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

by A. J. Baime

  “Let’s waste no time measuring the unfortunate man in the White House against our specifications. Mr. Truman’s time is short; his situation is hopeless.”

  When the balloting began on the morning of Thursday, June 24, people packed the convention center for the roll call, while the major candidates remained in their hotel suites, following the action on TV. In his eighth-floor suite at the Bellevue-Stratford, Dewey sat in shirtsleeves, tensely gazing at a television set through trails of his own cigarette smoke. When the power suddenly went out on the TV, the candidate dashed down the hotel hallway to the room of one of his campaign aides, to watch the returns.

  State after state cast its delegate votes, and when it was over Dewey topped the ballot, as expected. Yet he did not have enough votes to secure the majority needed for the Republican nomination. And so began a convention drama common to that era, before the reforms of the 1970s turned conventions into preordained theater. Behind the scenes, Brownell and his associates went to work to bring Dewey over the top. Brownell had been working for months to piece together this influential machinery, and now he flipped the switch. Orders went down the carefully constructed chains of command, reaching into the delegations of every state. Stassen was on the scene, his expansive forehead dripping with sweat. A delegate from Tennessee named B. Carroll Reece approached Stassen and told him how furiously the Brownell machinery was pushing to land Dewey’s victory. Brownell was demanding that delegates vote for the New York governor.

  “Harold,” Reece told Stassen, “you have no idea of the pressure put on me. That Dewey machine is like a row of tanks.”

  Not until the third ballot did Dewey capture the nomination, grabbing a unanimous vote of all 1,094 delegates. Writing in his diary later that night, Senator Vandenberg recorded, “[Dewey’s] ‘blitz’ was a thing of beauty.”

  At his hotel, Dewey showered, changed into a fresh suit, and made the drive with his wife to the convention hall in the back of a black limousine. It had been storming that night. As Dewey approached the arena, rain slowed to a stop and, as if on cue, a rainbow appeared, arcing over the City of Brotherly Love. Backstage in the convention hall, Dewey squirmed uncomfortably while makeup artists prepared him for the television broadcast. “I look just awful,”he commented. He could hear the crowds singing “Hail Hail, the Gang’s All Here” while they waited for him.

  When he stepped onstage with Mrs. Dewey, the masses gave him everything they had. The building’s girders soaked up the vibrations from the roars and applause. Dewey stood, waving his arms like he was conducting an orchestra. His speech was just minutes long, but he hit the right notes for this crowd.

  “It has been a difficult choice, in an honorable contest,” Dewey said. (Applause!) There had been “spirited disagreement, hot argument.” (Applause!) “But let no one be misled. You have given moving and dramatic proof of how Americans who honestly differ, close ranks and move forward, for the nation’s well-being, shoulder to shoulder.” (Applause!)

  “For tonight,” Dewey said, and he paused for effect. “Our peace, our prosperity, the very fate of freedom—hangs in a precarious balance.”

  * * *

  After Dewey’s acceptance speech, he headed to campaign headquarters at the Bellevue-Stratford to speak to his staff and his fans.

  “Will you excuse me for being late?” he started. “I finally got through a call to my mother in Michigan and I had a chance to talk to her and give her my love . . .”

  Dewey promised his audience that things were about to change. “I can assure you that we will have the finest housecleaning in Washington that ever there was in the history of our government,” he said. Then he retired to his hotel suite, where the Dewey-ites had gathered to begin the next chapter of their campaign—the choice of a VP candidate. The man everyone believed would be the next secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was in the room. Senator Vandenberg was there, as was Herbert Brownell. Conspicuously missing was Robert Taft, who had been invited but chose to nurse his wounded pride privately.

