Japanese reach Imphal region
Battle defenders of stronghold in India
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Army Liberators rock Wake Island
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GOP rivals scramble for Willkie vote
Governor Bricker first to woo supporters
Washington (UP) –
The scramble for the Republican presidential support cast loose by Wendell L. Willkie was underway today with Governor John W. Bricker of Ohio the first in the field.
Governor Bricker, the only remaining announced candidate among the top contenders, told the Indianapolis Press Club last night that Mr. Willkie’s withdrawal would intensify his own campaign for delegates to the GOP National Convention at Chicago late in June.
Whether Governor Bricker can assemble enough strength before the convention to outstrip Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, generally accepted as frontrunner at the moment, remained problematical.
Johnston mentioned
Meanwhile, the name of Eric A. Johnston, president of the Chamber of Commerce, was projected into the picture as a possible dark horse contender.
Mr. Johnston’s name was suggested by a New England Senator, a supporter of Mr. Willkie’s policies on international affairs. He said he had been sounded out recently by influential persons on his attitude toward the Chamber of Commerce president.
Some believed that Mr. Willkie, instead of accepting Governor Dewey, might get behind the candidacy of someone with a foreign policy more nearly like his own, such as LtCdr. Harold E. Stassen, who was his 1940 convention floor manager, or a dark horse such as Mr. Johnston.
Appeal of winner
There was some argument that a large segment would fall to Governor Dewey because of his leading opposition and the “human desire to ride a winner.” But this was countered by the contention that some of the Willkie supporters would never side with what they consider the isolationist elements that have joined in backing the New York Governor.
Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg (R-MI), the Senate’s principal advocate of Gen. Douglas MacArthur for the nomination, insisted that the convention will be dominated by uninstructed delegates and “the result, therefore, still is in the laps of the gods.”
Senator Vandenberg, now in Florida, said the Wisconsin primary showed “a spectacular testimonial to his [Dewey’s] 1944 popularity,” but he believed Gen. MacArthur’s showing likewise was “remarkable, with the candidate not only silent but 10,000 miles away.”
Pace-setter Dewey has ‘no comment’
Albany, New York (UP) –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey sidestepped questions regarding his presidential aspirations at his first press conference since Wendell L. Willkie’s withdrawal from the GOP nomination race.
He added:
I have discussed that subject so many times that my position in it is entirely clear. There won’t be any comment on any political question. I’m wholly engaged in attempting to dispose of some 900 bills left by the Legislature.
Governor Dewey likewise declined comment on a statement by Mayor Theodore R. Keldin of Baltimore that Governor Dewey was a “100% candidate.” Mr. Keldin’s statement was made following a visit with the Governor in New York City.
Bricker prepares to press campaign
Indianapolis, Indiana (UP) –
Governor John W. Bricker of Ohio today prepared to redouble “my efforts to fully inform the nation of my position on all the important questions confronting the people of the country today.”
Governor Bricker said later in Chicago he does not believe Wendell Willkie will bolt the Republican Party. At a press conference, he said he was “fairly certain” Mr. Willkie would not form a third party or return to the Democratic Party.
Governor Bricker, making his initial bid for support of the Hoosier delegation at the Republican National Convention, spoke at the Press Club last night shortly after Indiana GOP leaders indicated they would support Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York for the presidential nomination.
He said:
I am convinced that the Republican convention will be a deliberative one and that it will select as the Republican nominee the man that it determines represents the thinking of the Republicans of the entire country, and the man who can defeat in November the New Deal philosophy of government.
I have in the past few months spoken before hundreds of interested groups of Republicans and real Democrats alike in the East, South and Midwest, and in the next two weeks will carry my campaign to the Far West.
Roosevelt gets report –
Living costs ‘hold the line’ in year’s test
Prices actually down, economic heads say
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I DARE SAY —
Travesty
By Florence Fisher Parry
Wendell Willkie is through. That’s what people are saying, the stunned ones and the gloating ones alike.
