David Brinkley - Washington Goes to War 汉译

I am a journalist, not a historian, and while this book is an effort to describe a moment in the past, it is less a work of history than of personal reminiscence and reflection. Essentially, it is an account of my own observations and experiences in wartime Washington, supplemented by material drawn from interviews and other sources. I have tried to create out of it all a portrait of the pain and struggle of a city and a government suddenly called upon to fight, and to lead other nations in fighting, the greatest war in history, but pathetically and sometimes hilariously unprepared to do so.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

This is bound to be somewhere close to the last reporting form that period based on firsthand sources. One after another, with unsettling rapidity, those in positions of power and responsibility during World War II are passing from the scene. Several who agreed to recall and describe their experiences in the war years died before I could get to them.

I have not dealt here in any detail with the grand strategy of the war in Europe and the Pacific. Instead, I have tried to report mainly on what I saw and heard and learned in Washington during years now fading into a misty past, the wartime experience of a country two-thirds of whose people are now too young to remember any of it. The result is a sort of Our Town at war, the story of a city astonished and often confused to find itself at the center of a worldwide conflict without ever hearing a shot fired. A strange city, set up in the first place to be the center of government and, like government itself at that time, a city moving slowly and doing little.

As the forties began, Washington was mainly a middle-class town grown up around a middle-class government. A Hudson Valley patrician sat in the White House, yes, but he and his appointed assistants presided over a population of government employees of modest incomes and modest ambitions. A town where Raleigh Haberdasher on F Street ran advertisements suggesting that a man in an office job really should own more than one suit. (When the new and radical idea of zippers on men’s trousers began to appear, Woodward and Lothrop posted signs in its men’s departments saying that for $3.50 it would remove the zippers and replace them with buttons.) A town where people routinely bought Chevrolets not new but used.

It was a town and a government entirely unprepared to take on the global responsibilities suddenly thrust upon it. The executive branch, despite its expansion during the New Deal, remained relatively small, its employees more concerned with egg prices and post office construction than with the war clouds gathering in Europe and Asia. And Congress, all its members sent in from other places was even worse. No one in the Senate even laughed when one of its members, Kenneth Wherry, Republican of Nebraska, rose to declare that after the war China deserved American help so that “Shanghai can be raised up and up until it’s just like Kansas City.”

A government of drones and paper shufflers simply could not do the job. And so Franklin Roosevelt found that he had, in effect, to recruit and entirely new and temporary government to be piled on top of the old one, the new government to get the tanks and airplanes built, the uniforms made, the men and women assembled and trained and shipped abroad, and the battle fought and won. The war transformed not just the government. It transformed Washington itself. A languid Southern town with a pace so slow that much of it simply closed down for the summer grew almost overnight into a crowded, harried, almost frantic metropolis struggling desperately to assume the mantle of global power, moving haltingly and haphazardly and only partially successfully to change itself into the capital of the free world. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. Nothing like it is likely to be seen again. This book is a journalist’s attempt to describe it.