by A. J. Baime
At the time, Truman was also overseeing the most momentous reorganization of the military and intelligence establishments in the country’s history. The National Security Act of 1947, which Truman signed on July 26 of that year, created the new Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, and the Air Force as its own branch of the military. The War and Navy Departments merged to create a single Department of Defense under one defense secretary. Truman appointed the former secretary of the navy, James Forrestal, as the first secretary of defense. The push to implement this military reorganization put so much pressure on Forrestal, he began showing signs of mental distress. (Forrestal would ultimately commit suicide, jumping from the sixteenth-floor window of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1949.)
No problem, however, caused more of a headache for Truman in 1947 than the question of a Jewish homeland.
In the fall of 1947 the pressure on Truman to support a state for the Jews in Palestine had only increased, as had opposition from the US State Department. On October 3, 1947, Truman received a letter from one of his closest friends, Eddie Jacobson. It had been Eddie, “my Jewish friend,” with whom Truman had opened his failed haberdashery, Truman & Jacobson, two decades earlier. Jacobson’s letter was written on stationery from his new store, Eddie Jacobson’s Westport Menswear in Kansas City.
“I think I am one of the few who actually knows and realizes what terrific heavy burdens you are carrying on your shoulders during these hectic days,” Jacobson wrote. “I should, therefore, be the last man to add to them; but I feel you will forgive me for doing so, because tens of thousands of lives depend on words from your mouth and heart. Harry, my people need help and I am appealing to you to help them.”
As Truman read this letter, the United Nations General Assembly was in the process of debating a solution for the Palestine conundrum, in Paris. Already Jews were immigrating to Palestine and smuggling in weapons, empowered by prophecies that they would return to the land they believed God had decreed as their own. Ultimately, on November 29, 1947, the UN adopted a resolution to partition Palestine into two states, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs. Subsequently, the British announced that they would end their mandate over the region, to take effect at midnight on May 14, 1948—which meant that twenty-six years of British rule over Palestine was about to end.
Now there was a deadline. If the British pulled out with no internationally supported policy to keep the peace, war would result—possibly world war, if the Soviets jumped in.
The United Nations’ partition plan failed to assuage either the Jews or the Arabs. Each side thought it was getting less than it deserved. Public opinion in the United States supported the UN’s partition plan; 65 percent of Americans favored it, according to a Gallup poll, compared with 10 percent who did not (the rest had no opinion).
Truman made up his mind: He would support the founding of a Jewish state. But in order to do so, he had to figure out a way to get his own State Department—and particularly the department’s boss, George Marshall—on board. Truman summoned the young rising star of his administration, Clark Clifford. At forty-one, Clifford was in his third year working at the White House, and prior to coming to Washington, he had been a successful trial lawyer in Truman’s home state of Missouri. When Clifford arrived in Truman’s office, he could tell right away the president was troubled. Clifford took a seat in front of Truman’s desk and listened closely.
“Clark, I am impressed with General Marshall’s argument that we should not recognize the new [Jewish] state so fast,” Truman said. Marshall was going to continue to take a “very strong position,” the president believed. “When he does, I would like you to make the case in favor of recognition of the new state.” Truman paused, and Clifford felt the gravity of the moment. “You know how I feel,” Truman said. “I want you to present it just as though you were making an argument before the Supreme Court of the United States. Consider it carefully, Clark, organize it logically. I want you to be as persuasive as you possibly can be.”
* * *
The 1948 election was a year away. From the time Truman had become an accidental president, on April 12, 1945, he told his staff he’d never wanted the job, that he was ready to move out of the “Great White Jail.” But now his mind was made up. There was too much at stake not to run.
On November 12, he met in the White House with his secretary of defense, James Forrestal, and revealed his inner thinking on the upcoming national election. Truman told Forrestal how much he worried about his family, how difficult their lives had become because of his job. But he had no choice. He had to run.
“There is no question in my judgment as to the complete sincerity of the President,” Forrestal recorded in his diary, “that the only thing that holds him to this grinding job is a sense of obligation to the country and, secondarily, to his party.”
Truman had no illusions about what it would take to launch his national campaign. All the odds were against him. The only way he could win would be to create a campaign strategy so unexpected, it would take the opposition by storm. There had always been rules in electioneering—some established by law, others by tradition. The only way to win would be by breaking the right ones and by risking his entire political reputation in the process.
8
“Dewey’s Hat Is Tossed into Ring”
ON JUNE 12, 1947, GOVERNOR Dewey stepped off a train at the Mineola, Long Island, station. At a fund-raising luncheon at Jones Beach for five hundred Republican county officials, one of Dewey’s closest advisers, J. Russell Sprague, introduced him.
“We are here to pledge our loyalty to him as a friend, as a great Governor, as a leader of our party, and as the next President of the United States.”
The crowd went over the top as Dewey rose to his feet. New Yorkers loved the idea of having a New Yorker back in the White House again.
“That was a charming and overgenerous introduction,” the governor said. “But I would like to assure Mr. Sprague again in public as I have in private that I am happy where I am. I like the company and my friends and I would not lightly give up those opportunities.”
