Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America's Soul

by A. J. Baime

  Dewey doubled state aid to education and raised the salaries of state workers while reducing the state’s debt by millions. He increased scholarship funds for returning veterans, and moved hundreds of millions of dollars into a “Postwar Reconstruction” fund, which was instrumental in guiding the state out of the war with far less economic chaos than most other states. In a ceremony before popping camera flashes, he used twenty-two pens to sign a trailblazing desegregation law, which sought to eliminate racial and religious discrimination in hiring, and it made New York the most progressive state in the nation on race issues. Dewey’s labor policy resulted in far more harmony between unions and big business than existed at the federal level.

  In 1944 Dewey won the Republican Party’s nomination and set off on his first presidential campaign. Few believed he had a chance of toppling Franklin Roosevelt, running for a fourth term, but the candidate proved a fearless fighter. Not everyone loved him. He was accused of being cold, lacking the social nimbleness that politics sometimes required. “Dewey would always take on a face-to-face political fight,” recorded Herbert Brownell, who was now the head of the Republican National Committee, and the mastermind behind Dewey’s campaign. “He didn’t care if it ended up in a shouting match; he would usually dominate the scene.” There was that mustache, and the stiff Dewey countenance. The author and politician Clare Boothe Luce famously said of him, “How can the Republican Party nominate a man who looks like the bridegroom on a wedding cake?”

  As an underdog, Dewey ran an attack campaign. It would be most remembered for the September 25, 1944, Oklahoma City speech—called “one of the most vitriolic speeches ever made by a Presidential candidate” by one Washington correspondent present. Dewey decried FDR’s record as “desperately bad,” blamed the president for the loss of “countless American lives” in war, and accused Roosevelt of running a campaign of “mud-slinging” and “ridicule.”

  While Dewey lost the election, his attack strategy worked to some degree. He succeeded in coming closer to beating FDR in 1944 than Alf Landon did in 1936 or Wendell Willkie in 1940, defeating FDR in states including Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa. When it was over, and Dewey conceded at 3:45 a.m. on November 8, 1944, FDR muttered, “I still think he’s a son of a bitch.”

  * * *

  In 1946, Dewey—like the rest of the nation—watched closely as Truman floundered in the White House. The tragedy, Dewey told a friend, privately, was that Truman had two more years until the end of his term, and there was no inclination things would get any better. On April 1 of that year Brownell intoned in a Republican National Committee report, “The Truman administration is . . . a failure . . . Harry Truman is the weakest President since Pierce.”

  Following Dewey’s success in the gubernatorial reelection, he was a new man, friends and colleagues observed. He was a more personable leader than he had been in 1944, less of a prosecutor and more of a seasoned politician. “It has been wickedly said that when he entered politics he gave off all the human warmth of a porcelain plumbing fixture,” noted the syndicated columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop, “whereas today he has achieved the status of an electric toaster.”

  Whether or not the New York governor would run for president became the hottest gossip in Republican circles. Dewey knew what it felt like to lose a national election. Once, in a meeting with top Republican leaders including Brownell and Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, Dewey spoke philosophically about defeat. He mentioned two politicians in particular—Wendell Willkie (who lost to FDR in 1940) and Al Smith (the four-term New York Democratic governor who lost to Hoover in the 1928 presidential election). Both men had phenomenally successful careers. Both were pillars in the canon of American public servants. But future generations would remember them almost exclusively for one thing: losing. For a man of Dewey’s ambition, the prospect of losing the presidency twice was not something he wanted to entertain.

  “As long ago as Philadelphia, in 1940 [the Republican National Convention],” Dewey told his Republican colleagues, “I deliberately decided that I was not going to be one of those unhappy men who yearned for the Presidency and whose failure to get it scarred their lives.”

  6

  “It Is a Total ‘War of Nerves’”

  Our nation is faced today with problems, present and future, which equal in scope and significance any it has hitherto met in 171 years of existence . . . What America does today, what America plans for tomorrow, can decide the sort of world the generations after us will possess—whether it shall be governed by justice or enslaved by force.

  —​Dwight Eisenhower, August 29, 1947

  NO ONE COULD HAVE FORESEEN what would happen next. “I think it’s one of the proudest moments in American history,” recalled Clark Clifford, the president’s special counsel and increasingly one of his closest advisers. “What happened during that period was that Harry Truman and the United States saved the free world.”

  The year 1947 opened ominously. The British government released a white paper concerning the country’s finances. The war had left the United Kingdom destitute and His Majesty’s government would no longer be able to fulfill its international financial commitments. The London Times labeled the white paper “the most disturbing statement ever made by a British government.” Days later in Washington—on Friday, February 21—Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state, was in his office when an assistant came to him bearing two documents that had been delivered by messenger that morning from the British ambassador to the United States. “They were shockers,” Acheson would later write.

