The editorials led off with a requiem for the League of Nations, recognizing its failures and the idealism behind its formation. The great weakness that "contributed to its final death" was the absence of both Russia, ousted after invading its neighbors, and the United States. The editorial stated that Russia was more interested in the years between the wars in fostering a world revolution rather than in ensuring international peace and stability while the US chose isolationism over world government. The recent war, the editorial writer hoped, had taught both countries the price of their mistakes. Two other problems were the League's vague and contradictory concepts about the moral justification of war and its lack of a military force to counter aggression. The hope was that the UN would be able to wield effective military power to stop aggressive war in its bud.
The Times editorial board came out in favor of the recommendations of the State Department committee on atomic research headed by David Lilienthal. The committee sought to find a balance between the need for regulation with the need for scientific research. The report called for inspection by top-rank scientists to assure that pure materials given to researchers was being used appropriately. The alternative, to stop all procurement of radioactive uranium or its isotopes and derivatives or to make it very difficult to obtain, would be a calamity in the view of the editorial. Lilienthal was head of the TVA. In 1947 Truman asked him to be the first head of the Atomic Energy Commission. As the son of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe and a liberal, Lilienthal would become a target of the rabid right after he objected on civil liberties grounds to requiring a loyalty oath from scientists engaged in non-classified research.
In its recognition of the 56th anniversary of the Pan American Union, the Times editorial also took note that the Office of Inter-American Affairs had gone out of existence this past week with all of its functions passing to the State Department. The agency had been established under Nelson Rockefeller in 1940, primarily to combat pro-German propaganda efforts in Latin America. The Times praised its enviable, universally acclaimed record of achievements. However, not yet acknowledged publicly, agents and informants working for the Soviet Union had heavily infiltrated the agency.
The Times favorably commented on the granting of an honorary degree to President Truman by Washington College. It also advised Stalin that a better flow of information about everyday life in the Soviet Union would move us further along in true friendship between the two countries. It ended with a salute to the anemones now poking their heads through the woodland debris.