David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  More representative were such conclusions as drawn in the Los Angeles Times: “Mr. Truman is the most complete fumbler and blunderer this nation has seen in high office in a long time.”

  Even papers that expressed an open fondness for the President as a man chose not to support him. “However much affection we may feel for Mr. Truman and whatever sympathy we may have for him in his struggles with his difficulties,” said a front-page editorial in the Baltimore Sun, “to vote him into the presidency on November 2 would be a tragedy for the country and for the world.”

  For Charlie Ross, Clark Clifford, George Elsey, for everyone riding the Truman train, the campaign had become an unimaginable ordeal—interminable, exhausting in a way comparable to nothing in their experience.

  “If you’re winning, you’d be surprised how you can withstand fatigue,” Clifford would say later. “If you’re losing it becomes oppressive…. They were long, long days. I was young and strong, and in perfect health. From time to time I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.”

  The candidate, who bore the main brunt, seemed indefatigable, his outlook entirely positive. Between speeches he could lie down and go immediately to sleep, however pressed others were, however rough the road bed. “Give me 20 minutes,” he would say.

  “Strain seemed to make him calmer and more firm,” Jonathan Daniels recalled. At no point in the entire campaign did any of the staff, or the press, or his family ever see Truman show a sign of failing stamina, or failing confidence.

  Once during a lull en route to St. Paul after the stop at Duluth, Truman had asked George Elsey to write down the names of the forty-eight states, after which he gave Elsey the number of electoral votes for each and told him how they would go. By his count he would win with 340 electoral votes. Dewey would have 108, Strom Thurmond 42, Henry Wallace none.

  “He was not putting on a show for anybody,” Elsey would recall. “Obviously he wasn’t trying to influence or persuade or sell me. This is what the man himself believed.”

  “He either honestly believes he will win…or he is putting on the most magnificent and fighting front of optimism that any doubtful candidate ever did,” wrote Bert Andrews of the New York Herald-Tribune.

  The Truman staff was another matter, Andrews noted. They all appeared “a bit grim.”

  The work went on from seven in the morning until past midnight, day after day, until they lost all sense of time, until every day became merged with every other and everything became a blur. Margaret would remember the world beginning to seem like an endless railroad track. She would sit by the window and take idle snapshots of the passing countryside—telephone poles whizzing past, empty plains, country roads that seemed to lead nowhere.

  As Ross wrote, the President was driving himself “unmercifully,” and no one on the staff wished to do any less. Ross, “the old philosopher,” suffered from arthritis and heart trouble, yet worked twelve, fourteen hours a day, knowing how much Truman counted on him. “For years afterward,” Clifford said, “I’d sometimes wake up at night in a cold perspiration thinking I was back on that terrible train.”

  And day by day, steadily, the crowds grew larger. Clearly, something was happening. The mood of the crowds, their response to Truman was changing. People seemed always to be happier after hearing him speak.

  “I remember thinking,” said Clifford, “ ‘Well, I don’t know whether we’re going to make it or not, but, by God, I bet if we had another week we would surely make it.’ There was something rolling…. We could sense it and the newspapermen could sense it.”

  Robert C. Albright, the veteran political correspondent for the Washington Post, speculated, “Could we be wrong?”

  “We’ve got them on the run and I think we’ll win,” Truman wrote to his sister from the White House on October 20. After a day in Washington, he had flown to Miami, where 200,000 people filled the streets. From Miami he flew north to Raleigh, where there were “people all along the way from the airport which is fifteen miles out of town.”

  Things were looking decidedly more hopeful on several fronts. In Berlin, with improved landing facilities and more efficient air-traffic control after months of experience, the airlift was plainly succeeding at last, against all odds and forecasts. At his desk in the Oval Office on Friday, October 22, Truman authorized the dispatch to Berlin of still more of the giant C-54 transports, another twenty-six planes. “The airlift will be continued until the blockade is lifted,” General Clay declared triumphantly in Berlin. Winter supplies for the city were guaranteed.

