Eminentoes/Check-out Time
Brookhiser, Richard
there is such a thing as benevolent Trotskyism; or that by a process of self-mystification one can create out of nothing a Third Force, a Third Camp and thereby avoid having to make nasty political...
...The response from the freeze partisans was predictable...
...And Reagan was the loser in this, since his evidence was not conclusive in the minds of reporters...
...But he didn't practice it, either...
...This first problem leads to the second, namely that the charge of Communist involvement goes largely unexamined...
...Still, Dewey's life is interesting, even for what it does not teach us, and Smith lays it exhaustively (and exhaustingly) before us...
...When Dewey arrived in New York, millions were pouring down Tammany's maw each year...
...In the process, however, they reduced politics to job seeking...
...Dewey gave him a bicycle, with the warning that if he fell off it would be taken away for a year...
...The mere voicing of the word "McCarthyism" appears to have shut off debate and put the accuser in the dock...
...Richard Brookhiser is editor at National Review...
...More rarely, you find those who did not like Ike...
...Thomas Dewey, three times governor of New York, twice Republican presidential nominee, and execrated no more, is from another era...
...In vain...
...The problem here is twofold...
...Then, the matter was dropped, except for a few columns that ridiculed Reagan for citing a Reader's Digest piece...
...The morning after, she asked if Harry would come to New York, or should she go to Washington...
...Men and women all over the world are on the march, physically, intellectually and spiritually...
...Dewey and his lawyers sifted mounds of receipts and shelves of ledgers...
...But exaggerated notions of dignity paralyzed him, and he fell back on bromides...
...One is that busing of schoolchildren for purposes of racial integration is unpopular, even among blacks, and counterproductive, promoting more separation of white and black students in public schools...
...Tammany Hall," declared Dewey's editor-father, "represents all that is evil in govern ment...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1983 Five years later, the Iron Curtain fell...
...And Dewey...
...Willkie's claptrap sold a million copies...
...by Fred Barnes 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1983...
...But not this time...
...Certainly the recent experience of the New York Times will not encourage any reporter interested in examining a matter of alleged Communist involvement or influence...
...If Dewey had shown a little of his wife's spunk-or his own: in private, he called Earl Warren, his running mate, a "big dumb Swede"-he would have won going away...
...Fiorello LaGuardia beat Tammany at the polls...
...Six months later, a glee ers...
...The incentive of humiliating the President, of proving him wrong, often serves to spur reporters...
...This was one major difference between Dewey's era and ours...
...Schultz wanted to murder him...
...Secretary of State...
...All in all, a fair collection of positions...
...Social scientists, for whom acculturation (never mind how or to what) is the summum bonum, are apt to look on Tammany and similar institutions with a mild eye these days...
...The political criminals worked in cahoots with desperadoes of a more mundane sort...
...FDR simply wanted to destroy him...
...The White House was half-heartedly pushed to provide documentation for Reagan's accusation, which it did by pointing to articles from The American Spectator, Commentary, and Reader's Digest, along with some State Department Reports...
...There are those who remember the hectic days when everyone seemed to be Birching (perhaps they Birched themselves), those who still wonder who promoted Peress...
...He hedged no more than any other pol before Pearl OLD FOOLS There are some ideas that the mainstream press just can't digest...
...They are resolved, as we must be, that there is no more place for imperialism...
...Dewey rode his fame to Albany in 1942 (after a near miss four years earlier), and brought to the governor's office the same aggressive orderliness he had shown at the prosecutor's table...
...Robert Taft, the leader of the Old Right, opposed NATO and postwar aid to Great Britain, and wanted a twenty percent ceiling on the proportion of American troops that could be stationed abroad...
...When Dewey spoke of humane Republicanism or pragmatic liberalism, he thus meant something quite different from Nelson Rockefeller or Jacob Javits, who used such talk to steal bases for the omnicompetent state...
...Harbor about America's entry into the war...
...Still another is that Communists might be hyperactive and sometimes effective in the United States in promoting their interests and discrediting their enemies...
...Richard Norton Smith, author of Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, * is unaware of his subject's datedness...
...They are beginning to know that man's welfare throughout the world is interdependent...
...When they did look abroad, it was exclusively to the Far East...
...Or is the nuclear freeze campaign the grass roots movement most reporters seem to think it is...
