With the Democrats so divided, Dewey didn’t think he could lose. He ran a very careful campaign on what he called a unity platform, speaking vaguely of America’s greatness and portraying himself as a meticulous, upstanding, honest administrator. Elmo Roper, a pollster as famous in his day as George Gallup, had Dewey 44 to 31 percent and announced that he was going to stop polling: “My whole inclination is to predict the election of Thomas E. Dewey by a heavy margin and devote my time and energy to other things.” Newsweek published its own poll of fifty respected political reporters. Who would win the election? Dewey, said the pundits, fifty to zero.
Truman refused to let his opponent get away with vagueness, and he started out on an incredible whistle-stop train tour of more than 31,000 miles and 350 speeches. He attacked Republicans as “gluttons of privilege,” “bloodsuckers with Wall Street offices,” and “economic tapeworms.” His main target, interestingly, was not Dewey but the Republican-dominated eightieth Congress, which he called “the donothing Congress” and which he castigated for not helping to stop rising food and housing prices. Truman spoke to crowds of thousands in towns big and small all across America. He had one thing going for him that Dewey didn’t: He struck people as authentic. He used words like “damn” and “hell” while Dewey uttered “good gracious” and “oh, Lord.”
Truman introduced his wife, Bess, as “the Boss” (at least until she told him not to do it anymore) and sometimes blurted out incredibly dumb things. Carried away by enthusiasm at one rally, Truman said of Stalin, “I like old Joe. He is a decent fellow.” But when Republicans tried to use this against him to prove he was sympathetic to Communists, they found they couldn’t get much mileage out of it. Truman was not the Teflon president that Ronald Reagan would be, all smooth with shiny surfaces. Instead, as he campaigned to more and more enthusiastic crowds, he seemed like granite. Anything coming his way simply bounced off.
THE WINNER: HARRY TRUMAN
The press had Truman measured for his loser’s suit right up to and including Election Day, which, in 1948, was November 2, two days after Halloween. On November 1, Gallup gave the election to Dewey by five points. The Wall Street Journal published an article listing who Dewey’s chief advisors would be. One writer wrote, “We’re going to miss lil’ ole Harry.” Columnist Stewart Alsop wondered in the New York Times “how the government can get through the next ten weeks” with Truman as a lame-duck president. Overseas in Great Britain, Alistair Cooke wrote an article about Truman entitled “A Study in Failure.”
On November 2, Truman went to bed a loser, and on November 3 he woke up a winner. He beat Dewey 24,79,345 votes to 21,991,291 and was pictured in a photo that immortalized forever the foolish confidence of a press swayed by polls rather than the true desires of ordinary people—a grinning Truman holding the Chicago Tribune with a front-page headline reading, in big, bold letters, “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.”
Why did Truman win? Perhaps, as Dewey later claimed, it was because voter turnout was light for that era—only about 51 percent, which indicates that many Republicans were convinced by the polls and stayed home on Election Day, too confident of victory. Or maybe he won because Wallace’s Progressives made Truman appear less liberal, while Thurmond’s Dixiecrats made the president’s civil rights record look even better than it was, especially to blacks.
Or maybe he won because, as the underdog in the fight of his life, he simply went out, threw caution to the wind, and “gave ’em hell.” It was a lesson that future Democratic campaigners like Al Gore and John Kerry failed to learn, to their peril.
THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF DEWEY FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was no fan of Harry Truman, and—as he would do later with members of the Kennedy family—he attempted to find incriminating confidential information to use against the president to influence the outcome of the election. Hoover secretly put agents to work to find stuff that would be detrimental to Truman because, being a longtime friend of Thomas Dewey, he hoped that “President Dewey” would name him as attorney general. One FBI agent remembered that they didn’t find much, but the agency actually had the nerve to prepare position papers for Dewey on Truman’s supposed “softness” on Communism, which Dewey then released to the press as if they were written by his staff.
DEWEY TO TRUMAN: DON’T TOUCH THAT WHEEL! In the weeks leading up to Election Day, Dewey became so sure of his victory that he began to act like the presidency was already his. He became enraged when Truman announced that he was going to send a personal emissary to Stalin to try to mediate with the Soviet leader. Dewey fumed to reporters: “If Harry Truman would just keep his hands off things for another few weeks! Particularly, if he will keep his hands off foreign policy, about which he knows considerably less than nothing.”
TRUMAN TO DEWEY: BITE ME! Well, maybe those weren’t his exact words—but Truman went after Dewey with a vengeance. During his stump speeches, he loved to act out both sides of an imaginary dialogue between a doctor (Dewey) who diagnoses his patient (America) as having a great deal of troublesome but not-quite-specified “issues.”
“I feel really good, Doc,” America would say. “I’ve never been stronger. What could be wrong with me?”
“I never discuss issues with a patient,” Dr. Dewey said, “but what you need is a major operation.”
Here Truman made a moustache-twirling motion.
“Is it serious, doc?” the patient asked.
“Not very,” Dr. Dewey said, “it just means taking out your entire brains and replacing them with Republican ones.”
