National Affairs: WHO’S WHO IN THE G.O.P.: DEWEY

Before the Philadelphia convention next June, a major job of the nation’s voters will be to absorb, weigh and compare the records in the Republican Who’s Who of presidential candidates. Herewith, in the first of a series, TIME publishes the condensed biography and political record of New York’s Governor Thomas Edmund Dewey.

Vital Statistics. Age: 46 (born March 24, 1902 over a general store in Owosso, Mich.) Ancestry: the only child of George Martin Dewey, publisher of the Owosso Times and later postmaster of Owosso;* grandson of George Martin Dewey, one of the founders of the G.O.P. in Michigan; a fifth cousin of Admiral George Dewey. Educated: Owosso grade and high schools, University of Michigan (1923), Columbia University Law School (1925). Married: in 1928, to Frances Eileen Hutt of Sapulpa, Okla., daughter of a railroad brakeman, a onetime singer in a road company of George White’s Scandals. Children: Thomas Jr., 15; John, 12. Church: Episcopalian. Nickname: Tom.

Personal Traits. Of average size (5 ft. 8 in.; 165 Ibs.). His most pronounced facial characteristics are his famed brush mustache and his round, brown eyes. His most characteristic gesture when making a speech: emphasizing a point by rising on his toes, leaning forward, pointing his index finger and popping his eyes. He favors dark, conservative suits, hates to be photographed in his shirtsleeves (he thinks it undignified) or with his mouth open (his front teeth are slightly parted). He speaks in deep, deliberate tones, uses an occasional gentlemanly damn.

Career. A lawyer by profession, he has been appointed to one public office (special rackets prosecutor for Manhattan in 1935), elected to two (district attorney of Manhattan in 1937; governor of New York in 1942, reelected in 1946). Defeated twice (for the governorship in 1938, for the presidency in 1944). In 1941 he chairmanned the U.S.O.’s $10 million fund-raising drive.

Private Life. When away from the Executive Mansion in Albany, he relaxes on his 486-acre farm at Pawling, 50 miles north of Manhattan. For exercise, he has turned from tennis to golf (he has broken 90); he plays softball with his sons and does setting-up exercises in his bedroom. For recreation, he reads (mainly history, biography and thrillers), occasionally plays penny-ante poker, drinks moderately, sings duets with his wife.

He has a passion for neatness (never a stray paper on his desk) and precision (each morning he receives four fresh pencils sharpened to exactly the same length). He dislikes the telephone, which he keeps concealed in a desk drawer, but likes gadgets. His favorite: a system for dimming and increasing the indirect lighting in the governor’s office. He never gets excited in public.

Early Years. He was brought up in Owosso (pop. 8,000), where he had a perfect attendance record at school, played football and tootled the tuba in the school band. His parents were strict: they once forbade him to use his tricycle for a whole year because he had hurt himself in a fall. In his spare time, he sang in the Episcopal choir, managed a magazine route, worked in his father’s print shop. One summer he spent on a nearby farm as a member of the Boys’ Working Reserve of World War I. The $800 he saved put him through his first year at Michigan, where he was a serious but not brilliant student, no big man on campus, a member of Phi Mu Alpha fraternity. In his senior year, he won third place in a national singing contest, received a music scholarship to the Chicago Musical College. He spent the following summer in Chicago, dividing his time between singing lessons and reading law in the offices of his mother’s cousin.

In Manhattan the next fall, he gave up singing as a career when Critic Deems Taylor gave him full marks for a good voice but said that he sang without “enough impulse.” His voice kept him in pocket money (he sang in church choirs and in a synagogue) while he finished up at Columbia Law School. With his degree in his pocket, he spent the summer of 1925 on his first & only trip to Europe (London, Paris, Brussels), returned to enter the Manhattan law firm of Larkin, Rathbone & Perry. At the same time he jumped into local politics, worked his way up from Republican doorbell-pusher to precinct captain. He was a 29-year-old, $8,000-a-year law assistant with McNamara & Seymour when he was called into public life as chief assistant to the U.S. Attorney.

Public Record. As a prosecutor, he piled up an imposing list of convictions: Irving (“Waxey Gordon”) Wexler (income tax evasion); “Lucky” Luciano (prostitution); Jimmy (“The Honest Blacksmith”) Hines (Tammany graft); ex-Stock Exchange President Richard Whitney (grand larceny). Along with the bigwigs, he put away scores of smaller fry in the policy, loan shark’ and extortion rackets.

He became a national hero overnight, the prototype for all subsequent gang-busting radio programs. In his two years as special prosecutor, he made a record of 72 convictions out of 73 indictments; in his last year as D.A., 96.5% were convicted or pleaded guilty. His zeal for convictions led to one blunder. In 1938, his office got one Bertram Campbell convicted of forgery. Campbell spent three years in jail, was later found to be innocent. As governor, Dewey signed a bill giving Campbell the right to sue the state for damages. Campbell collected $115,000, died three months later.

As governor of New York, Dewey has been an excellent administrator, surrounded himself with able men. Aided by a Republican legislature, he has: 1) built up a $623 million Postwar Reconstruction Fund (because of high wartime taxes and little wartime spending) ; 2) reduced the state income tax 40%; 3) obtained, via referendum vote, a veterans’ bonus (top amount: $250); 4) allocated $69 million for temporary veterans’ housing and education; 5) overhauled the state’s mental and public health programs; 6) raised the salaries of legislators, state employees and teachers; 7) pushed through a state antidiscrimination bill and a bill forbidding public employees to strike; 8) maintained a standby state rent-control law; 9) cleaned up workmen’s compensation graft.

As a campaigner, he has been hard-hitting in his speeches, somewhat standoffish in his personal contacts. He has the best radio voice of any politician since F.D.R. His platform manner still bears traces of the district attorney addressing a jury.

He is for: most New Deal social reforms; a federal FEPC; Government support of farm prices (but “not high enough to make production controls necessary”); lower federal taxes; a balanced budget; strong national defense; universal military training; union of Western Europe; the Truman Doctrine; equal attention to the problems of the Orient; partition of Palestine; admission of D.P.s to the U.S.

He has changed his mind: on reciprocal trade agreements (from and to pro); on labor legislation (from pro-Wagner Act to pro-Taft-Hartley); on internationalism (from “keep completely out of the affairs of Europe” to broad U.S. participation in world affairs).

Pro & Con. His critics feel that he is a man guided solely by personal ambition, a man who makes up his mind on an issue not because of personal conviction but because he wants to be in agreement with the popular political trend. They feel that he is clever rather than brilliant, shrewd rather than wise, ruthless rather than strong.

His admirers feel that his administrative talents are beyond question, that he is an efficient executive with an incisive mind who listens patiently to all sides, digs up the facts, takes expert counsel and gets things done. They feel that he has grown steadily and has become an experienced leader who has steered an intelligent course between left and right. They point out that, for a candidate, he is a young man in vigorous health, the best campaigner in the Republican Party, and a man who won the confidence of the people by his overwhelming reelection (by a whopping majority) as governor of the nation’s biggest state.

* He died in 1927; his wife Annie, now 70, lives in Owosso.