In Independence, after the Trumans voted, Harry went to lunch at the Rockwood Country Club, where he was the guest of honor among a few dozen friends. The lunch was hosted by Truman’s old friend, the mayor of Independence and a local grocer named Roger Sermon. Outside, reporters paced and littered the sidewalk with cigarette butts, unaware that they were about to fall victim to a clever ruse.
Truman excused himself from the lunch table to go to the bathroom. Three Secret Service men escorted him out the back door to a car, and together they motored out of town. The only other person along was Truman’s personal doctor, Wallace Graham. Truman had informed almost no one as to where he was going. One of the people he told was his old friend Tom L. Evans, a local radio station and drugstore chain owner. Evans had helped raise money for Truman’s campaign, and now on Election Day, the stress had caused him to suffer from severe abdominal pain. “Boy,” he recalled, “those ulcers of mine and that day in ’48 were turning over and upside down and everything.” Evans would be one of the very few who would be permitted to call Truman at the place he was going—a secret hideaway.
The president’s car motored over a bridge past the Missouri River and up to the Elms Hotel in Excelsior Springs, about twenty-five miles from Independence. For sixty years people had come from all around to the Elms to soothe health problems in the hotel’s pools of warm natural spring water. The sprawling hotel was nearly vacant on this Tuesday night. The president checked into a room on the third floor picked out for him by the Secret Service. He had himself a Turkish bath, then ate a ham sandwich with a glass of milk in his room while he listened to the radio. He had left Independence without any baggage, so he was wearing a bathrobe and slippers borrowed from the hotel. While there is no mention of any whiskey in any surviving record, it is hard to imagine that Truman did not have a thimble of his favorite drink—bourbon and branch water.
“We didn’t talk any about the election [that night],” remembered Dr. Graham. “He wasn’t concerned one iota, not a bit. We talked fairly late that evening and went to bed and that’s all there was to it.”
In the afternoon of November 2, Dewey’s black limousine cut through traffic headed north to the Ninety-Third Street apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Roger Straus. The Deweys had an election-night tradition—a lavish meal with their friends, the Strauses, and perhaps a round of cards with the radio on. Mrs. Straus served a feast: consommé, roast duck, cauliflower, peas, fried apples, and blueberry pie. Then the Deweys motored back to the Roosevelt to listen to the returns on radio and watch the first-ever election-night television broadcast.
The hallways of the Roosevelt were crawling with police officers. On the mezzanine floor, GOP campaigners busied themselves setting up for the victory party in a huge ballroom. Dewey was expected to appear at 9 p.m. in the ballroom, but for now he remained on a couch in his suite, his mother sitting on his left and his wife across from him. ABC was featuring pollster George Gallup and popular news personalities Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson on both its radio and television broadcasts. On NBC TV, pundits could be seen talking into cameras between puffs of tobacco smoke, pausing occasionally to thoughtfully toss their cigarette ashes onto the floor.
A long night awaited. The Deweys settled in—excited, expectant, and terribly nervous—not because of the outcome but because of the awesome responsibilities they believed would soon weigh on their shoulders. Sitting on a chair in the Deweys’ suite, a cop was focused on a crossword puzzle. Dewey’s mother, Annie Thomas Dewey, asked him, “How do you think it’s going to go? What do you think his chances are?”
The cop looked up and said, “It’s a hundred to one, Mrs. Dewey. He can’t lose.”
The first election return of November 2, 1948, came from the tiny hamlet of Hart’s Location in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where voters leaned conservative. A small group gathered at 7 a.m. in the dining room of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Burke. Voters were handed ballots and told to fill them out on whatever surface they could find. The voting took six minutes. When it was done, the tally was announced.
Far off in Kentucky, a student named Donald P. Miller would recall sitting in a lounge at Centre College with a political science professor, hearing that New Hampshire tally over the radio: “Five votes for Dewey, two for Truman.” The professor stood up and said, “That’s it. Truman will win. If he can get two out of seven votes in that little town in New Hampshire, he will win the election.”
Truman campaigners set up shop in the presidential suite on the eleventh floor of the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City. This suite with its many rooms had already seen its share of historic events. Four years earlier, Truman had played songs on the piano for crowds of drunken campaigners the night FDR won the 1944 election, the night Truman became vice president–elect. He had signed the Truman Doctrine into law in this hotel suite. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Truman himself had used this suite as a Kansas City office space.
Downstairs in the Muehlebach’s smoky lobby, exhausted Truman campaigners were loafing in chairs and on couches, catching some rest for the long night ahead. Hotel staff in white gloves and pressed uniforms darted about the place like minnows, emptying ashtrays and moving luggage. A special private elevator led up to the hotel’s presidential suite, and in front of that elevator, the presidential seal had already been placed
