It cites the example of washing machines. A manufacturer had produced 5,000 and set the price 25 percent above the 1942 price, the OPA ceiling. The public wanted to pay the extra amount, but OPA had not yet approved the price and the manufacturer told the dealers that their purchase by consumers depended on this approval, that a full rebate would be granted for the difference in price should the OPA refuse the approval.

OPA then sued the manufacturer for $150,000, treble the amount by which the ceiling was violated, resulting in the washing machines being stuck with the dealers.

Such moves complicated reconversion.

In any event, there had been only seven questionable ballots in the county, the problem having arisen through the absentee ballot.

Yet, there was general respect for the Army's board of inquiry on the matter and no one questioned its integrity.

If General Marshall properly should shoulder the blame, then it was only appropriate to make that determination public, and if, as rumor had it, President Roosevelt also shared in the blame, then other inquiries ought reveal that information.

It suggests, however, that while the lesson of unpreparedness needed to be reinforced in the country, there was nothing to be gained at this juncture by fixing blame, that the whole country, as President Truman had stated, was unprepared, with an isolationist public and an isolationist Congress. It was not clear that the United States would have ever entered the war except for the attack at Pearl Harbor.

But, insofar as General Marshall's culpability was concerned, he had more than atoned by his strong leadership of the Army during the course of the war. So had the nation.

We have to comment, albeit not critically, that the memory of the editors in this piece regarding the atmosphere in the country preceding Pearl Harbor is a bit foggy by this point, understandably so after enduring 44 months of war. From at least September onward, gathering strength by the week, the press, including the News editorial column, then under the primary pen of Stuart Rabb, predicted regularly that war was coming. The only questions were when and where, most, including the military and the Administration, believing it would erupt first with an attack by the Japanese on the Philippines. Indeed, even earlier in 1941, W. J. Cash had made the assertion that war with Japan and Germany appeared inevitable.

That was the general impression of the country at large by November, even if plenty of people still were hoping against hope that the country would remain out of the war, essentially by either ducking its head in the sand, as the America First crowd and Charles Lindbergh promoted, or by engaging exclusively in Lend-Lease.

But, we have the advantage of long perspective on that time which the editors did not, especially in the rush of events which had swirled around them during the previous four and a half months, the death of the President, a new, untried figure entering the White House, of whom the country knew little, the crushing blow to Berlin, the end of the war with Germany and the news of Hitler's suicide following the fall of northern Italy and the summary execution of Mussolini, the signing of the U.N. Charter and its ratification, Potsdam and the ultimatum to Japan, and finally the atom bombs.

Just a month earlier, the general notion was that the war with Japan would not be over for at least another year. It had been an eventful month.

He concluded with a commendation to Senator Wiley for having sincerely reached his conclusion, though in disagreement with his own.

He first tells of his limits on subject matter by the fact of his being a member of the Cabinet, not therefore supposed to venture opinions on international matters or the Congress or his colleagues in the Executive Branch.

He could not engage in controversial assertions of opinion, and proceeds then to explain what he means. He could assert, for instance, that there was plenty of coal on hand to meet the need domestically and in Europe during the coming winter. But he should find trouble in the event he determined to go further and suggest that there were enough coal miners to produce that coal, for the fact that these men were in the armed forces—though he refrains cannily from disclosing that fact.

He also stated that he had wanted for years to criticize Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but had been compelled to refrain by the avoidance of controversy rule. But now he found that he could do so because of the criticism leveled against Franco by Assistant Secretaries of State Archibald MacLeish and Dean Acheson. He could at least agree with them.

So, finding himself so limited and stifled, he turned to an ostensibly safe topic, Benjamin Franklin, as his subject of the day. He imparts that the Franklin-owned Pennsylvania Gazette had never defamed any private citizen "nor indecently criticized the conduct of any public man".

He then quotes Franklin regarding his belief in the limits and scope of freedom of the press, that it was free for the discussion of public measures and political opinion, but should never be free to defame or utter calumny against another, that the printer and inventor would gladly part with that freedom for the privilege not to be so abused.

