Rex Stout (28 page)

Senator Corcoran cried, “By God, he’s gone war!”

Senator Reid, host in that enormous and ornate living-room, puffed his cigar and said nothing. Bronson Tilney, not too old either for truth or for beauty, was passing the tips of his fingers absent-mindedly back and forth across the pretty wrist of Mrs. Wilcox, who had her forearm on the arm of his chair. Others were around, all seated, all post-prandial, all looking uncomfortably here or there or nowhere because it was too impossibly silly to sit and look at the radio, even the Louis Seize cabinet of Senator and Mrs. Reid.

Senator Sterling said to Corcoran, “Grab a straw, Jim, and take it down with you.”

What is worse, my friends, American citizens will be killed. Not many, but one is too many. More than eight hundred of them have been killed since the beginning of the war. Of these, some seven hundred had crossed the ocean and volunteered for the conflict on one side or the other; they were combatants; the others, chiefly passengers on ships, have been the victims of submarines or aerial bombs.

American citizens have lent colossal sums to belligerent nations and will probably lose their money if their debtors lose the war. As for our liberty of movement, there are citizens old enough to vote who have never even heard the ancient phrase, freedom of the seas; and we enjoy freedom of the air only because we have so much of it all to ourselves, immune by distance from the dangers of their deadly incursions. Our relatives and friends abroad are in peril of their lives, and we cannot communicate with them or they with us; our foreign trade is utterly destroyed, for those who would buy are prohibited from doing so by the blockades of their enemies; the conveniences and ornaments we have been accustomed to receive from overseas are forbidden to us by the arbitrary mandates of foreign and unfriendly powers.

For some months a New York newspaper has been carrying on its front page a box with the prominent headline, Let’s Look at the Record, and filling it with the details of the injustices, restraints, and affronts which I have just summarized
for you in general terms. That is the record, I know it. I daresay that I am as painfully familiar with it as the editor or the owner of the New York paper, or anyone else. The paper cites the record, and says, over and over again, we must declare war. Many other papers and organs of opinion say we must declare war: Many thousands of citizens, and among them eminent leaders, say we must declare war. As for myself, I have on various occasions made my attitude apparent, but it is evident that I must now state my position unequivocally and with no possibility of a misunderstanding. I say, my friends, that we must not declare war.

Senator Sterling jumped to his feet. “Ha! What about his liver now, Jim? What about your own?”

Corcoran didn’t even glance at him. Bronson Tilney, in the armchair, stroked Susan Wilcox’s wrist.

Martin Drew grunted, “Here’s where he starts his swansong.”

He was in the most comfortable chair in the Grinnell library, with his leg resting outstretched on a cushioned stool and a pair of crutches handy on the floor. Old white George Milton was lying on the sofa, Voorman stood over by a window, and Daniel Cullen and Caleb Reiner were in chairs. The radio could not be seen; Mrs. Hartley Grinnell, George Milton’s daughter, had had it concealed behind a grille in the bookshelves.

At Martin Drew’s observation Voorman shook his head, turned to knock ashes from his cigarette into a tray, and turned back to the window.

That is my position: we must not declare war. I would like to defend it, or assert it, in two ways. First, those who demand war, for various reasons and with various arguments, deserve answers. I would like to reply to them, but I shall make my replies very brief.

There are those who say that Japan started the war, that it is immoral to start war, and that she should be punished for it. I have already answered that. I am certain that twenty years from now historians will be quarreling about who started this war. I am not willing to enter upon a moral
crusade where even the facts are questionable, let alone the morality.

