The activity associated with the growth of world air transport provided Tom with just the opportunity he had foreseen. Furthermore, after the American air-mail contracts had been canceled and the American long-term program had broken down, the business Tom had brought to United enabled us to keep our heads above water. Revenue from the sale of technical information provided us with funds with which to keep in the forefront of technological progress. And though we did not realize it, that morning when Tom came home from Europe, his efforts would later provide the sustenance which would save Pratt and Whitney and its organization for a decisive contribution to the coming World War II. It was the war clouds from the cold front in Europe that depressed Tom’s buoyant spirit. “This man Hitler,” he said, “is the world’s evil genius.” We were sitting in my office in East Hartford trying to plan our moves in a game of blind-man’s buff. “You people over here,” Tom went on, “tend to discount him because he wears a Charlie Chaplin moustache. But, believe me, he is no tramp. He knows Germans like a book and gives them just the sort of leadership they eat up. It reminds you of the old picture of the donkey with a carrot in front of him and a lash behind him. Hitler knows how to hold out the carrot with one hand and pop the whip with the other.” Tom went on to muse about the curious way thoughts took wing. Here was a former corporal of the Landswehr who had dreamed up a screwy idea and by force of his own conviction had sold it to the German people. Similarly, Lenin had generated an idea and, through sheer fanaticism, had come up from the dregs to impose a new tyranny on a people who had never known much else. Worse still, the cockeyed idea had spread into other lands in the short two decades since the Armistice from a war to make the world safe from such things. In Italy, it was Mussolini; in Japan, Hirohito. Here were four men on horseback, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and no one was doing anything about a counterattack with a better idea. One was ready at hand in the Christian faith, but subversive influences had persuaded Christians that it was unsophisticated even to talk about it. Protestants were so busy attacking Catholics that they were unwittingly led into an attitude toward communism which, if not sympathy, is at least not outspoken opposition.