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

by A. J. Baime

  “It is undoubtedly the first of a series of restrictive measures designed to drive us from Berlin . . . ,” Clay wrote. “It is my intent to instruct our guards to open fire if Soviet soldiers attempt to enter our trains.”

  Two days later, the Central Intelligence Agency issued a top secret intelligence report called “Possibility of Direct Soviet Military Action During 1948.” “The possibility must be recognized that the USSR might resort to direct military action in 1948,” it concluded, “particularly if the Kremlin should interpret some US move, or series of moves, as indicating an intention to attack the USSR or its satellites.”

  The Northern Hemisphere had divided into two opposing forces, and there seemed no turning back. Every presidential candidate was forced to consider the possibility of the election unfolding in a time of war.

  * * *

  As the Berlin standoff spread fear across the United States, violence was spreading across Palestine. On January 5, a truckload of bombs disguised as crates of oranges ripped apart an Arab office building in Jaffa, killing fourteen and wounding nearly a hundred others. A Jewish organization called the Stern Gang took credit. Six days later, gun battles broke out in sand dunes and orange groves along the coastal plain of Gaza, claiming twenty lives. On January 18, Arabs ambushed a group of Jews on a highway, killing roughly three dozen young men and women.

  The United Kingdom was scheduled to withdraw from Palestine at midnight on May 14, but the British occupying forces had already lost control.

  One morning in a February staff meeting in the Oval Office, Clark Clifford brought up Palestine. “People were blaming the United States for not acting,” assistant press secretary Eben Ayers recalled Clifford saying in this meeting. “[Truman] said that there was nothing further he could do. He had done everything possible except to mobilize troops.”

  On March 6, 1948, Truman received an intelligence memo on the “Proposed Program on the Palestine Problem.” “Unless immediate action is taken to preserve peace in Palestine,” it began, “chaos and war will follow Great Britain’s withdrawal on May 15th. Such a situation will seriously damage United States prestige and United States interests. It will surely be exploited by the Russians.”

  Truman still supported the United Nations proposal to partition Palestine into two states—one for the Jews and one for the Arabs—but the United Nations had made no progress. The Jews refused to embrace the plan. The Arabs refused to embrace the plan. And in the United States, the Palestine problem was highly politicized. Thomas Dewey was a popular governor in New York State, home of the city with the largest Jewish population in America by far. The Jews had been warm to Truman, but they would surely defect if they did not get what they wanted—Truman’s promise to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine. All Truman had to do to be reminded of this fact was to reach into his Oval Office desk drawer and pull out the Clifford-Rowe memo, which pointed out that no candidate since 1876 had won the presidential election without capturing New York’s electoral votes, except Woodrow Wilson in 1916. “Unless the Palestine matter is boldly and favorably handled [by Truman],” the Clifford-Rowe memo read, “there is bound to be some defection on their [the Jews’] part to Dewey.”

  Truman was hoping that somehow, the Palestine problem would solve itself, but as he waited, the whole affair blew up in his face. On Friday, March 19, the US ambassador to the United Nations, Warren Austin, informed the UN General Assembly that the United States was abandoning its support of the partition of Palestine into two states, in support of a UN “trusteeship” of the region. Austin’s statement to the UN was in opposition to Truman’s own position. Just the day before, Truman had met with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann and had all but promised him that the United States would support a Jewish homeland. Now Austin was informing the UN that this was no longer the case.

  When the story broke, Truman was stunned and worried. He wrote on his desk calendar, “The State Dept pulled the rug from under me today . . . The first I know about it is what I see in the papers! Isn’t that hell? I am now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser. I’ve never felt so low in my life.”

  He called Clark Clifford at seven thirty the next morning: “Can you come right down? There’s a story in the papers on Palestine and I don’t understand what has happened.”

