4th term ‘if’ put on issue of ‘emergency’
Democrats’ former publicity chief discusses Roosevelt candidacy
By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press staff writer
Washington –
Charles Michelson, publicity director emeritus and now adviser to the Democratic National Committee, is significantly on record again today as believing President Roosevelt will seek another term if emergency seems to demand it.
Mr. Michelson’s first recording of that opinion was on Aug. 7, 1938, in a paragraph in his weekly political column, Dispelling the Fog, which is reproduced now in the body of an article published in the current American Magazine. He was talking about a third term that time. Now he refers to a fourth.
The magazine article, entitled “Roosevelt, the Enigma,” discusses a number of things, including the probable political plans of former Committee Chairman James A. Farley.
Bolt doubted
Mr. Michelson predicts that Mr. Farley will not bolt the party if Mr. Roosevelt is renominated but will attempt to prevent his nomination at the convention. Failing that, Mr. Michelson says Mr. Farley will announce that he will vote the Democratic ticket straight and take no further part in the campaign.
This correspondent understands Mr. Farley’s intention to be precisely that.
Mr. Michelson relates a conversation with Mr. Roosevelt as follows:
He said to the President prior to 1940:
I think that you will agree with me that no Democrat but yourself can be elected this year. Would it not be better – in the event of your not being a candidate – to let Jim Farley have the nomination?
If he was defeated, that defeat would be attributed to religious prejudice. If almost any other of the aspirants was nominated and lost, that defeat would be hailed as a repudiation of your administration and the New Deal.
Farley praised
The President replied:
No, that would be most unfair to him. He is too fine a person to be subjected to the humiliation of a bad defeat and the setback that would involve to prospects and career. I do not agree that our party is destitute of available candidates. There is Cordell Hull, for example.
In same position
Mr. Michelson of 1944 writes:
As to Roosevelt’s intentions, I am in the same position as I was five years ago when I wrote:
Of course, I am entitled to a guess, and my guess is that Franklin D. Roosevelt would take a case of the hives rather than four years more of the headache that being President means. It will not be so easy a choice at that.
Circumstances might arise that would make it impossible for him to lay down the burden.
The world may be at war with or without threat of our involvement, or some other equally acute emergency may eventuate that would forbid a change of administration; and the man in the White House is not the kind of an individual who would let his personal desires interfere with what seems to him his duty.
Part left out
There was more to the paragraph in 1938, according to this correspondent’s files, and Mr. Michelson seems to have left out a fairly pertinent final sentence, as follows:
He could not say today, even if he were so inclined, that he would or would not be a candidate in 1940.
GOP internal unity urged by Willkie
New York (UP) –
Wendell L. Willkie said in a radio speech last night that the Democratic Party was “falling to pieces” and warned that the Republican Party “must achieve internal unity.”
In his first nationwide network talk since he announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President, Mr. Willkie said:
The New Deal Executive Department is becoming increasingly petty in its relationship to Congress.
Regarding the GOP, he said:
The Republican Party already has come to many basic conclusions, and it is apparent that steady progress has been made in both foreign and domestic fields. The problem now is to come to definite conclusions and agreements which will be the salvation, not only to the party itself, but to the nation.