  This hotel suite now represented the future of global power as far as everyone present was concerned. The leading candidate for VP was Charles A. Halleck, the conservative congressman from Indiana. (Since he was a candidate, Halleck was not invited to be present.) “We were all sworn to secrecy,” Vandenberg wrote in his diary. “All of the following names were canvassed: Stassen, Warren [Earl Warren, governor of California], Green [Dwight Green, governor of Illinois], Knowland [Senator William Knowland of California], Bricker [Senator John Bricker of Ohio], Halleck [the aforementioned Indiana congressman], Hickenlooper [Senator Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa], Ferguson [Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan], and two or three easterners who were promptly dismissed for geographical reasons.”

  Somebody threw out Green’s name.

  “Let’s not be mealy-mouthed about this,” said Dewey. “We can’t take him.” Dewey thought for a moment. “We should have notes,” he said. He turned to Dulles. “Why don’t you take notes?”

  Dulles grabbed a pad.

  Brownell said, “Well, how about Charlie?”

  Arthur Vandenberg and Joe Martin both said at the same time, “Charlie who?”

  “Charlie Halleck.”

  Vandenberg shouted, “Oh, my God!”

  “Halleck won’t do,” Dewey said. He was too conservative for Dewey’s taste.

  The group took a break for coffee and sandwiches at 2 a.m. By the time the meeting broke up at 4:30 in the morning, Dewey still had not made his choice. It was not until 11:30 the next day that Dewey associate J. Russell Sprague came barreling out, exclaiming to exhausted reporters: “It is the unanimous opinion of all of us that Governor Warren should be the candidate.”

  Earl Warren was not entirely surprised when the phone rang in his hotel room. Dewey offered the governor of California the VP slot and Warren accepted. Meanwhile, somebody had to break the news to Indiana congressman Charlie Halleck, who had been a front-runner and had been told he would get the nod. Dewey chose to do the job himself, and Halleck became emotional. His parting shot was significant. Dewey’s platform and his choice of Earl Warren were decidedly liberal for the Republican Party, and not at all indicative of the mood in the current Republican-controlled Congress—as represented by Halleck, Bob Taft, Speaker of the House Martin, and others.

  “You’re running out on the 80th Congress, and you’ll be sorry,” Halleck told the candidate.

  The Dewey-Warren ticket was the answer to the questions Republicans had been asking themselves for months. What was the way forward for the GOP in the postwar world? Dewey’s brand of liberal Republicanism, the GOP ideology of Theodore Roosevelt? Or Taft’s, a harking back to the conservative Republicanism of the 1920s?

  Dewey won.

  Already, the Republicans had made public the official plank that stated the party’s policies. It embraced civil rights, recognition of Israel, admission of Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico as states, extension of Social Security benefits. But it also trumpeted more traditional GOP policies—reduction in public debt, more tax cuts, elimination of some federal bureaucracy. And of course: a crackdown on domestic Communism.

  Dewey was thrilled with the platform, but the plank was a defeat for Taft and the leaders of the Eightieth Congress. Few realized at the time how problematic it could be to have a national party plank that the Republican presidential candidate embraced yet which made the party faithful in Congress uncomfortable. One who did realize it was Senator Vandenberg, who wrote in his diary after the convention, “If this is to be the policy of the next Republican Administration in the White House, it is desperately important to make it equally the policy of the Republicans in the next Congress.”

  Another of the few who noticed the discrepancy was Harry Truman.

  Nevertheless, the ticket was set: two popular, young, energetic, and progressive GOP governors, from states that bookended the country. New York and California were two of the biggest states in the union, which between them co
unted for more than a quarter of the electoral votes needed to win in November. Dewey was vigorous and tough as nails, the first presidential candidate born in the twentieth century. Hugh Scott, the Pennsylvania congressman and new head of the Republican National Committee, spoke for many when he said, “We have a dreamboat of a ticket.”

  When Dewey arrived back at his mansion in Albany, his mailbox once again flooded with congratulatory letters and telegrams. “You will make a great president,” wrote Dewey’s longtime friend Tom Warren (no relation to Earl Warren). “I knew 28 years ago you would some day be president.” Among the missives was one from the Republican senator B. B. Hickenlooper of Iowa. “Your victory,” Hickenlooper wrote Dewey, “is practically assured.”

