U.S. At War: Birthday Reminder

The word went round that Governor Tom Dewey, the glistening dark horse who pretends to be invisible, would make a “significant” political speech. His own assistants passed the word. (This was a change in Dewey technique; hitherto newsmen have been cautioned before each Dewey utterance: don’t try to find any significance; the Governor is merely tending to his state knitting.) For his venture into significance, Tom Dewey chose as a date his 42nd birthday; as the place, the ninth annual prize exhibit of New York news photographers.

Said the Governor: “There have been increasing signs . . . that our newspapers are being denied the right to print all the news. Important matters have repeatedly been withheld for months . . . the shooting down of 23 transport planes . . . what really happened in Teheran . . . the disquieting evidence of [United Nations] disunity. . . . One such incident might be charged to blunder; two such incidents begin to lay the unpleasant suspicion of Administration policy. People cannot fight a war with blinders on their eyes.”

What Dewey said was perhaps worth saying, although nearly everybody else in the U.S. had said it before him. What was its “significance”? Best guess: Dewey was thinking of next week’s crucial Wisconsin Presidential primary. Wendell Willkie was on the scene, hard at work; perhaps Tom Dewey thought he needed to remind Wisconsin that if you looked hard for a candidate, he wasn’t really invisible.