At San Diego, ten thousand turned out, despite threatening skies and the early hour of 9:00 A.M., and gave him the most enthusiastic welcome thus far. After the stop at Oceanside, California, where the train pulled within sight of the rolling surf of the Pacific, the route was east again.
By then, Friday, September 24, he had been on the road a week, and while some on board had already begun to show signs of strain, Truman, who bore much the heaviest burden, remained steady as a rock. Nor had he left the duties and concerns of the Oval Office. A White House pouch arrived daily—papers requiring his signature, letters to be signed, letters to be read, reports from department heads, reports to Congress, sealed manila envelopes marked “Confidential,” as well as copies of the Kansas City Star and the Independence Examiner. A memorandum from Head Usher Howell Crim reported on the quantity of plaster descending in the East Room.
The Berlin crisis and the risks involved in the airlift weighed heavily on Truman. Though the quantity of supplies being flown into the city had increased since August, the disturbing truth was that the airlift was supplying less than half of what Berlin needed. “We are not quite holding our own,” General Clay had cabled. In another few days, in Dallas, at Truman’s request, General Walter Bedell Smith, the American ambassador to Moscow, would come quietly aboard the train to give his assessment to Truman of Stalin’s mood and the chances of war.
Staff work on board had acquired a pattern of a kind, though little about it was systematic or efficient or ever very formal. Of the major speeches only the one at Dexter, Iowa, had been prepared well in advance. The rest—for Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles—were produced under way, with the combined efforts of Ross, Clifford, Elsey, Murphy, and the new writers Noyes, Carr, and Carter. No speech was ever the work of one writer, and no speech failed to go through several drafts. Truman himself went over every line, worked “painstakingly” on every draft, and was the first to approve suggested deletions. “That’s good,” he would say. “Never use two words when one will do best.” Convoluted structure and highblown or evasive phrases greatly annoyed him. “That’s not the way I would say it,” he would remark as the group sat around the mahogany table in the dining room of the Magellan, working late into the night. “Let’s just say what we mean.”
“Nobody had any special pride of authorship, but we did get into heated arguments now and then,” wrote Ross. “The President would grin and say, ‘All right, you fellows fight it out and I’ll decide.’ ” Ross wanted Truman to ease up on the abusive language and state his case in more dignified fashion. But Truman was determined to keep the heat on. He had also introduced a new line about the housing shortage that made the others wince. If they went to the polls and did their duty on November 2, Truman would tell the crowd with a smile, then he wouldn’t have to go “hunting around in this housing shortage.” He could stay right in the White House. It was a line he liked and that he was sure the people liked. So he kept it.
Background material, particularly material useful for the rear platform appearances, was provided by a “Research Division” of the Democratic National Committee—three or four “bright young men” who had been holed up in a small office off DuPont Circle in Washington and who, according to George Elsey, “worked like dogs and ground out an incredible amount of material. All kinds of historical, literary, political and economic data flowed through them, and news clippings, photostats of useful documents, anything that would give spark and vitality and originality and vigor to President Truman’s campaign effort.”
Elsey’s task was to sort and edit it all, then keep the President supplied with pertinent items to choose from, and in proper order as they sped along. “I was the ‘whistlestopper’ on the job doing the outlines, getting the stuff together, and feeding these back to him,” he remembered. “I felt I got twenty-five years exercise walking from my car to his car in the weeks of the campaign.”
Bill Boyle would be credited with “planning every inch” of Truman’s itinerary. Constantly in touch with state party leaders, he advised Truman on which towns mattered, and why.
Traveling ahead of the train, as “advance men,” were Oscar Chapman, the Under Secretary of Interior, and Donald Dawson, of the White House staff. They were responsible for all the details of local ceremonies, to make sure the local politicians knew where and when to come on board Truman’s train, and that no such fiasco as the empty hall at Omaha in June ever happened again.
Between stops, in the comparative quiet and privacy of the Magellan, the candidate himself remained even-tempered and steadfastly confident. The strain on him was unrelenting. Yet he showed no signs of wear-and-tear or faltering expectations. He knew he was behind and in private said so. But he was also sure he would catch up and move ahead by November, when it would count—a view shared by almost no one else on board, though few, other than the press, ever talked about it.
Once, late in an especially long day, a noticeably weary First Lady asked Clark Clifford if he thought the President really believed he could win and Clifford said yes. “He gives every appearance under every condition,” Clifford answered.
“Oh,” she said, “I don’t know where it comes from.”
Though several of his staff were gravely concerned about the split in the Democratic ranks—the campaigns under way by the Progressives and the Dixiecrats—Truman seems never to have taken the candidacies of Wallace and Thurmond as serious threats.
Henry Wallace was running hard. In August he had bravely campaigned through the South, decrying segregation and refusing to stay in hotels that enforced discrimination. In North Carolina angry crowds pelted him with eggs and rotten tomatoes. Traveling the rest of the country mainly by plane, he would eventually roll up more mileage even than Truman, his main theme remaining constant throughout: the Progressive Party was “the peace party” that could end the Cold War through direct negotiations with the Soviet Union. At Los Angeles, speaking at the same stadium where Truman had, Wallace drew a larger crowd than Truman had, and it was a paying crowd. But attendance overall at Wallace rallies and speeches was falling off, the excitement of his Progressive “crusade” plainly in decline, as he was perceived—and portrayed more and more in the press—as “playing Moscow’s game.” Of the Republicans and Democrats, he said they were “equally sinister” in their policies, both being in the grip of Wall Street and the Pentagon.