The Republican Party does not want him. Four years ago, it did. Four years ago, 22,304,755 people voted for him – the greatest number of people who ever cast their votes for any one man, except Franklin D. Roosevelt, for President. No Republican total for any elected President had ever been so high.
But that was four years ago. How could an honest man, a forthright and outspoken man, not afraid to speak the unpopular truth, think for a moment that he could last four years?
Now he is through at 52 years. He finds himself repudiated, denied, unwanted by American people who four years ago whipped themselves into a frenzy of determination that he was to be their President.
It is an American trait. It can happen only here. It is one of the oldest traits in human nature, but elsewhere it has not the opportunity to function so unimpededly. Only here, only in this free, unbridled land, can fickleness function with such utter ruthlessness.
Suicide
There are those, of course, who even now are saying he brought it on himself. He would not listen. And they are speaking truly. That is so. Wendell Willkie is an unmanageable man. His party could not manage him. Even the small and dedicated coterie of disciples who were so willing to work and die for him could not manage him.
Always there were those who were saying to him, “But Wendell, you can’t afford to do this and you cannot afford to say that.”
Looking back upon it now, one might have known he was bound to fail, for, realist though he was, he possessed one fatal trait. He believed with an almighty passion in the American people’s basic common sense; and that belief led him into making the fatal mistake of putting that common sense to too severe a test. He overestimated our intelligence. He lost out because he believed us faithful.
I knew. I knew on the last day of March what would happen in that Wisconsin primary. I knew it by a simple token. This is how and why I knew it:
I was standing by my window looking down at the shoppers. The streets were as crowded as they had been on Christmas Eve. Swarms of people were jamming into the stores and emerging from them heavy with bundles. The streetcars sagged with their human loads. The restaurants were packed. No merchant, no restauranteur, no salesgirl, no policeman had ever known such an Easter shopping frenzy. It was the day before the new tax on luxuries went into effect.
The nightclubs and hotels could not understand such Lenten business! For this, dear reader, was Lent in wartime, on the zero hour of our Allied invasion in Europe. Lent. Invasion. And a frenzied spending spree. And the Red Cross couldn’t meet its quota.
And there was Wendell Willkie up in Wisconsin, pumping his heart out hoarsening his voice again, trying to be heard, trying to make them listen, telling them what they were going to be in for in sacrifice and taxes and post-war burdens. Warning them. Telling them the truth. Exhorting them to face and prepare for what was to follow the war and its crushing, unavoidable, unending cost. Trying to sell them the fantastic idea that I-am-my-brother’s-keeper. Trying to sell them a map of One World.
Campaigning like that! Can you beat it? Pumping his heart out, ruining his chances, killing himself, this American, this man Willkie!
The great loss
Well, they say he had it coming to him. Didn’t he know when to shut up? Would he never know what was good for him?
Look at that man Dewey now, for example. Close-mouthed, noncommittal, Tom Dewey. Now there’s a candidate for you… a man who knew how to avoid taking risks, a man so slick that he couldn’t make a damaging statement or offend a voter! Tom Dewey, our Republican No. 1 prospect for the office of the President of the United States. A wonder boy. The Manhattan go-getter. The GOP’s pet, now.
But I and millions of others are unreconciled. We have not so many great men in this world that we can afford to render one impotent for the work that is ahead.
His prophetic warning should burn into our hearts, pound at our ears, and give our minds no peace, the fearless and honest speech of a man who knows no fear who will not be intimidated, who counts his country’s welfare greater than his own. And who in a moment of his acknowledged defeat, stands still among the great Americans we have today.
One-man invasion of Rome fizzles in ancient aqueduct
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By Pvt. Melvin Diamond, USA
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Raids called result of Tehran parley
By Edward W. Beattie, United Press staff writer
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Petrillo attacks recording firms
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Fortresses CAN do a loop, pilot who did declares
By Robert Richards, United Press staff writer
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‘All or nothing,’ Bricker says of his presidential campaign
Ohioan shuns second place, says main concern is defeat of New Deal policies
By S. Burton Heath
Columbus, Ohio –
John W. Bricker, Ohio’s first Republican three-term governor, says that he is after all or nothing. He isn’t interested in the GOP’s vice presidential nomination.
