When Ohio fell into the Truman column, “there was pandemonium” at the Muehlebach, recalled journalist Carleton Kent. “The Ohio vote finally came in and finally decided the election,” recalled Robert Nixon of the International News Service, who was at the president’s suite in the hotel. Nixon would remember wiring his news service’s bureau chief in Washington: “Bill, stop writing that Dewey is the victor. You’re going to find yourself dead wrong.”
In the ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel, where campaigners had set up for the Dewey victory party, campaign staff and high-level officials could be seen with tears streaking their faces. The unthinkable had occurred. “It’s awful,” one sobbing twenty-two-year-old stenographer was heard saying. “It was my first vote.”
In suite 1527, Dewey finally emerged from his bedroom and faced his wife and the small crowd of friends in his suite. Their expressions showed awe and heartbreak, but Dewey remained composed—ever the politician.
“What do you know?” he said. “The son of a bitch won.”
At the Elms Hotel, the Secret Service men guarding Truman had stayed up all night listening to the radio. “And all of the sudden . . . ,” remembered the man in charge, Jim Rowley, “comes this thing that the tide has changed. And so I figured, ‘This is important!’ And so I went in and told him. ‘We’ve won!’ And he turns on the radio.”
Truman was up now, in every way possible. His phone rang and it was H. Graham Morison on the line, an assistant attorney general calling from Washington. He had gotten the direct telephone number from Truman’s appointments secretary Matthew Connelly.
“Mr. President,” Morison said. He struggled for words. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Well, don’t worry about that,” said Truman.
“This is the greatest event that ever happened in my life.”
“Well, we did skunk ’em, didn’t we?”
“We didn’t. You did!”
Truman told his Secret Service men, “We’ve got ’em beat.” He asked them to get his car ready. “We’re going to Kansas City.”
At Wallace headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, the singer and black activist Paul Robeson had been leading Gideon’s Army in a sing-along for hours. But now, the singing was over. Wallace refused to exhibit any disappointment, but his wife wore an expression of defeat. With tears running down her face, she could be heard saying, “I told him so all the time. He should never have done it.”
Wallace gave his staff a pep talk. “Tonight we have had an extraordinary victory,” he announced, “because nothing can beat a spirit of this kind. You cannot do the impossible at once; we have done extraordinary wonders in the last ten months . . . This crusade is going ahead with renewed vigor.”
After Wallace’s speech, the Progressive Party’s legal counsel John Abt approached the candidate with a draft of a concession message he had written. It was not your usual concession. Wallace held the page in his hand and read it closely.
The message spoke of the moral bankruptcy that would result from Truman’s leadership, “so long as the policy of the Cold War is continued and we spend increasing billions of American dollars to support reactionary regimes abroad, arm Western Europe and militarize America.” It called for “one world at peace, not two hostile worlds arming for war,” and for “a comprehensive program of assistance to farmers, rollback of consumer prices, public housing, social security, conservation, irrigation and public power development.”
Wallace absorbed the message and noticed within it a bitter irony. His ideas on foreign policy clashed with Truman’s and Dewey’s. But on domestic policy, all three candidates were in the same ballpark. All three had campaigned for peace, for assistance to farmers, for anti-inflation policy, Social Security expansion, and conservation of natural resources.
Some of Wallace’s campaign staff argued that the draft of the concession was too antagonistic. There was no hint of the traditional congratulatory spirit, no flavor of sportsmanship. Wallace did not want to hear it. He approved the message.
“Under no circumstance,” he said, “will I congratulate that son of a bitch.”
Barney Allis, manager of the Muehlebach Hotel, was awakened by his telephone. A Secret Service man was on the line. “The President is on his way,” he said.
Allis glanced at a clock. “But it’s only 6 o’clock and I just got into bed,” he said.
The Secret Service man repeated: “The President is on his way.”
Forty minutes later, press secretary Charlie Ross awoke in his bed at the Muehlebach to find Truman looking down at him through his thick, round wire-rim spectacles. Ross too had just gotten to sleep. “I looked up,” he recalled, “and there was the boss at my bedside grinning.”
Truman appeared crisp in a dark suit, his hair brushed and his pocket square perfectly folded. He said that he had awoken at 4:30 a.m. to hear the latest news. “I heard the broadcast,” he told Ross, “and I decided I’d better drive back to town and have breakfast at the penthouse.”
It was 6:40 a.m. The president retired to a room so he could call Bess at their home a dozen miles away in Independence. The door to the room was open and reporter Robert Nixon looked in. Nixon too had been quickly awakened and he was wearing a trench coat over pajamas, peering in at Truman.
“His door was wide open,” Nixon recalled. “He was sitting on a sofa on the telephone . . . Tears were streaming down his eyes . . . From what he said, I knew he was talking to Bess in Independence, and he was telling her that he had won.”
The party at the Muehlebach was just getting started. Truman sat on a couch, greeting people, saying, “It looks as though we have them whipped.” The Associated Press’s Tony Vaccaro showed up in pajamas, with his hat askew.
“Tony, straighten your hat,” Truman said, cackling.
Truman also called Clark Clifford at his home in Washington. Clifford would later describe this
