by A. J. Baime
The message spoke of the moral bankruptcy that would result from Truman’s leadership, “so long as the policy of the Cold War is continued and we spend increasing billions of American dollars to support reactionary regimes abroad, arm Western Europe and militarize America.” It called for “one world at peace, not two hostile worlds arming for war,” and for “a comprehensive program of assistance to farmers, rollback of consumer prices, public housing, social security, conservation, irrigation and public power development.”
Wallace absorbed the message and noticed within it a bitter irony. His ideas on foreign policy clashed with Truman’s and Dewey’s. But on domestic policy, all three candidates were in the same ballpark. All three had campaigned for peace, for assistance to farmers, for anti-inflation policy, Social Security expansion, and conservation of natural resources.
Some of Wallace’s campaign staff argued that the draft of the concession was too antagonistic. There was no hint of the traditional congratulatory spirit, no flavor of sportsmanship. Wallace did not want to hear it. He approved the message.
“Under no circumstance,” he said, “will I congratulate that son of a bitch.”
* * *
Barney Allis, manager of the Muehlebach Hotel, was awakened by his telephone. A Secret Service man was on the line. “The President is on his way,” he said.
Allis glanced at a clock. “But it’s only 6 o’clock and I just got into bed,” he said.
The Secret Service man repeated: “The President is on his way.”
Forty minutes later, press secretary Charlie Ross awoke in his bed at the Muehlebach to find Truman looking down at him through his thick, round wire-rim spectacles. Ross too had just gotten to sleep. “I looked up,” he recalled, “and there was the boss at my bedside grinning.”
Truman appeared crisp in a dark suit, his hair brushed and his pocket square perfectly folded. He said that he had awoken at 4:30 a.m. to hear the latest news. “I heard the broadcast,” he told Ross, “and I decided I’d better drive back to town and have breakfast at the penthouse.”
It was 6:40 a.m. The president retired to a room so he could call Bess at their home a dozen miles away in Independence. The door to the room was open and reporter Robert Nixon looked in. Nixon too had been quickly awakened and he was wearing a trench coat over pajamas, peering in at Truman.
“His door was wide open,” Nixon recalled. “He was sitting on a sofa on the telephone . . . Tears were streaming down his eyes . . . From what he said, I knew he was talking to Bess in Independence, and he was telling her that he had won.”
* * *
The party at the Muehlebach was just getting started. Truman sat on a couch, greeting people, saying, “It looks as though we have them whipped.” The Associated Press’s Tony Vaccaro showed up in pajamas, with his hat askew.
“Tony, straighten your hat,” Truman said, cackling.
Truman also called Clark Clifford at his home in Washington. Clifford would later describe this call as “the most gratifying phone call of my life . . . With great jubilation he told me that Illinois and Ohio were going into the Democratic column. The victory was his.”
All morning the teletype machines kept chattering on and the phones kept ringing. The question on everyone’s lips: When would Dewey concede? Truman welcomed members of Battery D, buddies whom he had commanded in World War I, who had come to congratulate him. Also present was his former partner Eddie Jacobson, whose Westport Menswear, located nearby, would not be opening that day. Truman surprised everyone with his composure. Remembered his friend Jerome Walsh:
“He displayed neither tension nor elation. For instance someone remarked bitterly that if it hadn’t been for Wallace, New York and New Jersey would have gone Democratic by good majorities. But the President dismissed this with a wave of his hand. As far as Henry was concerned, he said, Henry wasn’t a bad guy; he was doing what he thought was right and he had every right in the world to pursue his course.”
In states across the nation, people were reading their morning newspapers, which were noncommittal for the most part, because press time for reporters had come before a lot of the results were in. “At 6 a.m. today,” noted the New York Times, “after a night in which his political fortunes waxed and waned with every passing hour, President Harry S. Truman took an impressive lead over his Republican opponent, Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York, in both the popular and electoral vote of the nation.” The New York Times offices were deluged with twenty-five thousand phone calls between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. on this day, from people wanting to know who had won. “Election Still in Doubt,” read the Los Angeles Times headline on November 3. “Truman Ahead with Dewey Holding Key States.”
