Phillips gagged. Coughing scotch, he ran out the door and headed for Times Square. Midway in his sprint he remembered his new topcoat, paused, decided to forget it, and raced on.
***
Every fifteen or twenty minutes Dr. George Gallup was interviewed by a network announcer asking for his interpretation of the running tabulation. Gallup explained that the present Democratic plurality would be wiped out by the farm vote. By eleven o’clock the farm vote began to come in, and it was Democratic. Out on the plains they had remembered which party had given them parity and grain storage.
***
At 11 P.M. Herbert Brownell entered the Roosevelt Hotel ballroom and claimed a Dewey victory. Party workers cheered, but before they could ask details he hurried upstairs again. It seemed that Hagerty had overestimated the size of the landslide; they weren’t going to be out of the trenches at midnight after all.
***
At midnight Harry Truman woke up. It took him a moment to adjust to the unfamiliar hotel room. Then he turned the radio on again. The voice was that of H. V. Kaltenborn, explaining that although Truman was 1,200,000 votes ahead in the count he was “still undoubtedly beaten.” The President turned him off and went back to sleep.
***
In the Washington headquarters of the Democratic National Committee a latecomer who had passed a radio brought word that the President wasn’t being overwhelmed after all; in some states he was even leading, though of course “the farmers haven’t been heard from yet.” One of the staff suggested they send out for a radio. They shrugged, then nodded. Might as well have a few laughs before it was all over.
***
“Meanwhile,” Richard H. Rovere wrote, “the solid Statler walls were crumbling. Republican matrons were eating their corsages, Republican gentlemen were wilting their collars with nervous perspiration.”
***
Shortly after midnight the party mood in the Roosevelt ballroom began to be replaced by anxiety and then consternation. Only now, at this late hour, had they been assured that Dewey had carried his home state—and by a mere 60,000 votes at that; if Wallace hadn’t been on the ballot, Truman would have trounced him here.
It now appeared that the outcome hung on Ohio, Illinois, and California. Unbelievable as it was, any one of them could give Truman a winning combination. He would take a slight lead in one, then Dewey would pass him; all three were seesawing. At 1:45 A.M. Brownell, for reasons known only to him, returned to the ballroom and issued a second victory statement. He roused a few faint cheers. The others just stared at him.
***
At 4 A.M. Agent Rowley awoke the President and suggested he switch the radio on again. His lead was now a stunning two million votes, though H. V. Kaltenborn—whose voice Truman would gleefully mimic for friends to the end of his life—said he couldn’t see how the President could be elected.
Dressing, the President told the agents to drive him back to the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, because “It looks as if we’re in for another four years.” They arrived there at 6 A.M. Wan reporters wondered where he had been and how he managed to look as though he had had some sleep.
***
At 4:30 A.M., as the President’s car pulled away from the Elms Hotel in Excelsior Springs, Hagerty had assembled the reporters at the Roosevelt and told them he had just been conferring with Dewey. He said: “We’re in there fighting. The returns are still coming in, but it looks as if we won’t know definitely until morning.” Thirty-five minutes later he was back again. “We are not making any predictions or claims,” he said.
Sometime after dawn, still unable to grasp that he was being beaten, the exhausted governor went to bed, and as he dozed the last hope slipped away from his haggard aides. Truman took Ohio at 9:30 A.M.—by 7,000 votes—putting him over the top with 270 electoral votes. An hour later, when Dewey awoke, he learned that he had also lost Illinois and California. At 11:14 A.M. he conceded. President Truman had not only won the race; he had forged a smashing victory in the electoral college—3042 to 189, with 38 going to the Dixiecrat ticket. Moreover, he had carried Congress in with him. In the 80th Congress the Republicans had controlled the Senate 51 to 45, and the House 246 to 188. Now the Democrats held the whip hand in the Senate, 54 to 42 (a gain of 9 seats), and the House, 263 to 171 (a gain of 75). Paul Douglas, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, and Estes Kefauver were Senators-elect; G. Mennen Williams was governor of Michigan, Chester Bowles governor of Connecticut, and Adlai Stevenson governor of Illinois.
Taft was fit to be tied. “I don’t care how the thing is explained,” he said. “It defies all common sense to send that roughneck ward politician back to the White House.” Elsewhere the character of Truman’s achievement overrode rancor. “You just have to take off your hat to a beaten man who refuses to stay licked!” said the arch-conservative New York Sun. “Mr. Truman won because this is still a land which loves a scrapper, in which intestinal fortitude is still respected.” The triumph was more than a personal victory, though. Two days after the election Walter Lippmann wrote, “Mr. Truman’s own victory, the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the Democratic victories in so many states, attest the enormous vitality of the Democratic party as Roosevelt led it and developed it from 1932 to 1944… the party that Roosevelt formed has survived his death and is without question the dominant force in American politics.”
