by A. J. Baime
Following this meeting, Truman ordered the National Security Council to add sixty-six more C-54s to the supply operation, and to secure aviation fuel for “the extraordinary demands of the air lift as well as stockpile for emergency purposes.”
On this same day, news broke of violence on the Korean peninsula, raising concerns that the US military and the Soviets might come nose to nose, in yet another part of the world. A Communist uprising on the peninsula’s southern coast hinted at a possible bigger rebellion in the making. It was a story that had been developing slowly since the end of World War II. In the summer of 1945, Japanese forces had surrendered to the Soviets north of the 38th parallel and to the United States south of the 38th parallel. That latitudinal dividing line had since morphed into a national border between the Soviet-controlled north and the US-backed south.
For months, American intelligence sources had warned of increasing instability on the peninsula. In the south, the Republic of Korea had established a government in August 1948, headed by the US-backed president Syngman Rhee, who spoke English and had earned a PhD in the United States at Princeton University many years earlier. But in September, the Soviets established a rival government based in the city of Pyongyang in the north. According to recent reports from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Soviets had some forty-five thousand occupation troops in North Korea. The same week that violence broke out on the Korean peninsula, the CIA issued a top secret document concluding, “It must be assumed that the USSR will not be satisfied with its present hold on North Korea and will exert continuing efforts to establish eventual control over all Korea.”
Truman later recalled, “Rhee’s government would be in grave danger if the military units of North Korea were to start a full-scale attack.”
At the same time, the pressure on the Truman administration to figure out some solution to the Arab-Israeli war continued to tighten. The casualties were mounting in the Middle East, and included many civilians. The United Nations mediator in Palestine, Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, had come up with a two-state proposal, known as the Bernadotte Plan, which (among other things) called on the Israelis to allow Arabs to return to their homes in what was now Israeli territory. On September 17, while Truman was campaigning in Ohio, Bernadotte was assassinated—shot dead in broad daylight in Jerusalem by the Jewish extremist group the Stern Gang.
On October 17 a State Department official named John McDonald cabled Truman from Jerusalem. “Arab refugee tragedy is rapidly reaching catastrophic proportions and should be treated as a disaster,” McDonald wrote. He concluded that, with approximately 400,000 refugees, the “approaching winter with cold heavy rains will, it is estimated, kill more than 100,000 old men, women and children who are shelterless and have little or no food.”
The Palestine situation was inextricably linked with the American election. On the day Israel was founded, Truman had extended de facto recognition to the new Jewish state. It was provisional recognition, while full legal and diplomatic recognition was expected to follow, once Israel had held democratic elections. Now Truman was under extreme pressure to grant de jure recognition, in order to court the Jewish vote in America, most notably in New York. But Israel had not yet held democratic elections, and critics within the State Department were horrified by the treatment of the Arab refugees. The United Nations, the US State Department, Harry Truman, the Jews, the Arabs—no entity could come forth with a plan that the others could agree upon. So any position Truman took had the potential for disastrous results.
The Democratic platform adopted in Philadelphia in July had promised “full recognition” of Israel, a rethinking of the arms embargo that prevented the United States from sending arms to Israel, and no modifications to the borders of Israel that were not “fully acceptable to the State of Israel.” Truman was under intense pressure from Jewish groups in the United States to come through on all these promises, but thus far he had been unable. The Democratic candidate for governor of Connecticut, Chester Bowles, had written Clark Clifford: “Like you and everyone else who is concerned about November 2nd, I am worried about the Jewish situation. We have an ardent group of Zionists here in the State and they have been urging me strongly to send a telegram to the President urging him to extend de jure recognition to Israel.”
The president ultimately tried to take the issue off the table—to avoid making commitments until after Election Day. He advised his State Department to use “any parliamentary procedures available” and to “use every effort to avoid having U.S. delegation [to the United Nations] drawn into the debate.” Truman subsequently told the undersecretary of state, Robert Lovett, that “every effort [should] be made to avoid taking position on Palestine prior to” the election.
On October 22, Dewey forced the Zionist issue onto the front pages. He gave an address in New York promising to bring “unity to our country to meet the great problems ahead.” Then his campaign made public a letter the governor had written to the American Christian Palestine Committee of New York, in which he attacked “the vacillation of the Democratic administration” on the Palestine issue. He stated that a Republican administration would give “wholehearted” support to Israel and welcome Israel “into the family of nations.”
Dewey was tacitly promising that he would grant immediate de jure recognition, or so it seemed. What was Truman going to do about it?
That night, the Truman Special pulled out of Washington for the final weeklong campaign frenzy. Clark Clifford stayed behind to strategize a response to Dewey’s letter. Clifford tapped out a memo to Truman, to be forwarded to him on the train. “I am working on a statement on Israel now and will have it ready to submit to you on Sunday morning,” Clifford wrote. “I consider Dewey’s action a serious error on his part and the best thing that has happened to us to date. Affectionate regards.”
