At the end of April, Dewey flew out of LaGuardia airfield bound for Oregon for a three-week fight. The national committee flooded Oregon’s radio stations with programs such as “Dewey and Women’s Rights” and “How Dewey Would Wage Peace.” To court farmers, the campaign formed an “Oregon Farmers for Dewey” organization based in the Multnomah Hotel in Portland, which distributed 175,000 pieces of campaign literature to rural mailboxes highlighting Dewey’s work on his upstate New York dairy farm, the candidate’s “farm philosophy,” and his ideas on how to fight cow mastitis. At one point, a reception with the Republican governor John H. Hall of Oregon was delayed because the bus carrying Dewey and his team ran over a dog. Dewey wired the owners his regrets and bought them a new cocker spaniel, which was subsequently named Dewey.
As the Oregon vote approached, Dewey and Stassen drew even in the race, and the contest attracted mobs of national press figures to a state that had never before found itself in the heat of the political spotlight. “The Governor is making rapid strides,” recorded Clyde Lewis, a member of Dewey’s campaign team, ten days into Dewey’s boots-on-the-ground Oregon offensive. “I would say his chances as of today are at least equal to those of Stassen. Terrific enthusiasm is being generated and Oregon is agog at the attention it is receiving.” The cost of Dewey’s Oregon operation would add up to three times the record ever spent up to that point by a candidate in a primary in the state, some $250,000.
On the night Dewey arrived in Oregon, he had suggested to one of his aides the idea of challenging Stassen to a live debate. The next day, the aide wrote Dewey in a memo that such a debate could fill a thirty-thousand-seat stadium and “would be a must pick-up for the national networks.” Nothing like such a debate had ever occurred in modern American history. Dewey’s team broached the idea with Stassen’s, and after haggling over the terms, Stassen agreed to debate “the little son of a bitch.”
When Stassen accepted, Dewey aide Paul Lockwood approached the governor and said, “I think you can take the guy to pieces.”
Dewey responded, “All right. God damn it, let’s do it!”
The debate would tackle a single question—the controversial issue that Stassen himself had raised when he called for a new law making Communism illegal in the United States.
Should Communism be outlawed? Stassen believed yes; Dewey believed no.
The first-ever live-broadcast political debate during national election season was scheduled for the night of Monday, May 17—two days after the founding of Israel. It would take place in the studio of Portland radio station KEX with no live audience—Dewey’s demand, since the diminutive candidate did not want to have to stand beside the six-foot-three-inch Stassen in front of a crowd. Fifty reporters were allowed to attend, and they sat with their backs to the wall in the studio, facing the candidates. Nearly a thousand local stations around the country would carry the event.
At 7 p.m. West Coast time, some forty million Americans tuned in. The two men arrived in the radio studio and shook hands—Dewey in a gray three-piece double-breasted pinstripe suit, Stassen in a two-piece suit of darker gray. The rules: twenty-minute speeches apiece, with Stassen going first, then each candidate would get an eight-minute rebuttal. The man speaking would stand at a lectern, while the one listening sat at a table ten feet away. Between the two, the debate’s moderator, Donald Van Boskirk, head of the Multnomah County Republican Central Committee, would remain for the most part silent.
Van Boskirk welcomed listeners and introduced the candidates. Stassen then kicked off the debate, in a steady and confident tone.
“Chairman Van Boskirk,” Stassen began, “your excellency Governor Dewey, and my fellow citizens: During the recent war I saw many young Americans killed. I watched ships explode and burn, planes crash in flames, men—our men, my friends—fall . . .”
It was a clever opening for Stassen—highlighting his war service, knowing that Dewey had never worn the uniform. However, as the hour moved on, Stassen realized he had made a drastic mistake. Dewey had spent much of his career arguing the most high-profile cases in courtrooms. He was cool, tactical, implacable, and brilliantly prepared. He ticked off twenty-seven laws already on the books that could be used to fight Communist plots in the United States, then argued that a law making Communism a crime could never work in a free society.
“The free world looks to us for hope, for leadership, and most of all for a demonstration of our invincible faith,” Dewey said into the microphone while Stassen looked on. “The free way of life will triumph so long as we keep it free.”
“Stripped to its naked essentials,” Dewey concluded of Stassen’s argument, “this is nothing but the method of Hitler and Stalin.”
Dewey spoke last, and when he finished, radio listeners nationwide heard a few seconds of silence—dead air—before the moderator, Van Boskirk, jumped in to end the night. Dewey proved the clear winner. His team was ecstatic. “Herb,” one supporter wrote Herbert Brownell afterward, “I feel that I can sense a great national tidal wave for Dewey that is cresting from Portland [Oregon] to Portland [Maine] and Hell to breakfast. That tidal wave started rolling in those few seconds of silence that you and I and a million of other guys felt when Dewey had finished that last eight minutes of the famous Dewey-Stassen debate.”
Four days later, Dewey beat Stassen decisively in the Oregon primary. Over the course of one live broadcast, Stassen had gone from a strong contender for president to all but out of the race.
While Dewey ascended, Henry Wallace fell. Wallace must have known that the guru letters were going to come back to haunt him. And indeed, around the time of the Dewey-Stassen debate, the letters fell into the hands of