  Back on his train again, Truman was telling a delighted crowd at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that the GOP stood for “Grand Old Platitudes,” and at a thunderous rally at Hunt Armory in Pittsburgh, he declared, “I am an old campaigner, and I enjoy it.”

  His opponent, Truman said, acted like a doctor whose magic cure for everything was a soothing syrup called unity. And here were the American people going for the usual once-every-four-years checkup.

  “Say you don’t look so good!” Truman said, acting the part of the doctor.

  “Well, that seems strange to me too, Doc,” he answered, as the voice of the people. “I never felt stronger, never had more money, and never had a brighter future. What is wrong with me?”

  “I never discuss issues with a patient. But what you need is a major operation.”

  “Will it be serious, Doc?”

  “Not so very serious. It will just mean taking out the complete works and putting in a Republican administration.”

  The audience roared with laughter. He had made the cool, letter-perfect Dewey a joke at last.

  Chicago went all out. Politicians who had taken part in the great Roosevelt rallies of 1936 and 1940 said they had never seen anything like it. Possibly as many as fifty thousand people marched in the parade from the Blackstone to Chicago Stadium. Another half million lined the route. Marching bands blared, fireworks burst overhead. Yet, oddly, not everyone was cheering. Here and there, remembered Paul Douglas, were people with tears in their eyes. “The newspapers had convinced them that Truman was going to lose, and they believed that the gains they had made under the New Deal were going to be taken away. They seemed to feel something precious was about to be lost, and they wanted to come out and show their sympathy arid support for the doughty little warrior who was doing battle for them against such great odds.” Privately, Douglas felt that he, too, like Truman would go down to defeat in his bid for the Senate.

  At the packed stadium, to a crowd of 24,000 Truman delivered his most savage speech of the campaign, a wild attack, uncalled for, in which he said a vote for Dewey was a vote for fascism. The authors of the speech were again David Noyes and Albert Carr, whose main purpose, Noyes later said, was to provoke Dewey into fighting back, a strategy Truman accepted. “An element of desperation comes into a campaign,” Clifford would say in retrospect. “And fatigue leads to it.”

  Dewey was properly outraged, so much so he drafted a new speech for his own scheduled appearance at Chicago, but then was persuaded by his advisers to drop it, not to get into a slugging match with Truman. He mustn’t get nasty, mustn’t make mistakes with victory so close. Reportedly, Dewey’s wife said that if she had to stay up all night to see him tear up what he had written, she would do it.

  “They have scattered reckless abuse along the entire right of way coast to coast,” Dewey would say only in Chicago, speaking of Democrats in general, “and now, I am sorry to say, reached a new low in mudslinging…. This is the kind of campaign I refuse to wage….”

  Truman offered no explanations or apologies. He was on his way east, and the “tide was rolling.” Dewey’s “Victory Special” would follow directly after him a day later.

  At Boston a quarter of a million people banked Truman’s parade route, cheered and yelled and enjoyed the obvious enjoyment written all over the candidate’s face. To the packed house at Mechanics Hall, Truman said Republican talk of unity was all “a lot of hooey—and if that rhymes with
anything, it is not my fault.”

  On Thursday, October 28, after nine stops and nine more speeches in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, the Truman campaign reached New York, where the outpouring of humanity and enthusiasm exceeded everything thus far. Had Truman’s whole career gone uncelebrated until now, the roaring, ticker-tape welcome that New York gave him would have made up for it. Over a million people turned out. Arriving at Grand Central Station in late afternoon, Truman set off on a nine-mile tour through the city, through the October twilight, led by a thundering motorcycle escort of a hundred machines. Truman was perched on the top of the back seat of an open car. Bess and Margaret followed six cars back.

  The confetti, ticker-tape and [shredded] telephone book demonstration along 42nd Street was extraordinary [wrote Meyer Berger in The New York Times]. It fell in great flurries and much of it landed on the Open cars. It curled and twisted from high windows. It fell in other places like driven snow. Through it all, the President’s figure, at times, was only dimly seen. He was smiling and he never stopped waving to curb crowds and to men and women clustered at high windows….

