WAITING TO BE ASKED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 October 1939, Page 5

WAITING TO BE ASKED

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT & INTERVENTION NO PLEA RECEIVED FROM GERMANY. POINTED PRESS COMMENT ON POSITION. By Telegraph—Press Association —Copyright. NEW YORK October 14. President; Roosevelt has dissipated any ideas of his intervention as a peacemaker on unofficial German suggestions, says the Washington correspondent of the “New York Times.” More by silence than by what he said, President Roosevelt indicated that he had no intention to move either through proffered mediation or otherwise unless one or all the belligerents asked officially. The Secretary of State, Mr Cordell Hull, said that no phase of the question of mediation was raised at the United States Embassy in Berlin by Germany. The White House Secretary reiterated that President Roosevelt had not received a German plea to mediate. A Berlin message says that an official news agency, referring to Dr Dietrich’s statement, now denies that there was any suggestion that President Roosevelt should intervene. It adds that this assumption was due to a misunderstanding of a private conversation. The “New York Times,” in an editorial. says: “Should Germany.formally request the United States to convoke a a peace conference, it would be our privilege to draw attention to the successive official appeals and warnings that the United States has given against German aggression and assert our readiness to call a conference when Germany had made restitution and appropriately guaranteed her intention to respect future treaties.” The “Herald-Tribune” in an editorial says: "Dr Dietrich’s interview has altered the whole face of the international situation. There has been no more brilliant, more ominous revelation of the paranoiac state of the Nazi mind than this. Divorced from all sense of the realities of the American attitude, it exposes a view of the international situation appalling in its implications. Exactly repeating familiar technique, it reduces the British Empire to the role of a second Poland and gives the United States the role hitherto contemptuously allotted Britain. If the United States fails in this, it will be branded as a warmonger, solely responsible for the slaughter a Nazi Napoleon ruthlessly threatens. Can even Senator Borah talk of the United States as an isolated, private island of peace, when Herr Hitler thus orders us to be his allies in a colossal second Munich or take the consequences? It is certainly impossible for the United States to move toward peace or mediation after this.”