  When Clifford arrived, he found his boss “as disturbed as I have ever seen him.” The backlash among Jewish organizations and politicians from states with Jewish constituents was furious, and the appearance of absolute ineptness was impossible to escape. As the New York Times political writer Arthur Krock commented, “At this time, the President’s influence is weaker than any President’s has been in modern history.” Truman was left to pick up the pieces. Even his staff was stunned.

  “All of this is causing complete lack of confidence in our foreign policy from one end of this country to the other end among all classes of our population,” Clifford wrote to Truman. “This lack of confidence is shared by Democrats, Republicans, young people and old people. There is a definite feeling that we have no foreign policy, that we do not know where we are going, that the President and the State Department are bewildered, that the United States, instead of furnishing leadership in world affairs, is drifting helplessly. I believe all of this can be changed.”

  Truman and Clifford agreed: The time had come for the administration to make its move in support of the Jews. Both feared that if the United States did not do so, the Soviets would. And then there were the ethical considerations, the idea that so many millions of Jews had died at the hands of the Nazis, that justice was on their side. The British Mandate was to end, and at that time the Jews were going to declare a new state in Palestine. Without Truman’s support, would the new nation have any chance of survival?

  Earlier, Truman had ordered Clifford to prepare a case to argue the matter with Secretary of State George Marshall. The day had arrived. On May 12, Truman summoned his secretary of state to the White House. When Marshall arrived at 4 p.m. with the State Department’s second-in-command, Robert Lovett (who had very recently replaced Dean Acheson in this position), they found Clark Clifford sitting in the Oval Office with the president. Clifford was nervous. “Of all the meetings I ever had with Presidents,” he recalled, “this one remains the most vivid.” Marshall was thought by many to be “the greatest living American,” according to Clifford, and the young White House special counsel found himself “on a collision course over Mideast Policy” with the secretary of state.

  Marshall was immediately suspect. When Clifford began his case in support of the Jews, he recalled, “I noticed thunderclouds gathering—Marshall’s face getting redder and redder.” When Clifford finished his argument, Marshall turned to Truman.

  “Mr. President,” said Marshall, “I thought this meeting was called to consider an important and complicated problem in foreign policy. I don’t even know why Clifford is here. He is a domestic adviser, and this is a foreign policy matter.”

  Truman replied, “Well, General, he’s here because I asked him to be here.”

  Marshall flatly accused Truman of making a decision that affected the future of the world based upon homespun politics. Lovett jumped in to agree.

  “It is obviously designed to win the Jewish vote,” Lovett said. “But in my opinion, it would lose more votes than it would gain.”

  As a former general, and even now as secretary of state, Marshall was committed to remaining above politics. He did not vote in elections, believing that doing so would compromise his independence. Now, he told Truman, “If in the election I was to vote, I would vote against you.”

  “Everyone in the room was stunned,” Clifford recalled. “Marshall’s statement fell short of an explicit threat to resign, but it came very close.”

  When it was clear no agreement could be reached, the meeting participants gathered up their papers and uncomfortably adjourned. As the deadline approached, Truman communicated his decision to General Marshall by messenger: The pre
sident would support the Jews in Palestine. Marshall had no choice. To oppose the president publicly would be to shatter the chain of command, and the general understood this fact. He responded that, while he did not agree with Truman’s decision, he would not oppose it publicly. “That,” Truman told Clifford, “is all we need.”

  Right up until the moment the British Mandate expired, Truman kept his decision to support a Jewish homeland a secret. In his May 13 press conference, a reporter asked, “Mr. President, will the United States recognize the new Palestine state?”

  “I will cross that bridge when I get to it.”

  The mandate expired at midnight on May 14 in Palestine, which was 6 p.m. on May 14 Washington time. In Palestine, Jewish leaders declared the new nation of Israel and began to secure borders with a makeshift army. Eleven minutes later, Truman released a statement: “This Government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof. The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel.”