He told me:
I’m a candidate for the nomination for President – and nothing else.
Back in his office between campaign trips, Governor Bricker had just three days between a nine-day tour just ended and a projected 15-day swing to the Pacific Coast.
Leaning back in his chair, puffing a light brier pipe, he was deliberately positive in expressing dislike for the entire New Deal philosophy, to which, he said, everything that has been is wrong, and should be changed. But he declined to discuss nomination, or their qualifications his rivals for the Republican nomination, or their qualifications or their philosophies.
He said:
I’m concerned only with my own effort to build up the Republican Party, to strengthen its position, to implant my ideas in the ranks of the party’s leadership.
I’m more concerned over defeating the New Deal and its trend toward absolutism than I am in becoming President myself. I’ll join any of the other candidates for nomination in building up the party and carrying its position to the country.
That was when – reminding him of a Washington news poll that counted him out for the presidential nomination. But mildly suggested his availability for second place – I inquired if he would consent. The answer was calm but firm.
In an attempt to get Governor Bricker’s platform boiled down into tabloid, I asked him if he would tell me first, in 1-2-3 order of importance, the things he had against the Roosevelt administration, and then, as to each, what he would do to rectify the conditions of which he disapproved.
The answers fail to consider some things which many persons consider issues. But I present, briefly, Governor Bricker’s answers, on the theory that both what he said and what he left unsaid are significant in testing his candidacy.
His first complaint was:
There’s too much concentration of power in the federal government. That takes in blanket authorizations to administrative boards, blank check appropriations, expansion of regimentation, etc.
Congress subordinated
In the second place, too much power has been taken over by the executive, subordinating Congress, relegating the states to an inferior role, and there has been too much reckless expenditure of money on non-war purposes.
The great number of appointments by one man to the federal bench, for adherence to the New Deal philosophy of government, creates a tendency to overbalance the judgment of the courts in favor of a particular philosophy of government.
In international affairs, the people have been kept in the dark – were before the days of the war – as to the seriousness of the situation in the Pacific, which it now appears the administration knew something about and should have known completely.
If Americans had known
If the American people had known, they would have demanded that we make Japan comply with her international obligations, and that we stop selling munitions to those who would use them against us.
What can be done about it?
I’d cut the expanded personnel of bureaucracy. I’d call into service in the various divisions of the government the best men of the nation. The administration of domestic affairs ought to be carried out through the various Cabinet departments.
Would limit censorship
I would do away with censorship except insofar as it affects the conduct of the war, and then take the judgment of military leaders and not of politicians.
I asked Governor Bricker to enumerate bureaus which he would eliminate or reduce, but he declined on the ground that to name some would be to concede the invulnerability of others, and would bring down upon him the fire of those named.
As for the New Deal social program, Governor Bricker said that the SEC should be continued, but made into an agency for helping good business while restricting bad business; that he would not touch either the Wagner Act or social security at present, though the former, he thinks, may have to be amended after the war.
Social Security
He would resist any further attempts to put Social Security on a national basis, because he believes that the closer it is kept to the people, the better it will function.
There will have to be a stable financial basis after the war, with a balanced budget as soon as possible. Control over the value of the dollar must be taken from the hands of the executive. Business ought to be given some protection in a stable currency and stable taxation, to make possible its return to a peacetime basis.
And finally:
The first duty of any administration is to prosecute the war. So far as I am concerned, there would be no shift in leadership. I have the greatest confidence in Adm. King and in Gen. Marshall, whom I know very well. There must be no politics in the conduct of the war.