Some other publications were even less on top of things. Columnist Fred Othman’s piece the morning of November 3 in Atlanta’s biggest paper, the Constitution, began: “The ballots haven’t been counted at this writing, but there seems to be no further need for holding up an affectionate farewell to Harry Truman, who will go down in history as the President nobody hated.” The Alsop brothers’ column in the Washington Post on November 3 began: “The first postelection question is how the Government can get through the next 10 weeks . . . Events will not wait patiently until Thomas E. Dewey officially replaces Harry S. Truman.”
Other newspapers, from Chicago to as far off as Munich, incorrectly reported that Dewey had won. The Munich Merkur ran a banner headline on November 3: “Thomas E. Dewey Amerikas neuer Präsident.” Women’s Wear Daily’s front page featured the banner headline: “Dewey, Warren Win; Business Gain Seen.” The Washington Post featured a gossip column with the headline: “ ‘Persistence’ Is the Dominating Trait that Carried Dewey to the Presidency.”
Most famously, the early edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune—a newspaper that had attacked Truman as vigorously as any other—appeared that morning with the headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman; G.O.P. Sweep Indicated in State.” Below the headline, an article declared that the GOP would be “back in the White House,” that “Dewey won the Presidency by an overwhelming majority.” (In 2007 the Chicago Tribune would call this “arguably the most famous headline in the newspaper’s 150-year history” and “every publisher’s nightmare.” Roughly 150,000 copies of the paper’s first edition streamed off the press, the ink barely dry, before panicked editors could change the front-page banner headline for the second edition, to “Democrats Make Sweep of State Offices.”)
At Democratic National Committee headquarters in New York, where corks were popping, the phone rang, and Chairman McGrath took the call. He heard Truman’s voice over the line, thanking him for all his work.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” McGrath said. “Nobody deserved to win more than you did, Mr. President.” McGrath held up his glass. One present remembered: “The wine shimmered effervescently in a shaft of sunlight.” McGrath said into the phone, “Your staff is drinking to you, Mr. President. From the bottoms of our hearts we drink to you.”
Standing next to McGrath was India Edwards, one of the only Truman campaigners who had insisted throughout that the Missourian would win. McGrath told Truman, “Now I want you to talk to the person who really had faith all the time, and who knew you were going to win.” He passed the phone to Edwards.
“I burst out crying,” she later recalled. “The best man won,” she said into the phone, almost incoherently. “The best man won.”
Minutes after McGrath hung up the phone he was handed a telegram. He called for silence. “Gentlemen,” McGrath announced, speaking specifically to the press corps, “I have here a message that will make your stories conclusive. This is a message addressed to Harry S. Truman, President. I will read it slowly, for you may wish to copy it down word for word.” McGrath looked down at the telegram in his hand. It was Thomas Dewey’s concession statement. “ ‘My heartiest congratulations to you on your election and every good wish for a successful administration. I urge all Americans to unite behind you in support of your efforts to keep our
Nation strong and free and establish peace in the world.’”
“Signed,” McGrath said, “by Thomas E. Dewey.”
* * *
At the Muehlebach, Truman’s arm was growing tired of handshaking. More news came through: Truman had unexpectedly won in California, against every prediction. This was the home state of the Republican vice presidential candidate Earl Warren. At 10:16 a.m. Kansas City time, a voice shouted for attention and the hum of conversation trailed off.
“Dewey has conceded!” someone shouted.
Truman was holding his hat in his left hand, and he pumped his other hand upward. In that moment, remembered one man present, “everyone was talking, yelling at once. The photographers’ bulbs blazed away. The reporters crowded around for the president’s first words now that his victory was confirmed . . . Radio reporters shoved microphones in the president’s face. Friends grasped his hand; some of them wept.”
“All I can say,” Truman offered, “is that I am very, very happy.”
