I didn't come up with this scenario. It comes from a book titled Almost America: From the Colonists to Clinton: a "What If" History of the U.S. by Steve Tally.
Here it is:
Thomas Dewey, with a commanding lead in the polls following the 1948 political conventions, decided to coast to the election, but Harry Truman was running for all he was worth. What if Dewey had decided to run a vigorous campaign, too? IT seemed as though it was over before it even began. In the election of 1948, no one gave the incumbent president , Harry Truman, a chance against Republican challenger Thomas Dewey-at times, it seemed, not even Truman himself . On July 31, 1948, both the Democrat Truman and Republican Dewey attended the dedication of the Idlewild Airport in New York. (Truman was big on the political benefit of dedications-he boasted that he had dedicated the Grand Cooley Dam three times.) During the event, Truman leaned over and whispered in Dewey's ear that when he moved into the White House, he would need to repair the plumbing. Even Bess Truman, Harry's wife, had a hard time envisioning a Truman triumph. That summer she laughed to a White House aide, "Does he really think he can win?"
Harry Truman was like the poor soul who is hired to replace the nationally famous coach with a decades-long winning record. After Franklin D. Roosevelt had served as president for twelve years, guiding the country through the the Great Depression and a world war, nearly everyone in the nation had a difficult time comprehending that he wasn't president any longer. Truman once mentioned a presidential appointment to an aide, who asked if the president had made the appointment before he died. "No," an annoyed Truman said. "He made it about a half hour ago." Truman's task of winning the presidency on his own merits became even more difficult when Roosevelt's wartime vice president, Henry Wallace, broke from the Democratic Party to run for president on the Progressive Party ticket. This was sure to drain votes from the left wing of the Democratic Party.
H. L. Mencken was dismissive of the Wallace movement, saying that it was an assemblage of "grocery-store economists, mooney professors in one-building universities, editors of papers with no visible circulation, preachers of lost evangels, and customers of a hundred schemes to cure all the sins of the world." But at the time, many considered Wallace's candidacy a real threat to Truman. In February 1948, there had been a special election for a congressional seat in the Bronx, an election that the Democrats had pointed to as an early test of public opinion, and the Wallace-endorsed candidate trounced the Democratic candidate.
The infighting in the Democratic Party continued at the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia in June. The party leaders had asked a young Hubert Humphrey to speak, and his rousing address in favor of civil rights propelled the party to add a civil rights plank to its platform. When this happened, thirty-five Southern delegates walked out of the convention . The Southern Democrats formed the States' Rights Party, more commonly known as the Dixiecrat Party, and nominated Strom Thurmond as their presidential candidate.
With the Democratic Party split three ways, it appeared that Truman ... in which so many delegates worked so hard and at such cross-purposes with seemingly but a single intent-how to make sure that the man nominated should not be elected." The New York Post agreed, saying, "The party might as well immediately concede the election to Dewey and save the wear and tear of campaigning." Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York, had been the Republican's nominee in '44, when he gave Franklin Roosevelt the closest of his four elections. Political wisdom said that a party shouldn't renominate a failed presidential candidate, but Dewey was able to overcome this belief and receive the party's nomination again in 1948.
Dewey was a short man, five-eight and dogged by rumors of elevator shoes. His angular cheekbones and chin prompted comments that his face looked as though it were squeezed by a vise. Dewey had first come to national attention in the early 1930s, when as a prosecutor, he courageously stood up to crime bosses such as Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz. His earnest do-gooder attitude had its detractors-one New York critic dismissed Dewey as "an honest cop with the mind of an honest cop"-but by the time he was thirty-five years old Dewey was a national celebrity. Dewey wore his celebrity uncomfortably. He was often uneasy around people, and he was also something of a technocrat. His only outside interests existed on a dairy farm that he kept as a hobby, where he was fascinated by the technology of artificial insemination. He was known to dominate dinner conversations at the farm extolling the virtues of procreating via pipette.
As a politician, Dewey saw himself as a more modern politician than his opponents, one who believed in making politics a science instead of an art. He was the first presidential candidate to have his own staff to conduct public-opinion polls, and he put enormous faith in what the poll numbers advised him to do. By the summer of 1948, the polls showed Dewey that he had a huge lead over Truman. He believed that all he had to do was to play it safe, not make any mistakes, and the election would be his. "My job is to prevent anything from rocking the boat," he said in July. Dewey preferred an aseptic form of politicking anyway- unlike Truman, he wasn't one to get out in the crowds and slap people on the back. When it came to inserting his ideas into the political arena, Dewey was a strong believer in artificial insemination. Dewey once shared a convertible with a popular county chairman in Ohio, George Bender. As the car passed entire groups of people who waved and shouted, "Hello, George!" Dewey turned to Bender and asked, "Who the hell is this guy George?" At another campaign stop, the local VIPs overheard Dewey asking his aides, "When the hell do we get out of this damn town?"
