'Moral Re-Armament has demonstrated its value to national defence. The President has so held. But the individual worker needs to make his necessary connection clear and certain as to the quality and type of his training and the actual things he is doing, because there is need not only to have his status proved but to satisfy the public that it is justified and thereby sustain selective service morale.'2

The issue Buchman was beginning to face in America had already become a matter of controversy in Britain. By the summer of 1940 twelve whole-time workers and 240 of MRA's most experienced part-timers had already voluntarily enlisted in the services, leaving only twenty-nine men of military age available to carry on. These twenty-nine were directing a nation-wide campaign sponsored by 360 Mayors and Provosts, concentrating particularly in heavily bombed areas. Their efforts had been widely welcomed,3 except by a section of the London press. In three weeks that August the Communist Daily Worker attacked them eight times and Tom Driberg in the Daily Express six times.4 Their complaint was that the MRA campaign mingled Christianity with morale, while Hannen Swaffer in the Daily Herald resurrected Buchman's alleged statement of 1936 to infer that MRA was pro-Nazi.

Peter Howard, also of Express Newspapers, whom many considered the roughest columnist of all, decided to investigate Moral Re-Armament personally. To his surprise he found his colleagues' accusations groundless, and when the editor of the Express refused to print his answer to Driberg's charges, he wrote a book. Innocent Men ,5* which both gave the facts about Moral Re-Armament as he saw them and described the unexpected change that it was bringing to his own life. The book sold 155,000 copies, and led to his resignation from his highly paid job, since Dick Plummer, the Assistant Manager, in the absence of Lord Beaverbrook and the paper's Managing Director, E. J. Robertson, forbade him to publish it.

(* The title echoed Guilty Men, the book he had written with Michael Foot and Frank Owen under the pen-name ‘Cato’ the previous year.)

Buchman's personality and mission were, from the first, made central to the controversy. Soon after Howard associated himself with Moral Re-Armament, his editor, John Gordon, and Brendan Bracken, then Minister of Information, took him out to lunch and told him categorically that Buchman would be arrested immediately America entered the war. Howard asked them for their evidence. 'Impossible to tell you, Peter,' they said. 'It comes from too high and secret a source.' Knowing of the support which Roosevelt and others had given his new friends in America, Howard discounted their statement. ‘Come back when you can show me real evidence,' he said.

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