...Dewey was an establishment internationalist-not the best of all possible worldviews, maybe, but what else was there in the GOP...
...This John Anderson of the producing class took a world tour in 1943, and wrote a book, One World, that would have done honor to Eleanor Roosevelt: *Simon and Schuster, $22.50...
...Attorney, special prosecutor, and District Attorney, worsted the mob in court...
...Have Communistfront groups infiltrated the movement...
...The ful Truman was waving the front page headlined "Dewey Defeats Truman...
...When at last the protege reached the office the older man had missed, he offered his patron a variety of high posts-ambassador...
...The Dewey-Stassen debate took place during the Oregon primary in 1948...
...Thomas's grandfather attended the first Republican rally in 1854, and the Owosso Times, the newspaper he founded and passed on to the family, lectured Michiganders in passionate tones on the wickedness of Democrats and drink...
...a campaign in which the writer has been pilloried as a CIA agent, a plagiarist, a near-congenital...
...not less...
...He supported, in the dawn of the Cold War, the Marshall Plan and aid to Chiang Kai-shek, and had averagethat is, sub-Willkieite, though still inflated-hopes for the UN...
...Reagan doesn't necessarily stand When sweet smiling Ike was ready to pitch Nixon overboard because of a trumped-up scandal, Dewey urged him to go on television...
...In twelve years, he managed to cut taxes, balance the budget, and inaugurate a series of new projects-a thruway, a state university...
...I like you," he once told Rockefeller, "but I don't think I can afford you...
...But that does not excuse the failure of the mainstream press-the big newspapers, the newsmagazines, the TV networks-to look into the charge...
...The talismanic words "waste, fraud, and abuse" actually meant something then...
...El to gain by a press probe into these questions...
...He was born in 1902, in Owosso, Michigan, in the heart of the lands where to be on time is to be fifteen minutes late...
...There is no question but that the Soviet Union saw an advantage in a peace movement around the idea of a nuclear freeze...
...In the organization of some of the big demonstrations, the one in New York, and so forth, there is no question about foreign agents that were sent to help instigate 'and help create and keep such a movement going...
...not everything one might have wished, but better than we actually got...
...The enemy is neither the White House nor democratic capitalism...
...He urged a stronger Navy, for which Roosevelt mocked him...
...He provided, it is true, no bulwark in principle against the free-for-all liberalism of his successors...
...Perhaps he was not entirely happy there...
...Government had been so slipshod that it was possible, with strict efficiency and common honesty, to lessen the taxpayer's burden while increasing services...
...Another is that the demise of authoritarian, anti-Communist regimes in the Third World usually produces repression instead of liberation, as in China, Vietnam, Iran, and Nicaragua...
...Everything that was bought, sold, or serviced in -New York-from artichokes to laundrywas traded by a racket...
...Nothing was too tedious or trivial, and nothing was sacred...
...There is plenty of evidence," he told report Fred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...The other great difference between then and now concerns America's role in the world, and America's conception of its role...
...After the war, the same people developed a lively interest in Communist subversion, without, for the most part, a corresponding understanding of global strategy...
...It's been published by some of your fraternity...
...and with each job went a letter of marque for fiscal piracy...
...they tapped phones and cold-shouldered the- press...
...He calls his book a biography of the "maker of the modern Republican Party, " which is quite wrong...
...Dewey pere was not so far off...
...Hollywood made movies about him...
...On several occasions-and most extensively in his nationally televised press conference last November 12he has charged that Soviet agents have been active in stirring up the nuclear freeze movement...
...Dewey, as U.S...
...Unfortunately, the reaction of the press was no less predictable...
...The gist was that Kosinski was the victim of a 17-year smear campaign engineered by Poland's Communist government...
...Why should he stoop...
...Returning to the tactics of McCarthyism," said Morton Halperin, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Center for National Security Studies...
...Owosso couldn't keep him, but it kept him from the White House...
...So-called, because before the war, they were Anglophobes more than anything else (Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune accused Dewey of making "the pilgrimage to Downing Street by way of Wall Street...
...it ended Stassen's presidential hopes, which were then serious (a third difference between that era and this), and guaranteed Dewey's nomination...
...On election eve, Frances Dewey' told her husband how much she looked forward to sleeping with the President...
...For his third birthday, Mrs...
