Tom Dewey Takes Over

It was Dewey in a walkaway. Withoutlifting a finger, without once giving to the men from Maine to Oregon the sign they asked for, Governor Thomas E. Dewey became Candidate Dewey, G.O.P. nominee for the Presidency of the U.S.

The nomination could not come too soon. For bunting and frustration hung equally over the steamy Chicago Stadium as the Republicans met this week in their 23rd convention--the first in wartime since Abraham Lincoln.

As the convention began, the frustration was as tangible as the mammoth blow-up pictures of Dewey that stood about everywhere in Chicago. The thumping bands, the badges, the pretty girls and all the time-honored foofaraw failed to charge up the Republican batteries to the sparking point. The great engine just would not turn over--at the start.

This was not the fault of the war, although this was the blackest of weeks for the enemy on both sides of the world. The steady flow of huge headlines--Cherbourg, Saipan, Vitebsk--could neither blot the Republican convention off the front pages nor out of Americans' minds.

The main trouble was that the convention's main job was finished before it met. The hundreds of empty rooms in Chicago hotels were silent testimony to Tom Dewey's preconvention strength. Americans will travel a thousand miles to see a horse race but they won't look out the window to see a certainty.

"We Have Met the Enemy. . . ." It had not been so cut & dried at first, while other hopefuls still had hope. Handsome John Bricker, tailor-fresh in a blue tropical suit, arrived in town to the strains of Beautiful Ohio from his own brass band. But three days later, jarred to the heels when Illinois caucused and threw its strength to Dewey, the Bricker forces held a desperate eleventh-hour strategy meeting.

It was too late. For Tom Dewey's men were not calling but receiving. Harold Stassen's men sat dutifully and dourly around hotel lobbies, just in case a freak bolt of lightning should strike. John Bricker fought on, he spoke his familiar views with familiar vigor at a jampacked press conference, provided the only good bar for thirsty newsmen. His managers buttonholed and cajoled tirelessly. But hoopla was not enough in Chicago in June 1944. The Dewey nomination rolled on.

No Smoking. The opposition to Dewey collapsed in the face of one question: how can you argue with the people? With Dewey so clearly in front in all public soundings,* to reject him for some other candidate might suggest a picture of sinister men in smoke-filled rooms, defying the will of the people. Tom Dewey's shrewd managers could either afford to sit tight, or had been ordered to, or both. And they did. They staged no preconvention banquets or band concerts. Dewey's No. 1 feminine supporter, tall, grey Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms, occupied inconspicuous basement quarters next to the Blackstone Hotel men's washroom. And the Dewey Triumvirate--Jaeckle, Sprague and Brownell--held court in businesslike fashion in a plain and bannerless 25th-floor suite, until Dewey's nomination was cinched.

With a similar almost brazen lack of display, the G.O.P.'s Man of the Hour spent the preconvention weekend on his 350-acre Pawling, N.Y. farm, 700 miles away, continuing to ignore politicos, if not politics. Governor Thomas E. Dewey was, so far as he let the rest of the U.S. know, concerned only with plans for a new road to his front door, with inspection of the new paint job on his barn. Yet he talked frequently by telephone to his Triumvirate. His shrewd dark eyes were on Chicago, just as surely as the eyes of 1,058 G.O.P. delegates in Chicago were on Pawling, N.Y.

Old Faces. Chicago's Mayor Ed Kelly had done his free-spending best to groom the cavernous Chicago Stadium for double duty, hiring Andy Frain as his special "Crowd Engineer." And his faithful aide, Tom Garry, the Democrats' famed 1940 "Voice from the Sewers," explained: "We did it up special so the Republicans couldn't squawk, see?" But four weeks later the 200,000 board feet of priority lumber will be used again, to provide equally uncomfortable roosting for 19,912 of the Democratic faithful.

Priority lumber, a shortage of Scotch, $4 steaks, a lack of taxicabs, other wartime hazards handicapped the delegates. But familiar faces restored an air of normalcy. On hand were Jeff Davis, king of hoboes; Mrs. J. Worthington Scranton of Scranton, queen of the Pennsylvania delegation; Massachusetts' chunky House Minority Leader Joe Martin. Tieless Joe Tolbert engaged in his quadrennial fight to be seated as delegate from South Carolina (he has been attending G.O.P. conventions since 1884), but wound up in the gallery once again. Pennsylvania's aging High Tariffsman Joe Grundy, 81, demanded a plank against reciprocal trade treaties. Alf Landon, the Kansas Sunflower of '36, swung his state's 19 votes to Dewey. Herbert Hoover got a key night radio spot as his Party's only living ex-President.

The only other living GOPresidential nominee, Wendell Willkie, had been invited to sit but not speak; he chose instead to stay home and ponder anew his Republican allegiance in the light of the candidate and the platform. (His 1940 aide, Russell Davenport, threatened to bolt the Party before the convention met.)

New Faces. But the convention's real attention was not on the relic-cluttered past of the Party's numerous defeats, but on the faces of the Party's future.

One of these was Representative Clare Boothe Luce, who gave the convention a new word for New Deal bureaucracy--bumbledom--and told the story of G.I. Jim, dead American buddy of G.I. Joe. As the "heroic heir of the unheroic Roosevelt decade," G.I. Jim, could he have attended the convention, would have said: "Take off your hats to the past, but take your coats off to the future."

Another most important new face was that of Keynoter Earl Warren, Governor of California, a big, reassuring man, who told the convention: "We are here to do a job for the American people. To get the boys victoriously back home; to open the door to jobs and opportunity; to make a peace that this time will be lasting. That is what the American people expect the Republican Party to accomplish. That is why, in so many streams of late, they have been changing so many horses. . . . We do not propose to deny the progress that has been made during the last decade. Neither do we aim to repeal it. Whatever its source, if it is good we will acknowledge it. If it is sound we will build on it. We do not aim to turn the clock back and make an issue of every administration mistake in the past eleven years."

But the new element in the Party that mattered most was Candidate Tom Dewey. He came into a position almost unique in U.S. political history--he owed none of the political debts that usually hang on a candidate's neck like so many albatrosses (e.g., the 1932 Roosevelt debt to Messrs. John Garner and William McAdoo for wrecking Al Smith).

In short, Dewey wore no man's collar. (His own choice in collars might seem a bit unfashionably stiff, but the U.S. would get used to that.) Thus unencumbered, he could move with absolute precision, unhampered by due bills, to the tasks ahead.

The first of those tasks, it was well known, would be to revitalize his own Party, weeding out the old troops and putting them on garrison duty. The second would be to train the new younger troops for the G.O.P.'s great assault on Franklin Roosevelt's political fortress.

* In the last preconvention Gallup poll among Republicans, Dewey's strength fell 7%, Bricker's went up 3%, in the past month. But Dewey still had an overwhelming 38%

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