  * * *

  Truman watched the first-ever televised national political convention from inside the White House, on the twelve-inch flickering RCA black-and-white TV set that had been placed in the Oval Office to the left of the president’s desk. Yet on June 24, the night of Dewey’s nomination, events in Europe tore the president’s attention away from Dewey’s moment in the spotlight. The Soviets had blockaded the border between the eastern and western sectors of Berlin. The western part of the city, controlled by American, British, and French occupation forces, was now sealed off, and completely surrounded by Soviet-occupied territory. Berliners in these sectors were suddenly cut off from supplies—food, coal, and some of their electric power.

  That night, the streets in the western part of Berlin filled with frightened people who realized they were now in desperate straits—cogs in the Cold War standoff between the Americans and the Soviets, and dependent primarily on the US government to figure out a solution. One German leader in Berlin called on the world that night to help “in the decisive phase of the fight for freedom.”

  As Republicans were leaving their convention in Philadelphia, Truman was in the White House, focused on how to respond to the Berlin Blockade. Surely, he must have surmised, the timing of the Berlin Blockade was no coincidence; the Soviets seemed clearly to be attempting to create crisis at a time the Americans were focused on their electoral process. The day after the blockade began, on June 25, Truman gathered his cabinet. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal thought the blockade was “not as serious as indicated,” according to the meeting’s minutes. Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall disagreed. “A very serious situation [is] developing,” he said. Truman wondered whether it was time to evacuate American women and children from the US sector of Berlin.

  The man in charge of the US forces in Berlin, General Lucius Clay, was making arrangements to use aircraft to bring supplies in. He had no other option. An aerial supply operation would require near-continuous flights. The airplanes had already begun to take off and land, crisscrossing each other in flight, moving from airports in western Germany into two airports in the blockaded part of Berlin. The logistics of such an operation in the long term would be staggering. Would it be possible to use airplanes to fly in food and supplies, day after day and night after night?

  The day after Truman’s cabinet meeting, on June 26, the president directed what he called an “improvised ‘airlift’” to be put “on a full-scale organized basis and that every plane available to our European Command be impressed into service.” The Berlin Airlift had begun.

  14

  “With God’s Help, You Will Win”

  ON JULY FOURTH WEEKEND, less than a week before the Democratic convention was to kick off, powerful members of the party panicked. James Roosevelt II—FDR’s oldest son—made a move he hoped would save the Democrats from doom in 1948. Roosevelt had arranged for telegrams to be sent out to all 1,592 delegates who would be voting for the party nomination in Philadelphia, asking them to arrive in the city two days early for a special “Draft Eisenhower” caucus, in which the Democrats would make a high-profile plea to Dwight Eisenhower to run for president on the Democratic ticket. Eisenhower—the beloved army general who had commanded the Allied forces in the D-day landings in Normandy—was a mysterious figure, politically. Being a military man, he had spent his career above politics, and as far as anyone knew, he did not belong to any political party.

  Over the next days, Democratic leaders came out in droves with Draft Eisenhower statements of their own: Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, former Interior secretary Harold Ickes, the powerful Democratic machine bosses Jacob Arvey of Chicago and Frank Hague of New Jersey, and more.

  “Nothing quite so strange has occurred in a long time as the frantic clamor among discontented Democrats for Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to come and save them from Harry S. Truman,” wrote the columnist Thomas Stokes. If the Democrats failed to get Ike to run, commented the nation’s most popular political columnist, Drew Pearson, “every seasoned political leader in the Democratic Party is convinced Harry Truman will suffer one of the worst election defeats in history.” In pollster Elmo Roper’s latest national study, Thomas Dewey was well ahead of Truman, 41.3 to 33.7 percent, but if Eisenhower ran as a Democrat, the public favored him over Dewey, 42.3 to 33.8 percent.