On the campaign trail, Dewey kept a railroad car full of speechwriters in the train's next-to-last car, known as the "squirrel cage." When the speechwriters brought Dewey their speeches, he derided their efforts, typically demanding a dozen or more drafts of a speech before he found it acceptable (the record was said to be twenty-one drafts). When one speechwriter protested that one speech had already been rewritten many times, Dewey responded coolly that, "practice is the difference between the amateur and the professional." Despite all of the professional help, the words that came out of Dewey's mouth were breathtaking in their inability to take one's breath away.
On the nation's business, he boldly asserted, "Government must help industry and industry must cooperate with government." On America's outlook: "Your future lies ahead of you." On the fate of nations: "The ancient civilization of Babylon is now a dead thing." To this incisive analysis he added, "This tragedy must never happen to America ." Making things worse, Dewey liked to add the rhetorical flourish "Period!" at the end of sentences he wanted to emphasize, and his delivery was so stiff that The New Yorker said that at campaign rallies, he arrived "like a man who has been mounted on casters and given a tremendous shove from behind." Truman poked fun at Dewey's cautious statements, saying that Dewey was running a "soothing-syrup campaign" and that now the GOP stood for "Grand Old Platitudes."
If Truman was laughing, some Republicans were annoyed about the oatmeal being served by the Dewey campaign. Dewey's running mate, Earl Warren, grumbled, "I wish I could call someone a son-of-a-bitch." Dewey's sterile, analytical style inspired few true believers, but it was his arrogance that irritated would-be supporters. A common quip among those who worked with him was that he was the only man alive who could strut sitting down. While he was prosecutor in New York, Dewey's arrogance had angered so many journalists that several photographers took photos of Dewey only in unflattering poses. Time magazine reported that those opposed to Dewey said that he was "too mechanistically precise to be liked ... too coldly ambitious to be loved." Dorothy Thompson reported that Dewey "had fewer real friends than any other leading candidate and that if he had been defeated more people would have been pleased with themselves."
Despite the shallow support for Dewey, it seemed that the election was a lock. "Dewey-Warren will be unbeatable. So: It's to be Thomas Edmund Dewey in the White House on January 20, with Earl Warren as backstop in event of any accident during years just ahead," said U.S. News & World Report in July. "Fifty political experts unanimously predict a Dewey victory," Newsweek reported in October. "Dewey is going to be the next president, and you might as well get used to him," The New Republic complained in October. In the fall, Life magazine put Dewey on the cover, with the caption "Our next President." At the Republican national headquarters, a sign was posted to help campaign workers maintain their focus. "1,460 more days until election," it said, referring to date in 1952 when Dewey would face reelection. The situation had become so desperate for the Democrats that they resorted to sports analogies. "We've got our backs on our own one-yard line with a minute to play," said Clark Clifford, neglecting to mention what down they were on or the field condition. "It's got to be razzle-dazzle." The desperation play that Truman used was to cast himself as an outsider, attacking those in Washington, especially the Republican Congress.
It was an odd sight, the Democrat Truman, who had served in Washington for decades and whose party had been in control of the White House for sixteen years, attacking New York governor Dewey and the newly installed Republican majority for their Washington ways. In September, a Newsweek cover caption asked, "Who is Challenger, Champ?" But for those who cared to notice, there were signs of trouble in the heartland for the Dewey campaign. The Staley Milling Company offered farmers a choice between feed bags with a donkey or an elephant stenciled on them, and when it was obvious after twenty thousand bags of feed that the donkey was pulling away, the company decided to stop the burlap poll. In another attempt to discern the thinking of the working man, in August a Truman crony disguised himself as a chicken farmer and drove an old truck along the Ohio River.
After three weeks he reported back to the White House that Truman was going to win. One cause of Dewey's eroding support was falling crop prices. At the beginning of 1948, corn prices were $2.50 a bushel; by September the price had dropped to $1.78, and it would eventually fall to less than a dollar a bushel by election day. On his whistle-stop train ride across America, Truman was quick to point out that the New York lawyer wasn't sympathetic to the hard life of farmers, saying that Dewey planned to "stick a pitchfork in every farmer's back" by cutting government price supports enacted during Roosevelt's New Deal. Truman, of course, also attacked the Republican Congress (always a convenient punching bag), and at times he even took the low road, telling audiences that the uptight Dewey was "a front man" for the people who had backed fascists such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo.
That caricature of Dewey stuck after an incident on the Dewey campaign train Victory Special in Illinois. At a campaign stop, the train had backed up a few feet instead of moving forward, almost crushing those in the crowd who had gathered to hear Dewey, including one of his closest friends. "That's the first lunatic I've had for an engineer," Dewey snapped at the microphone. "He probably ought to be shot at sunrise." Organized labor used the Dewey quote to show that the Republican candidate didn't care for the working man, and newspapers around the country printed the train engineer's response: "I think as much of Dewey as I did before, and that's not very much." Truman's campaign had gained traction, but almost no one in the country knew to what extent. Many pollsters had stopped taking polls in September because they considered Dewey's lead to be insurmountable. Still, some Republicans were worried, and they pleaded with Dewey to go out and campaign more vigorously.
