ABSTRACT
While Waiter Lippmann was in Maine deciding whether or not to go back to the column, Hitler and Stalin stunned the world by signing a nonaggression pact. Mr.Roosevelt called Congress into special session to repeal the Neutrality Acts so that London and Paris could buy American arms. Isolationists warned against taking sides, while America Firsters charged that FDR was secretly trying to lead the United States into war. Lippmann's overwrought analogy prompted historian Hans Kohn to remind him that Stalin's regime was hardly more "Genghis Khan" than Adolf Hitler's, and that the most serious menace to European peace was Nazi Germany, not Soviet Russia. France's capitulation stunned Lippmann as much as it did the general public. He had thought that the repeal of the Neutrality Acts would allow the British and French to hold back Hitler. Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union gave the Japanese a golden opportunity.