Poll: Dewey to get half Willkie’s ex-supporters
One-sixth to shift to Democrats
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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He talked himself out –
Stokes: Ups and downs of Willkie are amazing political saga
Professionals never quite trusted him, and rank-and-file lost admiration
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer
Columbus, Ohio –
Consider the case of Wendell L. Willkie, one of the most dramatic, amazing and intriguing in American political history.
Four years ago – resigned from the presidency of a great electric power corporation – nominated for President by the Republicans in the political miracle of the 20th century – recipient of 22 million votes though he had never served in public office nor even run for one.
A new phase is due
Why?
A Willkie phase Has ended, and we may inquire what happened before another begins – and one is sure to begin.
Essentially Mr. Willkie turned out to be the kind of a guy that regular Republican politicians just couldn’t understand or tolerate, and this opinion seems to have percolated down to the rank and file, proving that politicians must have a sure instinct after all.
Suspicious of him
They were suspicious of him from the start, such a free-swinging, free-talking man, but he looked so good to them standing up there with his hair mussed and his arms waving – and they just had to have somebody who could beat That Man in the White House.
They soon found out he was not their kind. He wouldn’t take their advice. He wouldn’t do the political thing. They sent Joe Martin, House Republican floor leader, to Colorado Springs, where Mr. Willkie had retreated to do his heavy thinking, to tell him for the party’s sake not to come out for the draft bill in his acceptance speech.
He listened to Joe. Then he came out for the draft act.
Wendell ‘in step’
Republicans in Congress, for the most part, went the other way. Everybody was in step but Wendell.
They so wanted him to be nice to the politicians. He snubbed the party elders, like Herbert Hoover and Alf M. Landon, and he snubbed the little fellows who handled the precincts and the wards, the counties and the cities. He just didn’t care much for the political breed.
He was defeated. And naturally, they blamed him.
Can’t keep quiet
He might have settled down and kept quiet. But no, look at him. He goes rushing off to England, some sort of an emissary for President Roosevelt. Just a Democrat, they whispered. Then he comes home and proves it to them by coming out for President Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease bill.
That’s not enough. He goes gallivanting around the world then – yep, just an emissary of Franklin D., just a Democrat, and he hobnobs with dictators and prime ministers, away out of range of the lowly politician.
Gradually the professional politicians dropped away from him. He knew it. So, he would go out among the people and talk to them. He’d show the politicians.
Politicians right
But the folks didn’t rally around. The politicians were right. He talked and he talked, he pleaded and he pleaded. The people weren’t moved.
One man on a train looked up from his newspaper and chortled: “The more he talks, the lower he gets.”
For he’s a great human being, generously endowed with what is commonly called guts.
Dewey polls half of Wisconsin GOP
Milwaukee, Wisconsin (UP) –
More than 50% of the 260,468 Republican votes cast in the Wisconsin primary election Tuesday were for Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, unofficial returns from 2,845 of the state’s 3,075 precincts showed today.
The total number of Dewey votes was131,740, the number cast for Wisconsin Secretary of State Fred Zimmerman, the leading candidate for delegate-at-large. Mr. Zimmerman’s total was more than the combined number of votes cast for the leading candidates for delegate-at-large for LtCdr. Harold E. Stassen (former Governor of Minnesota), Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Wendell L. Willkie.
The total Republican vote was 61% of the 426,996 ballots cast by both sides in the precincts reported.
Willkie to close his headquarters
New York (UP) –
Wendell L. Willkie, declaring that he felt “fine,” arrived in New York today and announced that his national campaign headquarters would be closed “immediately” as the result of his withdrawal from the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
Mr. Willkie, accompanied by his wife, laughed off any specific questions as to his future political moves.
Asked whether he intended to make any political trips or speeches in the near future, Mr. Willkie said:
Not that I know of. I’m going to devote all of my time to running my office and practicing law. This is my home, you know.
Mr. Willkie, for the most part, appeared less jovial than usual and appeared tired.
Asked whether he had any plans to meet with Governor Thomas E. Dewey, now considered the leading Republican candidate, Mr. Willkie laughed and declined to answer.