The Debate Begins

Tom Dewey made clear last week that he considers foreign policy a debatable campaign issue. For the first time he gave a detailed statement of his own ideas. They proved to be more Wilsonian than Rooseveltian. And he used the occasion to turn a klieg light on the man who might be Secretary of State if Dewey became President: Manhattan Lawyer John Foster Dulles, 56.

All of this came in five days of political maneuvers, which began quietly and became so explosive that Dewey hugged close to Albany through the weekend, foregoing his usual trip to his Pawling farm. It started when Dewey read news dispatches of the plan Russia was bringing to this week's Dumbarton Oaks conference of the Big Four in Washington. Russia proposed an international air corps tightly controlled by the Big Four (see below). For a day and a half Tom Dewey consulted with his advisers. Then he called newsmen to the five-story hilltop Capitol in Albany and soberly set off a blockbuster whose bearing on future U.S. foreign policy was probably more important than the conference itself. Said Dewey:

"I have been deeply disturbed by some of the recent reports concerning the [Dumbarton Oaks] conference. These indicate that it is planned to subject the nations of the world, great and small, permanently to the coercive power of the four nations holding this conference. . . . That would be the rankest form of imperialism. . . . The ideals for which we are fighting . . . must not be lost in a cynical peace by which any four powers dominate the earth by force."

Two-Part Peace. Then he countered with his own theme: peace is a two-part problem. First Germany and Japan, once beaten, "must be rendered permanently powerless to renew tyranny and attack.... That is a specific responsibility of the victors [the Big Four]. ... It cannot immediately be delegated to a world-wide organization while such an organization is yet new and untried.''

But, continued Tom Dewey, "in organizing permanent peace among the rest of the world, after the difficult postwar period, a very different attitude must be taken. In some of these proposals there appears to be a cynical intention that the four great Allied powers shall continue for all time to dominate the world by force and through . . . spheres of influence. I hope and pray that no such reactionary purpose will be allowed to dominate the conferences. As Americans we believe with all our hearts in the equality and rights of small nations and minorities. In the kind of permanent world organization we seek, all nations, great and small, must be assured of their full rights."

Secretary Level. No man considers himself a greater defender of small nations than Cordell Hull. Next day, at a hastily called press conference on a sweltering Washington morning, Cordell Hull lectured 55 newsmen (who were lined up in chairs as in a classroom): "I wish I could burn this into your minds and memories for the next 50 years at least. That is that the human race at this hour, this day, this week, this year is confronted by the gravest crisis in its experience. And we who are here on the scene of action have the responsibility of saying which way it is going for the next 50 years. . . ." Hotly he denied that the U.S. or the Big Four had any intention of muscling out the smaller nations. Acidly he recalled his June 1 statement, saying just that. He did not mention that his June 1 statement had been made necessary by the announcement of Franklin Roosevelt's Great Blueprint, in which an assembly of all nations was to be dominated by a council on which the Big Four had permanent membership.

After a 72-minute lecture, Cordell Hull said in answer to a question that he would welcome a conference with Governor Dewey. The inference was that he would like to give Dewey a lecture also. Dewey quickly snapped up the invitation (though it had been made only via the press). Said Dewey: he would send a representative. Dewey then set his own diplomatic protocol; this would be a meeting at the Secretary level: between an actual Secretary and a would-be one.

Mr. Dewey Introduces. In this way Tom Dewey called attention to his foreign-policy mentor, John Foster Dulles. He produced a man to whom could be attached no suspicion of isolationism by the most nervous of interventionist worrywarts. For Dulles is the guiding spirit of the Six Pillars of Peace, the international program of the Federal Council of Churches (TIME, March 29, 1943) His record is long and distinguished: he was secretary to the Second Hague Peace Conference at 19; legal counsel of a reparations commission in 1919; a grandson of one U.S. Secretary of State and nephew of another (Woodrow Wilson's Robert Lansing). From a penthouse office in Wall Street he presides over the front-rank law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. These formidable distinctions, and a somewhat persimmonous countenance have produced a favorite Wall Street conjugation: "Dull, duller, Dulles." But John Dulles is long-since deaf to such puns. One Dulles credo is that every man should have a hobby in which he regularly risks his life. His own: sailboating in the Great Lakes and the Atlantic.

Mistake at Versailles. Dulles met the press in Dewey's first-floor study in the barny, dingy-brown Governor's Mansion.

Said Dulles: the most important point of Governor Dewey's foreign-policy blast had been generally overlooked: that the jobs of 1) policing the conquered, 2) setting up a world order, must be kept separate. "The mistake made at Versailles was not in disarming Germany . . . but in making it everybody's job to keep her disarmed. That made it nobody's job." This time, that first job should belong to Russia, Britain and the U.S.--assisted by Germany's liberated neighbors. And policing of Germany and Japan should be a self-liquidating trusteeship:

"That is a specific task which for a considerable time, at least, will be a task of the principal Allied victors and not a task of a world organization, not a task of some 60 nations who are put together in a new and untried organization, when we don't know how it will work. If you turn it over to that sort of an organization, then you are controlling the organization not only for the purpose of keeping Germany and Japan under control, but you are more or less forced into a position where you control the organization for all of its purposes, to keep all of the world under control. That is not the thing we want."

Here were the beginnings of an earnest, honest Republican-Democratic foreign-policy debate--not on the 1939-41 level of isolationism v. internationalism. Clearly the question now was: What kind of internationalism? If out of this beginning was to come the foreign-policy issue of 1944, both sides owed the nation more details. But all could agree that the debate had begun at a high level.

Spectator. Tom Dewey wasted no time in capitalizing on his success to date. Sunday he told newsmen: "We invited Wendell to join us." But Willkie replied by wire: "I shall be glad to meet Mr. Dulles on his way to the conference . . . since ... the discussions between the Secretary and Mr. Dulles are to be of nonpartisan character." As the debate began, Wendell Willkie--still a man to be counted--was content to watch.

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