High Roads & Dead Pigeons

Tom Dewey, highball in hand, was all smiles as he circulated among the distinguished Republicans gathered at. Washington's Mayflower Hotel for the annual Lincoln Day dinner. The rumored boycott of his speech had failed to materialize, and there were no outward signs of the resentment some Republicans feel toward their losing candidate.

Tom Dewey was at pains to disarm any suspicion that he still had ambitions for the presidency. He was glad to be in Washington for a visit, he declared. "At one time last year, I expected to come for a longer stay. I was under the impression, which was shared by a great many others, that I had a clear call to duty. But last November it turned out to be some other kind of noise. Instead ... I have been graduated at a comparatively early age to the role of elder statesman, which someone has aptly defined as a politician who is no longer a candidate for office."

Living Example. Then the man whose campaign slogan had been unity bluntly declared: "The Republican Party is split wide open. It has been split wide open for years, but we have tried to gloss it over." He added: "I am a living example that that doesn't work." What Dewey had in mind seemed to be a purge.

The Republican platform, Dewey pointed out, declared the party's support for broader social security, for public housing and public power, for farm price supports. Said Dewey: "We have in our party some fine, high-minded, patriotic people who honestly oppose . . . such programs. [These people] ought to ... try to get elected in a typical American community and see what happens to them. But they ought not to do it as Republicans.

"If, as a party, we try to go back to the 19th Century, or even to the 1920s, you can bury the Republican Party as the deadest pigeon in the country . . . What we ought to do is to stop bellyaching about the past . . . and start making it everlastingly clear to the country where we stand and why."

The applause was less than deafening. House Minority Leader Joe Martin pronounced it "a good, fighting, constructive speech." Snorted Michigan's Representative Paul Shafer: "The Republican Party's No. 1 ghost has walked again." Ohio's Senator John Bricker, who was Dewey's running mate in 1944, concluded: "The party's going to be all right. All dinners help."

High Center. Where did the Republican Party stand? The response to Tom Dewey indicated that the question was far from settled. Two days later in Detroit, Michigan's Senator Arthur Vandenberg tried his hand.

Vandenberg spoke with wit and without rancor. He paid good-natured tribute to Harry Truman as "the most famous one-man tornado in the history of political hurricanes," twitted him for spending "six soap-box months telling the American people how the Republicans had ruined them," then opening his message to Congress with: ". . . the State of the Union is good."

Vandenberg wanted the G.O.P. to take "the high center road." Said he: "I want the Republican Party to be 'conservative' enough to save every time-tried fundamental upon which the unique and precious character of Americanism depends ... I want the Republican Party to be liberal enough to march with the times, to dare new answers to new problems, and to use the power and strength and initiative of government to help citizens to help themselves when they confront problems beyond their resources and control." Both Vandenberg's and Dewey's speeches were attempts to pin a label on the party's philosophy, instead of letting the party's deeds earn their own label.

Vandenberg spoke out of the deep good humor of a man without political worries. Before the speech, he had announced that he was retiring from public life in 1952. Said Vandenberg: "By then, I will have been in the Senate for 25 years, and I will be 68 years old. This is my last go at it."

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