  The papers explained that the United Kingdom would no longer be able to deliver aid to Greece and Turkey, two nations that were on the brink of falling victim to Soviet-inspired Communist revolution. In a short period of time, all British economic aid to the countries would stop.

  For some time, intelligence reports had warned that Soviet-backed Communist guerillas were gaining control of Greece and Turkey. British aid was all that was keeping the Kremlin from Sovietizing these nations, and if the Soviets could take Greece and Turkey, they would have an easy road into the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

  On Monday, February 24, Acheson and his boss, the new secretary of state, General George C. Marshall, met with Truman in the White House. In Truman’s eyes, no man deserved more respect than Marshall, who had served as army chief of staff during World War II and whose very countenance inspired trust and reverence. Marshall made the case that the United States had to take over the burden of aid to Greece and Turkey, to stop the Soviets from advancing. A Truman assistant, John Steelman, was in the room and recorded that the president was “very convinced . . . that there was only one way to deal with the Communists and that was to let them know straight from the shoulder where he [Truman] stood.”

  All the major players in Washington sensed that this was a crossroads. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote in a letter to a friend during this week, “The next eighteen months look to me to be about the most critical that this country has ever faced.”

  By this point Truman was well aware of the dark forces at hand. Months earlier, the State Department’s top Russia expert, George Kennan, had made an analysis of Soviet psychology in a paper that had come to be known as the “Long Telegram.” Kennan concluded that the Soviets believed their security could only result from a “patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power.”

  More recently Truman had received a report written by two advisers, Clark Clifford and George Elsey, called “American Relations with the Soviet Union” (known as the Clifford-Elsey Report), which laid out in chilling terms what the Americans should understand about Stalinist power politics. The Soviets already controlled much of Eastern Europe. The Kremlin’s goal was to dominate every nation it could. Italy, France, Korea, China, Greece, Turkey, Iran—all had been ravaged by war and were now balanced on a razor’s edge, ready to fall to one side or the other. Economic hardship in these nations made them easy
pickings for the Kremlin.

  According to the Clifford-Elsey Report, “Development of atomic weapons, guided missiles, materials for biological warfare, a strategic air force, submarines of great cruising range, naval mines and minecraft . . . are extending the range of Soviet military power well into areas which the United States regards as vital to its security.” (Truman was so unnerved by this report, he told Clifford, “If it leaked it would blow the roof off the White House, it would blow the roof off the Kremlin”; he confiscated all copies Clifford had produced, and the report would not surface again until historians got ahold of it, twenty-two years later.)

  Now the State Department’s two top officials—George Marshall and the dapper aristocrat Dean Acheson—were confronting Truman regarding aid to Greece and Turkey. It was time for decision. Marshall himself had just returned from a mission to save China from falling to Soviet-backed Communist leadership, a mission that had failed. China was on the brink. Would Western Europe and the Middle East be next?

  Truman made a determination that was to define US foreign policy for decades to come. “This was, I believe, the turning point,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Wherever aggression, direct or indirect, threatened the peace, the security of the United States was involved.” The idea was to use money instead of soldiers to fight the Soviets. Economic aid was imperative if countries like Greece and Turkey were going to create stable democratic societies. Without financial aid, these nations had no chance.

  The president knew support for Greece and Turkey would be highly controversial. It would require the Democratic administration to get the Republican-controlled Congress on board with an unprecedented program that would hand out hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to foreign governments, free of charge. This at a time when the Republicans were charging the Democrats and “High Tax Harry” with overspending, when Americans were anxious about their own volatile economy.

  Truman explained the situation in a letter to Bess: If the United States did not commit to Greece and Turkey, “we prepare for war. It just must not happen. But here I am confronted with a violently opposition Congress whose committees with few exceptions are living in 1890; it is not representative of the country’s thinking at all. But I’ve a job and it must be done—win, lose, or draw.”

  * * *

  On February 27, 1947, Truman welcomed into the White House the nation’s most influential figures in foreign policy. Here were Dean Acheson and General Marshall from the State Department. Six congressmen arrived, including Republicans Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and Speaker of the House Joe Martin of Massachusetts. The president opened the discussion, then turned the floor over to the secretary of state. Marshall had a prepared statement with him. He spelled out in dire terms what would happen if the Soviets succeeded in sacking Greece and Turkey: “It is not alarmist to say that we are faced with the first crisis of a series which might extend Soviet domination to Europe, the Middle East and Asia.”