But Dewey refused. "I waged an all-out fight in 1944 and lost," he said. "In 1942 and 1946 I waged a different kind of campaign for the [New York] Governorship, not even mentioning my opponents, and won by large margins." He continued his cautious ways: At a rally in the Los Angeles Coliseum where ninety thousand supporters showed up, after the crowd was pumped up by a parade of Hollywood celebrities, Dewey took the stage and began an economics lecture on the social security system. "This is wrong, all wrong," one Dewey aide worried. The night of the election, Dewey supporters gathered in the lobby and in the hallways of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, the same hotel where Dewey was awaiting the election returns, to celebrate and drink champagne. In the early morning hours, while the revelers enjoyed the presumed victory in the hallways, inside Suite 1527 there were white faces and hushed conversations.
Thomas Dewey sat quietly in the bedroom with a yellow legal pad in his lap, carefully recording his political demise. As the early election returns had begun coming in from the East Coast, Truman was leading, but this was hardly unexpected. Many Democratic races had gone this way, with the tide turning toward the Republicans as the returns began flowing in from the Midwest and mountain states. But the returns from the heartland were making the night of his triumph a nightmare for Dewey. Even Iowa, which a senator had said would "go Democratic the year hell goes Methodist," went for Truman. At three in the morning, George Gallup told a reporter that it was likely that his polls had been wrong and that Truman was elected. The reporter wrote that Gallup looked like an animal forced to eat its young. In Chicago, the night editor faced a difficult decision. The article announcing Dewey's victory had been finished for two hours, but as the time to go to press neared, Truman still held a half-million-vote lead. Finally the the editor decided to go with the now famously wrong banner headline: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.
WHAT IF?
Dewey decided that he had to mount a more aggressive campaign, but the question was how. He was offering himself as a more efficient and responsible candidate for the presidency-on most issues, there wasn't any difference between his position and Truman's. The single significant difference was in international relations. Truman was in over his head when dealing with global strategy, Dewey thought, and too quick to accept the explanations offered by the Soviet Union for its actions. Truman had even referred to Stalin as "good old Joe." Dewey, the former prosecutor, considered Stalin just another mob boss, and thought that he alone was capable of containing him.
In late October, Dewey went on a vigorous attack of Truman's foreign policy. "I agree with President Truman's decision to airlift supplies to Berlin," he said. "But I don't think he understands the type of cold-blooded people he is dealing with. I have faced such men in the mobs of New York, men with many notches in their guns, and I won't agree to friendly terms with 'Uncle Joe.' I will increase defense spending by $25 billion, and I will improve our ties with those who agree with our policies, such as Charles de Gaulle and Chiang Kai-shek. We will only support those who support our interests abroad, especially our ancient friend and ally, China." Dewey accused Truman of going too easy on the Soviet Union and the Democrats of having caved in to Soviet demands in the conferences at the end of World War II at Yalta, Quebec, Teheran, and Potsdam.
Dewey believed strongly that the Berlin airlift was necessary only because corridors to Berlin had not been negotiated by Truman at Potsdam. "These failed negotiations have cost our nation $30 billion dollars, money that could have been better spent here at home," Dewey charged. Dewey had miscalculated the degree of concern over international issues in the nation's heartland. Few people on Main Street cared about geopolitical issues, but the point was moot. The farmers and mechanics may not have spent much time thinking about international chess games, but they held a strong band-playing, flag-waving Fourth of July patriotism, and Dewey's calls for increased military spending and offering support abroad only to those governments who looked out for American interests was a perfect fit with their barbershop philosophies.
He also had strong words for the right wing of his own party: "Many are rightfully disturbed that Franklin Roosevelt, who has been in the grave for three years, still defines the public debate over our policies. But I will not abandon programs such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, and farm supports. Such programs cost us very little when compared with the gain in human happiness and security they provide. We need a pragmatic liberalism, of the type initiated by Republicans such as Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, that provides private incentive while maintaining the public conscience." A week before the election, Dewey's aides told reporters that he was going to make a major announcement about farm policy at his dairy farm in New York.
The statement was insignificant (a repeated vow to continue farm subsidies), but Dewey appeared in work clothes and allowed photographers to snap photos of him milking cows and cleaning out the stalls. Dewey picked up a shovel full of manure (a cow patty had been carefully positioned and its location mapped out in the briefing), smiled, and said, "I'll have to clear out a lot of this in Washington." The next day, the photo and the quip ran on the front page of many newspapers across the country. Many people, including Dewey himself, considered the dairy farm press event to be vulgar and inappropriate for a presidential candidate. But Dewey was pleased to see that within days, his own polls showed that he had pulled even with Truman among farmers.
On November 2, 1948, the election was as lopsided as the midsummer polls had predicted. Dewey won 55 percent of the popular vote, Truman received 41 percent, and Thurmond and Wallace received 2 percent each.
Almost immediately after being inaugurated on January 20, 1949, Dewey had to turn his attention to the civil war in China. Mao Tse-Tung's communist rebels were driving Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist soldiers to the south, and Chiang was in danger of seeing his government overrun. Within days after becoming president , Dewey signed legislation giving $2 billion in loans to Chiang's government. Dewey also offered the use of U.S. ships and airplanes to transport Nationalist soldiers and announced that he was sending sixty thousand soldiers to China to act as military advisors. Dwight Eisenhower, now president of Columbia University, spoke out against Dewey's China policy. "Any U.S. involvement in the internal politics of the nations of Asia is bound to become a national tragedy," he said.