  Truman was the first world leader to recognize the state of Israel. “The charge that domestic politics determined our policy on Palestine angered President Truman for the rest of his life,” Clifford later wrote in his memoirs. “The President’s policy rested on the realities of the situation in the region, on America’s moral, ethical, and humanitarian values, on the costs and risks inherent in any other course, and—of course—America’s national interests.”

  Meanwhile, the move did make for good politics. The night Truman recognized the new state of Israel, in Washington, the Israeli flag debuted at the Jewish Agency building on Massachusetts Avenue for a crowd of jubilant Zionists. In Palestine, the first shots of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War were soon fired, and violence and death began to spread across the region. Truman made a speech the night Israel was born, at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel.

  “I want to say to you that for the next four years there will be a Democrat in the White House,” he announced. “And you’re looking at him!”

  11

  “I Will Not Accept the Political Support of Henry Wallace and His Communists”

  ON FRIDAY, JULY 4, 1947—a date chosen for the obvious symbolism—Thomas Dewey left Albany by train with his wife and sons, headed west on a nine-state speaking tour. Dewey had yet to declare his candidacy, but the trip was clearly a test run for a national campaign. His first stop was Truman’s home state of Missouri. Dewey moved through Oklahoma, Colorado, and Texas. At every stop, local politicians lined up to shake the hand of the man they believed would be the next president of the United States.

  George Gallup’s latest numbers hit the press while Dewey was in Texas; the New York governor remained the GOP front-runner. Dewey was polling at 51 percent, far ahead of Harold Stassen of Minnesota, who had surged ahead of Robert Taft, polling at 15 percent to Taft’s 9 percent. In Salt Lake City, Dewey attended the National Governors Association conference, where he shopped around for a VP candidate, huddling for much of the time with Earl Warren, the progressive and popular young Republican governor of California. The trip was smooth sailing; the Dewey family’s only contretemps was a skin rash from exposure to poison oak that made Mrs. Dewey miserable for days.

  On January 16, 1948, at New York’s executive mansion in Albany, a small group of Dewey insiders officially announced the launch of Dewey’s historic run. Oswald Heck, Speaker of the New York State Assembly, told reporters, “The people have only to look at the record he has made at Albany in the last five years to gain assurance that he is the ideal man to successfully guide the nation through the perilous post-war years.”

  In Manhattan, Herbert Brownell fired up the Republican machine he had spent months building, hoping to propel Dewey into the White House. Brownell began a series of gatherings in New York with big donors, prying open wallets by means of ultralavish luncheons. The first occurred at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York on January 29, where the menu included “choice of cocktails, highballs and sherry,” followed by an appetizer of smoked salmon, sturgeon, and anchovies, then lobster and crab Louis, then fumet of gumbo chervil with “tiny cornsticks,” then hearts of celery with green olives and salted nuts, then filet mignon Henry IV with béarnaise sauce served with “a nest” of soufflé potatoes and new string beans, a dessert of Waldorf savarin au rhum with brandied cherries and golden sabayon, and a selection of cigars and cigarettes. Campaign donations flowed, as did the claret and bourbon.

  The national committee hired one of the best advertising agencies in Manhattan, Albert Frank–Guenther Law, to manage publicity. The firm moved to make tactical plans in each state, along with a national ad blitz to run in general newspapers, religious newspapers, farm papers, university publications, business newspapers, and the foreign-language press. The committee commissioned a detailed “statistical analysis” of the 1946 elections, which revealed some remarkably encouraging facts about the national electorate. Statistics showed “further evidence as to the change in the colored vote from Democrat to Republican.” Republicans had gained in 1946 in unexpected places, such as large industrial communities in traditionally Democratic strongholds like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Detroit.

  “The outlook is exceedingly favorable,” the analysis found, suggesting “a Republican trend which on the basis of historical precedent should almost inevitably bring about the election of a Republican President in the forth coming election.”

  Dewey ordered Brownell to assign a representative from the campaign to personally contact and woo the delegations that would be voting at the Republican National Convention from each of the forty-eight states. “The organizational job strikes me as being a staggering one but of the greatest importance,” Dewey wrote Brownell. Every delegate to the national convention “may be of decisive importance.”

