Truman (117 page)

It was an odd reversal of roles, with the incumbent President running as the challenger and his opponent performing as though he were already elected and the campaign a mere formality. Dewey had only to mark time, be careful, make no mistakes, say or do nothing silly or improper, and the presidency was his.

So the speeches were kept unceasingly positive. He was
for
unity,
for
peace,
for
“constructive change.” He was not running against the New Deal. He was not even running against Harry Truman, whom he never mentioned, any more than Truman spoke of him, which was another odd turn. “Governor Dewey is deliberately avoiding any sharp controversy with the Democratic incumbent,” reported
The New York Times
as the “Victory Special” rolled through California, passing, at one point, within only a few miles of the Truman train.

In some ways the two candidates were much alike. Both were efficient with their time, alert, and energetic. They always looked spanking clean and pressed. Both were men of medium stature, though Truman, the one so often referred to disparagingly as “the little man,” was an inch taller than Dewey, who was 5 feet 8 inches. And unlike Truman, Dewey was extremely sensitive about his height.

They were each diligent, career public servants who genuinely believed that good government was possible and the best politics. They both loved music. Truman had dreamed of being a concert pianist, Dewey of being a concert singer and still loved to sing (especially “Oklahoma” in the bathtub). Each was devoted to his family. Dewey’s wife, Frances, a particularly photogenic woman with a somewhat shy but winsome manner, was generally seen as an asset to his political career; and they had two teenage sons, Tom, Jr., and John.

Like Truman, Dewey was a product of small-town middle America. He had grown up in Owosso, Michigan, where his father, the editor of the local newspaper, was vitally interested in politics, just as John Truman had been.

Beyond there, however, the similarities ended. Where Truman was at heart a nineteenth-century man—raised, educated, formed in thought and outlook in the era before World War I—Dewey was of a different generation. Dewey had never lived with the burden of farm debt; he had never been to war, he had never been bankrupt. Born in 1902, eighteen years after Truman, he was the first candidate for President born in the twentieth century. His middle American origins, moreover, were hardly apparent any longer. Educated at the University of Michigan and the Columbia Law School in New York, he had made his entire career in the East, and with his homburg hats and cultivated voice, he had left Owosso far behind.

Where Truman had been, as Nellie Noland said, “a late bloomer all along,” attaining prominence only past the age of fifty, Dewey had soared almost from the start, achieving national fame as the crusading district attorney of New York while still in his thirties. He was “the Gangbuster,” a national hero. In 1938, at age thirty-six, he had made his first run for governor of New York. Trying again in 1942, he became New York’s first Republican governor in twenty years. Running for a second term in 1946, he rolled up the biggest victory in the state’s history, winning by nearly 700,000 votes.

As governor he cut taxes, doubled state aid to education, raised salaries for state employees, reduced the state’s overall indebtedness by over $100 million, and put through the first state law in the country prohibiting racial discrimination in employment. If elected now, he would be, at forty-six, the youngest President since Theodore Roosevelt. Given his youth, ambition, his proven ability, it was not inconceivable that Thomas E. Dewey could serve as long as, or longer than Franklin Roosevelt. If he were to have four full terms, he would be in the White House until 1965, and even then would still be younger than was Truman in 1948.

But, as often noted, Dewey was also extremely cautious and cold in manner, at least in public, which for a politician was what mattered. On the campaign trail, he seemed not to care for the gifts he was offered or to mix with the crowd. He was incapable of unbending. Where Truman, at the end of a platform talk, would ask, “Would you like to meet my family?” Dewey would say stiffly, “I’m pleased to present Mrs. Dewey.”

“Smile, governor,” a photographer had called at a campaign stop in 1944. “I thought I was,” said Dewey. A remark attributed to the wife of a New York Republican politician would be widely repeated. “You have to know Mr. Dewey well,” she said, “in order to dislike him.”

