Trainman News

The Great Drama

SEN. RICHARD NIXON "has been subject to a very unfair and vicious attack," said General Eisenhower at Wheeling, where he greeted Nixon with "You're my boy." Was it not Eisenhower's supporters, rather than Stevenson's, who most attacked Nixon? Review your newspapers. More Republican leaders, and newspapers supporting the GOP, questioned Nixon's conduct than did Democrats. In fact, Governor Stevenson urged the people to withhold judgment on Nixon and declared that any condemnation of him "without all the evidence, a practice all too familiar to us, would be wrong."

Eisenhower promptly expressed confidence in Nixon. He said Nixon "would not compromise with what is right." But GOP signals apparently were misinterpreted, for Eisenhower's own press secretary promptly repudiated Eisenhower's statement by saying it "expresses the faith of the General in Senator Nixon before the full facts are in." Altho promptly assuring the nation of Nixon's purity, it took Eisenhower five days to give formal assurance that he wanted Nixon to remain on the Republican ticket. And he even required Nixon to make a dramatic flight across the United States after Nixon "had bared his soul" on a $75,000 nationwide Republican radio and television extravaganza.

Nixon confessed, but he did not repent. He said he was saving taxpayers' money, but items covered by his slush fund were not properly chargeable to the taxpayers. Nor does the record show that Nixon ever turned back any of his allowable expense money. Sen. John Sparkman turns back to the government up to $15,000 annually of expense money to which he is entitled by law.

FDR made a famous speech in which he defended his "little dog Fala." But Fala had been attacked in the campaign. It had been falsely claimed that thousands of taxpayers' dollars had been spent to transport Fala on a U. S. destroyer.

Who kicked Nixon's pup around? Who said Nixon's little kiddies could not keep their beloved dog?

Such phony melodrama is too much for us. What does it all mean? TRAINMAN NEWS of Sept. 22 revealed, as reported by WALL STREET JOURNAL, that Republican campaign plans call for keeping General Eisenhower as vague as possible. The JOURNAL said Republicans are "banking heavily on the general's ability to keep up a lively running-fire on corruption in the Truman Administration, and to build his attack up to a crescendo just before election day."

Was the tiresome repetition of the "mess in Washington," growing stale? Was it necessary to dramatize purity and Republican "practice" of purity by running Nixon thru the wringer?

It was dramatic, clear down to the public display of the weepings of the General and the Senator. But what was there to weep about if everything was "as clean as a hound's tooth?" Staged from California, home of Hollywood, to the Eastern Seaboard, Republicans were principal actors, playing both villian and hero roles, many of them no doubt inspired by their irrepressible desires to have Senator Taft the vice-presidential, if not the presidential, candidate.

Before the GOP stages another such drama as they approach "a crescendo just before election day," we would remind them of Tom Dewey's grand techniques in 1948, written and produced by the best-known methods of box-top collecting, super advertising and public relations agencies, in out-of-this-world Whittaker and Baxter, Young and Rubicam style. Whittaker and Baxter have been doing the super propaganda job for the American Medical Association. But despite those tactics. Dewey's Great Drama was followed by Dewey's Great Defeat.

A word to the wise Republicans should be sufficient! Get off the drama and on the issues.

To responsible men, power is no source of satisfaction. "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown." It is rather cause for very real humility. It is the whole history of mankind that power lacking the inner strength of self-restraint will be eventually cast down. -- Gov. Adlai Stevenson, before AFL Convention, Sept. 22, 1952.