Democrats and Republican isolationists also questioned why America needed to send troops to the world's most populous nation. Dewey continued to commit more American "military advisors," however, until by the end of 1949 more than one hundred thousand American soldiers were fighting in China. Just as the voices of Democratic critics of the war in China were starting to have an effect on Dewey's polls in the heartland, Dewey had to contend with trouble from within his own party. In the autumn of 1949, a young congressman from California, Richard Nixon, began talking to reporters about Communist spies in the State Department.
Dewey was furious over Nixon's comments, and he telephoned Nixon himself and explained to the young congressman what an embarrassment he was causing the new administration. "If this continues, I guarantee that you will face a strong challenge in the next primary, one that you will lose," Dewey said. Nixon decided to leave the business of uncovering spies from the House Committee on Un-American Activities to the Justice Department, and Dewey went to California to campaign for Nixon in his run for the Senate in 1950. (After two terms in the Senate, Nixon retired from politics following a humiliating defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial election.)
More significant than the congressional commie-chasers (Dewey said that he had to "squash Joe McCarthy like a cockroach") was the problem of the failing war in China. Initially, in the summer of 1949, after the arrival of the United States' aid and weapons, Chiang was able to push the Communist troops back to the north and prevent them from taking Peking. But by late 1950, the effort wasn't going as well as the amount of aid that the United States was pouring in indicated it should. Not only were Mao Tse-Tung's guerrilla war techniques effective, but Mao also had the support of the Chinese people.
Chiang's government had treated the peasants as chattel or cannon fodder and denied even the soldiers such basics as uniforms (which the United States had shipped over). The Chiang government was so corrupt that even his own officers were selling the American weapons to the Communist rebels. Douglas MacArthur, frustrated at the ineffectiveness of the bombing missions, began saying, both privately to Dewey and in public interviews, that the United States should use the atomic bomb in China. Dewey and Mao Tse-tung were in agreement that the atomic bomb would have little influence in China. Mao's guerrilla techniques didn't rely on large military bases or urban centers; most of Mao's soldiers were in the vast rural areas of China. Instead, Dewey responded by sending additional American troops to China, increasing the number to more than two hundred thousand.
Despite the infusion of American soldiers, Chiang still was slowly losing ground to Mao's rebels. By the summer of 1950, even Dewey thought that the chances of a Nationalist Chinese victory were only fifty-fifty. "The only way we're going to win is to get rid of Generalissimo Chiang," Dewey complained in a cabinet meeting. When the CIA suggested that it was available to "correct this situation," the straight arrow Dewey blanched. The president decided that America was doing as much as it could and that no further assistance, financial, military, or covert, would be going to China. As the war continued into 1952, and the number of American soldiers killed in what the ex-prosecutor Dewey termed a "police action" increased, public opinion of the war fell.
As Dewey began preparations for his reelection in the spring of 1952, he and the rest of the nation were surprised when Dwight Eisenhower announced that he would enter the primaries as a Democratic candidate for president. That fall Eisenhower easily defeated the unpopular Republican Dewey, and Eisenhower immediately began working on a partial withdrawal of American troops from Asia. In May 1953, the United Nations was able to secure a cease-fire between the Communists and Nationalists. The Communists controlled Mongolia and Inner Mongolia; the Nationalists controlled Peking and all of China to the south.
The two countries established a heavily armed border that, in places, incorporated the Great Wall of China, and the Nationalist Chinese were able to prevent the Communists to the north from spilling over the border only because of a large and apparently permanent U.S. military presence along the border. There were now two Chinas, just as there were two Koreas, two Vietnams and two Germanys. Containing Communism, a job that the arrogant Dewey had thought Truman was unable to perform, turned out to be more nuanced than Dewey had realized. His eagerness to support a corrupt and inept regime in China left Dewey with what many considered a failed one-term presidency.
Truman won the election of 1948, but at times he must have wondered what he had worked so hard for. In December 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and his followers fled to the Chinese island of Taiwan and established their government there. China was split, but because the Nationalists controlled only a small portion of the great nation, for all practical purposes China was in complete control of the Communists. Republicans immediately charged that the Truman administration had "lost" China, and two months after the fall of Chiang's government , Wisconsin senator Joseph R. McCarthy announced that he had a list of 205 State Department officials who were working for the Communists. California representative Richard Nixon had a much shorter list, naming only Alger Hiss as a Communist, but it turned out that that was still one more name than McCarthy actually had.
In June 1950, North Korean Communists, buoyed by Mao's victory, invaded South Korea. Truman began sending troops and funds to both Taiwan and South Korea. By the end of the Korean War, 1.8 million Americans had served in Korea, with sixty-five thousand soldiers killed or missing in action. The public became frustrated with the difficulties in Asia, and in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower, running as a Republican, defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson for the presidency with a promise to go to Korea himself to help bring an end to the war.
For his part, Dewey never accepted that his inability to connect with the public caused his loss to Truman. He believed that he had lost merely because Americans hate seeing a candidate run away with an election. "I have learned from bitter experience that Americans somehow regard a political campaign as a sporting event," Dewey told Eisenhower.
