"Bertie" for President

After lumping Churchill, Stalin, Willkie, Chiang Kai-shek and Roosevelt as people to have no truck with (TIME, May 31), Chicago's infant Republican Nationalist Revival Committee came up with its own idea of a desirable statesman.

Its choice for U.S. President in 1944: Colonel Robert Rutherford ("Bertie") McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune.

The Nationalist Revival, a mishmash of the dwindling remainders of Coughlinites, anti-Semites, dissident Republicans and the old America First crowd, seemed to have notified the Tribune of the meeting's prime importance, because the Tribune sent aging Arthur Evans, its top-rung reporter on local politics, to cover the meeting. The news was coyly buried on p. 3, did not mention the McCormick boom until the second paragraph.

The Tribune-hating Chicago Sun generously allowed that the committee had chosen well from a narrowing field: "It's harder and harder to find a man who will come right out. . . for plain, unadulterated dog-in-the-manger jingoism. . . ."

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