The Pittsburgh Press (September 17, 1944)
Dewey ignorant, Pinchot charges
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania – (special)
In a statement issued through Democratic state headquarters, former Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot today charged Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Republican presidential candidate, with “sheer ignorance of national affairs.”
Mr. Pinchot’s charge resulted from Mr. Dewey’s statement implying that Gen. Douglas MacArthur had been neglected by the Roosevelt administration.
Mr. Pinchot said:
Political complaints against the conduct of the war by the candidate as spokesman for a great political party in the eyes of our enemies can mean only one thing. That one thing is disunity among us. And that is Hitler’s line.
I do not, of course, charge Mr. Dewey with any deliberate desire to help Hitler. But I do charge him with unbelievable ignorance and blind carelessness and with playing politics with the war… No man who can trifle with this tremendous situation, as Mr. Dewey has done, would be anything but a liability to America if he should ever come to the White House.