NEW YORK: Dewey & Dragon

New York’s Governor Thomas E. Dewey returned last week to the role in which the public knows him best. He was out to slay another dragon: this time the iron-scaled political monster which has dominated Albany for 20 years.

Boss of New York’s capital city is Democrat Dan O’Connell, a pudgy, bespectacled, saloonkeeper’s son. For years Republicans have pointed to Albany’s horse rooms and slot machines, to saloons that ran all night selling Hedrick beer, manufactured by the O’Connell family, to high local tax assessments, to the unwillingness of industry to move to Albany and “put its head in the bag.” But under nine consecutive Democratic administrations, the O’Connells enjoyed immunity.

As long ago as 1938 Tom Dewey pledged a clean-up of Albany’s O’Connell machine. Last week, deftly timed before Election Day, Governor Dewey was making good. As part of his campaign to elect Republican Joe R. Hanley as Lieutenant Governor over Democrat Lieut. General William N. Haskell, Tom Dewey was investigating : 1) a $1,600,000 bookkeeping shortage in Albany’s capital funds, 2) “wholesale and shocking violations of the election law,” 3) Albany tax assessments, which for years have been rigged to favor O’Connell friends and punish O’Connell enemies.

Albany Democrats roared a routine answer: “Cheap political trickery. . . .” But the O’Connell machine was alarmed. In self-defense, Albany’s district attorney promptly ordered a grand jury to investigate expense-account padding by the State Legislature, long dominated by the G.O.P. On the jury of 21 men were three contractors who do business with the city administration, twelve O’Connell party hacks.

At week’s end the battle was going Tom Dewey’s way. Joe Hanley looked like a sure thing in next week’s election. Dewey had his three investigations going full blast, had blocked the O’Connell grand jury, at least temporarily, with a court order. Albany had not seen such bitter fighting in years. Said one politico: “There ought to be a truce to exchange prisoners.”

In Mid-Career (See Cover) When Thomas Edmund Dewey sets out to slay a dragon, as he did in Albany last week (see above), he is no impetuous, old-fashioned St. George. He goes armed with concentrations of modern heavy artillery, preceded by elaborate reconnaissance and followed by a staff of logistics experts. As man, District Attorney or Governor, Tom Dewey is calm, neat, painstaking and deadly efficient.

For ten months, Tom Dewey has held the most important job of his life. As a politico, he is in mid-passage between upstart and established statesman. He is negotiating that passage cautiously, coolly and with scientific skill.

At 41, Dewey is all business. His only relaxations are an occasional game of backgammon with handsome Mrs. Dewey, a swim with his two young sons, infrequent golf, a horseback ride on his 350-acre dairy farm at Pawling, penny-ante poker with his Pawling friends.

Letting the Light In. As New York’s first Republican Governor in 20 years, one of Tom Dewey’s first moves was to remodel his office. For a half century, this office had been just another gloomy recess in the dismal granite pile of the State Capitol—a melancholy chamber with dark, wood-paneled walls and a high vaulted ceiling from which the gilt was peeling.

Now, when Governor Dewey arrives for the day’s work, the morning sun streams through a high Venetian blind, throwing bright patterns against a sea-green carpet and walls covered in pale tan cloth. The ceiling is low, the chandelier modern, the atmosphere air-conditioned.

The Governor’s working desk is small, trim and uncluttered. A brown desk blotter covers a precise rectangle of the brown leather top. At his right stands a chrome tray holding a water decanter and glasses. (He sips water constantly.) At his left, unused, lie a paperweight which was once a doorknob-plate in the old New York Court of General Sessions, where he made his reputation as District Attorney, and a scissors and paper knife in a leather case.

Behind this array works Tom Dewey, looking very much like a model agency’s Complete Young Executive. This is deceptive. Tom Dewey works hard at the business of being Governor. Appointments are arranged at 15-minute intervals. The telephone, hidden inside the desk, seldom rings. The only interruption comes from the flies sucked in occasionally by the air-conditioning system. Dewey extracts a rubber swatter from his desk drawer, waits, pounces as if he were swooping down mercilessly on another Waxey Gordon. He rarely misses.

Keeping the Hacks Out. When Dewey succeeded Democratic Governor Herbert H. Lehman last January, New York Republicans, sniffing spoils for the first time in two decades, deluged him with the names of their friends, their friends’ friends and numerous chance acquaintances. Dewey turned the names over to the State Police and had every job applicant, right down to the $2,500-a-year level, investigated from hell to breakfast.

He took two months to name a Tax Commissioner ($365,000,000 in revenues to collect), five months to name a Mental Hygiene Commissioner (98,500 patients to care for), nine months to find an Insurance Superintendent ($35,000,000,000 in assets to supervise). He has still not replaced Governor Lehman’s Labor Commissioner.

Asked how G.O.P. chieftains responded to this outrageously efficient personnel system, Dewey once said demurely: “I would say that there were a few individual heartburns.” Actually there were bleeding hearts from Montauk Point to Buffalo: one politico snorted, “Damn it, you’ve got to have a Dun & Bradstreet rating to get a job.”

