1943, October – 1945, May 15: (Lescot at the White House: The Grandest Foreign Trip, Nous Élie Lescot, the Four Freedoms Withheld, and Trujillo’s Smith & Wes…

1943, October – 1945, May 15: (Lescot at the White House: The Grandest Foreign Trip, Nous Élie Lescot, the Four Freedoms Withheld, and Trujillo’s Smith & Wessons): In October 1943, Lescot embarked on a triumphant progress — Montreal, Ottawa, Washington, New York, and Havana — including a stay at the White House as guest of President Roosevelt, who warmly described Lescot as a very old friend of mine. Roosevelt launched expansively into a favorite idea of rebuilding the Môle as a free port, and Stettinius suggested that from 1938 to 1946 the U.S. Government would have put $40 million into Haiti. On April 19, 1944, the National Assembly rewrote the constitution to further effect: no elections would be held until peace had been concluded with all enemy powers even unto Bulgaria, the presidential term was extended from five to seven years, and Citizen Élie Lescot would succeed himself for a new term extending until May 15, 1951 — his decrees now began to be prefaced Nous, Élie Lescot. His inaugural address of May 15, 1945, set out political conclusions: they knew that people sought to exercise the Four Freedoms — naive and impoverished people — and they had decided to extend the Four Freedoms only when the Haitian people had learned how to use them. In July there was a plot in the Garde — it miscarried and seven enlisted men were taken to Fort Dimanche and shot, while Colonel Armand, suddenly dispensable, was ordered to Mexico City as chargé d’affaires. In early October, on a tip that the Dominican consul at Belladère had imported thirteen Smith & Wesson .38s in the diplomatic bag, the Garde under Colonel Franck Lavaud pounced on the recipients — Excellent Desrosiers, that old Caco of Trujillo’s who had raided Hinche in 1937, was the leader, and when the weapons were traced to American military-assistance stocks received by Trujillo, Desrosiers and two others were shot. In June 1945, as delegates assembled in San Francisco to sign the UN charter, each found at his place a handsomely printed glossy pamphlet containing the unabridged Lescot-Trujillo correspondence since 1937.