Almost President

by Scott Farris

  By now, Dewey realized that his election was no longer inevitable. “We are slipping, aren’t we?” Dewey asked his staff. Yet, with barely a week left before the election, he decided it was too late to change tactics. With Wall Street complacently expecting a Dewey triumph, Truman ended up raising more money and made particularly effective use of radio. In a final national broadcast the evening before the election, Truman said voting Democratic was the “best insurance against going back to the dark days of 1932.” Neither candidate made a truly memorable speech during the campaign, H. L. Mencken concluded, but by appealing to so many special interest groups’ self-interest, Truman had at least proven himself to be “a smart mathematician.”

  On Election Day, Dewey swept the Northeast but lost the usually Republican Midwest. Truman had won 49.5 percent of the popular vote to Dewey’s 45 percent, with the rest going to third party candidates Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace. “You can analyze figures from now to kingdom come and all they will show is we lost the farm vote, which we had in 1944, and that lost the election,” said Dewey. Dewey had also been harmed by the belief among potential supporters that his election was a certainty. A full 13 percent of those who had identified themselves as Dewey supporters before the election simply did not bother to vote. Further, Americans had admired Truman’s scrappy performance and were thrilled to see an underdog beat the odds. “I have learned from bitter experience,” Dewey wrote Eisenhower in 1954, “that Americans somehow regard a political campaign as a sporting event.”

  While Truman’s upset win was thrilling, some of his methods were appalling, yet Dewey was magnanimous in defeat. At a news conference after the election, he said, “When I wished Mr. Truman well, I meant it. I think Mr. Truman is a good man. This nation will go on now; it will prosper and flourish. And so will we.” He had vowed that losing the presidency would not scar him as it had Al Smith and Wendell Willkie. Dewey tried to maintain a jocular attitude. Meeting with a group of Boy Scouts, he said, “Remember fellows, any boy can become president—unless he’s got a mustache!”9

  With his second defeat, Dewey knew his own presidential ambitions had ended. Since Republicans tend to nominate for president the candidate whose “turn” it seems to be, 1952 finally seemed to be Taft’s turn. The man known as “Mr. Republican” was an honorable and admirable man, and not the reactionary his critics portrayed. He favored an income floor for the poor, introduced legislation to provide federal aid to education, and his federal housing bill was so progressive it led one real estate industry lobbyist to label Taft a “fellow traveler.” Taft also took a courageous stand in criticizing the trials of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg on the grounds that the Nazis were being tried ex post facto in violation of the principles of American justice, and he had been one of the few public figures to oppose internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

  But Dewey could not stand the rigid and often tactless Taft. On more than one occasion, he was heard to suggest that Taft go “screw” himself. Dewey was convinced that a conservative like Taft would lead the party to disaster and that only one man, the Allied commander Eisenhower, could lead the Republicans to certain victory in 1952. Dewey began to recruit Eisenhower to run for president as early as April 1949, first reaching out to Ike’s brother, Milton, and then arranging a private meeting with the general himself.

  Eisenhower recorded the private meeting in his diary, noting that he and Dewey were in agreement “that the tendencies toward centralization and paternalism must be halted and reversed,” but they also agreed that no Republican candidate could say such a thing aloud and hope to be successful. Dewey counseled Eisenhower to say as little as possible of substance during the campaign, so that after his election he could quietly “lead us back to safe channels.”

  Eisenhower acknowledged Dewey’s key role in his becoming president. The two men never became intimates, but Eisenhower was awed by Dewey’s political skills. “It seems that in public he has no appeal, but he is a rather persuasive talker on a tête-à-tête basis,” Eisenhower said. And when Dewey made a highly successful thirty-minute commercial for the Eisenhower campaign in the new medium of television, a mildly humorous tour of “Harry’s Haunted House” in honor of Halloween, complete with skeletons in closets, Ike wrote Dewey, “I am still lost in wonder at your performance.”

  Before that, however, Dewey had worked behind the scenes to scuttle Taft’s candidacy. Taft had come into the Republican convention in the belief that he had enough pledged delegates to assure his nomination on the first ballot. But Dewey then led the charge to demand “fair play” in seating disputed delegations from the South so that delegates were equitably distributed between Taft and Eisenhower. Passions ran high, and the convention was well aware who was orchestrating Eisenhower’s move to the nomination. Westbrook Pegler said it was clear Eisenhower was “just standing around and doing as he is told.” Illinois senator Everett Dirksen took the podium to shake his finger at Dewey and proclaim, “We followed you before and you took us down the path to defeat!” Taft supporters distributed flyers, begging delegates to “Sink Dewey!” and “End Dewey’s Control of Our Party!” But a majority of delegates agreed with Dewey that Eisenhower was their best hope for victory, and he slipped past Taft to win the nomination on the first ballot in a very close election.