Here it is:
Thomas Dewey, with a commanding lead in the polls following the 1948 political conventions, decided to coast to the election, but Harry Truman was running for all he was worth. What if Dewey had decided to run a vigorous campaign, too? IT seemed as though it was over before it even began. In the election of 1948, no one gave the incumbent president , Harry Truman, a chance against Republican challenger Thomas Dewey-at times, it seemed, not even Truman himself . On July 31, 1948, both the Democrat Truman and Republican Dewey attended the dedication of the Idlewild Airport in New York. (Truman was big on the political benefit of dedications-he boasted that he had dedicated the Grand Cooley Dam three times.) During the event, Truman leaned over and whispered in Dewey's ear that when he moved into the White House, he would need to repair the plumbing. Even Bess Truman, Harry's wife, had a hard time envisioning a Truman triumph. That summer she laughed to a White House aide, "Does he really think he can win?"
Harry Truman was like the poor soul who is hired to replace the nationally famous coach with a decades-long winning record. After Franklin D. Roosevelt had served as president for twelve years, guiding the country through the the Great Depression and a world war, nearly everyone in the nation had a difficult time comprehending that he wasn't president any longer. Truman once mentioned a presidential appointment to an aide, who asked if the president had made the appointment before he died. "No," an annoyed Truman said. "He made it about a half hour ago." Truman's task of winning the presidency on his own merits became even more difficult when Roosevelt's wartime vice president, Henry Wallace, broke from the Democratic Party to run for president on the Progressive Party ticket. This was sure to drain votes from the left wing of the Democratic Party.
H. L. Mencken was dismissive of the Wallace movement, saying that it was an assemblage of "grocery-store economists, mooney professors in one-building universities, editors of papers with no visible circulation, preachers of lost evangels, and customers of a hundred schemes to cure all the sins of the world." But at the time, many considered Wallace's candidacy a real threat to Truman. In February 1948, there had been a special election for a congressional seat in the Bronx, an election that the Democrats had pointed to as an early test of public opinion, and the Wallace-endorsed candidate trounced the Democratic candidate.
The infighting in the Democratic Party continued at the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia in June. The party leaders had asked a young Hubert Humphrey to speak, and his rousing address in favor of civil rights propelled the party to add a civil rights plank to its platform. When this happened, thirty-five Southern delegates walked out of the convention . The Southern Democrats formed the States' Rights Party, more commonly known as the Dixiecrat Party, and nominated Strom Thurmond as their presidential candidate.
With the Democratic Party split three ways, it appeared that Truman ... in which so many delegates worked so hard and at such cross-purposes with seemingly but a single intent-how to make sure that the man nominated should not be elected." The New York Post agreed, saying, "The party might as well immediately concede the election to Dewey and save the wear and tear of campaigning." Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York, had been the Republican's nominee in '44, when he gave Franklin Roosevelt the closest of his four elections. Political wisdom said that a party shouldn't renominate a failed presidential candidate, but Dewey was able to overcome this belief and receive the party's nomination again in 1948.
Dewey was a short man, five-eight and dogged by rumors of elevator shoes. His angular cheekbones and chin prompted comments that his face looked as though it were squeezed by a vise. Dewey had first come to national attention in the early 1930s, when as a prosecutor, he courageously stood up to crime bosses such as Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz. His earnest do-gooder attitude had its detractors-one New York critic dismissed Dewey as "an honest cop with the mind of an honest cop"-but by the time he was thirty-five years old Dewey was a national celebrity. Dewey wore his celebrity uncomfortably. He was often uneasy around people, and he was also something of a technocrat. His only outside interests existed on a dairy farm that he kept as a hobby, where he was fascinated by the technology of artificial insemination. He was known to dominate dinner conversations at the farm extolling the virtues of procreating via pipette.
As a politician, Dewey saw himself as a more modern politician than his opponents, one who believed in making politics a science instead of an art. He was the first presidential candidate to have his own staff to conduct public-opinion polls, and he put enormous faith in what the poll numbers advised him to do. By the summer of 1948, the polls showed Dewey that he had a huge lead over Truman. He believed that all he had to do was to play it safe, not make any mistakes, and the election would be his. "My job is to prevent anything from rocking the boat," he said in July. Dewey preferred an aseptic form of politicking anyway- unlike Truman, he wasn't one to get out in the crowds and slap people on the back. When it came to inserting his ideas into the political arena, Dewey was a strong believer in artificial insemination. Dewey once shared a convertible with a popular county chairman in Ohio, George Bender. As the car passed entire groups of people who waved and shouted, "Hello, George!" Dewey turned to Bender and asked, "Who the hell is this guy George?" At another campaign stop, the local VIPs overheard Dewey asking his aides, "When the hell do we get out of this damn town?"
On the campaign trail, Dewey kept a railroad car full of speechwriters in the train's next-to-last car, known as the "squirrel cage." When the speechwriters brought Dewey their speeches, he derided their efforts, typically demanding a dozen or more drafts of a speech before he found it acceptable (the record was said to be twenty-one drafts). When one speechwriter protested that one speech had already been rewritten many times, Dewey responded coolly that, "practice is the difference between the amateur and the professional." Despite all of the professional help, the words that came out of Dewey's mouth were breathtaking in their inability to take one's breath away.