Who believed him? Not many. The next day’s New York Times ran a front-page headline, “Dewey’s Hat Is Tossed into Ring.”
Over the next month, a “Dewey for President” campaign began to crystallize, without any fanfare or even any statement from the man himself. The incipient campaign was like a bullet in a chamber; the question was when to pull the trigger.
The governor’s old friend Herb Brownell set up campaign headquarters in Midtown Manhattan to complement the Washington offices of the Republican National Committee, and Brownell began to recruit a team. There was Sprague, Long Island’s most powerful Republican politico, and the strategist Edwin Jaeckle, former chair of the New York State Republican Committee and still a powerhouse in the state. Along with Brownell, Jaeckle had guided Dewey’s gubernatorial campaigns. He would later describe his work with Dewey in these words: “I was like a trainer with a good horse.”
Brownell started to rebuild the party from the ground up. “Reorganization of the national party machinery was long overdue,” he recorded. He traveled by train from state to state to personally acquaint himself with local party leaders, so they would cooperate, in his words, “in building a new party structure.” He aimed to consolidate power, to weave the various localities into a highly coordinated centralized juggernaut.
Brownell stepped down from his chairmanship of the Republican National Committee to manage Dewey’s campaign. Yet the field of potentially strong candidates was growing crowded. Republicans believed they would take the White House, probably for the next eight years, but securing the nomination looked to be a harder fight than defeating Truman on November 2, 1948. Liberal and conservative factions were rivaling for control of the party. The conservative faction—in step with the Republican ideology of the 1920s and ’30s as personified by Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover�
��wanted to curb governmental intervention in the economy, and abroad. The liberal faction of the party—as personified by Theodore Roosevelt, and now Thomas Dewey—embraced the power of the federal government and progressive domestic policies.
The conservatives were led by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Taft was a Cincinnati lawyer and Washington royalty—the son of the twenty-seventh president, William Howard Taft. The younger Taft had come of age in the White House. He was the product of the best schools in the nation, a Harvard Law man who had cemented himself at the center of the conservative coalition on Capitol Hill. Taft was a fighter and enormously respected. “For many voters, especially independents,” according to Brownell, “ ‘Republican’ and ‘Taft’ were synonymous.”
As a liberal Republican, Dewey supported the Marshall Plan and internationalist foreign policy. Taft threatened to create an “Anti-Marshall Plan Committee,” arguing in a 1947 speech, “The solution of many of the European problems must rest with their own governments . . . Why should we make ourselves responsible for something entirely beyond our control?”
Dewey also supported Truman’s Universal Military Training plan. Taft loathed the idea—too much government.
As governor of New York, Dewey had a proven record of spending on social programs. Those who mocked the idea of a “welfare state” were “very clumsy Republicans,” Dewey said. “There has never been a responsible government which did not have the welfare of its people at heart,” he had said. “Anybody who thinks that an attack on the fundamental idea of security and welfare is appealing to people generally is living in the Middle Ages.” Taft fought for less federal spending at almost every turn, and blamed the current inflation crisis on High Tax Harry’s spending.
The only major policies that both Dewey and Taft consistently supported were civil rights and desegregation, and a homeland for the Jews. In other words, Dewey agreed with Truman on many of the major issues.
Taft launched his campaign early, announcing his run at a press conference on October 24, 1947, in Columbus, Ohio. He was fifty-eight years old. Taft offered a short list of the issues that would be front and center in the 1948 election, and number one on his list echoed the conservative ideology of his father: “The general issue [is] between people who want more federal power and action and the people who want less.” Taft, of course, wanted less.
“There will be violent differences of opinion,” he warned of the months ahead.
By the time he announced his candidacy, his team had already booked nearly 160 hotel rooms in Philadelphia for the Republican National Convention, where the 1948 GOP candidate would be crowned.
Taft and Dewey were the heavyweights, but there were also dark horses in the making, including General Douglas MacArthur, the military commander of occupied Japan. Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst spoke for many when he wrote in a letter in 1948, “I think we are going to have war with Russia. I think MacArthur is the only President who could avert war with Russia and, if it could not be averted, I think MacArthur would be the only President who could win.”
The most formidable dark horse, however, was Harold Stassen. At forty, Stassen was even younger than Dewey, and his politics put him in the middle, ideologically, between Dewey and Taft. He had been elected the Republican governor of Minnesota nine years earlier at just thirty-one, the youngest man ever elected governor of any American state. He had keynoted the 1940 Republican National Convention at just thirty-three, and had resigned as governor two years later to fight in World War II; he was awarded the Legion of Merit and became a war hero for his service with the US Navy in the Pacific Theater.
Holding no office when he returned home, Stassen announced a run for president before anyone, in 1946. Few took him seriously—until April 9, 1947, when Stassen went to Moscow and inexplicably got himself an in-person interview with the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Upon his return to America, Stassen released a transcript of the meeting to the press. It quoted Stalin saying, “The USSR does not propose to” have war with the United States, and “if during war they [the United States and Soviet Union] could cooperate, why can’t they today in peace?”
