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alternatives, including a shift of naval strength westward, even to Singapore, or a naval patrol, but he decided to play for time.
    “Now we’ve stopped scrap iron,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote him a week after Election Day, “what about oil?”
    “The real answer which you cannot use,” he replied “is that if we forbid oil shipments to Japan, Japan will increase her purchases of Mexican oil and furthermore, may be driven by actual necessity to a descent on the Dutch East Indies.” And that, he added, might encourage the spread of war in the Far East.
    Tokyo, for its part, was quiet. Matsuoka insisted that the pact was not directed against the United States; he even invited Washington to join the pact and to help the Axis make the world into one big family. It was this kind of bravado that led Cordell Hull to say that Matsuoka was as crooked as a basket of fishhooks.
    In mid-December Grew sent “Dear Frank” a personal year-end assessment of the Pacific situation. After eight years of effort, he told the President, he found that diplomacy had been defeated “by trends and forces utterly beyond its control, and that our work has been swept away as if by a typhoon….” He put the main problem directly to the President: “Sooner or later, unless we are prepared…to withdraw bag and baggage from the entire sphere of ‘Greater East Asia including the South Seas’ (which God forbid), we are bound eventually to come to a head-on clash with Japan.
    “A progressively firm policy on our part will entail inevitable risks—especially risks of sudden uncalculated strokes, such as the sinking of the Panay, which might inflame the American people—but in my opinion these risks are less in degree than the far-greater future dangers which we would face if we were to follow a policy of laissez faire ….
    “It is important constantly to bear in mind the fact that if we take measures ‘short of war’ with no real intention to carry those measures to their final conclusion if necessary, such lack of intention will be all too obvious to the Japanese, who will proceed undeterred and even with greater incentive, on their way. Only ifthey become certain that we mean to fight if called upon to do so will our preliminary measures stand some chance of proving effective and of removing the necessity for war—the old story of Sir Edward Grey in 1914….
    “You are playing a masterly hand in our foreign affairs,” he concluded, “and I am profoundly thankful that the country is not to be deprived of your clear vision, determination, and splendid courage in piloting the old ship of state.” These remarks were pleasing and barbed; the pilot in the White House, who had stayed on the bridge in part by promising to keep the American people out of war, now had to face Realpolitik.
WASHINGTON
    Two days after the election Franklin Roosevelt’s train rolled slowly south along the Hudson River, was shunted through New York City, and then bore him through the long night to Washington. In the morning Eleanor Roosevelt, Vice President-elect Henry A. Wallace, and several thousand Washingtonians greeted him at Union Station. Two hundred thousand people lined Pennsylvania Avenue. The returning hero, back from the wars like some conqueror of old, jubilantly doffed his familiar campaign fedora as the limousine inched its way to the White House. Thousands followed the car, poured through the open White House gates, swarmed over the lawn, and chanted “WE WANT ROOSEVELT!” until the President and the First Lady appeared on the north portico.
    And now the daily routine, fashioned during eight years in office, began again in the famous old mansion. Around 8:30 A.M. the President, a cape thrown around his shoulders, breakfasted in bed while he skimmed rapidly through dispatches and newspapers—usually the New York Times and the Herald Tribune (especially flown from New York), the Washington papers, the Baltimore Sun, and the Chicago Tribune— his