  Marshall made clear: No amount of American financial aid could guarantee success. “The choice,” according to the secretary of state, “is between acting with energy or losing by default.”

  At the end of the presentation, Vandenberg—head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and at times a fierce Truman critic—said solemnly, “Mr. President, if you will say that to the Congress and the country, I will support you and I believe that most of its members will do the same.”

  Which is exactly what Truman planned to do—address the hostile Eightieth Congress in person. He began work on what many would consider the most important speech of his life thus far. An administration official named Joseph M. Jones was tasked with writing the first drafts. “All . . . were aware,” Jones recalled, “that a major turning point in American history was taking place. The convergence of massive historical trends upon that moment was so real as to be almost tangible.”

  The speech would not only attempt to win over an opposition Congress, it would also be a direct signal to Joseph Stalin that Truman was going to support nations in an effort to resist Soviet bullying. Truman worked over the final drafts himself. As his special counsel Clark Clifford put it at the time, the speech would be “the opening gun in a campaign to bring people up to [the] realization that the war isn’t over by any means.”

  On March 12 Truman climbed to the rostrum in the Capitol before a phalanx of microphones. Behind him sat Vandenberg and Joe Martin, both of them Republicans. In front of Truman was the entire federal legislature. Millions more were listening over radio. The president began, laying out a philosophy that would come to be known as the Truman Doctrine.

  “The gravity of the situation which confronts the world today necessitates my appearance before a joint session of the Congress,” Truman began. “The foreign policy and the national security of this country are involved.” Nowhere in this speech was the Soviet Union mentioned. Truman continued:

  At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

  For most Americans, Truman’s address came across as just another presidential message. The gravity of the situation in Europe, and the demands of meeting that challenge, were not immediately appreciated by a populace wearied by war.

  There was little time for interpretation or deliberation, however. Even before the president delivered his Truman Doctrine speech, Secretary of State Marshall took off for Moscow in hopes of negotiating directly with the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin on the postwar future. The continent was emerging from a brutal winter, and what Marshall saw in Europe unnerved him. Entire national infrastructures were still in shambles. Mass starvation was imminent.

  In the Kremlin, the secretary of state found Stalin unwilling to compromise on much of anything. Marshall would remember watching Stalin doodle pictures of wolves on paper and respond with shocking indifference to the human misery that was rampant in countries like Czechoslovakia, Italy, Germany, and France. Stalin was in no hurry to help.

  “We may agree the next time, or if not, the time after,” Stalin told Marshall.

  It was clear to Marshall that the Soviets were content to see Europe starve. Weak nations were nations incapable of attacking the Soviet Union. As Marshall’s official translator Charles Bohlen later described this situation, “Europe was recovering slowly from the war. Little had been done to rebuild damaged highways, railroads, and canals . . . Unemployment was widespread. Millions of people were short on rations. There was a danger of epidemics. This was the kind of crisis that Communism thrived on. All the way back to Washington, Marshall talked of the importance of finding some initiative to prevent the complete breakdown of Western Europe.”

  While Marshall was abroad, on April 16, 1947, the famous financier Bernard Baruch gave a speech in the United States in which he used the term Cold War to describe US-Soviet relations, and from that time forward, the term worked its way into the American lexicon.

  On April 28 Marshall arrived back in the United States. The next day, he told a nationwide radio audience: “Disintegrating forces are becoming evident. The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate.” Marshall gathered the top analysts in the State Department and ordered them to begin thinking of a plan to save the continent, and to report to him “without delay.”

  “Avoid trivia,” he told them.

  * * *

  On May 9, 1947, the day after Truman
’s sixty-third birthday, the House of Representatives voted to appropriate $400 million (roughly $4.6 billion in today’s numbers) for aid to Greece and Turkey. The Truman Doctrine was so controversial, during the vote, dissidents in the House shouted that it was “a declaration of war on Russia.” One week later, Truman took off in his presidential airplane, nicknamed the Sacred Cow, bound for Missouri, where his ninety-four-year-old mother lay dying. On May 22, in the presidential suite at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, he signed the Greek-Turkish aid bill into law.

  Less than a month later, on June 5, George Marshall delivered an eleven-minute commencement speech at Harvard University. In the address, he voiced the ideas that became known as the Marshall Plan. “The entire fabric of European economy” had been destroyed by war, Marshall explained. The continent had no resources with which to recover.

  “The truth of the matter,” Marshall said, “is that Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products—principally from America—are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help, or face economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character.”

  What Marshall proposed was a program to use financial aid to fight “against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” Without naming the Soviet Union, he said that “governments, political parties or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States.”