“The document was sensational,” recorded Jack Redding, the publicist for the Democratic National Committee. “Here was a possible next President of the United States who was able to secure a face-to-face session with the Russian dictator.”
“Among the rank and file of politicians,” Time magazine stated in 1947, “the boys who know the ropes, no one laughs at Harold Stassen.”
Herbert Brownell’s candidate Tom Dewey was still the front-runner. But the quest for the nomination was going to be harder than either man thought. And the ideological landscape was growing increasingly diverse.
* * *
“From my point of view, we have a larger problem,” Dewey wrote the Republican congressman from New York, John Taber, looking ahead to the 1948 Republican National Convention. Thus far a Democrat in the White House had been navigating the country through the postwar period. Now it appeared the Republicans would be taking over.
What would be the GOP policy toward the Soviets? Who would shape it?
“We are just beginning to win the cold war,” Dewey wrote Taber. Dewey wanted to rally support for the Marshall Plan among Republicans. He believed that if “we win this cold war and can build a United States of Europe for a strong, free world,” it would be worth the “grief” and the billions in Marshall Plan dollars “many times over.”
“If we should lose the free world,” he wrote ominously, “then isolated and alone, we would have a defense budget alone larger than our entire budget of today. That is, we should have it unless we too surrendered to the onward march of Communism.”
One year before the election, on November 15, 1947, a Republican political operative wrote a scathing memo that landed on Dewey’s desk (the signature on this memo is illegible). The document put into words a fear that was growing among both Democrats and Republicans—that the Soviets would attempt to influence the outcome of the 1948 presidential election. “The Kremlin will make no serious move in the direction of establishing peace in Europe and elsewhere before the 1948 election in the United States has been decided,” the memo read. “In the meantime it will try to influence the result of the 1948 election by every means conceivable.”
The document warned that the election was going to get unprecedentedly ugly. “When one considers, for instance, that including their families there are millions of people who directly and indirectly have spent almost half of their adult lives in drawing support from the payrolls of the Federal government [due to the liberal spending policies and social programs of the New Deal]; when one further realizes the degree of sheer desperation that will surely envelop these millions when faced with the threat of losing their regular income from this source, one need not wonder how vituperative and reckless will be the language and actions of this formidable contingent of Democrats.”
What could make the difference, this writer implied, was Moscow. The Kremlin was sure to prefer the Democrats in the White House: “Not that these men love the Democrats; they only hate the Republicans more or, what is more to the point, the men in the Kremlin are afraid of the Republicans more than they are of the tested Democrats.
“The United States of America is fair game for Moscow and has been for years,” the memo concluded. “And, as far as anyone is willing to see, the year 1948 will be the year in which Soviet Russia will do everything in its power to influence the election here.”
9
“Wall Street and the Military Have Taken Over”
WHILE THE REPUBLICANS JOCKEYED FOR position, Henry Wallace stunned the Democratic Party by declaring his candidacy for president. Wallace was going to run not as a Democrat but as the face of a new and highly controversial third party.
On December 29, 1947, Wallace assembled forty friends in ABC’s radio studio in Chicago. His close advisers and his wife, Ilo, were there; they knew he was going to announce
his run. However, Wallace had kept it a secret from all but those closest to him as to which party he would represent. All over the country, Americans heard Wallace’s words, as he made the biggest leap of faith of his lifetime.
“Thousands of people all over the United States have asked me to engage in this great fight,” Wallace said into the ABC microphone. “The people are on the march. We have assembled a Gideon’s Army, small in number, powerful in conviction, ready for action.” A vote for Wallace was a vote for peace, the candidate said. He declared himself the candidate of the new Progressive Party—a group that situated itself to the left of the Democrats, as the anti-Truman, antiwar choice for voters. Then he addressed the obvious conflict straight on: Would votes for Wallace, a liberal and a hero for New Deal Democrats, steal votes from Truman and the Democrats, and guarantee a GOP victory?
“The lukewarm liberals sitting on two chairs say, ‘Why throw away your vote?’” Wallace asked rhetorically. “I say a vote for a new party in 1948 will be the most valuable vote you have ever cast or will ever cast. The bigger the peace vote in 1948, the more definitely the world will know that the United States is not behind the bipartisan reactionary war policy which is dividing the world into two armed camps and making inevitable the day when American soldiers will be lying in their arctic suits in the Russian snow.”
Reaction to Wallace’s announcement focused less on Wallace than on Truman. The following day, the Washington Post’s political columnist Edward Folliard described the political fallout: “Henry A. Wallace’s hat-in-the-ring announcement last night met with scornful indifference at the White House, but evoked from Republicans a joyous cry of ‘We’re in in ’48!’” Others saw in Wallace something far more dangerous. It was hardly a secret that Communists were supporting the Progressive Party, and following Wallace’s campaign announcement, the story began to unfold in public. The liberal group Americans for Democratic Action put out a report stating, “New reinforcements—Communist-dominated unions and individuals well-known as CP [Communist Party] apologists—took their place at the front” of the Wallace movement.