  Eisenhower had not given much thought to his running mate (he thought the convention delegates always chose the running mate), so Dewey convened a meeting of advisors and when all the other possible suspects had been named, it was Dewey who said, “What about Nixon?” Dewey had met Nixon earlier in the year and been impressed by the fact he was a “fine speaker” with a voting record that was “good, intelligent, middle of the road, and . . . [he was] a senator who knew the world was round.” He told Nixon that he could be president someday and was, by Nixon’s own account, the first person to suggest he would make a good running mate for Eisenhower. At the convention, Dewey even wanted to make Nixon’s nominating speech himself, but given the hard feelings in the hall, he left the task to someone else.

  Dewey, then, set Nixon on the path that would eventually make him president, and he remained a close advisor and confidant to Nixon until Dewey’s death in 1971. When Nixon was accused during the 1952 campaign of tapping a slush fund provided by wealthy supporters, Nixon feared it would be Dewey who would force him from the ticket. But it was Dewey who advised Nixon to respond to the allegations and save his candidacy via television in what became celebrated as the “Checkers speech.” Dewey’s influence with Nixon was such that nearly twenty years later, when leading Republicans worried that the Nixon White House was headed for political and perhaps legal trouble, the party tapped Dewey as the one man with enough influence to set Nixon straight. But Dewey died in March 1971, before he could talk to Nixon, and fifteen months later the Watergate scandal began to engulf the Nixon presidency.

  The 1952 convention had left a bitter aftertaste among conservatives. Taft privately told friends he almost wished Adlai Stevenson had won, that four more years of the New Deal would be preferable to an Eisenhower administration “dominated by Dewey.” Five-star generals are not dominated by anyone, but Dewey’s stamp was certainly evident. Several Dewey confidants, including John Foster Dulles, Herbert Brownell, and William P. Rogers, held key posts in Eisenhower’s administration, though Dewey himself declined any official post, admitting he was too arrogant ever to play second fiddle to anyone, even a former General of the Army. Dewey even turned down Ike’s offer of chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court—a post Dewey also turned down later when Nixon offered it in 1969.10 As he told Kitty Carlisle Hart, the Broadway actress and television personality whom he dated after Frances died, “I’m a warrior. I don’t want to be up there judging. I want to be down there in the arena, fighting!”

  Dewey regularly offered Eisenhower advice, and it seems clear that Dewey’s philosophy of pay-as-you-go liberalism influenced Eisenhower’s
own thinking, though Eisenhower and his aides preferred the term “Modern Republicanism.” In adopting Dewey’s philosophy, Ike linked his experience during the war, when government, private business, labor, and other interest groups cooperated, often on a voluntary basis, to further the public interest without the requirement of more federal power. In terms nearly identical to Dewey’s, Eisenhower feared increased “statism” would mean the loss of personal freedom and individual initiative, while generating class envy and conflict.

  Rolling back the social reforms of the New Deal, however, would be nearly impossible. Echoing Dewey’s own conclusion a decade before, Eisenhower told his brother, Milton, “Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” By now, even former president Herbert Hoover was agreeing with Dewey that the best Republicans could hope for was to slow the growth of the federal government.

  While Eisenhower was able to take some minor steps to lift wage and price controls, lower some taxes on capital and industry, and return some types of energy development back to the states or the private sector, he also expanded Social Security coverage, advocated extending minimum wage protection to workers in many more categories than previously covered, maintained the highest personal income tax rates in U.S. history, and began the largest public works project in American history, the interstate highway system—all validations of Goldwater’s charge that Ike was running a “dime store New Deal.” Yet, Eisenhower’s shrewd and pragmatic conclusion, inspired by Dewey’s tutelage, that the welfare state cannot be dismantled, only restrained, is still the Republican dilemma today.

  If Eisenhower, advised by Dewey, went beyond the New Deal, Nixon, handpicked for the national stage by Dewey and still soliciting advice from Dewey, went beyond Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. “Vigorously did we inveigh against the Great Society,” said Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan, “enthusiastically did we fund it.” Historian Charles Morris argues that Nixon was more liberal than Lyndon Johnson, and Nixon himself once said, “As a matter of fact, to tell you the truth, John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste.”

  The Nixon administration was the last truly liberal administration of the twentieth century. That legacy is obscured by liberal antipathy toward Nixon because of his history of Red-baiting, his policies in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, and Nixon’s conservative rhetoric. But the words were not matched by deeds. As liberal Republican congressman Hugh Scott, a Dewey ally, said of Nixon’s administration, “The conservatives get the rhetoric; we get the action.”

  Nixon’s appeal to conservatives was politically expedient. He needed conservatives to win elections but believed he needed liberal accomplishments to ensure his place in history. Under Nixon, wage and price controls were implemented, the Environmental Protection Agency was created, the food stamp program was begun, affirmative action was put in place, and tax reform essentially freed the poor from having to pay income tax. Nixon even called for comprehensive national health insurance, though he pursued the idea half-heartedly. Conservatives do not embrace Nixon’s legacy because it is not theirs; liberals will not embrace it because it belongs to Nixon.

  Conservatives do embrace Ronald Reagan, but while Reagan had no direct connection to Dewey, he shared Dewey’s pragmatism in a way his conservative hagiographers have ignored. He understood the Republican quandary articulated by Dewey. Reagan may have changed how many Americans feel about the federal government, based on his pronouncement that government is more the problem than the solution, but he did not fundamentally change how we are governed.

