TOM DEWEY: POLITICIAN IN GREASE PAINT

...This is due in part to his practice of making deals with underlings, whereby they would squeal and then go free—so that Dewey might catch the headlines with the conviction of a big name...

...There is an unmistakable odor of greasepaint about every move he makes, be it as trivial as lighting a cigarette with deliberate, practiced gestures or as significant as holding up the announcement oi his Presidential candidacy for the dramatic effect that will come with a convention stampede to "draft" him...

...Suddenly allergic to racket-busting, Dewey refused...

...The fresh young gang-busting District Attorney of 1940 has, for the past year and a half, been playing an entirely different role—that of the thoughtful, dignified, middle-aged state executive...

...My plume on high, my flag unfurled, I rode away to right the world...

...Come out, you dogs, and fight!' said 7, And wept there was but once to die...

...For instance, as special prosecutor, he made no secret of drama plainly designed to catch the popular eye...

...Suppose, then, Dewey—one way or another—should roll up enough votes this Fall to enter the White House in January...

...Gubernatorial Record: Peanuts His relations with the legislature, although they have recently begun to sour a trifle because of the Governor's high-handedness, were for many months the beneficiary of a prolonged honeymoon between the Republican law-makers and their first Republican Governor in 20 years...

...Never before has a probable nominee been so cordially disliked by most of the leaders of his own party —who helped build him to his present strength simply as the best bulwark against worse-hated Willkie, who have seen their biggest bugaboo disappear into Wisconsin air, and who now, like Frankenstein, feel impotent to stop the mechanical man of their own making...

...Moreover, Dewey shrewdly forbade his assistants ever to whisper so much as a word to the press...

...Hence too his well-known antipathy to unposed or informal photographs, his mania for looking exactly right when the shutter clicks...

...Highways and most other public works could not be built for lack of materials, and this not only saved money but did away with the commonest breeding-ground of graft...

...When Dewey became Governor, an investigation was under way, started by Governor Lehman, of racketeering in the Hod Carriers Union in the conf4~uction of an aquaduct to New York City...

...Much has been made in the press of Dewey's year and a half in Albany...

...Meet Tom Dewey...

...Although the cases which he argued in person were comparatively few, throughout the nation his name became a household word, a symbol against vice, an ill-concealed synonym for every gang-buster of radio or screen...

...His public statements include such gems as: "We shall have our freedom so long as we are all free...

...His Gang Buster Phase .But Dewey's insistence on theatrical effect is by no means limited to personal foibles...

...There was also Prosecutor Dewey's well-known flippancy with civil liberties, which gives the shivers today to many who envision trouble along that line after the war...

...It was as a Chief Assistant U. S. Attorney, then as special prosecutor of rackets for New York County, and finally as Manhattan's elected District Attorney, that he found, loved, and made the most of the center of the stage...

...What sort of President would he be...

...Hence all the publicity out of his office came straight from the boss's mouth—and somehow the boss was always the central character in the lurid tales he told of crime and punishment...

...Dewey had a way of gilding his activities with an aura of melodrama plainly designed to catch the popular eye...

...Wicks happily: "There's no friction . . . Dewey don't allow it...

...Why...

...It is rather the superficial caution of a man afraid of making the slightest slip, of a man with a constant sense of playing to an audience...

...His entire'career to date has been in essence a one-man play...

...That these orders are subject to easy abuse, being signed by judges blindly and in batches, contributes to the common conjecture in both Albany and New York City today that Dewey's agents are likely to be listening in on any telephone conversation dealing with important political affairs...

...Well, Westchester County is a Republican stronghold...

...Dewey's Political Philosophy It happens too that, last Fall, the Hod Carriers and other affiliated A.F...

...Furthermore, Dewey's predilection for wire-tapping is on public record...

...He was nothing much, scholastically or extra-curricularly at the University of Michigan, although he did discover the fine baritone voice that was later to mesmerize juries and radio audiences (and although he played the role, in a college opera, of a conspirator who was plotting to overthrow the king and seize the throne...

...he is largely responsible for New York's present law, which smiles on this sly practice provided the prosecutor gets a court order permitting it...

