Word: pittman
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Never minding might-be or has-been, Key Pittman last week ran his committee straight down the track of what-is. He gave only a minimum of lip-service to Franklin Roosevelt's desire for a return to the indefinable fog of international law -where an energetic President could easily get lost from Congress' view. Then he set himself to his dual task: the drafting of a bill which would provide national security insurance against involvement in war, and the spiking of his opponents' guns...
...Pittman believed that the mere question of repeal of the arms embargo was but a minor phase of the problem of national security. But as a practical man he knew how thunderous a drum-roll his Isolationist foes could beat up over that single issue. He set himself to smash their drumheads, roll the drum himself...
...Pittman's bill decreed: 1) When the President or Congress finds a state of war existing abroad, the President shall (i. e., must) name the belligerents. 2) After issuance of such a proclamation, no American vessel may carry passengers or goods to any named belligerents. 3) No goods of any sort may be shipped to belligerents until all rights, title and interest have been transferred abroad. 4) The President shall then proclaim combat areas, which no citizen or U. S. vessel may enter. 5) No U. S. citizen may travel on any belligerent's vessel...
...technicalities emerged the solid fact that President Roosevelt's discretionary powers over Foreign Policy would be sharply limited. In his strain to prove the honest will of the Administration to keep out of war, and to prove his intent to give Congress control over Foreign Policy, Senator Pittman even went beyond the Constitution. For, under the Constitution the President cannot be ordered by Congress to proclaim a state of war. Constitutionalists held that this provision of the bill would subordinate the White House to Congress...
...Senator Pittman's Isolationist foes were annoyed at the isolationism of the Pittman bill. But they found one good target-the fact that the bill was credit-and-carry, not cash-and-carry. They shouted that this would modify the Johnson Act, one of the most sacred of U. S. cows, which bars loans to any government still in default on its World War I debts. But Key Pittman, a wily strategist, knew that in winning a political fight you must ask for twice what you can get, then compromise for half (TIME, Oct. 2); and that the loser...