FOR THE BIRDS In 1946, only about 7,000 homes in America had televisions. By 1948, technology had made televisions both better and cheaper, and 148,000 people had shelled out for the big black boxes. Presidential candidates on both sides were quick to take advantage of technology. Both Truman and Dewey bought air time, but the honor for the first presidential candidate to do a paid political ad goes to Harry Truman, who gave a televised speech on October 5, 1948, from Jersey City, New Jersey.
Both 1948 political conventions were televised on the East Coast. In order to facilitate this, Republicans and Democrats agreed to hold their events in Convention Hall in Philadelphia—the Republicans in June, the Democrats a month later. For the first time in history, television cables ran over the convention floor, with batteries of hot lights arched over the stage (in the non-air-conditioned hall, the temperature at the podium was ninety-three degrees). Speakers wandered around wearing thick pancake makeup (women were told that brown lipstick showed up better on black-and-white television sets, so most female orators looked like they’d just bitten into a big piece of chocolate).
But people seemed to understand the medium—TV was theater, TV was spectacle. When India Edwards, executive director of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee, reached the podium to speak, she waved a steak in the air to emphasize the high price of meat.
But the biggest spectacle did not come off the way it was intended. At two o’clock in the morning, when Harry Truman was about to go on stage to accept his party’s nomination, a flock of pigeons was released from underneath a huge floral Liberty Bell. The birds, who had been trapped all night in the hot and humid bell, went berserk. In a scene straight out of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, the pigeons began dive-bombing delegates, smashing into the rafters of the hall and flying straight into the television lights.
After a moment of stunned silence, Truman and everyone in the hall broke into uproarious laughter. The few people awake and still watching were privileged to see one of the most wonderful moments of live television ever recorded.
At the first televised Democratic Convention, the release of a flock of pigeons didn’t go as planned.
DWIGHT EISENHOWER
VS.
ADLAI STEVENSON
“General Eisenhower exemplifies what the fair sex looks for in a man—a combination of husband, father, and son!”
—Clare Boothe Luce
The 1950s are often remembered as
a time of peace, security, and a big car with tail fins in every driveway, but they were also shaped by pervasive national fear and paranoia.
During Truman’s administration, America became embroiled in the Korean War, a so-called police action fought to keep the Chinese Communists and Russians out of the Korean Peninsula but that proved to be a highly unpopular and costly war for the Americans.
Then there was Joe McCarthy. The junior senator from Wisconsin began inspecting the activities of “subversive Americans” and ruined countless careers and lives in a Communist witch hunt. He was a vocal opponent of the Truman administration and constantly repeated his charge that the Democrats were responsible for “twenty years of treason.”
At the age of sixty-eight, Truman had decided that seven years of being president was quite long enough, thank you, and so he passed on another term. Because of his stunning upset victory in 1948, Truman was certain that anyone he anointed to follow in his shoes could beat the Republicans (who, after all, had not been in power for two decades, their longest period without a president since the inception of the party in 1856). Truman decided that Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois would be his man. A Truman supporter, Stevenson was a strong liberal with a good record and a man of charm and intelligence.
Have you ever offered someone something you are positive they will thank you for profusely, only to have them say, “Um, gee, can I think about it?”
That’s how Stevenson responded to Truman’s offer—partly because he knew that Dwight Eisenhower was going to be the formidable Republican candidate. He also knew that if he accepted too eagerly, he might be perceived as Truman’s lapdog—and, despite the president’s high opinion of his own powers, he wasn’t all that popular in the country anymore. But Stevenson finally accepted the nomination in a powerful speech at the Democratic Convention in July. The first presidential election dominated by television was about to begin.
THE CANDIDATES
REPUBLICAN: DWIGHT EISENHOWER Dwight Eisenhower, known popularly as Ike, had been a brilliant commander-in-chief during World War II and later served as Columbia University’s president and a NATO commander. He had spent most of his adult life surrounded by a staff that met virtually all his needs—in the morning, he was literally dressed from head to toe by a valet. Eisenhower didn’t even know how to use a rotary telephone. Yet, somehow, the average man on the street could relate to the general. Eisenhower radiated confidence and sincerity and a certain homely Americanism. His most famous campaign slogan—“I Like Ike”—just about said it all. Eisenhower’s running mate was a young California senator named Richard M. Nixon.
DEMOCRAT: ADLAI E. STEVENSON Stevenson had a wonderful Democratic pedigree. His namesake grandfather had been vice president under Grover Cleveland in 1892 and William Jennings Bryan’s running mate in 1900. Stevenson himself had been an assistant secretary of the navy during the war and was now the liberal Democratic governor of a populous and important state. But two significant characteristics were working against him. First, he spoke in elegant compound sentences. Second, he was divorced, and Americans had never voted a divorced man into the White House. (That would have to wait until Ronald Reagan in 1980). Stevenson’s veep nominee was John Sparkman, a ticket-balancing senator from Alabama.
THE CAMPAIGN
It’s difficult to run against “the most admired of all living Americans” (as one Roper Poll found Eisenhower to be in 1952), and, even given his underdog status, Stevenson conducted a poor campaign. Part of the problem was his vacillating over whether or not to accept the Democratic nomination; people saw him as weak and indecisive—like John Quincy Adams before him, a brooding Hamlet—not the person to fight Communism and bring the country out of a nasty war.
