MR. ROOSEVELT'S MISSIONERS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 32, 7 February 1941, Page 6

MR. ROOSEVELT'S MISSIONERS

The Roosevelt Administration cannot be accused of omitting any step that can add to its information on the crisis in Europe. The ambassadorial machinery of modern States is in constant operation in other States as a fact-finding agent and also as a recorder of atmosphere; but not all ambassadors are equally successful, nor do ambassadors in all cases share the policy of their Governments. It has therefore become a practice of Governments to employ, on occasion, special missioners. The late President Woodrow Wilson's Colonel House set a war precedent for the United States, whose ambassadorial methods have always been somewhat different from Europe's, and not immune from the corrective influences or the co-opera-tive activities of a Colonel House. In the present war, new American figures appearing on the scene of the European drama include Colonel Donovan and Admiral Leahy, as well as (in England) Mr. Harry Hopkins and the unofficial Mr. Wendell Willkie. While Colonel Donovan, having done his best to arrest events in Sofia, is now meeting the Turkish Government on his way to Egypt, Mr. Hopkins is about to return from England to America. His mission has been to get inside the works of the British war machine; his work has been as invisible as that of Mr. Willkie has been visible—and each of these two Americans, the silent administrator and the popular leader, has been pulling his weight in the war.