U.S. Navy Department (December 29, 1943)
For Immediate Release
December 29, 1943
Navy medium bombers of Fleet Air Wing Two which raided Nauru on the morning of December 29 (West Longitude Date) destroyed an ammunition dump and started several fires. Several of our planes suffered minor damage. One Navy Liberator while on a search mission in the Marshalls on December 27 damaged a tanker.
The Pittsburgh Press (December 29, 1943)
Action taken only 18 hours before deadline for walkout and follows conference with Army’s rail boss
By Raymond Lahr, United Press staff writer
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Berlin reports big death toll in suburbs of Italian capital
By Phil Ault, United Press staff writer
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8th Army takes keystones of German line
By C. R. Cunningham, United Press staff writer
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Push close to airfields on New Britain
By Don Caswell, United Press staff writer
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His disavowal of ‘New Deal’ regarded as start of campaign
By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press staff writer
Roosevelt ordered to rest by doctor
Washington (UP) –
The White House announced today that President Roosevelt is suffering from a head cold and will remain in his presidential quarters today.His physician, RAdm. Ross T. McIntire, said the President has no fever, but he thought it best for him to stay away from his offices.
Washington (UP) –
President Roosevelt’s disavowal of the term “New Deal” as the administration’s reform trademark was widely regarded here today as the first important move toward a win-the-war fourth term campaign.
But others regarded his triumphant accounting of administration policies since 1933 as a reply to those critics who have accused Mr. Roosevelt of having lost interest in the reform era now that a war was underway.
The President tossed the term “New Deal” overboard in a casual conversation last week. He made it official at yesterday’s news conference during which he read a partially prepared statement to nearly 200 reporters who somehow felt they were participating in an historic occasion.
Fourth term drive?
He said the patient – the United States – is not wholly well yet and won’t be until the war is won.
He was asked:
Does all this add up to a fourth term?
The President replied:
Oh now – we are not talking about things like that now. You’re getting picayune. I know you won’t mind my saying that, but I have to say something like that.
His rejoinder recalled a similar set of circumstances three years ago when he was asked whether he would seek a third term. On that occasion he advised the inquiring reporter to go in a corner and put on a dunce cap.
Raises questions
Whatever the motive, the abandonment of the term “New Deal” after ten years of what has come to be called the New Deal-Democratic coalition raises some political questions. The coalition began to sag in the 1942 general elections and buckled badly in scattered contests this year.
Some of Mr. Roosevelt’s left-wing supporters have been intimating that he was running out on New Deal philosophers as well as terms. Some of his conservative party partners have been warning of political disaster unless Democrats dissociate themselves from the New Deal at once.
Senator Edwin C. Johnson (D-CO) said on Dec. 6:
The New Deal is through. If the Democratic Party persists in hanging on to its dead corpse, it will lose the Senate, the House and the governors of every Northern and Western state in the next election.
Guffey’s dispute
Southern politicians have been muttering for months. Their displeasure burst like shrapnel in the Senate this month against Senator Joseph F. Guffey (D-PA) who had offended them in his role of New Deal spokesman. It is significant that the Southern bitterness is against the “New Dealers” rather than against the administration as a whole or against the President himself.
New Dealer No. 1 in this town is Harry L. Hopkins, Mr. Roosevelt’s personal aide and confidante. There was speculation here today whether the President might be preparing to get him out of the country in the presidential campaign year. There would be precedent for that.
When Herbert C. Hoover was nearing the test of his second presidential campaign, he summarily removed from his Cabinet and sent to London as ambassador an old man who had been the prophet of prosperity until the Depression came and then had come to be regarded as a crippling political liability.
The old man was Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Mellon did not want to go. But he went.
Left-wing supporters of the administration began to be apprehensive after Mr. Roosevelt, refereeing a bout between Vice President Henry A. Wallace and Secretary of Commerce Jesse H. Jones, declared Mr. Jones the winner and stripped Mr. Wallace of all participation in the war effort. It was a rebuke rarely equaled.
The New Republic’s Washington columnist on Aug. 23 wrote:
The New Dealers who are not trying to apologize for the President are asking themselves whether Mr. Roosevelt again will become the champion of progressive government once the war is won.
New leadership
The Nation, liberal weekly, said on July 24 after the Jones-Wallace row:
The man who created the New Deal seems intent on destroying it before he leaves office in his flaccid retreat before the Bourbons of his own party. Isn’t it about time for labor and the left to look around for new leadership?
