Word: rootes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Twenty-five years ago, in the magazine Foreign Affairs (see PRESS), the late Elihu Root, Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of State, looked behind and ahead and made some observations on history. "There is a general conviction," he wrote, "that there has been something wrong about the conduct of diplomacy under which peoples have so often found themselves embarked in war without intending...
Misrepresentation, thought Elihu Root, was at the bottom of such accidents-misrepresentation, and "ignorance and error [making] wild work with foreign relations. . . . Given the nature of man, war results from the spiritual condition that follows real or fancied injury or insult...
...with one big war over, the world looked like a "community of nations" to Elihu Root, and from that fact he took cautious hope. But even then hope had an acid taste: "The [world] community has grown just as communities of natural persons grow. . . . The neighbors generally must govern their conduct by the accepted standards or the community will break...
...smells faintly of the Hollywood atmosphere in which it was composed. The period sets are painstaking, the main characters are photogenic. With no strain on his attention, the reader can savor from one large dish a thousand tidbits of 18th Century custom & morality that he would otherwise have to root for in the garden of biography and memoirs...
...Derogatory Information." Actually, it had been going on, in a smaller way, even before Harry Truman first ordered Government agencies to root out their subversive-e.g., Communist and fellow-traveling-workers in March. The Army had fired over 100 civilian employees suspected of disloyalty, the Navy at least 23, the Labor Department five. None of the purgees had complained publicly. But when the State Department suddenly ousted ten of its workers because "derogatory information" had been received about them, some pertinent questions began to be asked...