Whose Policy?

For the first time since the campaign began, Candidate Tom Dewey was directly challenged on two matters of political record. The challenger was the New York Times's able reporter James B. Reston. The dispute centered on the origins of the nation's bipartisan foreign policy and the European Recovery Program.

"Great Objective." In a foreign-policy address in Louisville last week, Dewey claimed--as he had before--that the bipartisan idea was all his own. "That was the great objective," he said, "when I first proposed to Secretary Hull during the election campaign four years ago that we have cooperation between our two parties to win the peace. That was the beginning of our bipartisan foreign policy."

Timesman Reston did not dispute Dewey's full cooperation, once the bipartisan plan had been launched. But he refuted Dewey's interpretation of the plan's origins by quoting from Cordell Hull's Memoirs. They pointed out that it was Hull who had first suggested, in March 1944, the formation of a bipartisan group of Senators to discuss the framework of U.N. In August of that year Dewey had criticized the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, after which, said the Memoirs, it was Hull again who took the initiative by inviting Dewey to consultations with the State Department.

Reston then singled out Dewey's charge that "Republican statesmanship" had saved EGA from being "just another foreign-relief handout." Said Reston: "Secretary Marshall's speech at Harvard, announcing the ERP, emphasized that the United States could not go further until the European nations themselves got together and defined and devised a program that would bring about the recovery of Europe."

"Melancholy Importance." Though Reston was the first to challenge Candidate Dewey's version of history, he was not the only one to note the discrepancies. Fortnight ago Michigan's Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg, in his only speech of the campaign, gave Dewey full credit for agreeing to bipartisan liaison at the top level. But he admitted that the bipartisan approach "was first initiated informally in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under the chairmanship of Democratic Senator Tom Connally of Texas." Ailing, 77-year-old Cordell Hull added a plague-on-both-your-parties footnote from a Bethesda, Md. hospital bed.

Said Hull: "The melancholy importance of Governor Dewey's statement is that it is only the latest of many statements in which extravagant claims for credit have been made for achievements which were the fruit of joint and patriotic effort by members of both political parties."

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