...And there were New York taxpayers who were bothered by the fact that a large part of two of the four years he spent as District Attorney, on the public payroll every minute, was devoted to the purely personal pursuit of two other offices: the Governorship in 1938, when Lehman barely beat him out at the polls...

...It might then read: Any little boy, even though he never really grows up, even though he carries into chronological maturity a second-rate mind and a complete absence of intellectual courage or conviction, may become President—if only he is sufficiently smooth, sufficiently shrewd, and sufficiently ambitious...

...Actually, his performance, though smooth and even competent, has been neither so difficult nor so flawless as he has managed to make it appear to those a little way out from the footlights...

...Or: "We must be prepared as a nation when victory comes to assume our rightful place among nations...

...He was nothing much at Columbia Law School, where classmates of his remember him, if at all, as ambitious, arrogant, and thoroughly mediocre...

...He has played it so well that Dewey the Doughty Dragon-Killer has been almost forgotten—and that the bitter denunciations of the man as a "potential fascist," a "dangerous adventurer," which were heard in all sorts of circles four years ago, have simmered down to an occasional bleat from a rabid Rooseveltian, frightened by Dewey's mounting popularity across the country...

...In several ways, the pride of Owosso, Michigan, (where the Boy was born, in 1902) is a political freak...

...The plain and explanatory fact about Dewey—the key to his character and the best guide to an understanding of the way he works—is that Dewey is essentially an actor, who has developed from the slightly ham actor of 1940 and before into an actor of consummate skill...

...The special grand jury^ operating originally only in Orange County, found that the trail of corruption led into Westchester County and asked Dewey for authority and funds :to follow the smell of the rat into Westchester...

...He is no longer the impudent, bantam-sure "Buster" of four years back, whose chief appeal to the country at large was best symbolized in a verse written long before by Dorothy Parker: "When I was young and bold and strong Oh, right was right, and wrong was wrong...

...Which was not entirely fortuitous...

...As the Saturday Evening Post succinctly put it: "There have been no reform issues at Albany during Dewey's term...

...And it is not without significance that two of his earliest supporters in Republican ranks were Alf Landon and Herbert Hoover...

...He blew open the loan-shark racket, the policy racket, and rackets which had barnacled such otherwise respectable industries as baking, trucking, restaurants, poultry, and the peddling of used bricks...

...His proposal to put the independent State labor boards under a Dewey-appoint-ed industrial commissioner brought a howl from the unions and was quickly dropped...

...Yet his political philosophy, such as it is, and his personal philosophy as well, are perhaps best summed up in an unwittingly two-edged remark he once made: "No one," said Thomas Edmund Dewey, "has ever yet found a successful substitute for individual ambition...

...Circumstances have conspired with Dewey to make his job an easy one...

...Briefly, he would be a technically able administrator, a master at the petty and the superficial, a dodger of tough issues, a weakling in the face of real trouble, and the antithesis of a statesman...

...The war boom was bringing in big taxes and had almost abolished the relief problem...

...He has a habit of sliding...

...But there is little doubt that Dewey had advance knowledge of the results of a Gallup poll which appeared three days later and counted 61 per cent of the American public behind an Anglo-American alliance...

...His appointments, by and large, have been good and he has handled his subordinates effectively, as in freely delegating responsibility for all but the final Yes or No...

...For without an inside tip-off on what the public wants to hear—and he often uses a corps of professional pollsters to find out for him—Dewey is rarely articulate in a meaningful way...

...Many of the rackets he went after were merely scotched, not killed, and are still going- strong today under slightly different auspices...

...BUT, for all the glamor and even the achievement, there are blots on Dewey's record as prosecutor...

...B'ut the accomplishments of his Administration to date, for all their listing and boosting in publicity releases, do not add up to peanuts...

...Cautious" is a word that has often been applied to Dewey, but his caution is never that of the deep and careful thinker...

...His policies, which Raymond Clapper once called "as mysterious as love", and which others • have labeled "weather-vane views," remain as substantial and easy to pin down as a jelly-fish...

...Labor problems had become the headache of the Federal Government ; patronage problems were puny because of widespread employment...

...Of course, being a good Republican, he is vaguely in favor of laissez-faire, decentralization, lower taxes, balanced budgets—and against bureaucracy...

