"Out West, Podner"

Before the Wisconsin and Nebraska primaries, admirers of Tom Dewey sarcastically accused Harold Stassen of campaigning like a county sheriff. Now, before Oregon's May 21 primary, Tom Dewey was running like an alderman who wanted to meet all of Oregon's 630,000 voters personally.

He hustled down the rainswept Willamette Valley, over to the Pacific Coast and back to the central Oregon lumber country--pumping hands, signing autographs, ripping off ten speeches a day. He peered at cows in Corvallis, at logging operations along the Umpqua River. He accepted a salmon at Oregon City, signed his name in blood for a local booster club at Coos Bay, paraded with an organization called the "Cavemen" at Grants Pass and, at their bidding, munched on a large bone. When his bus ran over a dog near Salem, he shipped off a pedigreed cocker to the bereaved owners, who promptly named it "Dewey" (but told newsmen they were still for Stassen).

"Glib Proposals." Dewey's speeches followed a familiar pattern. He concentrated on belaboring "this incredible Administration of ours," on warning: "Let's be sure we spend our money like hard-headed Americans instead of soft-headed saps." Time & again he thwacked Harold Stassen's ill-considered plan to outlaw the Communist Party. Such "glib proposals" and "easy panaceas," he cried, were "nothing but the methods of Hitler and Stalin ... It is thought control borrowed from the Japanese." He rode the theme so hard that the Portland Oregonian was finally aroused to a tut-tutting editorial: "Let's not have an Oregon campaign based on who hates Communism most."

It was not all smooth sailing. In Eugene a group of student hecklers from the University of Oregon plopped down in the front row, diligently leafed through copies of LIFE with a picture of Harold Stassen on the cover. In Portland, Dewey refused a drink of bourbon offered by a local politico, ducked out for his own bottle of Scotch. Commented a local columnist: "Out West here, podner, men have been shot for refusing to drink out of the common cookin' likker bottle and then showing up with their own pizen."

New Converts. But Dewey's dogged campaigning, his determined attempts at folksiness were unquestionably winning him new converts every day. By week's end Harold Stassen anxiously changed plans and prepared to return to the scene three days ahead of schedule. Dewey was feeling cocky enough to start talking about the men he had in mind for his Cabinet. The Secretary of the Interior, he promised, would certainly be a westerner. For Secretary of State, he announced, he had two men in mind: his longtime adviser John Foster Dulles and his unannounced presidential rival, Arthur Vandenberg.

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