In newsrooms and editorial chambers men avoided one another’s eyes the morning after the election. The fourth estate and its sources were the laughingstock of the country and knew it. The Alsop brothers wrote: “There is only one question on which professional politicians, polltakers, political reporters and other wiseacres and prognosticators can any longer speak with much authority. This is how they want their crow cooked.” When the President and his Vice-President-elect returned to Washington (Truman holding aloft the Chicago Tribune’s “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline) they were greeted by 750,000 cheerers and a huge sign across the front of the Washington Post Building: “Mr. President, we are ready to eat crow whenever you are ready to serve it.” In a letter to his own paper, Reston of the Times wrote that “we were too isolated with other reporters; and we, too, were far too impressed by the tidy statistics of the poll.” Time said the press had “delegated its journalist’s job to the polls.” Several angry publishers canceled their subscriptions to the polls. The pollsters themselves were prostrate. Gallup said simply, “I don’t know what happened.” One New York Times reporter thought to call Wilfred J. Funk, the last editor of the Literary Digest, and ask for his comment. “I don’t want to seem malicious,” Funk replied, “but I can’t help but get a good chuckle out of this.”
Afterward the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan conducted a poll on the polls, while Gallup and Roper scrupulously investigated themselves. The results of the studies are startlingly alike. The Michigan group found that of the 24,105,000 Truman voters, 14 percent, or 3,374,800, decided to vote for him in the last fortnight of the campaign. Gallup and Roper, taking a different approach, learned that one voter in every seven (6,927,000) made up his mind in the last two weeks of the election. Of these, 75 percent (5,195,000) picked Truman; 25 percent (1,732,000) chose Dewey, a difference of 3,463,000. Inasmuch as Truman’s plurality over Dewey on November 2 had been 2,135,000, the inference is inescapable. Using either the Michigan figures or Gallup-Roper’s, one finds that some 3,300,000 fence-sitters determined the outcome of the race in its closing days—when Dewey’s instincts were urging him to adopt Truman’s hell-for-leather style and slug it out with him, and when he didn’t because all the experts told him he shouldn’t.
SIXTEEN
The Age of Suspicion
Before checking out of the Muehlebach and returning to Washington, President Truman was advised that he could not enter the White House. No coup; it just wasn’t safe. The most famous home in America was in imminent danger of collapse. Its householder wasn’t altogether surprised. According to the National
Archives, “President Truman became concerned because of a noticeable vibration in the floors in his study.” There had been more to it than that. The great chandeliers in the East Room had been tinkling when there was no breeze, and when the President held his physician’s stethoscope against the walls, he could hear them creaking.
He had appointed a commission to look into the matter—just in time, as it turned out. In the last week of the campaign horrified engineers had discovered that blackened beams, burned by the British in 1814 and never replaced, were about to give way; frescoed ceilings weighing seventy pounds to the square foot were sagging six inches. While the First Family had been walking out one door en route to Independence, frantic construction men had rushed in another with props and scaffolding. The reconstruction would cost $5,400,000. It might have been cheaper to erect a new building, but tearing down the White House was unthinkable. The next tenant would have air-conditioning, fireproofing, and multiple outlets for television cables. Meanwhile the Trumans would pig it in Blair House, diagonally across the street at 1648 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The Fair Deal was christened in Blair House. During the first three years of his Presidency Truman had regarded himself as the executor of FDR’s political will. But a third of the nation was no longer in want. The altered economy called for a new liberalism, “focused,” as Cabell Phillips put it, “on the creation and equitable distribution of abundance, which now loomed as an attainable reality.” Even before the miracle at the polls, a group of key Truman aides had conceived a program during a series of Monday evening seminars in the Wardman Park apartment of Oscar Ewing, director of the Federal Security Agency, whose advocacy of a national medical plan would soon make him the bugbear of the American Medical Association.1 In embryonic form their list of proposals had first appeared on the Hill in the President’s Turnip session proposals. Fully developed now, it included new measures for civil rights, housing, unemployment benefits, agricultural aid, and inflation control; a 3.2-billion-dollar tax cut for poor wage earners, federal aid to schools, and Taft-Hartley repeal. Together with Ewing’s Medicare, they would later form the nucleus of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society.
After a week of postelection convalescence at Key West, Truman put his back into his forthcoming State of the Union message. In time it would indeed alter history, but of the innovations which emerged from those last weeks in 1948, the one that would be most closely identified with Truman’s name was to appear not in the January 5 State of the Union address, but at his inauguration two weeks later. As Clark Clifford recollects, “We were having a real problem during late December putting the inaugural speech together. Our man had won a smashing and surprising victory at the polls, and he and all of us felt that when he stood up to take the oath of office on January 20, he should have something big and new and challenging to present to the country.” The message to Congress dwelt upon domestic issues; the inaugural would look abroad. The difficulty was that the great links of Truman’s foreign policy had already been forged in Greece, Turkey, Berlin, and the European Recovery Plan. Then Clifford remembered “a State Department memorandum that had crossed my desk a few weeks or a few months earlier. A technical assistance program had been tried on a very modest scale in Latin America, and this memo raised the question—not very hopefully as I recall—whether it might not be adapted to the Far East as a sort of substitute for the ERP.” Clifford suggested it to the President, who said after a moment’s reflection, “This looks good. We’ll use it. We can work out the operating details later.” Truman had already decided to tell the inauguration crowd that in dealing with other nations the United States would be sustained by faith in the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and a new North Atlantic alliance. In addition to these three points he now had another, technical aid to backward countries. In the final draft it appeared as:
Fourth. We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas….
