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Show PGENERAL Rj hugh s- fel JOHNSON Washington, D. C. WILLKIE'S NEW ROLE The Bill of Rights in our Constitution Constitu-tion doesn't use these words but what part of it means is, that it is every American's sacred privilege to say what he pleases, think what he pleases and change his mind as often as he desires. That goes for Wendell Willkie. But with such privileges go obligations, obli-gations, moral if not legal. Mr. Willkie, after a considerable period of hesitation as to just what it was all about, during which his stock slumped from the remarkable high of the Philadelphia convention to a very low point in August, finally began be-gan to attract followers again. He announced that he .was leading a crusade to return America to the Americans. He stood against any further delegation and concentration concentra-tion of power in the President. He was for aiding Britain "within our own and international law," but he felt that if Mr. Roosevelt were re-elected it would be construed as a mandate for an immediate, headlong head-long rush toward war. He, Willkie, stood for caution and discretion and the building of an impregnable American defense. In private conversations, he was even more explicit on this and revealed re-vealed that his only reason for not b-ing explicit openly was that he reared that he would lose the support sup-port of certain great New York publications. pub-lications. The impression that he tried to leave was that he stood against the war-minded and those who had been careless of American defense as the apostle of all-out hemisphere defense de-fense and the traditional American policy of a minimum of meddling with the interminable European conflict. con-flict. On this basis, millions of people left their party moorings, some of them at great sacrifice of personal friendship and prestige, to follow him. Some gave him more help than the leading members of his own new-found party. It was not a ques--1 tion with them of partisanship. It was a question of patriotism. Nothing has happened since to impair im-pair the apparent soundness of that doctrine. If anything, what has happened hap-pened since has strengthened it. But it would have been impossible for Mr. Willkie to have gone further , than he has now gone to repudiate I it and those ardent followers of it and him. AIDING 'EVERYBODY'? One thing should be made and - Icept clear about the fight on the "lease-lend" bill in its present form. It is that the issue here is not Whether Wheth-er we shall send aid to Britain. There are, on either side of the "lease-lend" argument, men of sev-' sev-' eral shades of opinion on both sides j of that question from those who be-I be-I lieve In all aid Britain may ask, to I other men who insist only so much be sent as will not slow up i or make impossible our own defense. ' The debate here is whether on the plea of aiding Britain by methods "short of war" principally .by selling sell-ing or giving supplies, with or without with-out credit whether on that plea, one man, the President, should be given unlimited authority to dispose of as much as he pleases of the material resources of the United States and its armament in ships, guns, planes and ammunition, not merely to Britain Brit-ain but to any nation anywhere. Those who want to aid Britain say they wish to do so to defend America. By this most of them mean that they want to keep the ocean approaches to our country open by supporting the British navy and the British bases in the Atlantic Atlan-tic and elsewhere. ' But the "lease-lend" "lease-lend" bill intends something much more than that. Taken with the President's fireside chat and annual message, his war aims are no longer merely to defend America in this sense. They are no longer "short of war." They are to "defend America" by insuring freedom of speech and worship wor-ship and from want "everywhere on earth," and to secure all nations from attack "anywhere on earth." Under the terms of the bill, all that is npressarv for him to do to be free to send our military and naval substance to any country whether it is at war now or not, is to "find" that to do so would help American defense. That is power to declare and fight economic war for anybody anywhere. Furthermore, some of the language lan-guage in this bill is so generalized (for example the appropriation clause) that it is not clear that it does not deliver to the President power to give away the financial resources re-sources of the country as certainly it grants him power to give away all the ships of our whole navy. There is talk about guarding against any such designs by limiting limit-ing this all-out economic war dictatorship dic-tatorship and partial military and naval dictatorship to two years. Many of the "emergency" powers granted since '33 have been so limited. lim-ited. All have been extended. Why? Because the granting of such massive mas-sive powers with a time limit is also a grant of power to force the extension exten-sion of that time limit. It has proved so with us over and over again during eight years of grants of emergency powers with a time limit. |