Almost President

by Scott Farris

  Dewey had no desire to see the parties sharply divided along ideological lines and thought a large part of the strength of American democracy was the general similarities between the two parties. Having struck up an unlikely friendship with Hubert Humphrey, whom he called “about the best liberal around,” Dewey argued that when Nixon and Humphrey ran against each other in 1968 there weren’t “five degrees” separating them on the political spectrum and that was just “swell” because in America “all the votes are still to be found in the middle of the road.”

  “This similarity is highly objectionable to a vociferous few,” Dewey said during a series of lectures he gave at Princeton University in 1950 (which were republished, not coincidentally in 1966, two years after the Goldwater debacle):

  They rail at both parties, saying they represent nothing but a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I must say that I have most often heard this view expressed by people who have no experience in government and are either extreme reactionaries or radicals who want a neat little party to carry out their special prejudices, or these people are pseudo-intellectuals, or just plain obstructionists. None of them contributes much to the sober, tough business of modern government.

  To Dewey, Americans are all one family who share the same basic values and objectives. The argument between the two parties is over which methods best achieve those objectives. “The disparaging epithets of those who want everything clear-cut and simple cannot erase the stubborn fact that our objectives and interests as Americans are not neatly opposed but are, I hope always will be, mutual.”

  Dewey had referred to himself as “a New Deal Republican” and vigorously defended Social Security, unemployment insurance, farm supports, and securities legislation as ideas that cost relatively little “when compared with the gain in human happiness.” In determining a governmental course of action, Dewey had two questions he needed answered: Is it right? Will it work? Dewey did share the general belief of American conservatives that programs work best when they are initiated and operated locally as opposed to centrally in the federal government, and he often proved that to be true while serving as governor of New York for a dozen years.

  Dewey was often far ahead of the Democratic administrations of Roosevelt and Truman in tackling such domestic issues as racial discrimination. Anti-discrimination legislation in New York signed into law by Dewey in 1945 ended segregated public transportation, prevented unions from using race as a qualification for entering a trade, and greatly expanded the hiring of minorities in a wide range of professions. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell heralded the law as the most important legislation benefiting African Americans since the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Dewey later pushed and approved similar laws to end discrimination in education and housing.5

  Dewey scoffed at those who said he was enabling the “welfare state.” “Of course they are running a welfare state,” he said. “There has never been a responsible government which did not have the welfare of its people at heart.” The question, Dewey believed, was how to provide for the people’s welfare without sacrificing personal freedom. That was where he believed the Republicans held an advantage over the Democrats. Republicans would first consider whether the private sector could address the needs of the people, or whether it would be better handled at the local or state government level, before turning to the federal government. But if the federal government were the right place to address a public need, then Republicans would be more fiscally responsible, more efficient, and less corrupt in the administration of the program.

  At least this was Dewey’s faith based on his own remarkable record as governor of New York. One of the more impressive achievements of his years as governor was completely revamping New York’s mental health care system after discovering the appalling condition of state hospitals. He bitterly noted that the squalid conditions of these facilities were “left to me by those who claimed to be liberals.”

  In addressing public welfare, Dewey echoed the words of Henry Stimson, who had served in the presidential Cabinets of Taft, Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt. “To me it seems vitally important that the Republican Party, which contains, generally speaking, the richer and more intelligent citizens of the country, should take the lead in reform and not drift into a reactionary position,” Stimson said.

  Stimson’s statement reeks of class-consciousness and a condescending noblesse oblige, but Dewey would not have objected to the basic sentiment; he had been taught from birth that “all good people” were Republicans.

  Dewey was born on March 24, 1902, in Owosso, Michigan, the son of the local newspaper editor, who was also a local Republican official and activist. His birth announcement stated: “A ten-pound Republican voter was born last evening to Mr. and Mrs. George M. Dewey.” Dewey’s mother later told the story of how young Tom, overhearing a political argument between his father and a neighbor, complained to his parents that he had been falsely told the neighbor was a nice man. “Why, he is, Tom,” his mother replied. “But he’s a Democrat!” Tom countered.

  Dewey was raised to work hard. At age nine, he was not merely a paperboy; he was the local distributor for the Detroit News and managed nine other boys who actually delivered the papers. At age ten, in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt bolted the Republican Party because it would not turn out the conservative incumbent, William Howard Taft, Dewey was an avid Roosevelt supporter, distributing literature door-to-door and even earning the nickname “Ted,” partly because of his devotion to TR and partly because t, e, and d were his initials.

  The cool perfectionism that would prevent Dewey from becoming a beloved political figure, rather than just an admired one, was present at an early age. Dewey was, his high school principal said, “by all odds the smartest kid in school,” but so arrogant he had trouble getting along with classmates. Dewey was aware that he was considered obviously straight-arrow. Not only did he never miss a single day of school in twelve years, he was never even tardy. When this came to light in his later political campaigns, Dewey begged his mother to joke that she had purposely scheduled his bout with chicken pox during summer vacation, and in high school, he deliberately earned a few Bs so that he would not receive straight As.

