CAMPAIGN: Buster Comes Out

A short, compact, jug-eared young man in a Chesterfield coat, hat in hand, came smiling through a door in New York City last week.

"Nope," grunted the photographers.

"You mean I gotta come in again?" asked Thomas Edmund Dewey. Smiling broadly under his full black mustache, he went back, reentered. New York County's 37-year-old District Attorney was going through his first paces as a G.O.P. Presidential candidate.

On the walls at his headquarters, No. 100 East 42nd Street, hung huge posters of New York's Galahad, unsmiling, grave lines under his eyes. Even thus artificially aged, Thomas Dewey looked mighty young to many a political oldster last week. Yet New York's G.O.P.—like that of many another State—has no elder statesman with a tithe of the vote-catching oomph of Mr. Dewey. What worried the elders was what the Democrats might call their handsome lawyer—things like Little Lord Fauntleroy or the Rover Boy. Worst of all, suppose they shortened "Racket-buster" Dewey to "Buster"?

Decision was to age Mr. Dewey in a hurry. From upstate came J. Russell Sprague, from New Mexico came Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms,* to act as Nos. 1 and 2, respectively, in the Dewey campaign.

Like a cathode in an electrolytic bath, Dewey has had a set of "advisers," or "board of experts," steadily added unto him. Among his brain trust—a name they deplore: Elliott V. Bell, shrewd, blond young money expert who quit his post as assistant financial editor of the New York Times to join; John Foster Dulles, grandson of a former Secretary of State, director of ten corporations, expert on international affairs; Representative Bruce Barton, titian-haired business-balm-dropper; and Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of another man who cleaned up New York. Dewey's pressagent and speaking coach is Benson K. Pratt, who promoted Arturo Toscanini for NBC, did G.O.P. publicity in the last three national campaigns. Pratt sees that his boss keeps his hands out of his pockets, his smile incandescent, his inflections up, not down, at the end of sentences.†

In the presence of these trusty brains, about 200 well-wishers and many a

GOPoo-bah, "Buster" Dewey said: "I have faith in our country and in its future and in every element of its people, who, relieved of a hostile and sniping government, can again learn to pull together for a happy and united nation. ... I shall be glad to lead the fight."