Always the Attack

Tom Dewey stayed on the attack. He kept his opposition scurrying through the voluminous records of twelve years, supplying the missing parts from quotations which Dewey had cited as indicative of New Deal thinking. At times the whole Government seemed busy justifying its long past; the White House mimeographs rolled out their "corrections" of the Dewey quotations.

Sample: Dewey had cited a paragraph in an official report by the President's uncle, Frederic Delano, which favored keeping the boys in the Army, as an example of the Washington thinking that led to General Lewis Hershey's unfortunate remark that "We can keep people in the Army about as cheaply as we can create an agency for them when they are out." In fact, the full text of "Uncle Freddie's" report ended up by recommending speedy demobilization. But while the Democrats were getting to their feet to shout "I object," Prosecutor Dewey was attacking on another front.

Last week he made his first full-scale assault on Franklin Roosevelt's foreign policy. His audience was the New York Herald Tribune's, annual forum, which the President had declined to address. Tom Dewey reiterated his approval of Dumbarton Oaks "because in this matter we have followed the American way of doing things--[leaving] it to the State Department where it belongs." But, said Dewey, "to the extent that we leave our international relations to the personal, secret diplomacy of the President, our efforts to achieve a lasting peace will fail. In many directions today our foreign policy gives cause for deep anxiety.

"Even in the earliest days of the Republic," he said, "the United States wielded a moral force in excess of its military power." Now Candidate Dewey called a roll of European problems where the U.S. does not seem to be wielding a great moral force:

Poland. "The restoration of free Poland is the outstanding symbol of what we are fighting for. . . . Mr. Roosevelt undertook to handle this matter personally and secretly with Mr. Stalin. Mr. Roosevelt has not yet even secured Russian recognition of those whom we consider to be the true Government of Poland." (This invited another spanking from the Soviet official press, which had already called Dewey a provocateur for his Pulaski Day address--TIME, Oct. 23.)

Italy, said Dewey, is suffering mass unemployment, hunger and despair. "The Italian people deserve something better than the improvised, inefficient administration which personal New Deal government is giving them today."

Germany. When Germany was invaded, there was still no completed plans for its occupation, said Dewey, although General Eisenhower had warned last January that the U.S. would have to deal with that problem in 1944. And when President Roosevelt met with Churchill at Quebec to discuss such plans, he took along not Cordell Hull but the Secretary of the Treasury, "whose qualifications on military and international affairs are still a closely guarded military secret. . . . Germany's Propaganda Minister Goebbels has seized upon the whole episode to terrify the Germans into fanatical resistance. On the basis of our Treasury's ill-conceived proposals the German people were told that a program of destruction was in order for them if they surrendered. Almost overnight the morale of the German people seemed wholly changed. Now they are fighting with the frenzy of despair. We are paying in blood. . . ."

France. "Mr. Roosevelt's well-known personal antipathy for General de Gaulle, [his] persistant refusal to grant recognition to the De Gaulle Government of France is contributing to the increasing civilian chaos behind our lines...."

Rumania signed a peace treaty ("no mere armistice") negotiated " 'by the authority of the Government of the U.S.S.R., the United Kingdom and the U.S. by Melinosky [sic].' That treaty was signed by a representative of Soviet Russia acting on behalf of the U.S."

All this, concluded Tom Dewey, is "What happens when a President insists upon handling foreign affairs on the basis of personal, secret diplomacy. The result is today that no one knows what our foreign policy is with respect to Poland, France, Germany, Rumania or other countries of Europe, or for that matter South America or China. We have no hint of what commitments we have made. . . ."

To Pittsburgh. Next day, the State Department wheeled up its mimeographs to reply to the Dewey charge. The flaw it found in Dewey's case was that the Rumanian surrender terms were a military armistice, not a treaty; the U.S. had been consulted at all stages.

Tom Dewey felt well satisfied with his attack on Roosevelt's foreign policy. He moved on to Pittsburgh.

There, as in Seattle, he sought to prove that labor's great gains had begun under a Republican administration--with the Railway Labor Act of 1926. "There's no reason why our social trend should not continue. There's no reason except one--the New Deal--tired out, and too long in office. It distrusts people. It treats social gains of the Nineteen Thirties as its own private property. It wants to hold office forever in stalemated idleness. I say that social gains are not the property of any party."

Then Tom Dewey quickened his attack: "The New Deal has posed for years as the friend-of labor. But today it has turned collective bargaining into political bargaining." He recited the 13-month struggle of railroad workers for a pay increase, after which "Mr. Roosevelt seized the railroads to forestall a national disaster which he himself had prepared. And after he did that he graciously gave the very wage increase to which the railway workers had been entitled for over a year.

"Now political power wasn't the only profit in this case. There was political cash, too. . . . The railway workers were forced to hire someone who knew his way around the White House. So the Railroad Brotherhoods had to hire Mr. Roosevelt's third-term national chairman--that eminent authority on Belgian paving blocks, Boss Flynn of The Bronx. . . . The price of his services to the railroad workers of America was $25,000."

"In Its Youth." This was the racket-buster speaking; this was what the crowds liked to hear. From organized labor Dewey shifted to the "whitecollar workers" under the New Deal. He told how a friend had spent 15 months appealing his request for increased pay before the New Deal at last decided it "by the old kangaroo method of splitting the difference." He continued: "It's been the same with millions of other white-collar workers. The New Deal . . . did some good things in its youth, but now it seeks to live on its past. It's the inevitable end of a philosophy which sees no real future for America."

Three times now Dewey had carried the fight to crucial Pennsylvania. Heartened by his latest reception, Tom Dewey returned to Albany, then once again set out on the road, to Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Chicago. He seemed coolly confident.

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