Similarly suspicious, the eighth annual convention of the CIO United Auto Workers on Oct. 7 voted to support a Roosevelt fourth term only on the condition that he took “an aggressive position against the foes of the New Deal.”
Davis flays Martin-Grundy-Pew faction in party supporting Duff for his position
By Kermit McFarland
A bitter battle for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator, at stake in the April 25 primary, today appeared virtually certain.
Senator James J. Davis practically announced his candidacy on a visit here in which he touched off a bristling attack on the factional leaders who plan to oppose him.
Backed by Governor Martin and the Grundy wing of the party, Attorney General James H. Duff of Carnegie is the leading probability as a candidate against Mr. Davis. While Mr. Duff has made no public statement, the Governor and the Grundy forces have been proceeding as though his candidacy were an accepted fact.
Local leadership
Locally Senator Davis’ campaign will be headed by County Controller Robert G. Woodside recently reelected to a fifth term; Sheriff Robert J. Corbett, C. J. McBride of the 31st Ward, long an organization stalwart, and the Young Republican group.
County Commissioner John S. Herron, also Republican County Chairman, will undoubtedly be among the leading backers of Mr. Duff.
Senator Davis said:
Reports indicate certain men and interests are pooling their personal wealth, their political positions and their personal influence to gain control of the processes of government.
Can hold whip hand
These forces are in position to collect enforced contributions from reluctant contributors. They can hold the whip hand of dismissal over many people, both in public and private employment. They are able to make concessions to, or to threaten reprisals upon many thousands of our citizens to support those whom these interests will designate.
Senator Davis named no names, but there was no disguising his targets – joseph R. Grundy, dean of the Old Guard and perpetually a Davis opponent, and Joseph N. Pew, perennial money prop of the Republican organization.
He denounced the “pernicious practice” of “spending vast, uncountable sums to control the selection and the election of candidates.” Their ability to spend and raise campaign funds has been the chief basis of power for both Mr. Grundy and Mr. Pew.
Pew guns for Davis
Mr. Pew has given no sign of his support of Mr. Duff, until now at least preferring Lieutenant Governor John C. Bell, but he appears to be more interested in licking Mr. Davis than in any other project. Mr. Bell is anxious to run for the Senate, but a three-way split is unlikely – it would only help Senator Davis.
Senator Davis, for the first time, was defeated when he sought the Republican nomination for Governor last May. This defeat has encouraged the Grundy-Martin forces in their efforts to unseat him, an effort in which they have previously failed three times.
Drastic action attributed by some to anger over union victory in mines case
By Fred W. Perkins, Pittsburgh Press staff writer
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New York (UP) –
The anti-Nazi motion picture, Watch on the Rhine, has been selected by New York film critics as the best picture of 1943, it was announced today.
Paul Lukas was voted the best actor of the year for his part in the picture and Ida Lupino was named as the best actress for her role in The Hard Way. Maj. George Stevens was cited for his direction of the film The More the Merrier.
A special award was voted the U.S. Army Signal Corps for its films, Why We Fight and Report From the Aleutians.
Tokyo, other enemy war confers will be bombed, but few expect end of war in next 12 months
By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard foreign editor
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Britons named naval and air commanders of Allied forces
By Joseph W. Grigg, United Press staff writer
London, England –
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Allied invasion command neared completion today with the announcement that two Britons, Adm. Sir Bertram Ramsay and Air Chf. Mshl. Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory – had been appointed naval and air commanders-in-chief respectively.
Another in the alternate series of announcements in London and Washington revealed that Gen. Eisenhower’s deputies for the naval and air phases of the European invasion would be British veterans renowned in their fields and tempered by long experience.
Helped at Salerno
Adm. Ramsay, an amphibious expert since early this century, supervised the Allied landings in Sicily and at the Salerno beaches of Italy, and took a prominent role in the planning of the entire Mediterranean campaign.
Marshal Leigh-Mallory has shouldered a large share of the responsibility for the organization of Britain’s fighter offensive for the past two years, and is an expert in the synchronization of fighting services. He laid out the aerial operations incident to the Dieppe attack.
