The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (31 page)

When the 1948 campaign first began, the task before him seemed hopeless. Even the big-city bosses were against him. On hearing that Dwight Eisenhower had no interest in the Democratic nomination, Frank Hague, the Jersey City (New Jersey) boss, said, “Truman, Harry Truman. Oh my God.” Everything appeared stacked against him: in the eyes of many, both politically and as a human being, he had seemed to shrink in the vast space left by his predecessor, and the Democrats had been in power too long. There were the inevitable scandals. Some of the close friends whom he trusted had predictably eaten too well at the public trough. The scandals, though they did not touch Truman personally, brought back the scent of the Pendergast machine. The liberal wing of his own party, led by Jimmy Roosevelt, the late president’s most liberal son, had tried desperately to draft Dwight Eisenhower, even though most of the people who liked Ike had no earthly idea what his politics were, and despite Eisenhower’s own clear rejection of a race. No one seemed to want Truman to head the ticket. “We don’t want to run a race with a dead Missouri mule,” said Governor Ben Laney of Arkansas.

The 1948 election turned out to be crucial in a way that no one understood at the time, and fateful as well because of the bitterness it created in a party that suffered its fifth straight defeat. The Republicans were prohibitive favorites. Truman, said Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of the country’s most powerful publisher, at the Republican convention, where they were celebrating the fall victory even before the summer was over, was “a gone goose.” Every knowledgeable political expert had conceded the election to the heavily favored Tom Dewey, who was considered admirable, if not likeable. Early in the campaign the Republican high command had even decided that it would be a waste of the party’s money to continue polling, because the outcome was such a sure thing. One major pollster, Elmo Roper, announced in early September that he too would stop polling because the election was a foregone conclusion: “Thomas E. Dewey is almost as good as elected…. That being true I can
think of nothing duller or more intellectually barren than acting like a sports announcer who feels he must pretend that he is witnessing a neck-and-neck race.” All of this had a considerable effect on Dewey himself. When another Republican visited Dewey at his Pawling, New York, farm, Dewey showed him the Roper statement and then said, “My job is to prevent anything from rocking the boat.” Clearly the principal aim of the campaign was not so much to define what a mid-century Republican victory would mean as to avoid making a mistake. That, of course, was in its own way a terrible mistake, even though the Democratic Party seemed badly fragmented. It had split three ways, and thereby on paper at least seemed unusually vulnerable: the far left going off with Henry Wallace; while the Southern Democrats, or Dixiecrats, as they would be known, followed Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. None of that seemed to bother Truman very much. Certainly, it made things harder, although the symbols of a party unraveling were far more dramatic than the unraveling itself. (At the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Washington in February 1948, Senator Olin Johnston, a Democrat from South Carolina, bought a large table, which because his wife was on the arrangements committee was set up right in front of the podium. Then, because the dinner would not be segregated, the Johnstons kept the table but made sure that no one showed up—a deliberate insult to the sitting president. “We paid $1,100 to keep this table vacant,” one of their friends said.)

What did bother Truman as he approached the fall campaign was that the Democratic Party, though it had been in office for sixteen years, had absolutely no money, and no one was willing to serve as its finance committee chairman. It was an additional but hardly needed reminder of how slim the Democratic chances were. On September 1, 1948, with the start of the campaign two weeks away, Truman had summoned eighty Party luminaries—men with clout and access to money—to the White House to talk about their financial problems. Only fifty had showed up. The president had then asked for a volunteer to run the finance committee. No one stepped up. The next day Truman called Louis Johnson and pleaded with him to take the job. Johnson agreed to do it. He was a classic example of a certain Washington type, a wheeler-dealer, a self-made man with an inflated sense of his political abilities and possibilities. Because he saw no limits to his ability, Johnson tended to move aggressively into any power vacuum he found. He intended when Truman’s presidency was finished to run for the presidency himself. His political base was his connection with the American Legion, whose senior officer he had been and whose views on foreign policy he tended to reflect. “He was a gambler,” said Jean Kearney, who had worked for the Democratic National Committee that summer. He got into the business of raising money for Truman, she added, “in a cold blooded, calculating way—he
gambled that Truman might win, and if he raised money for him, it would advance his own standing as a Washington lawyer and national figure.”

