Somebody threw out Green’s name.
“Let’s not be mealy-mouthed about this,” said Dewey. “We can’t take him.” Dewey thought for a moment. “We should have notes,” he said. He turned to Dulles. “Why don’t you take notes?”
Dulles grabbed a pad.
Brownell said, “Well, how about Charlie?”
Arthur Vandenberg and Joe Martin both said at the same time, “Charlie who?”
“Charlie Halleck.”
Vandenberg shouted, “Oh, my God!”
“Halleck won’t do,” Dewey said. He was too conservative for Dewey’s taste.
The group took a break for coffee and sandwiches at 2 a.m. By the time the meeting broke up at 4:30 in the morning, Dewey still had not made his choice. It was not until 11:30 the next day that Dewey associate J. Russell Sprague came barreling out, exclaiming to exhausted reporters: “It is the unanimous opinion of all of us that Governor Warren should be the candidate.”
Earl Warren was not entirely surprised when the phone rang in his hotel room. Dewey offered the governor of California the VP slot and Warren accepted. Meanwhile, somebody had to break the news to Indiana congressman Charlie Halleck, who had been a front-runner and had been told he would get the nod. Dewey chose to do the job himself, and Halleck became emotional. His parting shot was significant. Dewey’s platform and his choice of Earl Warren were decidedly liberal for the Republican Party, and not at all indicative of the mood in the current Republican-controlled Congress—as represented by Halleck, Bob Taft, Speaker of the House Martin, and others.
“You’re running out on the 80th Congress, and you’ll be sorry,” Halleck told the candidate.
The Dewey-Warren ticket was the answer to the questions Republicans had been asking themselves for months. What was the way forward for the GOP in the postwar world? Dewey’s brand of liberal Republicanism, the GOP ideology of Theodore Roosevelt? Or Taft’s, a harking back to the conservative Republicanism of the 1920s?
Dewey won.
Already, the Republicans had made public the official plank that stated the party’s policies. It embraced civil rights, recognition of Israel, admission of Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico as states, extension of Social Security benefits. But it also trumpeted more traditional GOP policies—reduction in public debt, more tax cuts, elimination of some federal bureaucracy. And of course: a crackdown on domestic Communism.
Dewey was thrilled with the platform, but the plank was a defeat for Taft and the leaders of the Eightieth Congress. Few realized at the time how problematic it could be to have a national party plank that the Republican presidential candidate embraced yet which made the party faithful in Congress uncomfortable. One who did realize it was Senator Vandenberg, who wrote in his diary after the convention, “If this is to be the policy of the next Republican Administration in the White House, it is desperately important to make it equally the policy of the Republicans in the next Congress.”
Another of the few who noticed the discrepancy was Harry Truman.
Nevertheless, the ticket was set: two popular, young, energetic, and progressive GOP governors, from states that bookended the country. New York and California were two of the biggest states in the union, which between them counted for more than a quarter of the electoral votes needed to win in November. Dewey was vigorous and tough as nails, the first presidential candidate born in the twentieth century. Hugh Scott, the Pennsylvania congressman and new head of the Republican National Committee, spoke for many when he said, “We have a dreamboat of a ticket.”
When Dewey arrived back at his mansion in Albany, his mailbox once again flooded with congratulatory letters and telegrams. “You will make a great president,” wrote Dewey’s longtime friend Tom Warren (no relation to Earl Warren). “I knew 28 years ago you would some day be president.” Among the missives was one from the Republican senator B. B. Hickenlooper of Iowa. “Your victory,” Hickenlooper wrote Dewey, “is practically assured.”
Truman watched the first-ever televised national political convention from inside the White House, on the twelve-inch flickering RCA black-and-white TV set that had been placed in the Oval Office to the left of the president’s desk. Yet on June 24, the night of Dewey’s nomination, events in Europe tore the president’s attention away from Dewey’s moment in the spotlight. The Soviets had blockaded the border between the eastern and western sectors of Berlin. The western part of the city, controlled by American, British, and French occupation forces, was now sealed off, and completely surrounded by Soviet-occupied territory. Berliners in these sectors were suddenly cut off from supplies—food, coal, and some of their electric power.
That night, the streets in the western part of Berlin filled with frightened people who realized they were now in desperate straits—cogs in the Cold War standoff between the Americans and the Soviets, and dependent primarily on the US government to figure out a solution. One German leader in Berlin called on the world that night to help “in the decisive phase of the fight for freedom.”
As Republicans were leaving their convention in Philadelphia, Truman was in the White House, focused on how to respond to the Berlin Blockade. Surely, he must have surmised, the timing of the Berlin Blockade was no coincidence; the Soviets seemed clearly to be attempting to create crisis at a time the Americans were focused on their electoral process. The day after the blockade began, on June 25, Truman gathered his cabinet. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal thought the blockade was “not as serious as indicated,” according to the meeting’s minutes. Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall disagreed. “A very serious situation [is] developing,” he said. Truman wondered whether it was time to evacuate American women and children from the US sector of Berlin.
The man in charge of the US forces in Berlin, General Lucius Clay, was making arrangements to use aircraft to bring supplies in. He had no other