On the nation's business, he boldly asserted, "Government must help industry and industry must cooperate with government." On America's outlook: "Your future lies ahead of you." On the fate of nations: "The ancient civilization of Babylon is now a dead thing." To this incisive analysis he added, "This tragedy must never happen to America ." Making things worse, Dewey liked to add the rhetorical flourish "Period!" at the end of sentences he wanted to emphasize, and his delivery was so stiff that The New Yorker said that at campaign rallies, he arrived "like a man who has been mounted on casters and given a tremendous shove from behind." Truman poked fun at Dewey's cautious statements, saying that Dewey was running a "soothing-syrup campaign" and that now the GOP stood for "Grand Old Platitudes."
If Truman was laughing, some Republicans were annoyed about the oatmeal being served by the Dewey campaign. Dewey's running mate, Earl Warren, grumbled, "I wish I could call someone a son-of-a-bitch." Dewey's sterile, analytical style inspired few true believers, but it was his arrogance that irritated would-be supporters. A common quip among those who worked with him was that he was the only man alive who could strut sitting down. While he was prosecutor in New York, Dewey's arrogance had angered so many journalists that several photographers took photos of Dewey only in unflattering poses. Time magazine reported that those opposed to Dewey said that he was "too mechanistically precise to be liked ... too coldly ambitious to be loved." Dorothy Thompson reported that Dewey "had fewer real friends than any other leading candidate and that if he had been defeated more people would have been pleased with themselves."
Despite the shallow support for Dewey, it seemed that the election was a lock. "Dewey-Warren will be unbeatable. So: It's to be Thomas Edmund Dewey in the White House on January 20, with Earl Warren as backstop in event of any accident during years just ahead," said U.S. News & World Report in July. "Fifty political experts unanimously predict a Dewey victory," Newsweek reported in October. "Dewey is going to be the next president, and you might as well get used to him," The New Republic complained in October. In the fall, Life magazine put Dewey on the cover, with the caption "Our next President." At the Republican national headquarters, a sign was posted to help campaign workers maintain their focus. "1,460 more days until election," it said, referring to date in 1952 when Dewey would face reelection. The situation had become so desperate for the Democrats that they resorted to sports analogies. "We've got our backs on our own one-yard line with a minute to play," said Clark Clifford, neglecting to mention what down they were on or the field condition. "It's got to be razzle-dazzle." The desperation play that Truman used was to cast himself as an outsider, attacking those in Washington, especially the Republican Congress.
It was an odd sight, the Democrat Truman, who had served in Washington for decades and whose party had been in control of the White House for sixteen years, attacking New York governor Dewey and the newly installed Republican majority for their Washington ways. In September, a Newsweek cover caption asked, "Who is Challenger, Champ?" But for those who cared to notice, there were signs of trouble in the heartland for the Dewey campaign. The Staley Milling Company offered farmers a choice between feed bags with a donkey or an elephant stenciled on them, and when it was obvious after twenty thousand bags of feed that the donkey was pulling away, the company decided to stop the burlap poll. In another attempt to discern the thinking of the working man, in August a Truman crony disguised himself as a chicken farmer and drove an old truck along the Ohio River.
After three weeks he reported back to the White House that Truman was going to win. One cause of Dewey's eroding support was falling crop prices. At the beginning of 1948, corn prices were $2.50 a bushel; by September the price had dropped to $1.78, and it would eventually fall to less than a dollar a bushel by election day. On his whistle-stop train ride across America, Truman was quick to point out that the New York lawyer wasn't sympathetic to the hard life of farmers, saying that Dewey planned to "stick a pitchfork in every farmer's back" by cutting government price supports enacted during Roosevelt's New Deal. Truman, of course, also attacked the Republican Congress (always a convenient punching bag), and at times he even took the low road, telling audiences that the uptight Dewey was "a front man" for the people who had backed fascists such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo.
That caricature of Dewey stuck after an incident on the Dewey campaign train Victory Special in Illinois. At a campaign stop, the train had backed up a few feet instead of moving forward, almost crushing those in the crowd who had gathered to hear Dewey, including one of his closest friends. "That's the first lunatic I've had for an engineer," Dewey snapped at the microphone. "He probably ought to be shot at sunrise." Organized labor used the Dewey quote to show that the Republican candidate didn't care for the working man, and newspapers around the country printed the train engineer's response: "I think as much of Dewey as I did before, and that's not very much." Truman's campaign had gained traction, but almost no one in the country knew to what extent. Many pollsters had stopped taking polls in September because they considered Dewey's lead to be insurmountable. Still, some Republicans were worried, and they pleaded with Dewey to go out and campaign more vigorously.