But Governor Dewey got the men he wanted, and the spoilsmen in his party got the idea. The search for good men has now penetrated down to the precinct organizations. Dewey’s patronage chief, an old-fashioned gentleman from Malverne, Long Island, named Hamilton Gaddis, chosen for his skill at the soft No, seldom has to exercise his talent these days.

Dewey & New York. Selecting his assistants, Dewey displayed the caution of a man starting a new business with the last cent of his own money, and the concern of a public servant eager to see a job well done. He has gathered a crackerjack staff which lives more on inspiration than on salary. Some of his plums:

> Dr. Frederick MacCurdy, 55, a topflight hospital administrator who helped found famed Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and for 15 years directed its Vanderbilt Clinic (400,000 patients a year). As Mental Hygiene Commissioner, able Dr. MacCurdy hopes to run the State’s 18 mental hospitals as curative institutions, thus halt the trend which has increased the number of patients from 65,000 to 98,500 in a decade.

> Rollin Browne, 47, successful Manhattan tax lawyer. As Commissioner of Taxation and Finance, Browne wants to “humanize” tax administration, encourage new industries, and wants State officials to take a more aggressive role in influencing Federal tax policy. (One Manhattan little businessman, asked by the State tax department for more data, made a routine offer to compromise any further claims for $1,000, was amazed when Mr. Browne’s department turned down the offer on the ground it had found no extra taxes due.)

> Charles H. Sells, 54, a clear-eyed engineer who was supervising a $16,000,000 Lend-Lease construction job in Persia when Dewey tapped him. As Superintendent of Public Works, Sells’s chief job is to draft postwar construction plans; already he has blueprints drawn up to provide work for as many postwar unemployed as the State could conceivably have.

> Budget Director John E. Burton, 35, a sharp, trim career man who studied public administration at Northwestern University, formed his own research firm, has been a Dewey adviser since 1938. Burton looks like one of the bright young men who flocked to Washington with the New Deal in the ’30s—but he grew up on an Ohio farm, helped his father run a small dairy, and is permanently stamped with Republican Ohio’s concern for individual enterprise.

> Banking Superintendent Elliott V. Bell, 41, onetime assistant financial editor of the New York Times, onetime member of the distinguished Times editorial board. Bell met Dewey in the late ’20s, when both were struggling for a foothold in Manhattan. They went to a lecture by Rexford Guy Tugwell, happened to walk out together, have been close friends ever since. In the 1940 campaign, Bell was on loan as an adviser on the Willkie train.

From end to end, the Dewey first team is solid as a rock. Dewey gives his men full responsibility, calls them in when major policies must be set, confers with them at all hours, day & night. Says he: “It is a fundamental of government that the chief executive can’t run the whole show, and only to a limited extent can run the cabinet. But a great deal depends on the cabinet heads and the men they select. . . . It’s the old story of getting the best men you can—and giving them full responsibility and more work than they can do.”

Outside his administration, Dewey has three close advisers whom he consults frequently: George Zerdin Medalie, Jewish philanthropist who, as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, gave Dewey his start in public life; Herbert Brownell, Manhattan lawyer, onetime leading liberal in the State Legislature; John Foster Dulles, an idealistic, international-minded attorney who was one of the leading authors of the “Six Pillars of Peace” (TIME, March 29) proposed by the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America.

But careful Tom Dewey has not neglected to make solid connections on the political side. He works hand in glove with shrewd Edwin F. Jaeckle, State G.O.P. chairman, and J. Russel Sprague, boss of Nassau County’s Republican machine. He maintains close working relations with G.O.P. legislative leaders. His political secretary is smooth, amiable Paul E. Lockwood, his onetime executive assistant in the District Attorney’s office.

Dewey & the G.O.P. Many a citizen is still leary of Dewey—for reasons which range from A) a much-publicized theory that his zeal as prosecutor led him to disregard the fine points of civil liberties, to Z) a vague but widely-shared impression that he is a little too perfect to be true. Even among G.O.P. bigwigs, he still inspires some private resentment.

But Tom Dewey is steadily proving his mettle: whatever happens in ’44, he will have an increasing voice in the Republican Party and the nation. At the Governors’ Conference in Columbus last June, he stole the show by offering a daring and sense-making food program (TIME, July 5). At Mackinac, a forthright Dewey press conference got as many headlines as the conference resolution itself (TIME, Sept. 20).

As a national leader, what does Dewey stand for? The basic facts of his foreign policy:

> Although some critics regard Dewey as an opportunist who jumped on the internationalist bandwagon after the horses were in full gallop, he was never really an “isolationist.” He concedes: “Certainly I have changed my views on foreign policy. Everyone has.” But he favored Lend-Lease, military preparedness, decided before Pearl Harbor that the U.S. would have to go to war. His ambiguous record as a Presidential candidate in 1940 was dictated by 1) his emotional distaste for war (“I suppose at heart I am really a pacifist”) and 2) political caution.

