OCR Text |
Show GENERAL HUGH S. JOHNSON Jour: i...i.:r.lii n fl. Washington, D. C. DEFENSE AM) POLITICS Our problem is in production and not in politics. There is a crisis in national defense. It is a need for immediate rearmament. It is a problem of industrial production and it is that alone. The record of this administration and the published programs of both the army and navy are absolute proof that it is moving to a solution far too slowly to be of any use. It can be made to move much more rapidly. . . Ours is the most efficient industrial indus-trial production machine in the world. It has the best production managers, men amply able to get this vitally necessary increased' speed for the government. But this government has no such men. The screamingly obviously necessary neces-sary first step is to get them right now. They don't have to hold office. They will come on request. They will see what is needed. They will get their fellows in industry indus-try to co-operate voluntarily. Are we doing that? We are doing just the reverse of that. It is well known in Washington that the President was planning to put three Republicans in his cabinet cab-inet in the vital post of war, navy and commerce. Names mentioned . ( , ymz$K $ . : A ! ?fi WAS IT JUST SOCIAL TALK? J. P. Morgan, financier, (at right) and British Ambassador Lothian at English speaking Union dinner. are Frank Knox, Alf Landon and Fiorello LaGuardia. Is that a production measure or a defense measure? It is not. It is pure politics. It is third-term poli- tics. It is said to be to "unify the country" coun-try" on the rearmament program. The country doesn't need any uni- Gcation on that. It is almost unanimous unani-mous on that. The real purpose is plainly to break down our two-party system using this as an excuse and to regiment regi-ment the election. With the trend toward dictatorship the greatest threat in the world, this is the last thing the head of a Democratic Demo-cratic party should be trying to do. The two-party system is the essence es-sence of our democracy and the American way of life. This is a blow at its heart. Mr. Roosevelt pleaded for the adjournment ad-journment of politics. He, himself, is the hottest political issue. If he wanted to adjourn politics, he would announce himself in public, pub-lic, as he has to some people in private, pri-vate, as not available for a third term. Nobody can believe even Mr. Roosevelt's assurances, except in writing and in public, that he is not a third-term candidate. Yet, no self-respecting Republican could accept ac-cept a place on this cabinet without believing that. If any did, he would be exposing himself to sucker stultification after a third election of Roosevelt, after the powers of a dictator had been granted the President In the direction of a real solution of the overwhelming vital problem of production, to bring an uninstruct-ed uninstruct-ed political amateur into the war department, for example, to take the gimp and tucker out of, Louis Johnson, would be a catastrophe. This barefaced use of a national crisis for the purposes of a partisan political attempt to perpetuate a particular President is the blackest mark with which this administration has yet smirched its own record-more record-more impudent than the 1937 conspiracy con-spiracy to revolutionize this to a personalized per-sonalized government by the court-packing court-packing and other defeated legislative legisla-tive plans-worse than the purges and the WPA political bribery and coercion of 1938. As in those other cases, there is strong hope its stench is so great it can't h c,.,,n j A TON OF TRIPE Secretary Ickes, the original triple termite, made a speech before the Amalgamated Garment Workers After a few punches at the economic eco-nomic royalists, it gloated that they are flocking to the Roosevelt standard stand-ard under the stress of threatenine war. Therefore, Mr. Roosevelt-and ZtVA lck" now be drafted because "democracy universally uni-versally demands it." both at home and abroad. Well, it's all a ton of tripe. |