But Dewey refused. "I waged an all-out fight in 1944 and lost," he said. "In 1942 and 1946 I waged a different kind of campaign for the [New York] Governorship, not even mentioning my opponents, and won by large margins." He continued his cautious ways: At a rally in the Los Angeles Coliseum where ninety thousand supporters showed up, after the crowd was pumped up by a parade of Hollywood celebrities, Dewey took the stage and began an economics lecture on the social security system. "This is wrong, all wrong," one Dewey aide worried. The night of the election, Dewey supporters gathered in the lobby and in the hallways of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, the same hotel where Dewey was awaiting the election returns, to celebrate and drink champagne. In the early morning hours, while the revelers enjoyed the presumed victory in the hallways, inside Suite 1527 there were white faces and hushed conversations.
Thomas Dewey sat quietly in the bedroom with a yellow legal pad in his lap, carefully recording his political demise. As the early election returns had begun coming in from the East Coast, Truman was leading, but this was hardly unexpected. Many Democratic races had gone this way, with the tide turning toward the Republicans as the returns began flowing in from the Midwest and mountain states. But the returns from the heartland were making the night of his triumph a nightmare for Dewey. Even Iowa, which a senator had said would "go Democratic the year hell goes Methodist," went for Truman. At three in the morning, George Gallup told a reporter that it was likely that his polls had been wrong and that Truman was elected. The reporter wrote that Gallup looked like an animal forced to eat its young. In Chicago, the night editor faced a difficult decision. The article announcing Dewey's victory had been finished for two hours, but as the time to go to press neared, Truman still held a half-million-vote lead. Finally the the editor decided to go with the now famously wrong banner headline: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.
WHAT IF?
Dewey decided that he had to mount a more aggressive campaign, but the question was how. He was offering himself as a more efficient and responsible candidate for the presidency-on most issues, there wasn't any difference between his position and Truman's. The single significant difference was in international relations. Truman was in over his head when dealing with global strategy, Dewey thought, and too quick to accept the explanations offered by the Soviet Union for its actions. Truman had even referred to Stalin as "good old Joe." Dewey, the former prosecutor, considered Stalin just another mob boss, and thought that he alone was capable of containing him.
In late October, Dewey went on a vigorous attack of Truman's foreign policy. "I agree with President Truman's decision to airlift supplies to Berlin," he said. "But I don't think he understands the type of cold-blooded people he is dealing with. I have faced such men in the mobs of New York, men with many notches in their guns, and I won't agree to friendly terms with 'Uncle Joe.' I will increase defense spending by $25 billion, and I will improve our ties with those who agree with our policies, such as Charles de Gaulle and Chiang Kai-shek. We will only support those who support our interests abroad, especially our ancient friend and ally, China." Dewey accused Truman of going too easy on the Soviet Union and the Democrats of having caved in to Soviet demands in the conferences at the end of World War II at Yalta, Quebec, Teheran, and Potsdam.
Dewey believed strongly that the Berlin airlift was necessary only because corridors to Berlin had not been negotiated by Truman at Potsdam. "These failed negotiations have cost our nation $30 billion dollars, money that could have been better spent here at home," Dewey charged. Dewey had miscalculated the degree of concern over international issues in the nation's heartland. Few people on Main Street cared about geopolitical issues, but the point was moot. The farmers and mechanics may not have spent much time thinking about international chess games, but they held a strong band-playing, flag-waving Fourth of July patriotism, and Dewey's calls for increased military spending and offering support abroad only to those governments who looked out for American interests was a perfect fit with their barbershop philosophies.
He also had strong words for the right wing of his own party: "Many are rightfully disturbed that Franklin Roosevelt, who has been in the grave for three years, still defines the public debate over our policies. But I will not abandon programs such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, and farm supports. Such programs cost us very little when compared with the gain in human happiness and security they provide. We need a pragmatic liberalism, of the type initiated by Republicans such as Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, that provides private incentive while maintaining the public conscience." A week before the election, Dewey's aides told reporters that he was going to make a major announcement about farm policy at his dairy farm in New York.
The statement was insignificant (a repeated vow to continue farm subsidies), but Dewey appeared in work clothes and allowed photographers to snap photos of him milking cows and cleaning out the stalls. Dewey picked up a shovel full of manure (a cow patty had been carefully positioned and its location mapped out in the briefing), smiled, and said, "I'll have to clear out a lot of this in Washington." The next day, the photo and the quip ran on the front page of many newspapers across the country. Many people, including Dewey himself, considered the dairy farm press event to be vulgar and inappropriate for a presidential candidate. But Dewey was pleased to see that within days, his own polls showed that he had pulled even with Truman among farmers.
On November 2, 1948, the election was as lopsided as the midsummer polls had predicted. Dewey won 55 percent of the popular vote, Truman received 41 percent, and Thurmond and Wallace received 2 percent each.
Almost immediately after being inaugurated on January 20, 1949, Dewey had to turn his attention to the civil war in China. Mao Tse-Tung's communist rebels were driving Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist soldiers to the south, and Chiang was in danger of seeing his government overrun. Within days after becoming president , Dewey signed legislation giving $2 billion in loans to Chiang's government. Dewey also offered the use of U.S. ships and airplanes to transport Nationalist soldiers and announced that he was sending sixty thousand soldiers to China to act as military advisors. Dwight Eisenhower, now president of Columbia University, spoke out against Dewey's China policy. "Any U.S. involvement in the internal politics of the nations of Asia is bound to become a national tragedy," he said.
