“That’s the worst speech I ever made,” Dewey told Scott. “I will not get down into the gutter with that fellow”—meaning Truman.
Soon after Dewey’s meeting with Scott, the conservative broadcaster Fulton Lewis Jr. brought up the same speech with the candidate.
“This campaign will be different from 1944,” Dewey said.
“That Oklahoma City speech—”
“Exactly,” Dewey said, interrupting Lewis. “It was all wrong. I was attacking the dignity of the office I was seeking.”
“I didn’t think so. I thought it was great. I thought you were attacking the dignity of the man who was seeking the office.”
Dewey did not want to hear it. He had run an attack campaign for governor in 1938 and had lost. He had run an attack campaign for president in 1944 and had lost. His two campaigns for governor in 1942 and 1946 were different; Dewey had put forth an image of composed leadership and a focus on the job at hand. In those two campaigns, he had won. That was the kind of campaign he wanted to run in 1948, and his wife, Frances, strongly supported him on the matter. Polling data had confirmed the shrewdness of this strategy, revealing that, when Robert Taft and other Republican figures from the Eightieth Congress attacked Truman, the president only benefited. The public sympathized with him.
On the sixteenth and seventeenth of August, Dewey welcomed his campaign staff and VP candidate Earl Warren to the Albany mansion for two days of meetings to map out the strategy. Reporters were invited into jam-packed press conferences, throwing questions at the governor while Warren looked on quietly.
“Can you tell us when you start [the campaign]?” asked Earl Behrens of the San Francisco Chronicle.
“No definite date,” Dewey said.
“How much of the Communist program at home and abroad will be brought up?” asked another reporter.
“I will tell you better on November 2nd,” said Dewey.
The GOP candidate was no longer acting like a man running for president, but one who already was president.
In July Dewey held a press conference about the Berlin Blockade—how war could result from “the slightest mismanagement” of the crisis—and revealed that he was conducting daily phone conversations with his foreign affairs adviser John Foster Dulles, who was preparing to head to Paris to participate in United Nations negotiations on Palestine, Berlin, and more. It was as if Dewey was already running his own State Department. He had Senator Arthur Vandenberg, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, give testimony on camera as to the New York governor’s “thoroughly competent grasp of all our major foreign problems.”
There was a focus on public appearances to make Dewey look presidential. In August he headed up a group of honorary pallbearers at the funeral of New York Yankees star Babe Ruth, before a crowd of seventy-five thousand standing in the rain outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. At the Albany governor’s mansion, he invited motion-picture cameras to capture him in the mahogany-paneled Executive Chamber, speaking to his advisers. The footage could easily be mistaken for a man already in the Oval Office.
And always, there was the driving message of Dewey’s success managing the Empire State, a state bigger than many countries, with a far more disparate populace than existed anywhere else on earth. State-built convalescent centers for wounded veterans, state-subsidized housing for more than sixty thousand people, a scholarly department set up at Cornell University to study labor-management relations in an effort to find solutions to labor strikes before they occurred—all of this was part of the Dewey legacy, a legacy his publicity managers were conveying to Americans via all manner of communications.
Behind the scenes his staff was busy setting up the itinerary for his cross-country campaign tour and delving into statistical algorithms in hopes of finding every advantage they could over Harry Truman. Dewey’s campaign had identified that a total of seven voting districts in the 1946 midterm elections had swayed by the tiniest margin of 50 to 50.9 percent between Republican and Democrat, allowing them to funnel resources into those districts (two of them were in Truman’s home state of Missouri). They knew that ten additional districts had been swayed by the slightly larger margin of 51 to 51.9 percent (there were also two in Missouri).
Dewey asked Brownell to begin courting celebrity figures from theater, literature, and the arts, the biggest names who could appear with Dewey when he arrived in Los Angeles to speak at the Hollywood Bowl in mid-September. “Why shouldn’t we have some people, smart organizers, devote their full time to doing this and doing it well?” Dewey wrote Brownell on August 23. It was “a whale of an idea,” Dewey noted.
An even bigger one, however, was The Dewey Story. Campaign staff came up with a plan to make Dewey a Hollywood star himself; they hired Louis de Rochemont—writer and producer for the popular newsreel series The March of Time—to produce a short movie on Dewey. The campaign budgeted production costs of $35,000, plus additional money to pay for prints. De Rochemont promised to finish The Dewey Story in time to show it in theaters before feature films during the final two weeks leading up to November 2.
At the same time, executives from the massive Madison Avenue advertising firm Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn reached out to all five major pollsters to interview them on their methods, as polls tended to get enormous publicity and were highly influential, especially to undecided voters. The Dewey team was creating the first-ever in-house polling unit. Four of these pollsters responded to questions about their process, and transcripts of these conversations were sent to Herbert Brownell at Dewey headquarters in Washington. Among the
