Pegler: The wrong man
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
I have just come away from the mirror and what do you know? The Republicans nominated the wrong man in Chicago.
Height six feet something, weight 180, clean-shaven, except on weekend, with a distinguished tough of gray at the temples, gay, witty, popular, lovable and just the right age, 50 next month, if not any too bright.
So, they had to pick a little guy with an eyebrow mustache with not a gray hair in his head and a serious preoccupation with the problems of national government who doesn’t try to wow them with gags at his press conference and won’t be 43 until after election.
These deficiencies are being exploited rather importantly against Mr. Dewey who doubtless will be called Tom Thumb before long if he hasn’t been so-called already, and some of the objections from the direction of Sidney Hillman’s Communist front are enough to make a person check back to make sure whether our fellow is a candidate for the Presidency or the police department.
They are particularly about such things in the cops. Their minimum height would disqualify Mr. Dewey.
Roosevelt offers contrast
Mr. Roosevelt, by contrast, is a big, limousine job, above six feet even now, and back in the early 1920s when he ran for Vice President there were fight managers in town who would have been glad to take him over, knock five years off his age and throw him in there for a shot at the heavyweight title. True, Dempsey would have taken a bead on his chin and knocked him into the dollar seats.
Another one who outscores Mr. Dewey in height, stance and looks is poor old Paul McNutt, who has found himself behind the eight ball ever since Mr. Big first got elected in 1932. There is a nice guy who, by force of circumstances, was compelled to waste his own chances serving the career of the very man who blocked his own ambition.
Mr. McNutt is a picture politician and one of his old managers admitted back around 1936 that he was practically all looks but was figuring to do a lot with him just the same.
This Hoosier politician was talking over the field one day, along toward convention time, and said that but for Mr. Roosevelt, his gut would be worth a fortune on the hoof.
I yelled:
McNutt! Why the Republicans could beat him with Hoover! All they would have to do would be to drag out his record as a lower-case Huey Long when he was Governor.
A real ‘show horse’
The Hoosier said:
Oh, I know all about that. I don’t figure to really run him for President. The mug couldn’t run a lick but he is a hell of a show horse, just the same. With that white hair and those dark eyes and I could so us a lot of good in the convention if the big guy would get out of the way.
I don’t want to be dirty to the Communists but, if it comes to a matter of height and the way a candidate landscapes his lip in this campaign, I wonder how they figure on squaring themselves with their boss. Because little Joe isn’t any taller standing up than Roosevelt is sitting down, and that tangle of hair-combings that he wears would make a good start toward stuffing a sofa.
He put on long pants for the first time when he went to Tehran and before that he always wore those stovepipe boots which, as any military stylist will tell you, are used more to create an illusion of height than to ward off rattlers.
They certainly must be affectation of vanity in a man with a desk job such as Joe’s because they are hard to get on and off and they murder your feet.
So, if Mr. Dewey had to sit on a dictionary to see over that big desk in Albany, Stalin could keep house in a drawer of the same desk and La Guardia couldn’t get into the chair without a ladder.
Anyway, the Commies should be the last to rib Mr. D. about this size. That Hillman, himself, is no Carnera and moreover they are always hollering up their great love for the little people of the USA. This sounds as though they are against little guys.