  As he rolled through Seventh Avenue, in the garment district, loudspeakers, cranked to full volume, blared “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

  He made three rousing outdoor speeches—at Union Square, City Hall, and Sara Delano Roosevelt Park on the Lower East Side—spoke at a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, then again that night, his fifth speech of the day, at Madison Square Garden, where two of his old nemeses, Albert Whitney and Harold Ickes, joined him on stage while the band played “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” A crowd of sixteen thousand roared its approval when Truman—evoking the memory of Al Smith, Robert Wagner, and Franklin Roosevelt—pledged his faith in the New Deal, pledged his support of Israel, and again, as at Pittsburgh, brought down the house with another doctor story. For weeks, he said, he had had the odd sensation that someone was following him. It had troubled him so he asked the White House physician about it, but the White House physician had said not to worry. “There is one place where that fellow is not going to follow you—and that’s into the White House.”

  The race nearly over, Truman was determined to finish strong. Friday the 29th, under a clear blue sky, in what by now was being described as “Truman weather,” he covered thirty-six sunlit miles through the city. He was seen and cheered, police said, by 1,245,000 people. There was not a discordant note through the whole day. Tugs on the East River tooted a greeting. In the Bronx, crowds screamed: “Hi, Harry” and “Hi, Margaret.” “You can throw the Galluping polls right into the ash can,” he told a delighted throng in Queens. If the campaign was only a ritual, as said so often, then it was a ritual people loved and they loved him for embracing it with such zest.

  In Harlem he made his only civil rights speech of the campaign. It was no impassioned personal declaration, but focused on the work of his Civil Rights Commission and its “momentous” report. Nonetheless, his appearance marked the first time a major party candidate for President had stumped Harlem, and after reminding his almost entirely black audience that he had already issued two executive orders to establish equal opportunity in the armed services and federal employment, he vowed to keep working for equal rights and equal opportunity “with every ounce of strength and determination I have.” The cheering in Harlem was the loudest of all.

  When he rose to speak at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that evening, the audience gave him a twelve-minute ovation.

  For months efforts had been made to persuade Eleanor Roosevelt to say something, anything, to help Truman—efforts that Truman himself refused to have any part in—but all to no avail. From Paris, where she was attending the United Nations session, she wrote to Frances Perkins that she had not endorsed Truman because he was “such a weak and vacillating person” and made such poor appointments. Now, at the last minute, she changed her mind, hoping to help the Democrats to carry New York.

  “There has never been a campaign where a man has shown more personal courage and confidence in the people of the United States,” she said in a broadcast from Paris.

  The scene of the final rally of the campaign, and the last platform appearance Harry Truman would ever make as a candidate for public office, was the immense Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, where there was not an empty seat.

  Discarding the speech efforts of his staff, he went on the attack, lashing out one last time at the Republican Congress, the Republican press, the Republican “old dealers,” and the Republican candidate. The stomping, cheering crowd urged him on.

  He felt afterward that he had done well. In any case, he had done the best he knew how.

  The odyssey was over. Sunday, October 31, Halloween, was spent at home at 219 North Delaware Street. “Home!” remembered Margaret. “I couldn’t believe it.”

  Truman worked on an election-eve radio address to be delivered from the living room the following night.

  From the bottom of my heart I thank the people of the United States for their cordiality to me and their interest in the affairs of this great nation and of the world. I trust the people, because when they know the facts, they do the right thing….

  Election day, up at five, he took his usual morning walk, read the papers, and had breakfast. Then, trailed by a swarm of reporters and photographers, he, Bess, and Margaret went to Memorial Hall three blocks away on Maple Avenue and voted.

  A final Gallup Poll showed that while he had cut Dewey’s lead, Dewey nonetheless remained a substantial five points ahead, 49.5 to 44.5. The betting odds still ranged widely, though generally speaking Dewey was favored 4 to 1.