Another problem for Stevenson was television. Simply put, Eisenhower’s people understood the new medium and Stevenson’s didn’t. In 1952, 40 percent of American homes, 18 million in all, owned a television. And Americans were buying them at an amazing rate of twenty thousand sets a day.
Stevenson, an eloquent campaign speaker, would become the first American presidential candidate to be truly reduced—made less than he actually was—by television. To begin with, Stevenson’s people always bought thirty-minute segments during which Stevenson gave set political speeches on various topics of interest. A half-hour is a very long time to look at one talking head, as we have since discovered, and Americans literally tuned him out. It didn’t help that Stevenson hated cue cards and teleprompters and would often digress from his set speech, almost always running over the allotted time. The networks were draconian about time, never granting one second more than what was purchased. Those still watching Stevenson got used to seeing him cut off in midsentence.
Eisenhower’s television ad men, who included the legendary Ben Duffy, knew that simpler and shorter was much better. They prepared a series of twenty-second spots entitled “Eisenhower Answers the Nation.” The camera would first go to a person or a married couple who had a concerned question: “Mr. Eisenhower, what about the high cost of living?” And it would pan back to Eisenhower: “My wife, Mamie, worries about the same thing!”
Eisenhower shot all these segments in the studio. Shorn of his glasses, which tended to glare and hide his eyes, he had to read from cue cards written in giant letters. Eisenhower hated doing the spots—“To think that an old soldier has come to this,” he said—but they were brilliantly effective. When George Ball, a disgusted Stevenson aide, griped that soon “presidential campaigns would have professional actors as candidates,” he actually predicted the future.
It wasn’t that Ike didn’t make mistakes. He was photographed shaking hands with Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom many people of both parties now considered to be a national disgrace. And McCarthy probably did not help Ike by doing a televised endorsement speech for the general in which he repeatedly referred to Adlai Stevenson as “Alger”; this was a smarmy reference to the supposed State Department spy Alger Hiss, whom veep candidate Richard Nixon had helped to convict while a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
But with the world looking more and more like a dangerous place—America had just tested the first hydrogen bomb and the Soviet Union had atomic weapons of its own—the American people were forced to choose between a plain-spoken modern man of action or a long-winded “egghead” who couldn’t end a speech on time.
THE WINNER: DWIGHT EISENHOWER
At 10:30 on Election Night, CBS’s powerful UNIVAC computer called the election for Eisenhower. The Democrats kept hope alive as Stevenson made gains in Pennsylvania and Ohio, but then the Republican “streamroller” headed West, completely flattening its opponents. Stevenson took only nine states. Eisenhower beat him in the popular vote 34,936,234 to 27,314,992.
Stevenson conceded graciously, quoting Abraham Lincoln, who said after a losing election that he was too old to cry but it hurt too much to laugh. He didn’t abandon his dreams of the presidency—but for the next four years, the beaming face of Ike Eisenhower would come to symbolize a secure, happy, and ordinary America.
ADLAI STEVENSON, HOMOSEXUAL Since Eisenhower had a very boring and unassailable personal life—few people at the time knew that his valet John Moaney pulled up the candidate’s underwear every morning—the divorced Stevenson was the main target of smears. Stevenson loved women and dated any number of them, but that didn’t stop Republicans from spreading rumors that he was gay—especially since, as the campaign began, a friend and aide named Bill Blair had arrived to live in the Illinois governor’s mansion. Truman was so alarmed by these rumors that he sent an aide to Illinois to investigate the matter. The man returned to assure the president that Stevenson was straight.
The rumors did not stop as the campaign wore on. A strange man pretending to be an FBI agent called on a friend of a member of Stevenson’s staff in order to “officially” investigate Stevenson’s supposed homosexuality. No one ever found out who he was. But new rumors spread that Stevenson’s former wife, Ell
en, had left him because he was gay (Ellen didn’t help matters any when she threatened to write a tell-all memoir entitled The Egghead and I. Their divorce had mainly been engendered by Stevenson’s devotion to his career and Ellen’s impatience with his lack of attention to her.)
ADLAI STEVENSON, MURDERER One of the worst rumors that circulated in 1952 appeared in leaflets distributed in the Midwest claiming that Stevenson had killed a young girl “in a jealous rage.” The jealous rage part wasn’t true, but much of the rest was surprisingly accurate. The incident occurred around Christmas of 1912, when the almost thirteen-year-old Stevenson and some friends were playing with a .22 rifle they thought was unloaded. The official story at the time was that, as Stevenson went to put the gun away, it discharged and killed a girl named Ruth Merwin. But children who were there said that in fact Stevenson, fooling around, had pointed the gun right at Merwin and pulled the trigger; the bullet hit her dead center in the forehead.
In either version, the death was accidental, but Stevenson carried around the guilt of the incident for the rest of his life, so much so that he never even told his wife or any of those closest to him about it. It is unknown how the Republicans discovered the secret, but fortunately their leaflets were not widely circulated, and America as a whole was unaware of the episode.
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