Strom Thurmond kept harping on states’ rights and demanding that the “evil forces” in control of the Democratic Party be “cast out.” He called Truman’s Fair Employment Practices Committee “communistic.” Racial integration of the armed services was “un-American.” The South must hold the line. “There’s not enough troops in the Army to break down segregation and admit the Negro into our homes, our eating places, our swimming pools and our theaters.” He and the Dixiecrats would win 140 electoral votes in the South, Thurmond said, more than sufficient to force the election into the House. But almost no one took the claim seriously, and Truman least of all.
In his speeches, Truman never mentioned Wallace or Thurmond by name. But then never in the major addresses or in any of his largely extemporaneous remarks to small crowds in out-of-the-way places did he speak of Dewey by name. Dewey was always “my Republican opponent,” or “the other fellow.”
He never criticized or ridiculed Dewey in a personal way. Interestingly, Dewey was never even a subject of discussion on board the Ferdinand Magellan. There was no talk of Dewey’s personality or failings, no gossiping about him, or ever any consideration of attacking him on personal grounds. It would not be recalled that the President ever even mentioned Dewey.
II
Governor Thomas E. Dewey had gone aboard his own campaign train at Albany on Sunday, September 19, two days after Truman left Washington, and Dewey, too, delivered his first major speech in Iowa, at Des Moines on Monday the 20th, two days after Truman spoke at the Dexter plowing contest. Starting later than Truman, Dewey would travel nowhere near so far, and at a m
uch more leisurely pace. And he would deliver far fewer speeches—all this, like everything about the Dewey campaign, having been carefully thought out in advance. As the candidate and his advisers proudly informed the press, nothing was to be left to chance.
Press coverage of Dewey’s advance across the country was also to be far greater than that Truman received. There were ninety-two reporters riding the “Dewey Victory Special”—ninety-eight by the time the train reached California—roughly twice the number traveling with the President, and they were catered to, their everyday needs handled with a skill and efficiency unknown on the Truman train. Copies of the candidate’s speeches were nearly always available twenty-four hours in advance, as they seldom ever were on the Truman train. An internal public address system fed Dewey’s remarks directly to the press car and dining cars, so reporters need not bother leaving their air-conditioned comforts. Coffee and sandwiches were provided to reporters at odd hours, their laundry attended to, their luggage moved from train to hotel for overnight stops. To those who had traveled with both candidates, the Truman operation, by comparison, was forty years behind the times.
“If you wanted anything laundered [on the Truman train], you did it yourself, in a Pullman basin,” Richard Rovere informed his readers in The New Yorker.
When you detrained anywhere for an overnight stay, it was every man for himself. You carried your duffel and scrambled for your food. If a man was such a slave to duty that he felt obliged to hear what the President said in his back-platform addresses, he had to climb down off the train; run to the rear end, mingle with the crowd, and listen. Often this was a hazardous undertaking, for the President was given to speaking late at night to crowds precariously assembled on sections of roadbed built up fifteen or twenty feet above the surrounding land. The natives knew the contours of the ground, but the reporters did not, and more than one of them tumbled down a cindery embankment.
A condescending tone entered into a lot of what was written about Truman and his efforts. His whole campaign, as Jonathan Daniels said, was given a “sort of rube reputation” by the largely eastern press traveling with him. The Dewey campaign, by contrast, was described as “slick,” “tidy as a pin,” everything handled with “junior-executive briskness.” The favored drink on board the “Dewey Victory Special” was the martini, not bourbon as on the Truman train. The favorite game was bridge, not poker. Dewey himself was cool, careful, “supremely self-confident,” and from the start elevated in tone.
“Tonight we enter upon a campaign to unite America,” he told the crowd at Des Moines, where, reportedly, he was leading Truman by a resounding 51 to 37 percent.
“We propose to install in Washington,” Dewey said, “an administration which has faith in the American people, a warm understanding of their needs and the competence to meet them. We will rediscover the essential unity of our people and the spiritual strength which makes our country great. We will begin to move forward again shoulder to shoulder….”
There were no harsh or divisive accusations, no pitting of farmers against Wall Street, no pitchforks in the back or angry, staccato assaults on any segment of government or society.
A Republican congressman from Minnesota, August H. Andresen, had written to warn Dewey of discontent among farmers, saying, “We cannot win without the farm vote.” But Dewey refrained also from any mention of farm problems.
His voice was deep and resonant, as flowing as the smoothest radio preacher—everything Truman’s voice was not. Dewey was dignified. He spoke ill of no one, offended no one. He had no surprises, he took no risks. And the pattern prevailed, his text seldom more rousing than a civics primer. “Government must help industry and industry must cooperate with government,” he would say with a grand preacherlike sweep of the right arm.