  Yet, throughout his life, Dewey was abnormally conscious of image and duty. He smoked but refused to be photographed smoking. He insisted a magazine profile change a reference to him playing poker to him playing bridge. One of his great loves was the farm he purchased in rural New York and he had a genuine passion for raising livestock, but thought being photographed in his overalls seemed gimmicky, so “candid” photos of the Deweys on the farm showed Dewey and his sons incongruously lounging about in three-piece suits. Extraordinarily disciplined, while district attorney and governor, Dewey would routinely work from 9:00 a.m. until midnight. When tired, he had the uncanny ability to lie on his office couch, fall asleep immediately, and awake precisely fifteen minutes later, refreshed. He was also a creature of habit. He had the same lunch every day—a chicken sandwich, an apple, and a glass of milk—and he drank three quarts of water every day. On those occasions when he dined out, he always sat with his back to the wall—but that was perhaps a habit he picked up while a prosecutor when the mob had supposedly placed a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bounty on his head.

  Yet, while wags said you had to know Dewey to really dislike him, his friends testified that in private Dewey could be warm, funny, caring—even sentimental. Once, concerned he had hurt a friend’s feelings with an intemperate joke the week before, he suddenly showed up at the friend’s house late at night, put his arm around the fellow, and said, “Whenever you feel you have hurt a friend of a lifetime, heal that hurt at once. I love you.” Then he turned and left, leaving his friend comforted if befuddled. A Dewey intimate said, “It was almost tragic how he put on a pose that alienated people. Behind a pretty thin veneer was a wonderful guy.”

  Dewey would eventu
ally revolutionize the methods of a criminal prosecutor, but his first calling was as an opera singer. Possessor of a marvelous, deep, rich baritone voice that would also make him the second most effective radio speaker in politics after FDR, Dewey placed third in a national singing contest in 1923. Eager to continue his training in New York City, Dewey left the University of Michigan to study law at Columbia University and to be near another singing student he had met—Frances Hutt, a five-foot-three-inch brown-haired beauty from Texas, who would later become his wife. In 1924, Dewey gave a recital attended by the renowned music critic Deems Taylor, who later narrated the Disney film Fantasia. Unfortunately, Dewey was suffering from laryngitis the night of the performance, and Taylor’s review was sufficiently negative that Dewey decided to stick to law.

  Shortly after graduating from law school, Dewey had the good luck in 1931 to be selected chief assistant to the U.S. attorney for southern New York, George Medalie. In his post, Dewey tackled cases involving securities fraud, stock manipulation, and the field with which he would be most identified: racket busting. In New York City, rackets were thought to raise the cost of living for New Yorkers by a whopping 20 percent. Racketeering drained an estimated eleven billion dollars out of the national economy each year, an amount ten times greater than what the federal government spent on national defense.

  The young Dewey earned his boss’s admiration and affection. To boost Dewey’s career, Medalie timed his resignation in 1933 so that Dewey had to be temporarily appointed U.S. attorney in order to complete a major racketeering trial and so that he could become, at age thirty-one, the youngest U.S. attorney in history. Two years later, Dewey received another career boost from his mentor. When the State of New York decided to name a special prosecutor to bust the rackets, Medalie and other prominent Republicans declined the post and insisted Dewey be appointed instead. “This was just the chance to do the biggest job that any lawyer could do,” Dewey said. And he did it well.

  Just like in the movies (and many movies were based on Dewey’s exploits), Dewey was given broad autonomy and nearly unprecedented authority to bypass the civil service system and handpick a team of dedicated and incorruptible aides and experts in various specialties to take down the leaders of the underworld. The use of teams of lawyers and investigators to crack complex cases was a Dewey innovation. He also “revitalized” the grand jury system, using the panels to gather evidence that he could not have obtained otherwise. To be sure, he engaged in questionable activities in his zeal for convictions. He arrested hundreds of potential witnesses and held them in secret (sometimes for their protection, sometimes just because he could), until they agreed to testify. And not only was he able to select jurors he believed would vote for convictions, using methods that would not be allowed today, he even had the latitude to choose the judges who would hear the cases.

  Not surprisingly, he had a remarkably high conviction rate (94 percent, to be exact), though not always for the crimes of racketeering. Just as Al Capone was convicted not for murder but for income tax evasion, so Dewey’s most famous conviction of a racketeer was for an offense not directly related to racketeering: prostitution.

  There remains debate about how important a mobster Salvatore Lucania, better known as “Lucky” Luciano, really was. The one-time bootlegger and sometime associate of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel was certainly a major criminal force, and his lavish lifestyle attracted public attention. Dewey, however, was successful in portraying Luciano as America’s arch gangster, and the legend grew that Luciano created the modern Mafia and was the chieftain of the underworld. Yet, Dewey had difficulty building a case against Luciano for racketeering, including his alleged control of various labor unions, such as the longshoremen. “Sometimes I feel the entire town is against me,” Dewey said. “You’d be surprised at the places where people like these defendants have friends.”