He was so self-controlled as to seem mechanical—Dewey came on stage, wrote Richard Rovere, “like a man who has been mounted on casters and given a tremendous shove from behind”—and there was a hard look in the dark eyes, a look that had served him well as a prosecutor. “Those eyes tell you this guy doesn’t crap around,” a staff man once said.

It was Dewey’s small, dark “bottle-brush” mustache that the public knew him best for and that many people disliked, or wished he would get rid of, mustaches having been long out of fashion among public men. He had grown it on a bicycle tour of France years earlier and kept it because his wife approved. To the actress Ethel Barrymore, the mustache and Dewey’s diminutive size made him look “like the bridegroom on the wedding cake,” a remark greatly amplified by the acerbic, much-quoted daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and that may have done Dewey real harm in the campaign.

To the reporters on board his train, he seemed aloof, even haughty. They were kept at a distance, and though they were certain he would win—and most believed he would make an efficient chief executive—almost none of them liked him, which was quite the reverse of how they felt about Truman. Dewey’s “mechanical smile…and his bland refusal to deal with issues, have got under everybody’s skin,” wrote Richard Strout of the mood in the press car. Dewey, it was cracked, was the only man who could strut sitting down.

In sharp contrast to Truman, who had never wanted to be President, Dewey had started running for the job as early as 1939, in advance of the Republican Convention that nominated Wendell Willkie. Dewey believed it was his destiny to be President. “It is written in the stars,” he said privately.

That it was written in the polls as well also carried enormous weight with him, for, unlike Truman, Dewey took such samplings with utmost seriousness. He was the first presidential candidate to have his own polling unit.

On several major issues Dewey, as a liberal Republican, held the same or very similar views as Truman. Dewey backed aid to Greece. He supported the Marshall Plan. He believed in a strong military defense, including Universal Military Training. He was for recognition of Israel. He supported the Berlin Airlift and wanted further progress made in civil rights. As he and his advisers saw things, the real struggle waited beyond November, not with the Democrats in Congress, but with Taft, whom Dewey intensely disliked. (On more than one occasion Dewey had been heard to say that the Ohio senator should have carnal relations with himself.)

The dominating strategy of the Dewey campaign, to say as little as possible, was Dewey’s own—“When you’re leading, don’t talk,” he would tell the Republican politicians who came aboard his train. The “Dewey high command,” however, had more influence than did the people around Truman. They included campaign manager Herbert Brownell, Jr., whose headquarters were in Washington, but who talked to Dewey every night by phone; Paul Lockwood, Dewey’s veteran executive assistant; and Elliott Bell, an old friend who wrote speeches and served as unofficial chief of staff on the train. These were able, experienced men. Brownell had been Dewey’s campaign manager the last time, as well as chairman of the Republican Party. Lockwood had been with Dewey since his days as district attorney. Elliott Bell, a former financial writer for
The New York Times,
had managed Dewey’s two triumphant campaigns for governor.

And they all agreed: the campaign was going fine. Nor had other Republican politicians objected thus far. “We always asked them what our strategy should be,” remembered Bell, “and they all said that as matters stood Dewey was in and the thing to do was not stir up too much controversy and run the risk of losing votes.” The consensus was that Dewey would have done better in 1944 had he not gone on the attack as he did. So why repeat the mistake?

“The tone of his campaign was set,” wrote
Time
approvingly—
Time,
like its sister publication
Life,
having concluded that Dewey was as good as elected. The real concern among the Dewey staff, reported
Time,
was over what Truman might do between now and January to upset things, and particularly in the field of foreign policy. “The responsibilities of power already weighed on them so heavily that a newsman inquired blandly: ‘How long is Dewey going to tolerate Truman’s interference in the government?”

Dewey, said
Life,
would keep his composure “no matter how much his rival taunted, teased and dared him to come out in the alley and scrap.” Dewey himself remarked that he would never “get down in the gutter” with Truman. He would have preferred a more worthy opponent. In the seclusion of his private car, Dewey wondered aloud, “Isn’t it harder in politics to defeat a fool, say, than an abler man?”