There are those who say that American citizens are being wantonly murdered. I reply, of course they are; and I hope that the hardness of my reply will not be taken to prove me devoid of compassion. The point is that in this respect compassion is all that is left to us. What if a peaceful citizen of a neutral country had gone strolling about Waterloo during the height of that famous battle? Would he probably have been killed? Yes. Would his government have protested against the outrage? Certainly not; he was on a battlefield during an engagement; the risk was his. But Waterloo was more than a hundred and twenty years ago. In the fourth decade of the twentieth century a battlefield is no longer a hill and a stretch of valley and a bend in a river; a battlefield is a continent, a hemisphere, the oceans, and the skies. When the nations of Europe are at war and an American citizen embarks on a ship to cross the ocean, he is venturing on a battlefield in precisely the same sense as the hypothetical stroller at Waterloo. The plain fact is that modern methods of warfare have stretched the confines of the field of battle to include the entire land and water surface of the earth, stopping only at the borders of neutral countries who may be depended upon to defend their neutrality; and however violently we may protest against this expansion of the domain of war, whatever we may do or say, we cannot alter that fact. We may fight, if we choose, to lick an enemy; but to fight in an attempt again to confine the hazards of war within the neat corral of a nineteenth century battlefield would be quixotic nonsense. American citizens have ventured upon a battlefield and been killed; I deplore it and I grieve with those who loved them. You all do, my friends.

There are those who say—some openly, some by indirection—that we must enter the war to protect our foreign trade, our investments in alien lands, and the vast sums that have been lent to certain belligerents. I believe that to some of you that position appears reasonable. To me it seems so insupportable that it is difficult for me to reply to it with patience and restraint. Would our entering the war have the effect desired? What about the last war we entered? On that occasion, too, we had lent enormous sums. We entered the war, and lent additional billions; and we and our allies won. Splendid; we had protected our loans and investments and foreign trade,
and it had only cost us a paltry three hundred and fifty thousand American young men killed and wounded. Splendid! But, did we then collect our loans? Have we collected them? Will we ever collect them? No. It was too bad, but it didn’t work that way. But that is not my real reply. It is, I believe, a pretty good one, but to my mind there is still a better one. Even if it were likely that our entering the war would safeguard our foreign loans and investments, I would still say, no! When a man, be he American or British or Hottentot, lends or invests money in an alien country he should know, and in fact does know, that one of his risks is the chance that that country will become involved in war. It is his risk; it is his gain if he gains; let it be his loss if he loses. I tell you, my friends, I have done my very best to think clear to the bottom of this; I have done so to my own satisfaction, and I can only say that so long as I remain in the position of the executive head of your government, not one American boy carrying gun and bomb and the expectation of death will be sent to foreign soil to leave his blood there as security for your loans. No loan on earth deserves that sort of collateral.

Martin Drew grunted as he shifted the position of his leg on the stool, and muttered savagely, “The clever, clever bastard.” Daniel Cullen and Caleb Reiner, like a team of comedians responding with humorous simultaneity to a cue, chewed on their cigars. D. L. Voorman tossed the butt of his cigarette through the open window, turned and stepped silently across to the sofa where old white George Milton lay, and stood looking down at him.

George Milton was snoring.

Chick Moffat said, “The old boy’s going good. Do you realize that you’re sitting at the desk where he wrote that?”

Alma Cronin said, “Be quiet.”

Chick went over to the radio and touched a knob to make it a shade louder. Against the radio, at its angle with the wall, a heavy walking stick was leaning. Chick grinned at it. He would probably keep that as a souvenir. He couldn’t very well
have taken it along to the Maryland Avenue Garage, and the President had plenty more anyway.

There are those who say our sovereignty has been challenged and we must assert it. That I flatly deny. Our territory and borders and possessions are undisturbed, and none of our truly sovereign rights have been violated. I have already spoken of the vast extension of the theater of war caused by modern methods of fighting. That is a fact which no victory we might gain could alter. For that reason some rights which were formerly thought sovereign to a nation no longer exist; but since they are not vital and could not in any event be recovered by any nation whatever, we shall, with no great privation I am sure, manage quite well without them.