  Meanwhile, powerful global leaders began to arrive at the Albany executive mansion to curry favor with the man most likely to be in the White House come Inauguration Day in 1949. Former British prime minister Winston Churchill appeared at 138 Eagle Street for a nine-hour tête-à-tête with Dewey, as did Italian prime minister Alcide De Gasperi.

  Eight states were scheduled to hold Republican primaries, and while the national convention would choose the 1948 ticket, the advance elections would spell out which candidate these eight states would be voting for in Philadelphia—a strong indicator of who would come out on top. The first primary was held in New Hampshire, and Dewey captured victory as expected. But when the spotlight moved to Wisconsin—a state where Dewey had beaten FDR in 1944—things did not go as planned. Dewey found himself overwhelmed with work during a highly charged New York legislative session, and his advisers made the decision to leave the campaigning in the state to local politicos. Based on the 1944 stats, Dewey’s team believed he had Wisconsin sewn up tight.

  If the dark horse Harold Stassen had any chance of competing with Dewey nationally, he would have to charge out in front in the Midwest primaries. Stassen began to crisscross Wisconsin, where he was well known and liked, as he hailed from the neighboring state of Minnesota. Carloads of Stassen campaigners flooded Wisconsin’s rural areas. On March 8, in a speech in Cleveland, Stassen grabbed headlines with a call to quash Communism in the United States.

  “The Communist Party organization should be promptly outlawed in America,” Stassen said, “and we should urge that it be outlawed in all liberty-­loving countries in which there yet remains the authority in free men to do so.”

  Dewey arrived in Wisconsin just five days before primary day. When voters went to the polls, the governor was trounced. It was Stassen, then Douglas MacArthur, with Dewey coming in third.

  In the coming weeks, Stassen—a towering figure physically, with a bald dome and a commanding speaking voice—surprised election observers by jumping out in front, winning Republican primaries in Nebraska and Pennsylvania. Suddenly the New York governor faced do-o
r-die in Oregon, where he was at a disadvantage—a big-city man in a rural farm state, a member of the eastern establishment out of his element in the Wild West.

  Dewey was in trouble. “There isn’t any use in deceiving you regarding the situation here in Oregon,” a Republican delegate named F. N. Belgrano Jr., president of the First National Bank in Portland, wrote Brownell. “It is decidedly bad, and whether or not Stassen’s lead can be whittled down and reversed will depend entirely on the personal efforts of the governor.”

  At the end of April, Dewey flew out of LaGuardia airfield bound for Oregon for a three-week fight. The national committee flooded Oregon’s radio stations with programs such as “Dewey and Women’s Rights” and “How Dewey Would Wage Peace.” To court farmers, the campaign formed an “Oregon Farmers for Dewey” organization based in the Multnomah Hotel in Portland, which distributed 175,000 pieces of campaign literature to rural mailboxes highlighting Dewey’s work on his upstate New York dairy farm, the candidate’s “farm philosophy,” and his ideas on how to fight cow mastitis. At one point, a reception with the Republican governor John H. Hall of Oregon was delayed because the bus carrying Dewey and his team ran over a dog. Dewey wired the owners his regrets and bought them a new cocker spaniel, which was subsequently named Dewey.

  As the Oregon vote approached, Dewey and Stassen drew even in the race, and the contest attracted mobs of national press figures to a state that had never before found itself in the heat of the political spotlight. “The Governor is making rapid strides,” recorded Clyde Lewis, a member of Dewey’s campaign team, ten days into Dewey’s boots-on-the-ground Oregon offensive. “I would say his chances as of today are at least equal to those of Stassen. Terrific enthusiasm is being generated and Oregon is agog at the attention it is receiving.” The cost of Dewey’s Oregon operation would add up to three times the record ever spent up to that point by a candidate in a primary in the state, some $250,000.