...Some lay their strange uneasiness about Dewey to an impression that, as a public figure, he is utterly synthetic, lacking in solid substance, built up on the outside instead of developed from the inside...

...Said State Sen...

...Dewey has always been an efficient executive who knows how to use (and appropriate personal credit for) the talents of the men working under him...

...For Dewey has matured—not in his mind or his heart but in the practice of politics—since the spanking he took at .Willkie's hands in the Republican convention of 1940...

...YET those who come in contact with Dewey still confess to a queasy feeling about him which is hard to put the finger on...

...From the beginning, Dewey had a set-up, a cinch...

...AND so far as the former Fearless Racket-Buster's courage and convictions are concerned, one incident from among several is especially revealing...

...There is no denying that Dewey, for all the trimmings and the play-acting, was an effective prosecutor...

...He does not speak impromptu...

...Hence his meticulous care with his speeches on which he spends hour after hour of preparation—not in thinking and writing, for most of both is done for him by others, but in timing his words to the second, in planning and marking on the manuscript his emphases and his pauses for effect, and in elocutionary rehearsal...

...Typical are minor tax revisions, minor pay increases for State employes, a couple of new Commissions, and the touted reorganization of the Department of Mental Hygiene, set off by a sanitation scandal in a State hospital— a scandal which Dewey is said to have let grow worse before he acted, simply in order to ensure a front* page story...

...and the Presidency in 1940 until he lost the nomination to Willkie...

...Don't Underestimate Dewey And by all means don't underestimate Tom Dewey as a candidate, even against The Champ...

...Others, noting his new and not inconsiderable surface charm, but sensing his complete lack of warmth and humor and earthiness, say they just don't trust the man...

...away from issues that threaten to cause trouble...

...If, as now seems not too unlikely, Thomas E. Dewey should become the 33rd President, the old adage would be imbued with new and still greater hope...

...He took over a state which had been soundly run for 20 years by Al Smith, F.D.R., and Lehman—a state with a surplus of $69,000,000...

...And among those public officials were a Republican State Senator (to whose campaign the union had generously contributed) and a Republican State leader (who had received at least $2,500 from the union "for legal services rendered...

...Never before has the run-away leading candidate for a major party nomination publicly and solemnly purported, up to a few weeks before the convention, to be no candidate at all—while his henchmen all over the country corral delegates with his unquestioned consent, and while he himself spends a day or two a week conferring in a private hotel suite (at The Roosevelt, New York City) with party bigwigs who scarcely come from afar to discuss with him the affairs of the State of New York...

...The old accusations, never disproved, include the faking of grand jury subpoenas, illegal searches and seizures, and the holding of potential witnesses incommunicado in prison at impossibly high bail, under the guise of "protective custody...

...In fact, here lies his sole qualification for the Presidency...

...The one notable exception to this in recent years was his dramatic declaration for a postwar alliance with Britain, which (characteristically for Dewey)] stole the show at the Republican Governors' conference at Mackinac...

...Never before has a would-be head of the nation essayed the political heights, not by declaring himself on important national issues, but by treating them—¦ and the electorate—with a contemptuous combination of silence, evasion, and double-talk...

...And the grand jury, in its report, referred to "evidence in its possession showing transactions between public officials and the unions involved...

...When his committee to look into racial discrimination came through with a couple of dynamite-laden bills instead of a routine report, he effectively ditched the bills by urging the appointment of another committee...

...For instance, as special prosecutor, he made no secret of the fact that his offices in the Woolworth Building were equipped with secret entrances, sound-proofing, frosted-glass windows, a private elevator, a tap-proof telephone cable, and 24-hour-a-day police protection...

...of L. unions strongly supported Dewey's candidate, Hanley, in the election of a lieutenant-governor...

...Thanks largely to a brilliant young corps of assistants whom he bossed with an able and iron hand, he jailed such unsavory public characters as the gambling ex-bootlegger, Waxey Gordon, the top tycoon of Manhattan bordellos, Lucky Luciano, and—on a second try—the grafting Tammany politician,, Jimmy Hines...

...One way or another, Dewey is known as a vote-getter...

...Even as Governor, Dewey has not succeeded in shedding his nickname of "Tapping Tom...