For Dewey, this was getting downright scary.
He left his family for the quiet of a bedroom, and shut the door so he could be alone, jotting notes on a yellow legal pad. Things were not going as planned, but elections often followed this pattern. East Coast returns tended to favor Democrats. As the farm vote of the Midwest began to roll in, the tide would turn. Midwest farmers from Ohio to Iowa were expected to vote Republican.
What was going through Dewey’s mind during these solitary moments no one will ever know. Did he fear the sting of embarrassment? Was he struggling to come to terms with the idea that his entire campaign strategy might have been wrong all along?
At 11:15 p.m. Brownell issued the latest statement from campaign headquarters: “We are now getting into the stage of the election returns which permit a definite appraisal of the prospects of the respective candidates and I am convinced, as I stated earlier, the election of the Dewey-Warren Ticket is assured . . . We conclude here at Republican Headquarters that Dewey and Warren are elected.”
At midnight, at the Elms Hotel in Excelsior Springs, Truman awoke from a slumber and fumbled with the knob on a radio. He heard broadcaster H. V. Kaltenborn’s voice clearly over NBC radio. Kaltenborn was saying that Truman was in the lead in the popular vote by 1.2 million, but it was early; he could not possibly win.* He was “undoubtedly beaten,” Kaltenborn said. Truman went back to sleep.
At 1:45 a.m. Herbert Brownell released another statement: “We now know that Governor Dewey will carry New York State by at least 50,000 votes and will be the next President of the United States.”
At about 2:30 a.m. Truman was awoken by a jingling telephone. It was his friend Tom Evans, calling from the Muehlebach.
“Well, Mr. President,” Evans said with excitement, “you’re just about in this position that you’ve got to carry either Ohio, Illinois or California.”
“That’s good,” Truman said. “Don’t bother me anymore. I’m going to bed. Don’t call me anymore.”
“What the hell do you mean you’re going to bed,” Evans said. “You can’t go to bed until you carry one of those states.”
“Why, I’m going to carry all three,” Truman said.
As the returns continued to come through, the suite at the Muehlebach became, as one present put it, “a churning madhouse of newsmen, staff workers and political friends.” Hour after hour, the returns kept showing that Truman was ahead in the popular vote. The electoral vote was too close to call. Nerves began to fray; eyeballs were turning red. There was no alcohol on hand; only coffee and cigarettes.
Truman press secretary Charlie Ross took a break to escape the pressure at one point, heading down to the hotel coffee shop. Frank Holeman of the New York Daily News approached him and asked how the night was looking from Ross’s perspective.
“We don’t say that we’re going to win this election,” Ross said. “But it’s going to be a lot closer than anybody ever thought. And win, lose or draw, there’s a lot of sonsobitches we don’t have to be nice to any more.”
The hotel’s manager Barney Allis walked in. Allis was holding telegrams, and he explained that telegram after telegram was arriving in the hotel’s communications office. People wanted rooms at the Muehlebach. People were scrambling to leave Dewey headquarters in New York, wanting to head to Kansas City. Allis started reading the telegrams aloud.
“Dear Barney, I need a room.”
“I need two rooms.”
Ross could not believe his ears.
Twelve hundred miles away, at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Biltmore in New York, the crowds kept getting bigger and bigger. “As the night wore on people who had never bothered to get accredited [at] our headquarters came over because the Dewey headquarters were silent,” remembered the committee’s assistant publicity director, Samuel Brightman. In his office Chairman McGrath tabulated reports as they arrived, talking on the phone to Jake Arvey, a powerful Democratic political operative out of Chicago, about the action in Illinois. It was 5:40 a.m. on the East Coast. Truman was ahead in Illinois, but his lead was diminishing. Illinois was critical. The state’s twenty-eight electoral votes were caught in a tug-of-war between the typically Republican farming communities and Chicago, the nation’s second-most-populous city. In the state’s highly competitive gubernatorial race, the rookie Democrat Adlai Stevenson was running against the virulently anti-Truman incumbent, Republican Dwight H. Green.
Standing by the teletype machines, a Democratic campaign staffer named Jim Sauter was pulling the returns out as they came in. One campaigner would remember watching him in the moment: “He was sweating, his face was flushed, his hand shook.” Sauter would glance at the reports, then hand them to Chairman McGrath.
Suddenly, McGrath’s face brightened. He looked at his wristwatch. Then he said to Sauter, “Jim, you can take it easy on those Illinois returns. We’ve got Illinois. Close, but we’ve got it for Truman and it’s a landslide for [Paul Douglas, running for Senate] and Stevenson.” (Adlai Stevenson would go on to become the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, losing both times to Dwight Eisenhower.)
Truman had been ahead in the popular vote. But for the first time, he was charging out front in the electoral vote too.
At the Muehlebach, reporters and campaign officials were making meals of their fingernails. Suddenly, over the radio, they heard the unmistakable voice of Drew Pearson. Truman’s longtime friend and campaign official Bill Boyle stopped what he was doing and said, “What is Drew Pearson saying?”
The reply was, “He is devouring his young. He is conceding that Truman is going to win.”
In the Muehlebach Hotel suite, the focus turned to Ohio, where the final tallies were imminent. The