> For the postwar world, Dewey favors a U.S. alliance with Britain and, if possible, with Russia and China. He stands for international cooperation, including a pledge to use force against aggressors to prevent future wars. Says he: “We must be prepared as a nation when victory comes to assume our rightful place among nations. That place must be neither narrow nor imperialistic. . . . Equal opportunity for self-development is a fundamental American doctrine. It can and should be part of our foreign as well as our domestic policy.”

> Dewey does not believe, as he suspects Vice President Henry Wallace of believing, that the U.S. can guarantee the economic life of the rest of the world. Says he: “If we gave up half the income of every family in the U.S., I don’t believe we would improve the living standards of the rest of the world. Certainly we do have to increase trade, which is the best guarantee of living standards everywhere.”

> On tariffs Dewey says: “I believe in general reduction in all areas where it won’t injure basic American production. I believe Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s reciprocal trade treaties point in the right direction. It would be easy to say they are too slow, but if you move too rapidly you injure the way in which so many of our people make their living.”

> Dewey & the U.S. On domestic policy, Dewey has the same sort of carefully decided opinions. His views on government:

> He believes that the Securities & Exchange Commission and the Wages & Hours Act are here to stay.

> He believes that social security must be expanded.

> He wants antitrust laws enforced “more vigorously and more sensibly” than they have ever been before. Says he: “The U.S. can have no healthy trade under monopoly conditions.”

> In regard to Federal relief during depressions, he disapproves of WPA as “made work,” prefers the old PWA, which provided projects of real and lasting value.

> Although Dewey approves many of the New Deal’s works, he scorns its operating methods and its curbs on private enterprise. Says he:

“On administrative grounds, the thing I criticize most in Washington is the senseless creation of innumerable overlapping agencies. All Government agencies should have full authority to do a specific job and should each be responsible exclusively to one Cabinet member.

“In the last analysis, the greatest single need is for better management in government. In a successful government the people are free to think and do and create to their maximum capacity—and in that I definitely include private enterprise. No one has ever yet found a successful substitute for individual ambition.

“The Government cannot do everything, and it must recognize this fact above all others. It must permit a basic freedom of action to its people, remembering that the things that Government does are in response to the will of the people. Government does a good or bad job as it succeeds in carrying out its mandate.

“The most important thing is the spirit in which the job is done and the way in which it is done.

“The present administration does not have confidence in the people. Many of its methods look like a deliberate effort to put something over on the people. In a democracy, thriving as its people thrive and as their own ambitions flourish, this kind of government is intolerable. Government should be close to the people. When it is no longer close to the people, it is no longer free government.”

Four Did It. Because the next biggest job is good training for the biggest, no Governor of New York can help thinking of himself as a Presidential possibility. An air of destiny hangs over the grotesque old Albany Capitol; its halls still echo with the footsteps of men who went on to the White House.

In the vast Executive Chamber, where clemency hearings and full-dress conferences are held and visitors come to gape, hang the portraits of many past Governors of New York. The gold frames cover the mahogany walls, deploy along the full-length glass windows and over the hammered brass fixtures of the great fireplace.

Any Governor, sitting in that old room, must occasionally let his eyes wander over the portraits. And eventually they must come to rest in the southwest corner, which is reserved for the four New York Governors who thereafter rose to the Presidency.

Martin Van Buren sits in repose, a white tie and high collar at his throat, his white hair like a halo around his balding old head, white sideburns creeping down his pink cheeks. Grover Cleveland leans back in majestic bulk, the imperious, mustachioed symbol of the era of bankers and builders. Teddy Roosevelt stares through his pince-nez with impatient energy, head belligerently forward, right hand resting on table, left fist clenched at the hip. And Franklin Roosevelt relaxes, hands on chair arms, in a pose so familiar that not even the bad, sharp lines of the Albany portrait can obscure it.

Six Did Not. Six other New York Governors won their party’s Presidential nomination: John Jay, George Clinton, Horatio Seymour, Samuel J. Tilden, Charles Evans Hughes, Alfred E. Smith.

Bill Lamborn, the rotund, one-armed reception clerk who has presided at the Governor’s office for most of his 65 years, has seen four men depart and run for the Presidency, and two of them succeed. He goes about his business amiably conscious of his responsibilities, knowing the odds are good that he will be serving another President in his lifetime.

For Tom Dewey, victim of some of the most thorough journalistic hatchet jobs of the century, laughed off the stage in a premature Presidential try in 1940, has shown his ability to grow and thus to come back. He is compiling an unassailable record as Governor of the nation’s No. 1 political state. In Gallup polls—despite Wendell Willkie’s recent spurt (see p. 14)—he leads all other Republicans as he has for many months.

But there is hardly a chance that Dewey will be President by 1945. When Dewey decided to run for Governor last year, he committed himself—publicly & privately—to serve out his full four-year term. Presumably he decided that 1) no Governor should step out after two years, 2) no Republican would have much chance against Roosevelt in 1944, 3) a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.