Point Four stirred the world. Endorsed by the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council on March 4, 1949, it roused the hope that American technical skills might revolutionize primitive agricultural techniques, raise the standard of living in Asia and Africa, and tame their rivers with new TVAs. “While there is some criticism of the President for having shot first and questioned later,” James Reston wrote from Washington, “there is general approval of his colonial development program here.” The Christian Science Monitor reported that “President Truman’s dedication of United States technological resources to improve the lot of the globe’s less fortunate people has kindled the imagination of thinking people throughout Britain and Western Europe.” Predictably, there were rumbles of dissent on Capitol Hill from “the primitives,” as Dean Acheson called them. Senator Kenneth Wherry and Joe Martin groaned, Senator Jenner of Indiana said the whole thing had been invented by Earl Browder, and Senator Taft wanted to know where the money was coming from.
Taft knew. It had to come from Congress. But many Democratic candidates who had ridden in on the President’s coattails were turning out to be ungrateful; once again the Republican and southern Democratic coalition was bucking the administration. The chairmen of eighteen powerful Senate committees were from the South, and the President pro tempore of the Senate, the Speaker of the House, and the two party whips were all coalition members. Point Four, with a humble allotment of 45 million dollars, did not reach Truman’s desk until June 5, 1950. Even then it was hedged with multiple restrictions which, as Cabell Phillips wrote, largely vitiated “the great propaganda value it had when President Truman first proposed it.”
In the aftermath of his election, problems abroad bore upon Truman with special urgency. General Marshall was in Walter Reed Hospital having a kidney removed; he would continue as Secretary of State until the inaugural but step down then. Truman gave hard thought to the choice of a successor. He couldn’t pick a crony, a faceless bureaucrat, or a free-spending campaign contributor like Louis Johnson, who would succeed James Forrestal as Secretary of Defense in March. Marshall’s successor must be esteemed in friendly chancelleries, respected in Moscow, and known on the Hill.
Three weeks after the election he sent for Dean Acheson, who had retired to the private practice of law. As Acheson remembers it, he passed the Executive Mansion, of which only the outside wall had been left standing “for sentimental reasons,” and was escorted to the President’s “minute office” in Blair House. The President asked him to sit down, then grinned.
“You had better be sitting down when you hear what I have to say to you,” he began. Without pausing he continued, “I want you to come back and be Secretary of State. Will you?”
Acheson recalls that he was “utterly speechless.” The President suggested that he talk it over with his wife. Mrs. Acheson being agreeable, her husband accepted. He would take oath on January 21 and become the fifty-second and, with the possible exception of Seward, the most controversial of U.S. Secretaries of State.
As one crew of workmen rebuilt the White House, others were encircling the country’s inner cities with America’s new suburbs—the Hillendales, Gardenvilles, Northwoods, Parkvilles, Stoneleighs, Baynesvilles, Drumcastles, Anneslies, Wiltondales, Dunbartons, and Cedarcrofts. Levittown had become an American institution, with thousands of imitators, and outside Chicago a group of businessmen broke ground for another pilot development, Park Forest. Recognizing the housing needs of veteran families with small nest eggs but stable jobs, Park Forest’s founders first erected rental “garden apartments” around a central shopping plaza. Then, as their tenants’ savings accumulated, they added split-level ranch houses financed by themselves. The end result was a constantly recycling population of 30,000 whose predictable wants were supplied by stores in the shopping center—owned, again, by the businessmen. The inhabitants knew they were being exploited and loved it, and the envious hardhats who built Park Forest could hardly
wait to reach the new suburbia themselves.
Baltimore spawned no fewer than sixteen developments, and it is worth noting that the president of the PTA in one of them, Loch Raven Village, was a 10th Armored veteran named Spiro T. Agnew. Agnew was in many ways representative of homeowners in the packaged communities. Although he had held a commission he was a zealous egalitarian (“Call me Ted”). He was active in the VFW and Kiwanis. As a licensed though not practicing lawyer, he was naturally interested in public office, but his style was the new politics. Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., Baltimore’s incumbent mayor, advertised his background by remaining in his Little Italy home; Agnew, also a product of a downtown ethnic neighborhood, was doing his best to forget it. He attended the Episcopalian church. His favorite musician was Lawrence Welk. His leisure interests were all midcult: watching the Baltimore Colts on television, listening to Mantovani, and reading the sort of prose the Reader’s Digest liked to condense. He was a lover of order and an almost compulsive conformist. Saturday mornings he happily joined other Loch Raven men in washing and waxing their ’48 Fleetline Chevies, ’49 Buick Specials, and Oldsmobile 88s. Mondays he donned his double-breasted—later three-button—suit, set his snap-brim squarely on his head, and arrived in his Schreiber Food Stores office at 8:45 on the dot. Anyone who came in after nine o’clock heard about it. Agnew, the manager, believed firmly in punctuality, a stitch in time, and plenty of elbow grease.
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