Heath: Truman ‘appeals’ to Governor Dewey’s masterminds
By S. Burton Heath
While Peter Edson is absent from Washington, S. Burton Heath is writing a series of articles on the campaign plans of the Republican presidential candidate.
Albany, New York –
Dewey strategists would have been delighted if the Democrats had renominated Henry Wallace for Vice President. They profess to feel that Mr. Wallace could have attracted no votes that President Roosevelt will not get anyway, and would have alienated enough to have helped Governor Dewey’s cause materially.
But don’t get the idea from this that the choice of Senator Truman discouraged the Dewey entourage. Quite the contrary. When the President’s he-is-my-beloved-friend letter sent Mr. Wallace’s prospects tumbling to about two degrees above freezing, almost everybody around the State Capitol held his breath least by inadvertence he should chill the ensuing boomlet for Senator Truman.
Before the campaign is very old, the public is going to be reminded of Senator Truman’s political debts to the notorious Pendergast machine in Kansas City. The text of the Missouri Senator’s tribute to his benefactor, after Boss Pendergast had been sent to the penitentiary for his proved crimes, will be given wide distribution.
This, however, is not the Achilles’ heel that pleases the Deweyites most. Paradoxically enough, the real reason GOP lads think a Roosevelt-Truman ticket was made to order for Governor Dewey’s big guns is the splendid job the Truman Committee has done checking war contracts and their fulfillment – the very job that made Truman a national figure and won him the vice-presidential nomination.
Damaging witness
Dewey researchers, even before they begin checking the committee’s reports word by word, are certain that its findings can be used to make Senator Truman their most damaging witness against his running mate.
The Truman Committee hearings and reports unquestionably would have been combed anyway for ammunition in support of the GOP contention that President Roosevelt has badly mismanaged war production. But the blessing that the Democratic Convention placed upon the Missouri Senator’s work is counted upon to make this material the more devastating.
It will no longer have to be presented as the findings of a statesman who, though a Democrat, might be considered hostile to Mr. Roosevelt. It now becomes a reluctant indictment drawn by the Democratic Party’s alternate choice for President by one of the three men with whom President Roosevelt said he would be glad to run for reelection.
The line of attack opened up by Senator Truman’s selection is broader than that which would have been available if Vice President Wallace had won out.
In the latter case the major argument would have been that Mr. Wallace himself is unfitted in capacity and temperament to succeed to the President, if anything, should happen to Mr. Roosevelt.
Triple-threat attack
With Senator Truman, the approach has three spearheads:
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Senator Truman’s indebtedness to one of the worst big city machines in recent political history.
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The findings of Mr. Truman can be used against Mr. Roosevelt’s conduct of the home front.
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The contention that when the Democrats discarded Henry Wallace and his four years of experience, they knocked the props out from under their own don’t-change-horses argument for a fourth term.
Even Senator Barkley, with the record of his recent short-lived break with the President and their harsh interchange of invective, did not seem to the Deweyites to offer them so much ammunition as does Senator Truman.
It cannot be said that the Republicans around here were fully satisfied with the doings of the Democrats in Chicago. They would have preferred another Madison Square Garden fiasco, like that which gave President Coolidge a walkover in 1924.
But they aren’t complaining. The Southern delegations came through better than the GOP dared to hope. And the nomination of Senator Truman was pleasing, and – foolishly or not can be determined in November – the Deweyites seem very cheerful.