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Show Washington, D. C. LETTER TO A LONELY MOTHER To a lonely mother with a son on the beachhead in Normandy and another in the Aleutians: Dear Mrs. R.: I have your letter wondering why you should sacrifice the sons you so carefully taught not to hate or to hurt, on a bloody beachhead beach-head where every minute they must hate and hurt In order to survive. You say that you write and tell your sons that, after it's over, life will be the same and we'll all be happy, but that, deep in your heart, you know it won't be, for there will be more wars and more bloodshed blood-shed all over again. Naturally you would expect a hard-boiled and cynical newspaper man, trained to look under rocks for all the seamy side of official life, to agree with you that we will have more wars and that your boy on the Normandy beachhead is making his sacrifice in vain. But somehow or other, I don't agree. Somehow or other, I have a sneaking suspicion that things are not going to be so bad, and that we may be able to prevent your son's son from doing what his father had to do in Normandy. Nor-mandy. Maybe 1 am too much of an optimist, opti-mist, but it seems to me, looking back, that we made a lot of progress toward permanent peace between the last war and this. In the end, we failed. But there are a lot of things you do that fail the first time, or even several times, before you finally make the grade. Kellogg's Dream of Peace. One of these tries which failed was the Kellogg Treaty to outlaw war. Old Frank B. Kellogg, who wrote that treaty, was just an ordinary American citizen from Minnesota, not much different from the rest of us. He was Coolidge's secretary of state, and not a very brilliant one. But he had one great dream to outlaw out-law war. And he kept pecking away at it, and hammering the idea home on the unwilling governments of Europe, until the people of Europe were too strong for their governments, govern-ments, and they just had to sign the Kellogg Pact. I was with Kellogg when he sailed to Europe to sign his pact, stood with him in the Quai d'Orsay in Paris when, with a great gold pen given him by the people of Le Havre (a city now under bombardmenf), he scratched his signature to the document which carried the hopes and prayers of millions. Of course, many of the diplomats who also used that golden pen on that hot August afternoon in 1928 had no. sympathy with the hopes and ideals of the people they represented repre-sented among them, Count Uchida, whose imperturbable face gave no hint that four years later he, as foreign for-eign minister of Japan, would be snapping his fingers at the treaty he had signed. Cynical newsmen watching the ceremony remarked that this would be another case of the League of Nations an instrument of peace devised de-vised by the United States but which the United States would abandon. There, however, they were wrong Frank B. Kellogg, of course, was ahead of his time. But so were most of our great leaders Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln. The history of progress is a constant succession of men who are ahead of their time Stimson's Fight Against War. However, it did not fail until it had been used and almost successfully success-fully by another man also ahead of his time, the man who succeeded Kellogg. Henry L. Stimson, secretary of state under Hoover, was one of the few men in high position who then saw clearly signs of approaching wars, and who figured fig-ured that, tf the world could head off the minor wars In the Chaco between Paraguay and Bolivia, in Siberia between Russia, Rus-sia, and China, and in Manchuria Man-churia between Japan and China, then we could build up ' a machinery of peace strong enough to head off the major war which he knew was coming on the continent of Europe. His greatest effort was to mobilize the peace machinery of the world against Japan in Manchuria. Man-churia. And he almost made it. That he failed was due to an Isolationist revolt inside his own Hoover cabinet, plus the undercutting under-cutting of British imperialists who put their own selfish empire em-pire ahead of world peace. I was with Mr. Stimson during part of that trying time. I know how heroically he labored. Three times in all, he went to Europe determined to hew out new machin ery for peace. MAIL BAG Capt. Dan T. Moore, Washington Thanks for the gentle reminder that r-a-d-a-r spelled backwards is r-a-d-a-r. . Pvt. Gordon Lange. Camp Grant, Ill.-Other names for General Donovan's office of strategic stra-tegic services are: "Oh So Secret." "Office of. Synthetic Soldiers" and "The Cloak and Dagger Club." Its fab deals largely with highly secret Intelligence, some of it behind the enemy lines. Tradition is that, to get in, you have to be a Republican, Repub-lican, 'though a few lonely Demo-:rats Demo-:rats have been admitted. |