Doolittle named
Balanced against the delegation of the two key posts to Britain were Gen. Eisenhower’s appointment as supreme commander and the assignment of Lt. Gen. Carl A. Spaatz as commander of U.S. Strategic Air Forces over Europe and Maj. Gen. James H. Doolittle to head U.S. air forces in Britain and as commander of the 8th Air Force.
Other members of Gen. Eisenhower’s new staff are: British Air Chf. Mshl. Sir Arthur W. Tedder, deputy commander under Gen. Eisenhower, and Gen. Sir Bernard L. Montgomery, commander of British ground forces.
Two outstanding gaps in Gen. Eisenhower’s command were the places of Adm. Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham and Gen. Sir Harold R. L. G. Alexander, deputies under Gen. Eisenhower in the Mediterranean Theater. But Adm. Cunningham was already in London as British First Sea Lord and obviously will take a major role in the invasion in one capacity or another.
Plan Balkan push
The fact that Gen. Alexander, who fashioned the 8th Army campaign and was largely responsible for the victories in Tunisia and Sicily, remains in the Mediterranean indicated that that theater was not going to be written off by stabilizing the Italian front, but that a Balkan campaign was probably planned.
In support of this indication was the transfer of Maj. Gen. Ira C, Eaker, head of the U.S. 8th Air Force and an expert in daylight bombing, to become Allied air commander in the Mediterranean, and the shift of Lt. Gen. Jacob L. Devers, one of America’s foremost tank officers, from command of all U.S. forces in Britain to become deputy supreme commander of all Allied forces in the Mediterranean under British Gen. Sir Henry Maitland Wilson.
Washington (UP) –
Both the United States and Britain “will hit the common enemy with everything available,” the U.S. High Command pledged today.
The pledge was apparently issued in reply to Senator Edwin C. Johnson (D-CO), who said Saturday that Americans would comprise 73% of the Western Europe invasion force and British and Canadian troops the remainder.
The High Command did not reveal the proportion to be used but it noted that Britain, with one-third of the population of the United States, has considerably more troops in the Mediterranean than the United States. The High Command also declared flatly that “there has been no disagreement between American and British chiefs of staff” in the matter of the invasion proportions.
Sentiment, however, is linked with popularity of White House incumbent
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
For the first time in six years, a periodic sampling of public opinion on the issue of amending the Constitution to limit the presidency to two terms, a majority of Americans voters are today in favor of such a plan.
An anti-third-term amendment, approved this year by the legislatures of four Midwestern states, will be taken up by many other state legislative bodies in the coming months, and because of heavy support among Republicans, may find its way into the GOP presidential platform next June.
The sentiments of the nation’s voters on the two-term amendment have been recorded at regular intervals since as early as 1937. Always a majority of voters with opinions on the subject have opposed the idea until the present date. Now, more favor it than oppose it.
Present trend shown
The trend is revealed in Institute surveys on the following issue:
Interviewing Date 11/25 – 12/1/43 Survey #307-K Question #3aWould you favor adding a law to the Constitution that would prevent any President of the United States from being reelected in the future if he has already served two terms?
| Yes | No | |
|---|---|---|
| 1937 | 49% | 51% |
| 1938 | 48% | 52% |
| 1939 | 42% | 58% |
| 1940 | 41% | 59% |
| April 1942 | 46% | 54% |
| Today | 54% | 46% |
In both surveys this year, only one person in every 14 (7%) had no opinion.
Depends upon party
Sentiment on the two-term issue is closely bound up with the question of how well-liked the incumbent in the White House happens to be.
Republican voters are overwhelmingly in favor of limiting the presidency to two terms. Their vote is 81% today. Democratic voters, on the other hand, oppose the idea by 72%.
Still another reform often proposed concerning the presidency is to limit it to one six-year term with no reelection. Senator O’Daniel (D-TX) has introduced a resolution in the Senate calling for a six-year term, and Ohio Governor John W. Bricker recently came out in favor of the same reform.
While the majority of voters oppose a six-year term, nevertheless there has been a rise in the number approving the change.
Six-year term opposed
The trend is revealed in surveys by the Institute on the following issue:
Interviewing Date 11/25 – 12/1/43 Survey #307-T Question #3bWould you favor changing the term of office of the President hereafter to one six-year term with no reelection?
| Yes | No | |
|---|---|---|
| 1936 | 26% | 74% |
| 1939 | 24% | 76% |
| Today | 34% | 66% |