George Gallup’s latest numbers hit the press while Dewey was in Texas; the New York governor remained the GOP front-runner. Dewey was polling at 51 percent, far ahead of Harold Stassen of Minnesota, who had surged ahead of Robert Taft, polling at 15 percent to Taft’s 9 percent. In Salt Lake City, Dewey attended the National Governors Association conference, where he shopped around for a VP candidate, huddling for much of the time with Earl Warren, the progressive and popular young Republican governor of California. The trip was smooth sailing; the Dewey family’s only contretemps was a skin rash from exposure to poison oak that made Mrs. Dewey miserable for days.
On January 16, 1948, at New York’s executive mansion in Albany, a small group of Dewey insiders officially announced the launch of Dewey’s historic run. Oswald Heck, Speaker of the New York State Assembly, told reporters, “The people have only to look at the record he has made at Albany in the last five years to gain assurance that he is the ideal man to successfully guide the nation through the perilous post-war years.”
In Manhattan, Herbert Brownell fired up the Republican machine he had spent months building, hoping to propel Dewey into the White House. Brownell began a series of gatherings in New York with big donors, prying open wallets by means of ultralavish luncheons. The first occurred at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York on January 29, where the menu included “choice of cocktails, highballs and sherry,” followed by an appetizer of smoked salmon, sturgeon, and anchovies, then lobster and crab Louis, then fumet of gumbo chervil with “tiny cornsticks,” then hearts of celery with green olives and salted nuts, then filet mignon Henry IV with béarnaise sauce served with “a nest” of soufflé potatoes and new string beans, a dessert of Waldorf savarin au rhum with brandied cherries and golden sabayon, and a selection of cigars and cigarettes. Campaign donations flowed, as did the claret and bourbon.
The national committee hired one of the best advertising agencies in Manhattan, Albert Frank–Guenther Law, to manage publicity. The firm moved to make tactical plans in each state, along with a national ad blitz to run in general newspapers, religious newspapers, farm papers, university publications, business newspapers, and the foreign-language press. The committee commissioned a detailed “statistical analysis” of the 1946 elections, which revealed some remarkably encouraging facts about the national electorate. Statistics showed “further evidence as to the change in the colored vote from Democrat to Republican.” Republicans had gained in 1946 in unexpected places, such as large industrial communities in traditionally Democratic strongholds like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Detroit.
“The outlook is exceedingly favorable,” the analysis found, suggesting “a Republican trend which on the basis of historical precedent should almost inevitably bring about the election of a Republican President in the forth coming election.”
Dewey ordered Brownell to assign a representative from the campaign to personally contact and woo the delegations that would be voting at the Republican National Convention from each of the forty-eight states. “The organizational job strikes me as being a staggering one but of the greatest importance,” Dewey wrote Brownell. Every delegate to the national convention “may be of decisive importance.”
Meanwhile, powerful global leaders began to arrive at the Albany executive mansion to curry favor with the man most likely to be in the White House come Inauguration Day in 1949. Former British prime minister Winston Churchill appeared at 138 Eagle Street for a nine-hour tête-à-tête with Dewey, as did Italian prime minister Alcide De Gasperi.
Eight states were scheduled to hold Republican primaries, and while the national convention would choose the 1948 ticket, the advance elections would spell out which candidate these eight states would be voting for in Philadelphia—a strong indicator of who would come out on top. The first primary was held in New Hampshire, and Dewey captured victory as expected. But when the spotlight moved to Wisconsin—a state where Dewey had beaten FDR in 1944—things did not go as planned. Dewey found himself overwhelmed with work during a highly charged New York legislative session, and his advisers made the decision to leave the campaigning in the state to local politicos. Based on the 1944 stats, Dewey’s team believed he had Wisconsin sewn up tight.
If the dark horse Harold Stassen had any chance of competing with Dewey nationally, he would have to charge out in front in the Midwest primaries. Stassen began to crisscross Wisconsin, where he was well known and liked, as he hailed from the neighboring state of Minnesota. Carloads of Stassen campaigners flooded Wisconsin’s rural areas. On March 8, in a speech in Cleveland, Stassen grabbed headlines with a call to quash Communism in the United States.
“The Communist Party organization should be promptly outlawed in America,” Stassen said, “and we should urge that it be outlawed in all liberty-loving countries in which there yet remains the authority in free men to do so.”
Dewey arrived in Wisconsin just five days before primary day. When voters went to the polls, the governor was trounced. It was Stassen, then Douglas MacArthur, with Dewey coming in third.
In the coming weeks, Stassen—a towering figure physically, with a bald dome and a commanding speaking voice—surprised election observers by jumping out in front, winning Republican primaries in Nebraska and Pennsylvania. Suddenly the New York governor faced do-or-die in Oregon, where he was at a disadvantage—a big-city man in a rural farm state, a member of the eastern establishment out of his element in the Wild West.
Dewey was in trouble. “There isn’t any use in deceiving you regarding the situation here in Oregon,” a Republican delegate named F. N. Belgrano Jr., president of the First National Bank in Portland, wrote Brownell. “It is decidedly bad, and whether or