At that moment Truman’s standing was so low as to be off the charts, and the Democrats were without money, seriously burdened by debt. Johnson came in and signed a personal note for $100,000, which allowed the party to get out of debt and for Truman’s train, scheduled to leave Union Station for its whistle-stop tour of the country on September 17, to depart on time, and go farther than Pennsylvania, which for a time had seemed likely to be the last stop. Johnson did a remarkable job as finance chairman, raising more than $2 million in two months. When the campaign was over, Truman was deeply in his debt, which was why, when James Forrestal came apart emotionally, Johnson got the Defense portfolio.

The lack of money as they began the 1948 campaign was more important than the party’s interior ideological divisions. The Wallace campaign, from the left, actually gave Truman protection against charges that he might be too far left, since no one was attacking him harder than the Communists and their fellow travelers. As for the Dixiecrats, they carried only four Southern states, for a total of thirty-nine electoral votes. Truman’s special strength that year was that he never lost faith in himself or in the American people. He campaigned vigorously in blunt and simplistic terms. Economic issues were still primal. Before Truman started on his campaign, Vice President Alben Barkley had told him, “Go out there and mow ’em down.” “I’ll mow ’em down, Alben,” Truman had reportedly answered, “and I’ll give ’em hell.” Somehow that part—about giving them hell—had gotten out, and the crowds loved it. There was always someone at every stop egging him on, yelling “Give ’em hell, Harry,” and he did just that, and the American people responded enthusiastically. If he could not be Roosevelt, then he had found the perfect role, the cocky little underdog, his back to the wall, fighting back against the big boys. He had not exactly sought that image, but the role suited both him and the era perfectly.

Everyone had been sure that he was finished, except the candidate himself. In the 1948 campaign he managed to define himself in the eyes of his fellow citizens in a way he had been incapable of doing in the previous three and a half years. It was one of the last political campaigns to be conducted from trains, a whistle-stop visit to the American people, often in small towns, where Truman felt an easy affinity with the crowds gathered around the caboose. It was a very comfortable incarnation, utterly authentic. “He is good on the back of the train,” his shrewd Democratic colleague Sam Rayburn, the speaker of the House, once noted, “because he is one of the folks. He smiles with them and not at them, laughs with them and not at them.”

His gritty, earthy campaign was carried out so close to the voters that it
took place under the radar screen of the taste-making part of the media and the top people in the Republican Party (and even many in his own party). The Republicans were already overconfident, given the poor Democratic showing in the 1946 midterm elections, and they believed the myth of Truman’s incompetence. Dewey helped out by running a disastrous campaign. “The Dewey campaign,” said Clarence Buddington Kelland, a Republican national committeeman from Arizona, “was smug, arrogant, and supercilious.” For Dewey campaigned as if he were the incumbent, Truman the challenger, and the Democrats a minority party. His speeches were boring and full of truisms. Some aides, like Herbert Brownell, blamed his wife for not wanting him to engage in partisan attacks because she wanted him to seem as presidential as possible, above the base quality of politics. If that were true, it would not have been the first time she had been a decisive force in terms of his image. Other aides had argued for years that he should shave off his trademark mustache—it had been an asset when he was a tough district attorney, but as a presidential candidate it made him look cold and hard. “His face was so small and the mustache was so large,” Brownell lamented years later. But Mrs. Dewey liked the mustache, and so it stayed.

Dewey was in fact an exceptionally able man, well prepared for the presidency after six years as governor of New York—he would eventually be elected for three terms—essentially the same political staircase Roosevelt had taken to the nation’s highest office. At forty-six he was young and seemingly modern—the first presidential nominee born in the twentieth century. He had started as a Mr. Clean, a prosecutor intent on going after the New York mob, and perhaps, some critics thought, that was the problem. It had been a role that demanded a certain icy briskness, a manner invaluable to a prosecutor in front of a jury, that was not necessarily attractive in a presidential candidate, where an instinctive, tangible humanity is of the essence. He looked, said the acerbic Alice Roosevelt Longworth in a quip that seemed to cling to him, like “the little man on the wedding cake.” He was, said one longtime associate, “cold. Cold as an icicle in February.” Even on his campaign train, surrounded by other Republican pols, he would excuse himself at a certain point so he could lunch alone. “Smile, Governor,” a photographer called to him during the campaign. “I thought I was,” he answered.