  It was Dewey’s lone African-American and only female assistant, Eunice Hunton Carter, a “street smart” lawyer who had once worked as a social worker, who persuaded him to investigate Luciano’s control of prostitution in New York City.6 Dewey discovered, according to one madam working for Lucky, that Luciano had grand plans to syndicate prostitution “the same as the A&P.” A massive raid on eighty houses of prostitution led to witnesses and evidence that identified Luciano as the prime operator of prostitution in New York City. Luciano was found guilty on an astounding 538 counts and was sentenced to thirty to fifty years in prison.7

  Luciano’s conviction made Dewey a national hero. Warner Brothers quickly churned out a film based on the case called Marked Woman, with Bogart and Bette Davis, and many other films with titles like Racket Buster and Smashing the Rackets soon followed. Dewey declined offers to portray himself in movies, but it was reported that whenever he appeared in newsreels, theater audiences would wildly applaud and cheer.

  Despite his diminutive five-foot-eight-inch stature, Dewey cut a dashing figure. He had high cheekbones, a jutting jaw, dark brown hair, and, in the words of an associate, “the only piercing brown eyes I’ve ever seen. Those eyes tell you this guy doesn’t crap around.” Then there was the mustache. Dewey had grown it after graduating from law school while on a trip to Europe with a Columbia classmate (and future Supreme Court justice) William O. Douglas. He intended to cut it off when he returned, but Frances liked it and so, to the gratitude of editorial cartoonists, it stayed. He later trimmed it short when a campaign advisor said it would be easier to raise contributions if he looked more like Clark Gable.

  Dewey was eager to cash in on his newfound fame and weighed an offer to earn $150,000 per year at John Foster Dulles’s law firm, but the New York Republican Party had other ideas. To avoid being thought a “skunk,” Dewey agreed to run as the party’s nominee for New York district attorney with its $20,000 annual salary instead.

  Dewey’s reputation as a crusader for decency and good government (he began the first public defender program) received additional boosts when he secured convictions against the purported “head” of Murder Inc., Louis “Lepke” Buchalter (though Dewey’s conception of a corporation of professional killers was fanciful); against Tammany Hall boss Jimmy Hines for selling protection to the city’s numbers racket for thirty thousand dollars a year; and against former New York Stock Exchange president Richard Whitney for embezzlement. “No! Not Dickie Whitney!” Franklin Roosevelt exclaimed when told of his fellow aristocrat’s indictment.

  Dewey lost a bid for governor of New York in 1938, but his vote totals were the highest of any Republican in twenty years. William Allen White compared Dewey’s loss against Herbert Lehman with Abraham Lincoln’s loss to Stephen Douglas in the 1858 Illinois Senate race. It prepared Dewey for a run for national office. So, as 1940 approached, Dewey, a thirty-seven-year-old whose only elected office was as a local district attorney, was now, remarkably, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president.

  Dewey would acknowledge late in life that “everything came too early for me,” and his first campaign for the White House betrayed his lack of seasoning. The resident curmudgeon of the Roosevelt administration, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, mockingly announced, “Tom Dewey’s thrown his diaper in the ring,” while the New Republic characterized Dewey’s campaign as “Pollyanna for President.”

  Dewey never really liked campaigning, shaking hands, kissing babies, and posing for photographs. For one thing, he had a phobia of germs. For another, an overbite and two missing teeth from playing football made him reluctant to smile broadly. A photographer once entreated, “Smile, Governor!” Dewey replied, “I thought I was.”

  A campaign aide from 1940 said Dewey was “brilliant, thoroughly honest . . . [but] cold as a February icicle.” A man who worked on Dewey’s farm claimed that Dewey’s “greatest fun was finding out someone had made a mistake.” Herbert Brownell, one of Dewey’s longest-serving advisors, said Dewey’s talents were not his charm but that “he’d cli
mbed up the ladder the hard way. He worked harder, studied longer than anyone else. He could take a problem, break it down into component parts, assign it to talented people. He organized people. He was a real fighter. As president, he would have been [the] boss.”

  Dewey had thought the fight for the 1940 nomination would be with Ohio’s new senator Robert Taft, and already the Dewey-Taft rivalry began to define the divisions within the Republican Party: city versus country; East versus Midwest; internationalist versus isolationist; pragmatic against dogmatic. But while Taft and Dewey weren’t watching, a third figure, Wendell Willkie, arrived on the scene and, in one of the most improbable events in American political history, snatched the Republican nomination from both men.

  Willkie, who had been a Democrat until 1938, was a New Deal critic but a strident internationalist who benefited from a new and growing concern among Americans regarding the war in Europe. Willkie aggressively supported Roosevelt’s increasing calls for aid to the British and for enhancing American preparedness should the United States become involved in the fight. “We don’t want a New Deal; we want a New World,” Willkie proclaimed. Taft took the opposite tack and believed the United States could and should stay out of a foreign conflict where there was no direct American interest. Dewey tried to chart a middle course, supporting some aid to Britain but insisting the United States needed to stay out of war.

  The Republican National Convention, however, occurred during the very week in June 1940 when Nazi Germany invaded France, which made Willkie seem prescient. Dewey actually led on the first three ballots during the convention, but with feelings high, party delegates decided to abandon the efficient but seemingly soulless Dewey for the raucous Willkie campaign that one reporter likened to “a whorehouse on a Saturday night.”