  While Reagan came into office with a conservative agenda to cut budgets and shift social programs back to the states, he was unable to eliminate a single major federal program or agency. While he cut the highest marginal income tax rates, he then had to raise other taxes in seven of his eight years as president to reduce deficits, and yet was still unable to submit a single balanced budget to Congress. The national debt tripled under his presidency. Rather than eliminate or privatize Social Security, Reagan appointed a commission that successfully ensured Social Security’s solvency for decades without trimming benefits. “Americans are conservative,” said conservative columnist and Reagan admirer George Will. “What they want to conserve is the New Deal.”

  This is what Dewey had concluded: Americans are conservative more in temperament than ideology. His imprint on Republican philosophy was still evident when President George H. W. Bush talked about launching “a thousand points of light” to respond to America’s social welfare needs; when Bush’s son, President George W. Bush, who had campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” greatly expanded Medicare and federal funding on education; and in the 2008 election, when Republicans eschewed more conservative choices and nominated the self-styled Republican “maverick” John McCain, known for working across the aisle with Democrats on issues such as immigration reform.

  After 2008, the Tea Party movement agitated to purge the remnants of Republican liberals and moderates from its ranks and pursued the party realignment of pure conservatism that Dewey dreaded and predicted would lead to political disaster. Time will tell if Dewey’s prophecy is correct, but Republicans should recall Dewey’s legacy and wisdom. He lost the presidency twice, but he pointed the way for many other Republican victories.

  5 A Dewey-appointed commission charged with implementing the 1945 anti-discrimination laws urged New York’s three baseball teams, the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers, to sign a fair employment pledge. The clubs declined, but the request reassured Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey that his plan to integrate baseball had at least local political support. Dewey, therefore, liked to take partial credit for Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in baseball.

  6 Later as district attorney and then governor, Dewey had an excellent record, for the period, in appointing African Americans, Jewish Americans, and members of other minority groups to positions of authority. He was also the first major party candidate to endorse the Equal Rights Amendment for women.

  7 Remarkably, given the profile of the case, Dewey commuted Luciano’s sentence in 1946 and had him deported to Italy, reportedly as a reward for Luciano using his gangland contacts in Sicily, Italy, and even New York to help the Allied cause during World War II.

  8 Some scholars have argued that Truman’s incendiary remarks led Republicans to condone the later excesses of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy as retribution for Truman’s excesses.

  9 As of 2008, no presidential nominee had sported facial hair since Dewey.

  10 Eisenhower instead appointed Earl Warren; Nixon appointed Warren Burger.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ADLAI STEVENSON

  1952, 1956

  Eggheads of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks!

  “All the eggheads” were for Adlai Stevenson in his 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, and the enthusiasm with which they embraced him has spurred Republicans ever since to argue that the Democratic Party abandoned the values of the middle class to become the party of the elite.

  It is certainly true that intellectuals—and many common-man voters—loved the eloquence of Stevenson’s speeches, the irony of his wit, the urbanity of his manners, and the contrast he provided to the self-consciously anti-intellectual campaigns waged against him by Dwight Eisenhower and Eisenhower’s running mate, Richard Nixon. But while Stevenson was erudite, he was no fringe radical. He was governor of Illinois, located in the middle of America, and if that were not enough, he was raised but five miles from that supposed epicenter of Middle America, Peoria, of which it is said that if it “plays in Peoria” then it will be accepted anywhere in the heartland.

  Yet, Republicans have, in virtually every election si
nce 1952, leveled the charge that Democrats are out of touch with this very same Middle America. They point to polling that shows that those who attend religious services regularly, which “average Americans” presumably do, tend to vote Republican, while those who do not tend to vote Democratic.11 They argue that while the Democrats once dominated the heartland regions of the Midwest and South, these are now Republican strongholds. And while this formulation presupposes that the East and West Coasts, which are now the centers of Democratic strength, must be lacking in middle class Americans, even some Democrats suggest the charge of Democratic elitism has merit.

  Ted Strickland, the Democratic governor of Ohio from 2007 to 2011, fretted that Democrats no longer make the populist appeals that lent the party its nickname, “Party of the People,” because of “a sort of intellectual elitism that considers that kind of talk is somehow lacking in sophistication.”12 And Thomas Frank, the author of several books that question why the Democrats have supposedly lost touch with the middle class, has written that “at the bottom of their hearts, many of the [Democratic] party’s biggest thinkers agree with the ‘liberal elite’ stereotype. They can’t simply point to their working-class base and their service to working-class America, because they aren’t interested in that base; they haven’t tried to serve that constituency for decades.”

  Conservative critics point to Stevenson’s campaign as that point, decades ago, when the Democrats supposedly abandoned the working-class. Conservative political analyst Michael Barone charged that Stevenson “was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle class American culture.” Conservative commentator George Will added the charge that the “cultural liberalism” and “condescension” of “the post-Stevenson Democratic Party” drove Southern whites and Northern blue-collar ethnic voters out of the Democratic Party.