The man who might be the next U.S.
Secretary of State conferred with Cordell Hull last week, two hours a day for three days.
After the third session, tall, ruddy John Foster Dulles, 56, foreign-affairs adviser to Candidate Thomas E. Dewey, reported to the U.S. press. On crutches (he had an infected foot), he swung out of Mr. Hull's office, across the black & white marble checkerboard hall of the State Department, into the diplomats' waiting room. Said he:
"We have done something which is perhaps unique in American politics." The Manhattan Republican and the Tennessee Democrat had agreed—in a general way—on the machinery of a potential international peace organization, and were ready to take that much of foreign policy out of the 1944 campaign.
John Foster Dulles may now have been satisfied that Franklin Roosevelt's Great Blueprint did not plan to hold down small nations (TIME, Aug. 28). If so, he did not say so. His discussion with Cordell Hull was conducted with all the diplomatic caution of a disarmament conference, which in fact it was.
Dulles prepared himself in two days & nights of conferences with Tom Dewey in Albany. En route to Washington, he stopped over in Manhattan to talk to Wendell Willkie. A joint Willkie-Dulles communique described their visit as a "full exchange of views not animated by partisan considerations." Then he motored on to the capital, using special gasoline coupons; his doctor said he was not up to train travel. (On his return from the conferences with Cordell Hull, Dulles underwent a two-hour operation on his foot.) In Washington, Mr. Dulles talked with G.O.P. leaders as well as Cordell Hull. Among them: Senators Taft, Vandenberg, Austin, Capper, Hiram Johnson—in effect, all shades of Republican opinion.
Mr. Hull was cooperative. The Secretary showed Dulles the U.S. plan for the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. He also outlined the chief differences in the British and Russian plans, just as he had done previously for Congressional leaders of both parties.
Cause for Caution. The atmosphere of diplomatic caution was in order. First, the two men had areas of honest disagreement to iron out. Second, political implications were inescapable; each is the guardian of a Presidential candidate's foreign policy.
The big fact was that the Democratic and Republican candidates are agreed that the U.S shall participate in a new League of Nations, and all the U.S. could take heart that the discussion had been conducted so far on a high and non-political level.