The next night—Saturday, October 23, at 10:00—Truman delivered what his daughter, Margaret, would later call her favorite speech of the campaign, in Pittsburgh. At the city’s Armory Hall, with one hundred thousand people on hand and a national radio audience tuned in, Truman put on an unexpected comedy routine. It was a surprising moment of levity, given the pressure weighing on him. Dewey, Truman said, was acting like “some kind of doctor with a magic cure for all the ills of mankind.”
Twirling an imaginary mustache, pretending to be a doctor, Truman asked the crowd: “You been bothered much by issues lately?”
Then he became the patient. “Of course, we’ve had a few,” Truman said. “We’ve had the issue of high prices, and housing, and education, and social security, and a few others.”
He switched to the doctor again. “That’s too bad,” he said. “What you need is my brand of soothing syrup—I call it unity.”
The crowd erupted in cackles and applause. Truman then ran through a litany of “symptoms” that the American people were suffering—the Taft-Hartley law, inadequate funding of Social Security, a stagnant minimum wage, etc. His administration had come up with policies to confront all of these issues, but had passed little in the way of legislation, due to the Eightieth Congress’s refusal to come aboard. Dewey’s claim that he was a magic cure-all was a sham, Truman said. “He opened his mouth and closed his eyes and swallowed the terrible record of the good-for-nothing 80th Congress.”
The next morning, as Truman headed east to Cleveland, Clifford’s proposed statement on Israel arrived aboard the train. Truman released the statement at 9:10 that morning.
The Republican candidate for President has seen fit to release a statement with reference to Palestine. This statement is in the form of a letter dated October 22, 1948, ten days before the election. I had hope our foreign affairs could continue to be handled on a nonpartisan basis without being injected into the presidential campaign. The Republican’s statement, however, makes it necessary for me to reiterate my own position with respect to Palestine.
The statement then reprinted what was in the Democratic platform, released back in July at the
Democratic National Convention, most notably: “We pledge full recognition of Israel.” For Americans who had been paying attention, it was equivocation at its best. Truman’s party had pledged “full recognition” but none had come. He merely repeated what he had said three months earlier, and criticized Dewey for violating the bipartisan spirit of American foreign relations. Meanwhile Truman’s State Department had to remain mute on the subject, to restrict any communications on the matter until after November 2. Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett wrote his boss George Marshall, “Am told removal of restrictions on normal procedures may be expected . . . when silly season terminates.”
29
“We Are Engaged in a Great Crusade”
THE FINAL WEEK OF CAMPAIGNING saw the two major candidates in a point-counterpoint showdown, as Truman and Dewey followed the same route—Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, New York.
Truman began the battle with his most vituperative attack yet, in Chicago on October 25. Prior to his arrival, he spoke in whistle-stops en route to the Windy City. When he reached his main destination of the day, three hundred thousand people stood in the streets. “A parade a mile long,” Margaret wrote in her diary. “Huge fireworks and displays, too much noise.” Before a jammed crowd at Chicago Stadium, Truman walked onstage along with Bess, Margaret, and Ed Kelly, Chicago’s mayor. The president was going to push hard, in an effort to draw Dewey into a rhetorical brawl.
Truman began by warning against the reactionary forces of an “extreme right wing” that, he said, would put Wall Street’s needs over those of the common man.
“Do you want that kind of future?” he asked.
A crowd of some twenty-five thousand roared, “No!”
He then compared the rise of Thomas Dewey to the rise of Adolf Hitler, and accused Republican leaders of using the same tactics Hitler did for “stupefying the German people” in order to take advantage of them.
“This evil force must be defeated,” he shouted. “I shall continue the fight. And I pledge to you that I shall never surrender . . .
“It is not just a battle between two parties,” Truman said of this election. “It is a fight for the very soul of the American government.”
“So emotional was Mr. Truman that he stumbled over words at times,” recalled the Chicago Daily Tribune’s Willard Edwards. The New York Times’s front page the next day ran a banner headline: “President Likens Dewey to Hitler as Fascist Tool.” The speech was the most inflammatory of any of the campaign’s, and one of its writers, David Noyes, later acknowledged that it was partly crafted to lure the GOP opponent into an open slug match.
Dewey heard Truman’s speech over the radio while aboard the Dewey Victory Special, which left Albany that night, bound for Chicago. Listening to Truman compare him to Hitler, Dewey’s face contorted with rage. He had finally had enough. Sitting across from him were his advisers—pressman James Hagerty, Edwin Jaeckle, and advertising maven Paul Lockwood. Dewey held a draft of the speech he was scheduled to deliver in Chicago the night after Truman’s Windy City rally. It was another “high-minded” address on unity. Dewey said he wanted to “tear it to shreds.”
He took a poll of the room and every one of his aides disagreed. Dewey should stick to the plan, they said. His wife was in the train car and she said, “If I have to stay up all night to see that you don’t tear up that speech, I will.”