Democrats and Republican isolationists also questioned why America needed to send troops to the world's most populous nation. Dewey continued to commit more American "military advisors," however, until by the end of 1949 more than one hundred thousand American soldiers were fighting in China. Just as the voices of Democratic critics of the war in China were starting to have an effect on Dewey's polls in the heartland, Dewey had to contend with trouble from within his own party. In the autumn of 1949, a young congressman from California, Richard Nixon, began talking to reporters about Communist spies in the State Department.
Dewey was furious over Nixon's comments, and he telephoned Nixon himself and explained to the young congressman what an embarrassment he was causing the new administration. "If this continues, I guarantee that you will face a strong challenge in the next primary, one that you will lose," Dewey said. Nixon decided to leave the business of uncovering spies from the House Committee on Un-American Activities to the Justice Department, and Dewey went to California to campaign for Nixon in his run for the Senate in 1950. (After two terms in the Senate, Nixon retired from politics following a humiliating defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial election.)
More significant than the congressional commie-chasers (Dewey said that he had to "squash Joe McCarthy like a cockroach") was the problem of the failing war in China. Initially, in the summer of 1949, after the arrival of the United States' aid and weapons, Chiang was able to push the Communist troops back to the north and prevent them from taking Peking. But by late 1950, the effort wasn't going as well as the amount of aid that the United States was pouring in indicated it should. Not only were Mao Tse-Tung's guerrilla war techniques effective, but Mao also had the support of the Chinese people.
Chiang's government had treated the peasants as chattel or cannon fodder and denied even the soldiers such basics as uniforms (which the United States had shipped over). The Chiang government was so corrupt that even his own officers were selling the American weapons to the Communist rebels. Douglas MacArthur, frustrated at the ineffectiveness of the bombing missions, began saying, both privately to Dewey and in public interviews, that the United States should use the atomic bomb in China. Dewey and Mao Tse-tung were in agreement that the atomic bomb would have little influence in China. Mao's guerrilla techniques didn't rely on large military bases or urban centers; most of Mao's soldiers were in the vast rural areas of China. Instead, Dewey responded by sending additional American troops to China, increasing the number to more than two hundred thousand.
Despite the infusion of American soldiers, Chiang still was slowly losing ground to Mao's rebels. By the summer of 1950, even Dewey thought that the chances of a Nationalist Chinese victory were only fifty-fifty. "The only way we're going to win is to get rid of Generalissimo Chiang," Dewey complained in a cabinet meeting. When the CIA suggested that it was available to "correct this situation," the straight arrow Dewey blanched. The president decided that America was doing as much as it could and that no further assistance, financial, military, or covert, would be going to China. As the war continued into 1952, and the number of American soldiers killed in what the ex-prosecutor Dewey termed a "police action" increased, public opinion of the war fell.
As Dewey began preparations for his reelection in the spring of 1952, he and the rest of the nation were surprised when Dwight Eisenhower announced that he would enter the primaries as a Democratic candidate for president. That fall Eisenhower easily defeated the unpopular Republican Dewey, and Eisenhower immediately began working on a partial withdrawal of American troops from Asia. In May 1953, the United Nations was able to secure a cease-fire between the Communists and Nationalists. The Communists controlled Mongolia and Inner Mongolia; the Nationalists controlled Peking and all of China to the south.
The two countries established a heavily armed border that, in places, incorporated the Great Wall of China, and the Nationalist Chinese were able to prevent the Communists to the north from spilling over the border only because of a large and apparently permanent U.S. military presence along the border. There were now two Chinas, just as there were two Koreas, two Vietnams and two Germanys. Containing Communism, a job that the arrogant Dewey had thought Truman was unable to perform, turned out to be more nuanced than Dewey had realized. His eagerness to support a corrupt and inept regime in China left Dewey with what many considered a failed one-term presidency.
Truman won the election of 1948, but at times he must have wondered what he had worked so hard for. In December 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and his followers fled to the Chinese island of Taiwan and established their government there. China was split, but because the Nationalists controlled only a small portion of the great nation, for all practical purposes China was in complete control of the Communists. Republicans immediately charged that the Truman administration had "lost" China, and two months after the fall of Chiang's government , Wisconsin senator Joseph R. McCarthy announced that he had a list of 205 State Department officials who were working for the Communists. California representative Richard Nixon had a much shorter list, naming only Alger Hiss as a Communist, but it turned out that that was still one more name than McCarthy actually had.
In June 1950, North Korean Communists, buoyed by Mao's victory, invaded South Korea. Truman began sending troops and funds to both Taiwan and South Korea. By the end of the Korean War, 1.8 million Americans had served in Korea, with sixty-five thousand soldiers killed or missing in action. The public became frustrated with the difficulties in Asia, and in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower, running as a Republican, defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson for the presidency with a promise to go to Korea himself to help bring an end to the war.
For his part, Dewey never accepted that his inability to connect with the public caused his loss to Truman. He believed that he had lost merely because Americans hate seeing a candidate run away with an election. "I have learned from bitter experience that Americans somehow regard a political campaign as a sporting event," Dewey told Eisenhower.