The defect of Roosevelt's method led to this: the American people did not understand their own position in the world. The President had appealed to their moral sense when he asked for a quarantine of the aggressors; he appealed to fear when he cited the distances between Dakar and Des Moines; but he had no unified body of opinion behind him. The Republican Party might easily have nominated an isolationist as a matter of politics if not of principle; and it was a stroke of luck that politics (not international principles) gave the opportunity to Wendell Willkie. Yet the boldest move made by Mr. Roosevelt, the exchange of destroyers for bases, had to be an accomplished fact, and a good bargain, before it could be announced. Even Mr. Willkie's refusal to play politics with the fate of Britain did not assure the President of a country willing to understand its new dangers and its new opportunities.
Nothing in the past twenty years had prepared America; and the isolationists picked up the weapons of both the plutocrat and the debunker to prevent our understanding our function in a fascist world. The grossest appeal to self-interest and the most cynical imputation of self-interest in others, went together. There were faithful pacifists who disliked armaments and disliked the sale of armaments even more; but there were also those who wanted the profit of selling without the risk; there were the alarming fellow travelers who wished America to be destroyed until they discovered the USSR wanted American guns. There were snide businessmen who wanted Hitler even more than they wanted peace, and a mob, united by nothing—except a passion for the cruelty and the success of the Nazis.
The spectacle of America arguing war in 1941 was painful and ludicrous and one sensed changes ahead; but it had one great redeeming quality, it was in our tradition of public discussion and a vast deal of the discussion was honest and fair.
The war did not change Americans over night. The argument had not united us; but in the first days we dared not admit this; we began a dangerous game of hypnotizing ourselves.
CHAPTER IV[ToC]
"The Strategy of Truth"
The consequences of building on a unity which does not exist are serious. We have discovered that all war is total war; we have also found that while our enemies lie to us, they do not lie to their High Commands.