Nor was his personal style, or lack thereof, his only problem. The terrible fault lines of the Republican Party were another. To the isolationists, he was the living symbol of everything that was wrong with their party. Colonel Robert McCormick’s
Chicago Tribune
hated him for his internationalism and for his defeat in the 1944 election, and constantly belittled him. In what turned out to be the most critical decision of the campaign, he held back from taking up the
only issue that might have excited them, that of subversion, and refused to make it a central part of his campaign. Indeed, at a key moment in a debate with Harold Stassen during the Oregon primary fight, he had opposed outlawing the Communist Party. It would, he said—and he was a law-and-order man—only serve to drive the Communists underground. Other prominent Republicans, beginning to sense the blood in the water, and knowing they were in trouble on economic issues, pushed him to use the Communists-in-Washington charge. William Loeb, the right-wing New Hampshire publisher, and Senator Styles Bridges, who was Loeb’s man in the Senate as well as the Republican national campaign manager, pleaded with Dewey to use the subversion issue against Truman and the Democrats. He listened to them carefully and then, in the words of one of his campaign aides, Hugh Scott, said he would “fleck it lightly.” Instead he thought it demeaning to accuse the president of the United States of being soft on Communism. He was not, he told Senator Styles Bridges, going to go around “looking under beds.”

His campaign was uniquely bland. Even as Truman was drawing ever larger crowds, Dewey continued making the same curiously antiseptic, passionless speeches. His campaign, wrote the Louisville, Kentucky,
Courier Journal,
could be “boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. The future lies ahead.” Still, victory seemed such a sure thing. The media, which in those pre-television days was still the press corps, helped to make Truman’s victory a great surprise because its members spent so much time interviewing one another and ignoring what was happening right in front of them. In mid-September, for example, Joseph Alsop, then an important syndicated columnist with a home base on the influential
New York Herald Tribune,
had witnessed two events: Truman’s speech at the national plowing contest in Iowa, before an enthusiastic audience of seventy-five thousand—the president was sharp, focused, and very much on the attack—and soon after, a Dewey speech to a disappointingly small crowd of about eight thousand at Drake University, also in Iowa. A reporter who was responding to political nuance out in the field might have sensed something was up, but Alsop did not. “There was something sad about the contrast between the respective campaign debuts here in Iowa,” he wrote. “The Truman show was threadbare and visibly unsuccessful—the Dewey show was opulent. It was organized down to the last noise-making device. It exuded confidence. The contest was really too uneven. After it was over one felt a certain sympathy for the obstinately laboring president.”

In mid-October,
Newsweek
polled fifty political writers scattered throughout the country. Every single one predicted a Dewey win. The Truman people
knew the article was coming, but the headline, “Fifty Political Experts Predict a Dewey Victory,” was disheartening nonetheless. Only one man did not appear to be bothered by it, the candidate himself. “Oh those damned fellows; they’re always wrong anyway,” he said. “Forget it, boys, and let’s get on with the job.” On the eve of the election, the press was still getting it wrong. Alistair Cooke, of the
Manchester Guardian,
titled his last preelection piece “Harry Truman—Study of a Failure,” and the people who put out the then-influential Kiplinger newsletter devoted their preelection issue to “What Dewey Will Do.”

In the end Truman won relatively handily: 24.1 million votes to Dewey’s 21.9 million; he carried twenty-eight states, with 303 electoral votes, to Dewey’s sixteen, with 189 electoral votes, and he would have carried Dewey’s home state of New York if Wallace had not siphoned off votes on the left. It was one of the great upsets in American political history. The newly reelected president celebrated famously by holding up for photographers a copy of the
Chicago Tribune
with the headline “Dewey Beats Truman.” The comedians had a field day. “The only way a Republican can get in the White House now is to marry Margaret Truman,” Groucho Marx said.