The Pittsburgh Press (October 18, 1944)
Hannegan derides Dewey’s promises
New York (UP) –
Democratic National Chairman Robert E. Hannegan charged yesterday that Governor Thomas E. Dewey had refused to argue any of the real issues of the presidential campaign and said the GOP candidate “would promise anything if he thought it would get him votes.” Mr. Hannegan issued a formal statement in which he attacked Mr. Dewey’s Monday night speech at St. Louis and other addresses as holding the record “for cold insolence, unexampled effrontery and callous disregard of either truth or probability.”
He repeated the charge made in a recent White House analysis of Mr. Dewey’s speeches that the Republican nominee had distorted the truth by selecting separate sentences of paragraphs out of administration reports. Mr. Hannegan charged this technique had been employed in regard to recommendations concerning the demobilization of the Armed Forces.
The Democratic chairman predicted that Mr. Dewey would “make his supreme bid for the internationalist vote” in his address tomorrow night before the New York Herald-Tribune Forum, and called on him to answer four questions:
How will you get a peace plan approved by a Republican Foreign Relations Committee headed by Senator Hiram Johnson?
How will you obtain the necessary appropriations from a Senate Appropriations Committee headed by Senator Gerald Nye?
If you believe that executive agreements should be ratified by a simple majority of both houses, have you made a deal with Ham Fish who would be your chairman of the Rules Committee to get your legislative program through?
If you are in good faith about an effective world organization to preserve the peace, will you have the honesty to repudiate the Chicago Tribune and Gerald L. K. Smith?