To help guarantee a Dewey victory, J. Edgar Hoover was secretly supplying him with all the information the FBI could provide. Dewey and Hoover were old friends and got along well. Hoover had put the resources of the bureau at Dewey’s disposal months before, in the expectation that when Dewey became President he would name Hoover as his Attorney General. “The FBI helped Dewey during the campaign itself by giving him everything we had that could hurt Truman, though there wasn’t much,” remembered an assistant to Hoover, William C. Sullivan, who was one of those assigned to cull the files.

Only on the issue of Communists in government was Dewey willing to taunt Truman. “I suggest you elect an administration that simply won’t appoint them in the first place,” Dewey said at one stop after another, the line always drawing applause.

In Los Angeles, at the Hollywood Bowl, flanked on stage by Republican movie stars—Gary Cooper, Jeanette MacDonald, and Ginger Rogers, who came from Independence, Missouri—Dewey described communism on the march. “The tragic fact is that too often our own government…seems so far to have lost faith in our system of free opportunity as to encourage this Communist advance, not hinder it…. Communists and fellow travelers [have] risen to positions of trust in our government…[and yet] the head of our own government called the exposure of Communists in our government ‘a red herring.’ ”

Dewey did not try to inflame crowd passions. He opposed outlawing Communists. “We’ll have no thought police,” he said. Still the charge that the government was “coddling” Communists, a charge that had been injected into the campaign by the House Un-American Activities Committee, would be made again and again at nearly every stop.

Joseph Alsop described the typical Dewey speech as “over-rehearsed” and “a trifle chilling.” Marquis Childs warned in his column that in the “very expertness” of his campaign, Dewey might be “laying up future trouble for himself.” Privately among the Dewey people there was an increasing uneasiness over the size of the crowds, which, as
Time
conceded, were “good—but no more than good.” At Salt Lake City, Dewey, like Truman, filled the Mormon Tabernacle to overflowing, but the turnout along the streets had been nothing like that for Truman. “We hit Salt Lake City about five
P.M.
,” Elliott Bell would recall. “I was struck by the fact that there were very few people on the sidewalks—and a good many people walking hardly bothered to look at the motorcade.”

“Then we went into Texas and everybody said Texas was going to be cold to the President,” Truman would later tell a crowd in Neosho, Missouri, recounting his latest adventures.

Pounding his way across Texas, Truman had seemed to gather strength by the hour and give more of himself to the campaign with every stop. He was fighting for his political life and having a grand time at it.

“He is good on the back of a train because he is one of the folks,” said Sam Rayburn. “He smiles with them and not at them, laughs with them and not at them.”

With the rest of the Old South in revolt over his stand on civil rights, Truman had to hold on to Texas and its twenty-three electoral votes. Yet racial bias ran strong in Texas—segregation, poll taxes, outright race hatred. In Texas he was in Dixiecrat territory for the first time, which was why a “cold” reception had been assumed. There had even been rumors of threats on his life, of Dixiecrats claiming “they’d shoot Truman, that no-good son-of-a-bitch and his civil rights.” It was the first time a Democratic nominee for the presidency had ever found it necessary to court Texas, and banking on friendships with such longstanding, powerful Democrats as Rayburn and Garner, Truman had decided to make it the most strenuous campaign ever waged there by a non-Texan.

A high point was the breakfast put on by “Cactus Jack” Garner at Uvalde, which, reporters discovered to their surprise, was a tree-shaded town with neat green lawns and no sign of anything remotely like cactus. Served on the glass-enclosed porch of Garner’s big, buff-colored brick house, the breakfast was the best he had had in forty years, Truman later told the delighted crowd outside. Ten thousand people and a high school band had been at the Uvalde station to greet him at 6:50 that morning. Now several thousand cheered as he stood on the front porch with Garner, Rayburn, and Governor Beauford Jester, none of whom was known for his devotion to civil rights. (Jester, not long before, had called Truman’s civil rights program a “stab in the back.”)