“America’s future is still ahead of us,” he also said.
They were not speeches of the kind he had given in 1944, when he had hit hard and often, charging Franklin Roosevelt with failure to end the Depression, failure to build American defenses before Pearl Harbor. At one point, he had called Roosevelt truly “the indispensable” man—“indispensable to the ill-assorted, power-hungry conglomeration of city bosses, Communists, and career bureaucrats which now compose the New Deal.” But there would be no such harangue this time, because this time Dewey was not the challenger. This time he had the election sewed up.
It was an odd reversal of roles, with the incumbent President running as the challenger and his opponent performing as though he were already elected and the campaign a mere formality. Dewey had only to mark time, be careful, make no mistakes, say or do nothing silly or improper, and the presidency was his.
So the speeches were kept unceasingly positive. He was for unity, for peace, for “constructive change.” He was not running against the New Deal. He was not even running against Harry Truman, whom he never mentioned, any more than Truman spoke of him, which was another odd turn. “Governor Dewey is deliberately avoiding any sharp controversy with the Democratic incumbent,” reported The New York Times as the “Victory Special” rolled through California, passing, at one point, within only a few miles of the Truman train.
In some ways the two candidates were much alike. Both were efficient with their time, alert, and energetic. They always looked spanking clean and pressed. Both were men of medium stature, though Truman, the one so often referred to disparagingly as “the little man,” was an inch taller than Dewey, who was 5 feet 8 inches. And unlike Truman, Dewey was extremely sensitive about his height.
They were each diligent, career public servants who genuinely believed that good government was possible and the best politics. They both loved music. Truman had dreamed of being a concert pianist, Dewey of being a concert singer and still loved to sing (especially “Oklahoma” in the bathtub). Each was devoted to his family. Dewey’s wife, Frances, a particularly photogenic woman with a somewhat shy but winsome manner, was generally seen as an asset to his political career; and they had two teenage sons, Tom, Jr., and John.
Like Truman, Dewey was a product of small-town middle America. He had grown up in Owosso, Michigan, where his father, the editor of the local newspaper, was vitally interested in politics, just as John Truman had been.
Beyond there, however, the similarities ended. Where Truman was at heart a nineteenth-century man—raised, educated, formed in thought and outlook in the era before World War I—Dewey was of a different generation. Dewey had never lived with the burden of farm debt; he had never been to war, he had never been bankrupt. Born in 1902, eighteen years after Truman, he was the first candidate for President born in the twentieth century. His middle American origins, moreover, were hardly apparent any longer. Educated at the University of Michigan and the Columbia Law School in New York, he had made his entire career in the East, and with his homburg hats and cultivated voice, he had left Owosso far behind.
Where Truman had been, as Nellie Noland said, “a late bloomer all along,” attaining prominence only past the age of fifty, Dewey had soared almost from the start, achieving national fame as the crusading district attorney of New York while still in his thirties. He was “the Gangbuster,” a national hero. In 1938, at age thirty-six, he had made his first run for governor of New York. Trying again in 1942, he became New York’s first Republican governor in twenty years. Running for a second term in 1946, he rolled up the biggest victory in the state’s history, winning by nearly 700,000 votes.
As governor he cut taxes, doubled state aid to education, raised salaries for state employees, reduced the state’s overall indebtedness by over $100 million, and put through the first state law in the country prohibiting racial discrimination in employment. If elected now, he would be, at forty-six, the youngest President since Theodore Roosevelt. Given his youth, ambition, his proven ability, it was not inconceivable that Thomas E. Dewey could serve as long as, or longer than Franklin Roosevelt. If he were to have four full terms, he would be in the White House until 1965, and even then would still
be younger than was Truman in 1948.
But, as often noted, Dewey was also extremely cautious and cold in manner, at least in public, which for a politician was what mattered. On the campaign trail, he seemed not to care for the gifts he was offered or to mix with the crowd. He was incapable of unbending. Where Truman, at the end of a platform talk, would ask, “Would you like to meet my family?” Dewey would say stiffly, “I’m pleased to present Mrs. Dewey.”
“Smile, governor,” a photographer had called at a campaign stop in 1944. “I thought I was,” said Dewey. A remark attributed to the wife of a New York Republican politician would be widely repeated. “You have to know Mr. Dewey well,” she said, “in order to dislike him.”
He was so self-controlled as to seem mechanical—Dewey came on stage, wrote Richard Rovere, “like a man who has been mounted on casters and given a tremendous shove from behind”—and there was a hard look in the dark eyes, a look that had served him well as a prosecutor. “Those eyes tell you this guy doesn’t crap around,” a staff man once said.
It was Dewey’s small, dark “bottle-brush” mustache that the public knew him best for and that many people disliked, or wished he would get rid of, mustaches having been long out of fashion among public men. He had grown it on a bicycle tour of France years earlier and kept it because his wife approved. To the actress Ethel Barrymore, the mustache and Dewey’s diminutive size made him look “like the bridegroom on the wedding cake,” a remark greatly amplified by the acerbic, much-quoted daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and that may have done Dewey real harm in the campaign.
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