Dewey doubled state aid to education and raised the salaries of state workers while reducing the state’s debt by millions. He increased scholarship funds for returning veterans, and moved hundreds of millions of dollars into a “Postwar Reconstruction” fund, which was instrumental in guiding the state out of the war with far less economic chaos than most other states. In a ceremony before popping camera flashes, he used twenty-two pens to sign a trailblazing desegregation law, which sought to eliminate racial and religious discrimination in hiring, and it made New York the most progressive state in the nation on race issues. Dewey’s labor policy resulted in far more harmony between unions and big business than existed at the federal level.
In 1944 Dewey won the Republican Party’s nomination and set off on his first presidential campaign. Few believed he had a chance of toppling Franklin Roosevelt, running for a fourth term, but the candidate proved a fearless fighter. Not everyone loved him. He was accused of being cold, lacking the social nimbleness that politics sometimes required. “Dewey would always take on a face-to-face political fight,” recorded Herbert Brownell, who was now the head of the Republican National Committee, and the mastermind behind Dewey’s campaign. “He didn’t care if it ended up in a shouting match; he would usually dominate the scene.” There was that mustache, and the stiff Dewey countenance. The author and politician Clare Boothe Luce famously said of him, “How can the Republican Party nominate a man who looks like the bridegroom on a wedding cake?”
As an underdog, Dewey ran an attack campaign. It would be most remembered for the September 25, 1944, Oklahoma City speech—called “one of the most vitriolic speeches ever made by a Presidential candidate” by one Washington correspondent present. Dewey decried FDR’s record as “desperately bad,” blamed the president for the loss of “countless American lives” in war, and accused Roosevelt of running a campaign of “mud-slinging” and “ridicule.”
While Dewey lost the election, his attack strategy worked to some degree. He succeeded in coming closer to beating FDR in 1944 than Alf Landon did in 1936 or Wendell Willkie in 1940, defeating FDR in states including Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa. When it was over, and Dewey conceded at 3:45 a.m. on November 8, 1944, FDR muttered, “I still think he’s a son of a bitch.”
In 1946, Dewey—like the rest of the nation—watched closely as Truman floundered in the White House. The tragedy, Dewey told a friend, privately, was that Truman had two more years until the end of his term, and there was no inclination things would get any better. On April 1 of that year Brownell intoned in a Republican National Committee report, “The Truman administration is . . . a failure . . . Harry Truman is the weakest President since Pierce.”
Following Dewey’s success in the gubernatorial reelection, he was a new man, friends and colleagues observed. He was a more personable leader than he had been in 1944, less of a prosecutor and more of a seasoned politician. “It has been wickedly said that when he entered politics he gave off all the human warmth of a porcelain plumbing fixture,” noted the syndicated columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop, “whereas today he has achieved the status of an electric toaster.”
Whether or not the New York governor would run for president became the hottest gossip in Republican circles. Dewey knew what it felt like to lose a national election. Once, in a meeting with top Republican leaders including Brownell and Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, Dewey spoke philosophically about defeat. He mentioned two politicians in particular—Wendell Willkie (who lost to FDR in 1940) and Al Smith (the four-term New York Democratic governor who lost to Hoover in the 1928 presidential election). Both men had phenomenally successful careers. Both were pillars in the canon of American public servants. But future generations would remember them almost exclusively for one thing: losing. For a man of Dewey’s ambition, the prospect of losing the presidency twice was not something he wanted to entertain.
“As long ago as Philadelphia, in 1940 [the Republican National Convention],” Dewey told his Republican colleagues, “I deliberately decided that I was not going to be one of those unhappy men who yearned for the Presidency and whose failure to get it scarred their lives.”
6
“It Is a Total ‘War of Nerves’”
Our nation is faced today with problems, present and future, which equal in scope and significance any it has hitherto met in 171 years of existence . . . What America does today, what America plans for tomorrow, can decide the sort of world the generations after us will possess—whether it shall be governed by justice or enslaved by force.
—Dwight Eisenhower, August 29, 1947
NO ONE COULD HAVE FORESEEN what would happen next. “I think it’s one of the proudest moments in American history,” recalled Clark Clifford, the president’s special counsel and increasingly one of his closest advisers. “What happened during that period was that Harry Truman and the United States saved the free world.”
The year 1947 opened ominously. The British government released a white paper concerning the country’s finances. The war had left the United Kingdom destitute and His Majesty’s government would no longer be able to fulfill its international