Nearby to Truman, Eddie Jacobson stood in a daze. “I cried and I prayed for this,” he said aloud.
A fuse blew out and the hotel suite turned suddenly semi-dark, but no one seemed to notice. Truman’s brother Vivian, a Missouri farmer all his life, had his arms around the president, and from the crowd the words “Four more years” could be clearly heard.
The news began to spread. In New York City, lights from the Times Square Tower beacon switched to a steady beam pointing south, a declaration of Truman’s victory, as Times Square below filled with revelers. One man told the New York Times reporter Meyer Berger, “It’s something like the night President Roosevelt died. You can’t quite believe it. You have to talk it over with someone—anyone—to make sure you’ve got it right.” Many blocks south, alarm spread across Wall Street. The stock market fell into a near freefall upon news of Harry Truman’s victory.
In California, the head of the Democratic state committee Harold I. McGrath rode a taxi to work that morning through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. “It was the most exhilarating personal experience,” he recalled, “an experience of personal achievement where everything felt good.”
Truman had won his home state of Missouri. In Independence, after Dewey conceded, Mayor Roger Sermon declared a holiday and all the students were released from school. A sprawling crowd had come together for an impromptu celebration outside the town’s Memorial Hall. By this time, enough votes had been tabulated to show that the Democrats would regain control of the House of Representatives, which was expected, but also of the Senate, which was not. So the president would begin his first full term with a friendly Congress and all hopes of success. After the sun had set, Truman made an appearance in front of Memorial Hall. He stood on the steps and looked out at thirty thousand of his hometown friends. It was the biggest gathering ever assembled in the town’s history.
“It was not my victory . . . ,” he said into a microphone. “It was not for me but for the whole country. I want everyone to help me in working for the welfare of the country and peace of the world.”
* * *
Dewey was originally scheduled to appear at the campaign party in the Roosevelt ballroom at 9 p.m. on November 2. He did not appear until 1 p.m. the next day. Some 150 reporters were on hand for the most solemn political press conference any of them would ever recall. Dewey forced a smile for the photographers.
“Can we regard the pictures as done?” he asked them. “Will you let us go ahead without any more interruptions?”
The photographers obliged.
Dewey said, “Anything I can tell anybody here that they don’t already know?”
One reporter shouted, “What happened Governor?”
“I was just as surprised as you are, Dick, and I gather that is shared by everybody in the room as I read your stories before the election.”
“Looking back, was it an error of strategy or tactics?”
“No,” Dewey said. “Governor Warren and I are both very happy. I talked with him—that we waged a clean and constructive campaign and I have no regrets whatsoever.”
One reporter asked, “What do you think were the chief factors?”
“I think that would be impossible to answer at this date,” Dewey said. “I would have to study it and get more opinions and read what you write over the next few days. I am no better able to guide you than before the election.”
When asked if he would ever consider running for president a third time, Dewey responded with an emphatic syllable.
“No.”
33
“Dewey Defeats Truman”
IT WAS THE GREATEST ELECTORAL upset in the nation’s history, and the press had to answer for its role in calling it wrong.
The Denver Post: “We, and the rest of the American press, have an awful burden of explanation to offer for this refutation of our ‘expert’ opinion. For the fact is that we have failed abysmally in putting a finger on the real pulse of America.” The Boston Daily Globe: “President Truman’s victory in his race for election to the White House will go down in the books as one of the political miracles of all time.” Marquis Childs in the Washington Post: “We were wrong, all of us, completely and entirely, the political editors, the politicians—except for Harry S. Truman. And no one believed him.” Newsweek put out an “Election Special” on November 4. On the cover was Truman’s smiling face and two simple words below it: “Miracle Man.” “If the 1948 election proved nothing else,” the magazine concluded, “it demonstrated that everyone accepted the rules but Harry S. Truman. He defied them. And he won.”
