The Brooklyn Eagle (June 6, 1944)
Heffernan: Bricker or Dewey – which?
Governor John W. Bricker of Ohio concluded his address the Conference of Governors with these words:
The strength of America stems from the practice of representative government in the towns, the cities, the counties and the states of this nation. When state and local governments become paralyzed, the door is open to totalitarianism and every form of demagogy. When local responsibility is destroyed, citizenship atrophies and dies. But when state and local governments flourish, when men and women practice representative government and exercise home rule, the foundations of the Republic are secure. The more the history of the Republic is written at the crossroads and the less at the Capitol, the freer we shall be.
Mr. Bricker’s immediate predecessor on the platform was his rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Governor Dewey of New York. Mr. Dewey had also stressed the desirability of strong state and local governments.
As I read both these addresses, each delivered by a statesman in whose hands may soon rest the destiny of our nation, a memory came to me. Where had words of the same import and in some instances very similar form been uttered before and by whom? In the capital of this state, and by Franklin D. Roosevelt, then – as now is Mr. Dewey – Governor of New York. Then, as now is Mr. Dewey, an aspirant for the Presidency.
And it occurred to me that among men of high ambition the desire often existed to have the seat of power wherever they may be themselves located. It is perhaps natural. So with this in mind, as a seeker for my own candidate for the Presidency, I studied carefully the two addresses. For I wanted to find a man in whom this feeling would be fundamental, as it was, let us say, in Thomas Jefferson, and would govern his actions when he had ascended from the Chief Magistracy of a state to that of the Republic. Would Mr. Dewey, who ran for the District Attorneyship and used it as a stepping-stone and the echo of whose declaration that he was resolved to serve four years in the Governorship is still on the air, hold true to the views now expressed, if he succeeded Franklin Roosevelt?
Or would John Bricker, who after three splendid terms in the Governorship of Ohio voluntarily surrendered the certainty of another successive term in order to seek the Republican nomination for the Presidency, hold fast should his ambition be gratified?
I think Bricker rings true. And, as one of those Americans who found themselves four years ago without a candidate and are again threatened with a Hobson’s choice, I hope Mr. Bricker will be the nominee.