There are those who say our national honor has been impugned. Well, conception of the demands of honor is a highly personal and highly variable quantity. For those who really and honestly feel that way and are not merely seeking the last refuge of a scoundrel, I feel in my heart a warm and sincere sympathy, but I do not feel as they do. I can only say that I do not feel myself dishonored, I do not feel my office dishonored, I do not feel my country dishonored. Do you? Honestly, do you? Has anything happened in connection with this war, has anyone done anything or have we done or failed to do anything, that would make you ashamed to look a German or an Englishman or a Russian or a Japanese in the face and say, “I am an American”? That is what a sense of national dishonor would mean. I can only say that I would not be ashamed, and I hope you would not.

I said that I would like to defend my position, or assert it, in two ways. I have finished with the first. Now for the second
.

I am not what is popularly called—and frequently sneered at—a pacifist. I do not agree with them that violence never decides anything. If an insane man attacks me and I—or someone else—shoot him, that act of violence has certainly decided that I am not going to die—at least not on that occasion. If a choice is unescapable between my life and that of the insane man, or even for that matter a sane one, I shall not hesitate. Similarly, should any foreign power attack our true and vital rights, or our means of livelihood, or the land we live on, or our existence as a united people, I shall be proud that my position as Commander-in-Chief of our Army and Navy places me in control of the necessary violence to
repel, suppress, and annihilate. I believe that if the use of violence becomes unavoidable, it should be employed with vigor, dispatch, and ruthlessness. I am sure, my friends, that you will have nothing to complain of me on that score if the occasion should arise, which God forbid.

What I say is that the occasion has not arisen. Not yet. I hope and believe it will not, if the nations at war understand that we will not shed our blood to assert rights problematical at best and certainly not vital, to protect or salvage property unluckily caught in the path of their cyclone of jealousy and hatred, to defend our honor when we have no reason to feel it betrayed; and if they also understand that we are prepared to deal swiftly and surely with any assault on our lands, our livelihood, or our basic human and national rights. It is a sad commentary on the shortcomings of human intelligence that the contemplation of violence, and adequate preparation for it, should be necessary at all; but we shall have to leave that comment for our philosophic moments, and in our practical hours make sure that we are ready for violence, both in body and in spirit, if and when it becomes inevitable.

And to make equally sure of another thing: that we use it only when no other feasible and honorable course is left to us. Not at the behest of the selfish and rapacious among us, not through false pride and a too easily inflamed sense of injury, not through mere resentment at interference with some of the things we would like to keep on doing here and there over the surface of this amazing globe. After all, it is not all ours; we know where our country is, our beautiful and beloved country. We are not cramped in it, as some others are in theirs; there is plenty of room for us here, plenty of things to do, plenty to eat. We have, God knows, a job here at home difficult enough to engage all our intelligence and energy: so to arrange our affairs that plenty may be enjoyed by all of us. That is a job worthy of our genius and offering a reward beyond the limits of our hope.

That, my friends, is all I shall say to you about war. I trust and believe that you will agree with me. I would like, here at the end, to say a word of thanks to the thousands from whom I have received messages of sympathy and goodwill since my return to the White House this noon. I thank you with all my heart. There is no need for me to comment on the experience I have been through except to say that I am happy to be back
again and I am glad I didn’t get hurt. Thank you again for your many welcome messages.

 … 
This is the Federal Broadcasting System. You have been listening to a talk, from the study in the White House in Washington, D. C., by
 …

Chick walked over and turned it off. He picked up the walking stick and, twirling it, crossed to the desk where Alma was and sat on its edge. Alma, her fingers interlaced on her lap, was not looking at him. At length she sighed, and said:

“It was a great speech. It really was.”

Chick grinned. “It ought to be. He wrote it on my desk.”

“Don’t you think it was great, Chick?”

“Yeah. I guess I do. I’m no judge of speeches. I never heard one yet that didn’t sound like hooey.”

“That one didn’t.”

“I admit that one didn’t. It was all right. Anyway, it certainly did the job it was meant for, and that’s all you can expect of a speech or a beefsteak or a poker hand or anything else.”