That morning of November 4, the second full day after election night, Truman left Kansas City’s Union Station, ensconced within the very familiar walls of the swaying Ferdinand Magellan. Bess and Margaret were with him. The Magellan had turned out to be an apt symbol for his campaign, for it was named after the sixteenth-century explorer who had risked life and limb to discover the unknown. In fact, Truman had traveled more miles on his campaign than Magellan ever did.
On the way back to Washington, Truman stopped in St. Louis. Someone gave him a copy of a November 3 issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune—yesterday’s paper. He stood on the back platform of his train car and waved the Tribune at crowds who had amassed to see him. At that moment, the news photographer W. Eugene Smith snapped a photograph of a moment forever imprinted in the American consciousness. Arguably, no president in history had ever been captured with a facial expression of such unbridled joy. Time magazine would later comment that Smith’s photo was “the greatest photograph ever made of a politician celebrating victory. Period.”
Truman held up the newspaper so its headline could be clearly read: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
* * *
In Washington, DC, on the morning of November 5, Truman was greeted by some 750,000 people. The historian David McCullough would call this turnout “the biggest, most enthusiastic outpouring for a President in the history of the capital.” Before Truman could even get off the train, Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina was there to shake his hand.
Johnston had been the man behind some of the most vicious attacks on Truman’s civil rights program. It had been Johnston—an outspoken white supremacist—who had publicly humiliated Truman months earlier at the Jackson-Jefferson Day Dinner by buying tickets to reserve a table right in front of the stage where Truman was to speak, and then boycotting the event so that the highly visible table remained empty. Now here Johnston was to make amends.
The well-wishers lined up in such great numbers to shake Truman’s hand, it took the president twenty-two minutes to get from the Magellan to his automobile, at which point the motorcade began to snake through the city. Bess, Margaret, J. Howard McGrath, and others sat in the back of the open seven-seater. When they passed the Washington Post building, they saw a big sign waiting for them: WELCOME HOME. FROM THE CROW-EATERS. The Post editors had sent Truman a telegram inviting him to a “crow banquet,” in which the newspapers’ wri
ters and editors would enjoy a main course of “crow en glace.”
“I will never forget that ride to the White House,” Margaret recorded. “Every band in the world seemed to be playing ‘I’m Just Wild About Harry.’”
At the White House, a microphone had been set up on the North Portico. Truman and Barkley thanked a crowd that stretched out farther than their eyes could see, all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue. Once Truman entered the White House, however, the very moment he was out of view of all those cameras, he was cornered by a very nervous J. B. West, the White House chief usher.
“I am afraid you’re going to have to move out right away,” West said.
More scaffolding had been erected, and construction workers were legion. The place was not safe for inhabitation.
“Doesn’t that beat hell!” Truman said. He knew he was moving out, but he did not know that—win or lose—he was moving out now. “Here we’ve worked ourselves to death trying to stay in this jailhouse,” he said, “and they kick us out anyway!”
As the Trumans prepared to move across the street to Blair House—an official government home typically used to host foreign dignitaries—the congratulatory letters poured in. One arrived from the president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, who mistakenly called Truman’s victory a “re-election.” Since Israel declared its independence nearly six months earlier, sixty-two thousand Jewish refugees in Europe had immigrated to the new country, Weizmann said in his letter. “We have special cause to be gratified at your re-election because we are mindful of the enlightened help which you gave to our cause in these years of our struggle.”
Around the globe, State Department officials reported on the reaction to Truman’s victory. In Moscow, Joseph Stalin’s second-in-command, Vyacheslav Molotov, praised a rejection of a “most aggressive program of the Republican Party and Dewey.” It was the closest the Soviets could come to saying something nice about Harry Truman. In Paris, the US Embassy reported, “papers of all political persuasions see Truman election as ‘victory of [the] people over Wall Street,’ with Gallup and bookies still being mentioned as lesser losers.” In Nanking, the crumbling Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek issued a statement: “The world looks hopefully to his [Truman’s] leadership in the difficult four years which lie ahead.” From Lisbon, the US Embassy reported that “opinion frequently expressed even by man in [the] street [is] that ‘now there will be no war.’”