The Dewey Victory Special pulled into Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station at 4 p.m. the next day. A reception committee and motorcade was on hand to transport the Dewey party around downtown, where 125,000 people greeted him on the streets. That night, on the same stage where Truman spoke the night before, Dewey received an ovation lasting two minutes and forty seconds. ABC television cameras were rolling, while NBC was taking the speech nationwide via radio. He started in—“Thank you so much for this glorious welcome”—and was immediately interrupted again by applause. Dewey then defied his team and unleashed the first attack speech of his campaign.
The purpose of this campaign is clear. It’s to bring something better to our country than the confusion, inconsistencies, weakness and bitterness that we now have in Washington . . . We all know the sad record of the present administration. More than three years have passed since the end of the war. It has failed tragically to win the peace. Instead, millions upon millions of people have been delivered into Soviet slavery while our own administration has tried appeasement one day and blustered the next.
Dewey berated his opponent for his “weakness” and “incompetence,” for the administration’s “grave problems and troubles.” Truman had reached a “new low in mud-slinging.” The Democratic party was a “failure, with their party split in all directions . . . Its candidates have spread fantastic fears among our people . . . scattered reckless abuse . . . attempted to promote antagonism and prejudice.”
Forty times, Dewey had to pause for applause. This is what most of his fans had wanted all along: a fighting spirit, a response to the populism that was infuriating countless Republican voters. Dewey had finally delivered.
* * *
The night of Dewey’s Chicago speech, Truman arrived in Cleveland, where he had a special message he had been saving for just the right moment. The message was for the newspapermen and the pollsters who had been reporting on his perceived failures through the entire campaign and for most of his presidency.
By Truman’s estimation, 90 percent of the daily newspapers were against him. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Star, the two biggest papers in his home state of Missouri—the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Kansas City Star—all had endorsed Dewey. Over the past few months, newspaper columnists had leveled every insult imaginable at the president. That very week, the Los Angeles Times would call Truman “the most complete fumbler and blunderer this nation has seen in high office in a long time.” Also that very week, the Chicago Daily Tribune would call him “an incompetent” and worse. The columnist Westbrook Pegler had called Truman “a sorry and pathetic squirt,” “the little squealer who broke the rules,” and “a tacky county commissioner in a scene of historic humiliation.”
As Truman saw it, the newspapers and radio stations were “operated, or subsidized by the same private interests that always benefited from Republican economic policies,” he later wrote. He resented “the commonplace practice of distorted editorials and slanted headlines in the press and of outright misrepresentation in the daily offerings of the columnists and commentators. The worst offense of all was the editing and distorting of the facts in the news.”
Truman saw the inner workings of the media as a conspiracy to favor one candidate over another using what amounted to fake news. It was the pollsters who had done the most damage, and it was the pollsters whom Truman attacked on the night of October 27, before a packed Cleveland Municipal Auditorium:
Now, these Republican polls are no accident. They are part of a design to prevent a big vote, to keep you at home on November 2nd, by convincing you that it makes no difference whether you vote or not. They want to do this because they know in their hearts that a big vote spells their defeat. They know that a big vote means a Democratic victory, because the Democratic Party stands for the greatest good for the greatest number of the people. The special interests now running the Republican Party can’t stand a big vote—they are afraid of the people. My friends, we are going to win this election.
The next night, the Dewey Victory Special rolled in for a gala event in the same hall. It was packed, and the crowd stood for an ovation lasting three minutes and twenty seconds. Dewey attacked Truman for using divisiveness for his own political gain. The Dewey-Warren campaign, the Republican candidate said, had “not been guilty of using our high responsibility to rip our country apart or to arouse fear or prejudice. We will win this campaign and we will win it by clean and decent methods.”
Dewey then blamed the administration’s foreign policy failures for the Cold War. “In a little more th
an three years,” he said, “the Soviet Union has extended its sway nearly half way around the world and now rules more than five hundred million human beings.”
By almost all accounts, Dewey’s speech was a hit. Senator Arthur Vandenberg gushed in a letter to the candidate the next day: “Your Cleveland speech was one of the greatest of our time.”
* * *
Six days left. “I remember coming into Pittsfield, Massachusetts, about 6 o’clock on a very frosty morning,” recalled John Franklin Carter, a speechwriter on board the Truman Special. “Pittsfield has a population of something like thirty thousand people and there were fifty thousand people waiting to see the train. And then I realized that something really phenomenal was happening.” In Hartford, Connecticut, on this same day, a police-estimated one hundred thousand people came out to see “Give ’Em Hell” Harry—“a human sea,” the Hartford Courant described the scene.
Clark Clifford recalled the excitement generated by the campaign in its final push. “That last month you could actually feel it,” Clifford said. “The last ten days of the campaign were something of a triumph. Now we were all indoctrinated with the fact that he had a real long shot on our hands; but that last ten days, that last five days even, you could sense there was something going on. I remember thinking, ‘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.’”