Bob Taft Takes Aim

Ohio's deadly-earnest Robert Taft dominated the Republican platform-making. In shirtsleeves, tie unhitched, a pitcher of ice water at hand, Bob Taft carpentered away, exhausting relays of stenographers.

Taft and his crew manfully sawed and hammered away at the platform planks over a table piled high with dictionaries, economic tomes, and the timbers of past G.O.P. and Democratic platforms. Doggedly they listened to a great deal of advice from would-be platform makers, from crackpots to able special pleaders (for causes good & bad).

The Pressure Boys. Like all spotlights, the G.O.P. Convention had attracted a swarm of moths, buzzing and beating their wings. Some appeared before Taft's committee; others simply hired a hall. A handful of Democratic malcontents, grandiosely naming themselves the American National Democratic Committee, assembled on the fringe of the Convention, trying for a Byrd Bricker ticket, but died of avoidance. "General" Jacob S. Coxey, sans army, argued for his own free-wheeling fiscal plan. Gerald L. K. Smith, followed by a shrill covey of "We the Mothers," took over the Stevens ballroom while the Chicago Symphony orchestra was tuning up on the stage. Smith so loudly denounced Dewey, Willkie, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin that politicos in the Bricker headquarters next door could hardly hear each other weakly cheering on their losing fight.

The main, grueling job of shaping the platform to please one & all had fallen to Bob Taft because no one else could possibly do it. The subcommittees were loaded with Old Guard politicos, whose feudal opinions had to be leavened by the new gang of liberal Governors.

Pressure Off. Republicans tried to take foreign policy out of the campaign. They did this with a plank most carefully nailed and glued together by Michigan's Senator Arthur Vandenburg. The plank closely followed the party's Mackinac Declaration of last September, advocating international organization and "peace forces" to put down aggressors.

Internationally minded Senator Joe Ball of Minnesota complained of its "rubber words"; New Jersey's Willkieite Governor Walter E. Edge demanded it be made much stronger--meaning more internationalist. The sharpest criticism came from ex-Candidate Wendell Willkie. He compared the foreign-policy plank to the one on which Warren Harding ran in 1920: "The Republicans won the election of 1920. A Republican President, claiming that he in no way repudiated the Party's platform, immediately after the election announced that the League of Nations was dead. A Republican President elected under the proposed platform of 1944 could, with equal integrity, announce that the U.S. would not enter any world organization in which the nations agree jointly to use their 'sovereign' power for the suppression of aggression. And every effective world organization proposed could be rejected as a 'world state.' And all proposed joint forces for the suppression of aggression could be called armed forces and not 'peace forces.' "

But the plank had not been trimmed to please Willkie and his followers. Its aim was to go no further than, but just as far, as Franklin Roosevelt's recently announced postwar design, which likewise had something for the nationalists, something for the world-citizens (TIME, June 12).

This decision permitted the platform carpenters to concentrate on the conduct of U.S. affairs. The G.O.P. premise was that the Republican Party, as the "party of prosperity," could best guide the U.S. to full postwar employment. The premise was an assurance that the G.O.P. would feed and shelter all the people whenever the economy went wrong.

Could the Republicans win the support of the 22.7% of the American electorate who, a FORTUNE poll reported are still "undecided" how to vote? Their reaction to Bob Taft's platform would be important--until Candidate Dewey revises it by word and deed, as candidates always do.

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