Background of news –
Dewey and foreign policy
By Bertram Benedict
Second of two articles.
Thomas E. Dewey as President might find the Soviet Union coy about cooperating with him, because of a speech Mr. Dewey made in New York City on Jan. 20, 1940.
He said the Roosevelt foreign policy was largely acceptable because “broadly” it had followed the Republican foreign policy as carried out by Secretaries of State Hughes, Kellogg, and Stimson. But there had been one “most unfortunate departure.”
This was the diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia, where “a godless government had raised up to a state creed the sterile doctrine of atheism.” The Communist government had seized and maintained power by murder and assassination. He said:
It is a perversion of government, abhorrent to the conscience of mankind.
The Roosevelt administration, in recognizing the Soviet government in 1933, had been “gullible.” We needed no partnership with Russia, no more “fuzzy-minded departures” from the established course of our foreign policy.
For revised Lend-Lease bill
This Dewey pronouncement for an isolationist policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union seemed to be paralleled by Mr. Dewey’s original attitude on Lend-Lease aid to Britain.
After the administration bill to that end had been introduced in Congress, Mr. Dewey told reporters in Philadelphia, on Jan. 15, 1941, that it would “bring an end to free government in the United States and abolish Congress, for all practical purposes.”
But Mr. Dewey changed his mind fast. On the following Feb. 12, in a speech in Washington, he followed the example of Wendell L. Willkie in supporting Lend-Lease, and offered what sounded like a collaborationist credo:
I believe our party stands for all-out aid to the heroic people of Great Britain, because we believe with all our hearts and all our souls in rendering all possible aid to free men resisting tyrants who would enslave them.
Mr. Dewey explained that the original Lend-Lease bill had been unwise, but that the measure had been made less objectionable. It was true that in passing the Lend-Lease bill on Feb. 6 the House had added certain amendments which tightened Congressional supervision over Lend-Lease operations. The Republican representatives had voted more than 5–1 against the bill even as amended, so in supporting it, Mr. Dewey was opposing them.
Cooperation sentiment grows
As the months rolled on, Mr. Dewey progressed farther and farther from the keep-away-from-Europe philosophy he had expounded in his primary campaign in Wisconsin during March 1940.
In May 1942, he called for cooperation by the United States in post-war planning, and remarked that we could not hide behind the boundaries of geography. In the same month, he asked for the rejection of Rep. Hamilton Fish, outstanding isolationist, in the Republican primaries in New York.
In June 20, 1943, at Columbus, Ohio, he said the Republican Party must take responsibility for a post-war program of international cooperation. He endorsed the anti-isolationist resolution of the Republican National Committee at Chicago in April 1943, the resolutions of the Mackinac Conference of Republicans on post-war policy in the following September, and the Fulbright Resolution passed by the House in the same month.
Mr. Dewey’s most recent statement on foreign policy was ion Tuesday of last week. He said the United States must work with the British to keep the doors of Palestine opened permanently to Jewish immigration. He denounced by name Gerald L. K. Smith as a would-be “polluter of the stream of American life.” And he called for “a system of international cooperation.”