The Pittsburgh Press (September 30, 1944)
Mrs. Luce warns of U.S. ‘disunity’
Roosevelt ‘secrecy’ assailed in talk
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (UP) –
Rep. Clare Boothe Luce (R-CT) last night accused President Roosevelt of a “plain desire to monopolize not only the conduct of foreign affairs, but the creation of a world organization” and said such a attitude would create a “wholly unnecessary mood of national disunity.”
Speaking before the Pennsylvania Council of Republican Women, Mrs. Luce lashed at government secrecy surrounding the Dumbarton Oaks world security conference, citing it as an example of the public’s being kept so much in the dark about foreign policy that “we have been forced to adopt a new system in the conduct of foreign affairs – the Braille system.”
Wilson’s deeds recalled
Mrs. Luce warned against putting faith in the “miraculous powers” of any one man to make peace and said that Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to make the League of Nations his personal dream without confiding in the American people was responsible in part for World War II.
The cooperation needed to write a lasting, democratic peace is not the “undercover cooperation” of Mr. Roosevelt, Mrs. Luce said, but the “open-and-above board cooperation” of the American people, the U.S. Senate and the Chief Executive.
Dewey praised
Mrs. Luce said:
The Roosevelt peace is to be a one-man personal peace. But a one-man personal peace will be no peace at all. For today’s children it means tomorrow’s war.
Describing Governor Thomas E. Dewey as the “inevitable man,” Mrs. Luce said he would wage a “people’s peace” and “articulate the mood of America, which is that the foreign policy of America is not a partisan matter.”
Rep. Richard M. Simpson (R-PA) of Huntington County, charged that the Supreme Court no longer represented the majority and minority opinion of the nation, but is “an appendage of the New Deal.”