  In the White House, Truman was humiliated by the Draft Eisenhower movement. “Doublecrossers all,” he wrote in his diary. “But they’ll get nowhere—a doubledealer never does.” To Bess, he wrote, “This job gets worse every day. Look what . . . [the] Demorepublicans are trying to do to me now. But I’m going to lick ’em or go down fighting.”

  Ike himself responded politely but adamantly: He would not run.

  All the while, the pressure in the White House mounted, as it seemed that war in Berlin could come at any moment. The same week that the Democratic convention began, Truman met with his military advisers to discuss the Soviet standoff in Berlin, again. “I’ve made my decision,” he wrote in notes of this meeting. There would be no retreat. “We’ll stay in Berlin—come what may.”

  * * *

  On July 12, the first televised Democratic National Convention opened ceremonies in Philadelphia. From the get-go, the tone was one of irritability and despair. The heat in the city was unbearable. Hotel rooms were nonexistent. Across from the convention hall’s front door, a man waved an EISENHOWER FOR PRESIDENT banner, even though Ike was not attending and would not be running. “The glum resignation of the leading Democrats has to be seen to be believed,” wrote the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop. “There never has been anything like it in the major political history of the United States,” wrote Erwin Canham, editor of the Christian Science Monitor.

  In the White House, Truman watched on TV—the familiar calls to order, dull speakers failing to arouse attention. One thing seemed eminently clear: how much the world had changed in the four years since the 1944 convention. Atomic energy. The Iron Curtain. The Cold War. None of this terminology had held any meaning four short years earlier.

  By this time Truman had picked a VP candidate—Alben Barkley of Kentucky. The president’s first choice had been the popular Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, but Douglas had declined, claiming lack of political experience. Truman believed the rumors, however, that Douglas did not want to be “a number two man to a number two man,” as the president put it in his diary.

  “I stuck my neck all the way out for Douglas,” Truman told his staff, mixing his metaphors, “and he cut the limb out from under me.”

  On that first night of the convention, the president sat cross-legged in his bed wearing pajamas, watching Senator Barkley deliver the keynote. Truman was alone, as his wife and daughter were back home in Independence for the summer break. He held his chin in his hands, as if too tired to hold up his head. A friend was shown into the room and the two began to talk over the convention.

  Truman reportedly said, “Why do they hate me so? I’ve tried to do the right thing. I’ve done everything I could. But they just don’t seem to appreciate it.”

  From the president’s point of view, his current approval rating—a miserable 36 percent—did not reflect the job he was doing. America was booming. Ever since the end of the war
, economists had been sounding alarm bells. There was going to be another depression . . . There was going to be hardship and fear . . . But no depression had come. The labor force was strong, the incomes of average Americans in various sectors were strong, and people’s standard of living in many parts of the country was high and rising. Despite high prices and a housing shortage, postwar America was on a tear. But no one was giving any credit to the Truman administration. Instead, the president was the picture of defeat.

  Secretly, he had a plan.

  Days earlier, a memo had appeared circulating in the White House, dated June 29, 1948, called, “Should the President Call Congress Back in Session?” The memo was unsigned, and the author of it would remain a mystery. It began: “This election can only be won by bold and daring steps, calculated to reverse the powerful trend now running against us. The boldest and most popular step the President could possibly take would be to call a special session of Congress in early August.”

  Congress had broken for recess, and was not scheduled to convene again until after the November election, which was more than three months away. Thus members of Congress who were running for reelection would have time to go home and campaign in their states. However, the president technically had the legal right to call an emergency session of Congress.

  The Republicans at their convention had come up with a platform that exposed a schism within the GOP. The most influential Republicans in the Eightieth Congress were those on the farther right. They were out of step with the liberal Dewey-Warren ticket on many of the election’s most impor­tant issues, such as housing reform and extension of Social Security benefits. Indeed, Dewey supported some of the same positions that the Truman administration did.