"Is It Honest?"

Tom Dewey kept punching. In St. Louis this week on his second appearance in the doubtful border state of Missouri, he said that the next administration must meet three tests:

1) Is it honest?

2) Are the people who run it trained and competent for their jobs?

3) Is it a Government with faith in the future of America and a wholehearted determination to make our system work?

Tom Dewey charged that the New Deal flunks all three tests. His bill of particulars :

"For twelve years the New Deal has treated us to constant bickering, quarreling and backbiting by the most . . . incompetent people who ever held public office. We must not trust our future to such people as Harry Hopkins, Madame Perkins and Harold Ickes. Certainly America can do better. . . . But we can never do better under the New Deal. . . ."

Tom Dewey once again recalled the long history of New Deal internecine quarrels, pointing out that they went all the way back to the NRA. He asked: "What kind of a Government is this that even a war cannot make it sober down and go to work?

"This Administration has lived on conflict. They plan it that way." He read aloud from one of the President's Executive Orders, which said that the Secretary of Agriculture and the War Food Administrator "shall each have authority to exercise any and all of the powers vested in the other." Said Dewey: "Mr. Roosevelt gives two men the same powers and then turns them loose to fight about it."

Undismayed by Democratic criticism of his successful campaign-by-quotation, Tom Dewey answered with a stinger. He threw in for the voters a quote from Franklin Roosevelt's great & good friend Winston Churchill. In 1937, Winston Churchill had said:

"The Washington Administration has waged so ruthless a war on private enterprise that the United States . . . is actually at the present moment leading the world back into the trough of depression. . . . Those who are keeping the flag of peace and free government flying in the old world have almost the right to ask that their comrades in the new world should . . . set an example of strength and stability."

Said Tom Dewey: "But Mr. Roosevelt ignored the warning."

Then Tom Dewey tried to convince the voters that the Administration's foreign policy is dangerously vague and weak. But many millions of U.S. voters feel that any talk about foreign policy is necessarily baffling and complicated. This is how Dewey got his point across at St. Louis:

"The New Deal's record at home is one long chapter of failure. But some people still tell us: 'We agree that the New Deal is a failure at home but its foreign policies are very good.' Let me ask you: can an administration which is so disunited and unsuccessful at home be any better abroad? Can an administration which is filled with quarreling and backbiting where we can see it be any better abroad where we cannot see it?"

This was the kind of talk any voter could understand.

*With Chief Speechwriter Elliott Bell.

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