune reported with meticulous care...
...Raymond Clapper, who often manages to look the other way when the Messrs...
...To build up a tension in America and Britain ajid then let it down is even more serious...
...Dorothy Thompson summed up the more basic failure of the Teheran Conference best of all when she wrote: "We received reiterations of noble phrases, but not a single positive principle...
...Military experts visited the Holy Sepulchre...
...Roosevelt, Churchill, or Stalin are cutting up individually or collectively, was too disgusted this time to ignore the implications of what had...
...The fact that the measure has gone back to the Senate Judiciary Committee for further hearings is due largely to the vigilance of Sen...
...Red officers "smartly turned out in black boots, blue breeches, olive drab tunics with red and yellow shoulder boards, their heads covered with black visored caps formed a guard of honor about the sword and took it from the room...
...Reactions like these from commentators who are ordinarily sympathetic to the global planning of the Messrs...
...Secret Diplomacy THE FANTASTIC CONDUCT of the conferences at Cairo and Teheran has demonstrated that for all his vaunted knowledge of history and his determination to avoid the tragic errors of a generation ago, President Roosevelt has allowed himself to become an addict of the un-American and undemocratic practice of secret diplomacy...
...Indeed, O'Mahoney drew the following comment from Sen...
...The pomp and ceremony, the seclusion and secrecy, and the glitter of dress uniforms and pop of champagne corks at Teheran must have made an hilarious weekend, but it was hardly the setting for a solemn conference on war and peace...
...Describing the presentation of a handsome four-foot sword by Churchill as a gift from King George the Sixth to the people of Stalingrad, Angley reported how Joe Stalin kissed the massive sword and there was a Russian ceremonial march—"a modified . . . form of the goose step...
...The whole experience was so exhausting to some of our military leaders that 43 of them consumed in one day "26 bottles of Scotch whisky, 12 bottles of French champagne of 1928 vintage, nine bottles of chablis, two bottles of claret, three bottles of 1864 French brandy, and an unspecified quantity of sherry" in Jerusalem on their return from Teheran, according to a special report to the New York Herald Tribune...
...In concert with Churchill and Stalin, Mr...
...To build up a tension in Germany and then let it down suggests that an agent of Mr...
...Philip Jordan, commenting on the secrecy, the leaks, and the lack of coordination and timing, reported for the London News-Chronicle that the conference "has ended in about as big a mess as did the building of the Tower of Babel...
...Let us hope that the results will be—as one insurance spokesman put it—"the darndest investigation Washington ever saw...
...A Lobby Gets Hit THE WELL-HEELED fire insurance lobby whose purpose in invading Washington is to obtain legislative immunity from the anti-trust laws was left hanging on the ropes recently when it ran into a two-fisted, hard-slugging Irishman from Wyoming, Sen...
...What an astounding admission from a man who is not only a sponsor of the bill but whose Judiciary Committee is charged with giving it a complete airing...
...Toasts At Teheran SOME INDICATION of the pomp and flourish at Teheran appeared in Edward Angley's eyewitness report to the Marshall Field publications...
...But democratic leadership cannot afford to cut itself off and become barricaded behind the wall of pseudo-secrecy...
...How those two bits of news could be sufficiently related to get into the same paragraph is not clear, unless you want to blame that on the paper shortage too...
...Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill are only part of the price these leaders must pay for indulging in the dangerous practice of secret diplomacy...
...Frederick Van Nuys, co-author of the bill: "No member of the committee can answer O'Mahoney's questions as to how the insurance business operates and determines rates or its relations with state insurance authorities...
...O'Mahoney...
...Rayburn should take his complaint not to Congress and the people but to the White House...
...It is not a very good thing politically for Mr...
...Roosevelt often seemed to be behaving more like an Oriental potentate than the leader of a great democratic nation...
...Goeb-bels prepared the publicity...
...This "dangerous trend," if it is that, is the direct outgrowth of the Roosevelt Administration's resort to secret diplomacy which leaves the great mass of Americans in the dark on issues which will shape their lives and the lives of their children...
...He is needed, and all the leaders are needed, and such conferences ought to be held frequently...
...happened, and he had this to say in his syndicated column: "There must be a thrill for such powerful Allied leaders as they go into seclusion behind elite guards and settle the affairs of the world...
Vol. 7 • December 1943 • No. 51
