The Battle of Omaha

The Republican National Committee marched into snowbound Omaha last week, bitter, bewildered and quarrelsome. They had come to find some constructive answers to the lessons of five consecutive presidential defeats. Instead, they plunged "angrily into a vicious, bare-knuckle denunciation of Candidate Tom Dewey and his hand-picked national chairman, Congressman Hugh Scott Jr., of Philadelphia.

A $10 dinner of breast of capon on ham soothed no one; neither did Senator Kenneth Wherry, Nebraska undertaker and now the Republican floor leader, who wound up a luncheon speech by pleading: "Let's smile right now." The committeemen and women just couldn't see anything to smile about. There was a rebellion in the committee and the rebels were out to get Hugh Scott.

Back to Garfield. Stubborn Chairman Scott fought back. To those who blamed the party's 1948 disaster on him, Scott let it be known that he had a secret weapon: recordings of telephone conversations during the campaign, in which many state leaders had been put on record as approving Dewey's campaign strategy. "Blackmail," cried his opponents. Said Scott, scrambling metaphors right & left: "Age must have its fling. The cliffhangers are making a last-ditch fight . . . My view is that the party has a choice of going back to Garfield or forward to victory." At 48, Hugh Scott was the youngest of the Republican committee brasshats and one of the few with a World War II record.

But this was no clear-cut struggle between "cliffhangers" and party progressives. Among the rebels were ex-Willkieite liberals and supporters of Harold Stassen, as well as Bob Taft's and Bertie McCormick's old guard. Hugh Scott's own support came not only from Dewey liberals, but also from the errand boys of Pennsylvania's 86-year-old Boss Joe Grundy, the oldest guard of them all.

Through three furious days of politicking, not one committeeman had any real praise for Tom Dewey. Even Hugh Scott, fighting to save his own neck, scrubbed frantically to wash off the Dewey colors. Dewey, he cried, "should not, could not, and will not be a candidate in 1952 . . . We've suffered because we tried to me-too the New Deal. I announce here and now that there's an end to that." No one else had a good word for me-tooism either: most everyone talked as if the party only needed to have been forthrightly conservative to have won the election.

Mere Puppets. The rebels insisted on a showdown. They picked Minnesota's 236-lb. Roy Dunn, who calls himself "a country politician," to oppose Scott. For 4 1/2 bitter hours, speaker after speaker rose to fling recriminations at Dewey and Scott. West Virginia's Walter Hallanan opened up for the prosecution: "An election was lost because of stupidity, arrogance and cockiness . . . We've been mere puppets."

Arizona's wizened, choleric Clarence Pudington Kelland took it from there. Said Kelland: "Scott . . . is a symbol of the ineptitude and of the betrayal of the Republican Party . . . He was only a ghost wandering around looking for a campaign to haunt." Iowa's Harrison Spangler, onetime national chairman, was next:

"We have lost the confidence of the people. We are the subject of ridicule on every street corner. We are the laughing stock, because we didn't fight. If we endorse that campaign, the party will just evaporate from any position of importance in this country."

When the oratory was all over, the balloting came. By a vote of 54 to 50, Hugh Scott hung on to his job. Afterwards, the men who had denounced him, and whom he had denounced as "a clique of scheming men," decided to make his re-election unanimous, as a vote of "confidence." But the whole performance left the G.O.P. no nearer to the comeback trail than ever. The committeemen had demonstrated some of the things wrong with the party; not one of them seemed to have any real idea how to set it to rights.

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