Three divisions would be needed additionally for the occupation for a limited time of Korea. An equivalent number would be needed in Shanghai and two or three other ports in China in an effort to open the supply route by sea to China, ending the costly journey over the Hump in the Himalayas. Via this route, more than 100,000 tons of Lend-Lease supplies were being funneled to China each month, 86% of it by air and the remainder over the Ledo Road, reopened at the start of the year. The manpower needed to operate the route amounted to more than 200,000 Americans. Ending the air route would free these Americans to return home.

Russia also was going to provide troops for Chiang to avert civil war in China.

General Eisenhower had estimated that 420,000 men would be needed for the occupation of the American zone in Germany through July 1, 1946.

The figures in both theaters might be reduced, provided the Japanese occupation were to go smoothly and the winter in Germany would be less onerous than anticipated. But aside from those contingencies, the numbers of men being drafted per month, 50,000, against those being discharged, would result by the following July 1 in a deficit of 400,000 men based on the estimates of required occupation forces, and that assumed the recruitment of 280,000 regulars permitted by law, a doubtful prospect at this stage, with the nation no longer at war.

It was one thing to invite a neighbor to negotiations, quite another to set terms in advance and bring pressure to bear on the other country's press when the head of state was visiting as a guest, as in the case of General De Gaulle.

Lord Halifax and John Maynard Keynes of Britain had also come humbly to the United States to negotiate on Lend-Lease, only to find the door effectively slammed in their faces by the abrupt termination.

Lend-Lease had to be ended but, she suggests, it should have been done more slowly, as in the wake of World War I when economic adjustments were made for six to eight months following that war. A bridge had been expected by the British and it was a certainty that, for the sake of maintaining Britain's economy, a bridge would eventually be constructed.

France had also been adversely impacted by the sudden termination, as it was more dependent on the largesse of the United States than Britain. General De Gaulle was faced with the need to quell internal unrest from economic difficulties prior to the election set for October. Yet, he had been received in the United States by President Truman with the suggestion that he ought do something about the French free press, a statement, she offers, usually reserved for heads of totalitarian states as Germany or Russia. Ms. Thompson understood the President's frustration with the French press, to which she, herself, had leveled criticism. But she felt it the job of journalists and not the President.

For De Gaulle to exert control over the French press in response to the President's urging, would set a dangerous precedent and possibly set off a chain reaction of demands by other governments to regulate free press. If De Gaulle asked Truman to discipline the U.S. press, what would be the reaction?

While no irreparable damage had been done, she suggests an end to such arrogation, contravening the spirit of both the U.N. Charter and Bretton Woods.

If the United States acted in such a way that the rest of the world was opposed to it, then even the atomic bomb, obtained through agreement with Britain, would not work to afford legitimacy.

While China had never bowed to a foreign conqueror, it had become subservient to opium since the seventeenth century, addiction affecting at least 40 percent, or 80 million, of its male population.

The Dutch had begun the process, surreptitiously spiking cigarettes with the drug to make them more attractive. The resulting addiction led the Chinese to use opium on its own. The initial effect was as a stimulant, eventually devolving to complete lassitude and finally death.

President Wilson, realizing the debilitating effects of the drug, incorporated into the League of Nations Covenant a clause to regulate the traffic in opium and restrict its use only to medicinal purposes. It had no effect, however, because the Congress, under the leadership of President Harding, refused to ratify the treaty.

Chiang Kai-Shek, from 1934 to 1937, had waged a relentless one-man war against the narcotic, providing for legislation to prohibit its production, sale, or use in China, and sanctioning it with the death penalty, resulting in executions of many hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens.

China's addiction had made it more ripe for the picking by the Japanese in its quest for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Japanese even brought with them large quantities of the drug, providing it to the children and distributing it among the population for free during the initial weeks of occupation of a given locality. When the Chinese became addicted, the Japanese set up stores and charged for the drug as a medium of barter. The result was that millions of Chinese were again addicted, and now Chiang would face another war against that internally corrosive menace.

His success ten years earlier, predicts Mr. Golden, placed him in a well-qualified position to eradicate the problem once more.