  The New York Times predicted a Dewey victory with 345 electoral votes. “Government will remain big, active, and expensive under President Thomas E. Dewey,” said The Wall Street Journal. Time and Newsweek saw a Dewey sweep. The new issue of Life carried a full-page photograph of Dewey “the next President” crossing San Francisco Bay by ferry boat. Alistair Cooke, correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, titled his dispatch for November 1, “Harry S. Truman, A Study in Failure.”

  Changing Times, the Kiplinger magazine, announced on its front cover in bold, block type, “What Dewey Will Do.” Walter Lippmann wrote about the work Dewey had cut out for him in foreign policy. Drew Pearson, who thought Dewey had run “one of the most astute and skillful campaigns in recent years,” surveyed the “Dewey team,” the “exciting, hardworking, close-knit clique” that would be moving into the White House. Marquis Childs questioned whether the Democratic Party could ever be put back together again, while in their final column before election day the Alsop brothers worried over “how the government could get through the next ten weeks with a lame-duck president: Events will not wait patiently until Thomas E. Dewey officially replaces Harry S. Truman.”

  For Truman there were but two irregular, entirely unprofessional samplings to take heart from. One was from Les Biffle, the Senate Secretary, who, on his own, posing as a “chicken peddler,” had traveled about rural areas asking people how they felt about the election. Truman needn’t worry, Biffle had reported—the common people were for him. The other was from the Staley Milling Company of Kansas City, which had taken a “pullet poll” among farmers who bought chicken feed in sacks labeled “Democratic” or “Republican.” The Democratic feed had pulled well ahead, but then the company decided there must be something wrong and so abandoned its polling efforts.

  Among the campaign staff, the state of physical and emotional exhaustion, the sense of relief that finally the ordeal was over, all but precluded any capacity for rational judgment of the outcome. Their devotion to the President was greater than ever, but that, of course, was another matter. Yet some now honestly thought he might just make it. In Washington, after a quiet day at the White House, Eben Ayers worked out his own remarkable assessment of the situation in the privacy of his diary:

  Were it not for all these predictions and the unanimity of the pollsters and experts, I would say the President has a
n excellent chance. All the signs that I see indicate it. The crowds which have turned out for him on his campaign trips have grown steadily…. I cannot believe they came out of curiosity alone. Other conditions are favorable to the President, the general prosperity of the country. It is contrary to political precedent for the voters to kick out an administration in times of prosperity.

  The Dewey personality and campaign has not been one to attract voters. He is not liked—there is universal agreement on that. I have repeatedly asked individuals, newspapermen and others, if they could name one person who ever said he liked Dewey and I have yet to find one who would say “yes.” The Dewey campaign speeches have dealt only with national “unity,” with the promise to do things better and more efficiently. He has not discussed issues clearly or met them head-on at any time. I have repeatedly asked my wife if it is possible that the American people will vote for a man whom nobody likes and who tells them nothing.

  Late in the afternoon of election day, Truman decided to disappear from the scene. It was an odd move and one never quite explained. The impression was he wanted to be alone, simply to get away from everyone and everything and be by himself. Only his immediate family and the Secret Service knew where he was going.

  The Secret Service was about to have a changing of the guard at 219 North Delaware. At 4:30 a Secret Service field car, a black four-door Ford carrying the night shift, pulled into the driveway behind the house. The day shift was ready to leave, to drive back to Kansas City, to presidential headquarters at the Muehlebach Hotel.

  A crowd had gathered in front of the house. Truman went out the kitchen door and climbed into the back seat of the Ford with Agents Henry Nicholson and Gerard McCann on either side of him. Agent Frank Barry took the wheel and Jim Rowley, head of the detail, got quickly into the front seat beside the driver. The car pulled away, drawing no attention.

  They drove to Excelsior Springs, the little resort town across the Missouri in Clay County, and checked into the Elms Hotel, the same place Truman had escaped to sixteen years earlier, crushed by disappointment the night he learned he was not to be Tom Pendergast’s choice for governor.