...Tammany's connections with the mob were fraternal and intimate...
...Harold Stassen took the affirmative, seconded by Joseph McCarthy...
...He played his last important political role in 1952, helping Eisenhower beat his old rival Taft,, and pushing a young and coming senator, Richard Nixon, for the second slot...
...O CHECK-OUT TIME This takes us back, conservativefeud-wise...
...For half a year, Thomas Edmund Dewey had been rated a sure thing for the highest post of all...
...He has accepted, as Eliot said of Milton and Charles I, the constitution of silence...
...The Deweys had been partisans from day one...
...Indeed, the superficial evidence is far more compelling about a Communist role in the peace movement in Europe than in America...
...Last November 7, the Times ran in its Sunday Arts and Leisure section an extraordinarily long (6,500 words) and well-researched article on Jerzy Kosinski, the Polish emigre novelist...
...The enemy is the head of the Soviet secret police who, in changing jobs, has taken over half a world and brought George Orwell's frightening prophecies into a reality earlier than had been expected...
...One anecdote of that famous upset has escaped Smith's care, so I pass it along...
...On Dewey's left, Wendell Willkie, the down-home Wall Street lawyer, a fatuous narcissist who barnstormed his way to the Republican nomination in 1940, and was still a contender in 1944...
...Perhaps there is little to it...
...In March 1971, rebellious Cabinet members planned to approach Dewey to sell him (and through him, Nixon) on the idea of replacing Haldeman with Melvin Laird...
...In fact, he might turn out to be embarrassed, politically at least, by his accusation, should a rigorous inquiry into the freeze movement prove the charge of Communist influence to be false, misleading, or overstated...
...But before they could meet with him, he was found in a hotel room, dead of a heart attack: fully dressed, bags packed, hat resting neatly on his suitcases: the last time he would fail to affect us...
...Have KGB agents been active in the United States in the freeze movement or is that a canard...
...In return for payoffs and assorted political favors (Dutch Schultz and his gang served as Democratic poll watchers), complaisant district attorneys gave the lampreys a free ride, and they bled the city ashen...
...So it usually ignores them...
...he left for New York City to study law at age 21, and never looked back...
...first is that the President alone seems to have been put on trial, forced to buttress his charge with irrefutable evidence or fall guilty of McCarthyism...
...or that by a process of self-mystification one can create out of nothing a Third Force, a Third Camp and thereby avoid having to make nasty political choices...
...If today's GOP has any makers, they are Clif White, William Rusher, and the late John Ashbrook, founders of the Draft Goldwater movement...
...The underworld's exactions were estimated to have raised the cost of living twenty percent...
...He did, and it was...
...He brought to his- task all the energies he had once focused on not falling off bicycles...
...In short, it is time for Irving Howe to dissent from Dissent and to seek his fulfillment, not in rewriting history or dreaming up new strategies for old politicocultural frauds, but to free himself from a faith which, in his "intellectual autobiography," has driven him to forget his chosen vocation as scholar...
...Chief Justice...
...Do they have any influence...
...The charge was simply not taken seriously enough to warrant an investigation...
...Nixon gave the Checkers speech, and saved his political life...
...After centuries of ignorant and dull compliance, hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe and Asia have opened the books...
...On Dewey's right stood the socalled isolationists...
...and the old machines did indeed take,boatloads of immigrants whom nobody particularly cared about and Americanize them...
...Hang around the right wing for a while, and you soon meet veterans who grunt, "I was for Barry when Irving Kristol/Jerry Falwell was still a socialist/preacher, and I'll be damned if I'm going to have my agenda set by any Public Interest/ Moral Majority...
...He came before the cusp...
...He opposed in public debate the resolution, "Shall the Communist party be outlawed in the United States...
...But the punctiliousness and workaholism of his home, particularly his mother, had been scrubbed into him as with a d\II.\1._1II by Richard Brookhiser bristle brush, never to be washed out...
...The crooks didn't stand a chance...
...Dewey represented, when it was still possible, a real middle of the roadmoderately paternalistic and genuinely frugal...
...From the men in his family, he received a conviction (the evangelical terminology seems appropriate) of the truth and justice of the GOP...
...President Reagan is among the latest to encounter this phenomenon...
...During the twenties, the city's budget increased sixteen times faster than the population...
Vol. 16 • February 1983 • No. 2
