One Truman campaigner was asked, “What do you think of the President’s chances?”
“One to two weeks more and he’d be a cinch,” came the answer.
Said another Truman campaigner: “I’m nearly dead, and if he doesn’t win I’ll want to die.”
“Crowds, crowds, crowds,” said another. “Tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands! How can he lose?”
Upstairs in the presidential suite, White House press secretary Charlie Ross milled about nervously, talking to reporters who were coming in and out. Ross’s deep, smokestack voice could be heard over the ringing telephones, which were being managed by White House secretaries Roberta Barrows, Grace Earle, and Louise Hachmeister. In a corner, four teletype machines had been set up next to a desk covered in typewriters.
In the early afternoon, the teletype machines began to churn and hum, pumping out paper—returns coming in from the first voting precincts on the East Coast. “It was a rather sober bunch of us that put up in the Muehlebach Hotel,” recalled Chicago Times reporter Carleton Kent. “I think it’s fair to say that those of us of the press corps who were in Kansas City were there to see the roof fall in on Mr. Truman.”
Outside the hotel on West Twelfth Street, in the afternoon hours, crowds began to steadily grow.
At Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Biltmore Hotel, chairman J. Howard McGrath sat at a huge conference table that had about thirty empty seats. In front of him were three telephones, which he would be manning through the night. The hallways and offices were full not of people but of gloom. The place was virtually empty. Outside McGrath’s office was a large room with teletype machines and tables with rows of silent typewriters. When a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune stopped by, he found the publicist Jack Redding alone.
“Nobody here,” said the reporter, who looked embarrassed. It was clear he had been sent to write a story about the losing side. Redding would remember him as a “third string” journo.
“Not yet,” Redding said.
“Do you think this is the way it’ll be?”
“No. It won’t be this way. It’s early yet. The polls are still open here in the East. Everyone’s still working.”
“Then you think you have a chance?”
“Look, friend.” Redding was irritated. “You’re here to cover what your boss thinks is a losing cause. If he’s right you’ll get your story as it develops. And that story will be much better than any you can get from me. If your boss is wrong, and I think he is, you’ve got the top assignment of the day. What more can you ask? Now let me be.”
In the White House, the offices were nearly empty. Truman’s special aide for minority issues, Philleo Nash, and assistant press secretary Eben Ayers were alone and had the run of the place. “We had the President’s office with a TV, and the press office with a teletype, and a White House car, and the White House staff to bring us sandwiches and coffee, so we had a pretty good time,” Nash recalled. Ayers wrote in his diary that morning, “Were it not for all these predictions and the unanimity of the pollsters and experts, I would say the President has an excellent chance.” Ayers seized on one important factor: the economy, “the general prosperity of the country.”
Was America really going to kick an administration out of office when paychecks were so high and unemployment so low?
The White House staff was all abuzz. “I had a feeling that perhaps the good Lord was not on the President’s side this time,” remembered head butler Alonzo Fields, “though my wife kept saying that, despite the papers, he was going to win . . . I do not recall when there was ever as much excitement and open discussion as went on around the place during this election.”
Fields kept a radio tuned in, and in the Oval Office, the television was on, as the early returns began to come through.
Clark Clifford was back in Washington on Election Day. He spent much of the day in his office. At one point, his phone rang, and when he picked up, he heard the familiar voice of Robert Lovett, the State Department’s second-in-command under George Marshall. Lovett wanted to know if Clifford would help him work on an orderly transition if Dewey were to win, as everyone believed would be the case. Lovett was concerned that the Soviet Union could benefit from the “terrible uncertainty” that would exist between the election and inauguration day, six weeks later.
Lovett, Clifford would later learn, was a front-runner to become secretary of defense in the Dewey administration. Clifford assured Lovett politely that he would do whatever was needed.
That night, Clifford and his wife ended up in the home of a friend, Washington correspondent Jay Hayden of the Detroit News, because the Hayden family was one of the first among Clifford’s friends to have a television. They settled in and stared at the huge machine with its fuzzy screen.
“We had planned to stay only about an hour,” Clifford remembered. “Almost everyone expected the result to be settled early.”
In Moscow, the city’s three major newspapers printed the exact same report on the end of Henry Wallace’s election campaign, painting an inaccurate portrait of Wallace’s return to New York City. From the Russian point of view, Wallace was entering the city as if he were Caesar returning to Rome.
“Police said at least half a million people greeted Wallace, who rode about 80 miles through the Brooklyn district in an automobile accompanied by 50 machines decorated with banners and posters appealing for support of the Progressive Party,” read the Russian report. “Several times groups of people pushed through the police and rushed up to Wallace in order to shake his hand.”
The truth was far different. Wallace headed quietly to party headquarters in the brownstone on the corner of Park Avenue and Thirty-Sixth Street. “Wallace seemed to be in good
