“Nick, don’t worry about that,” Truman said, as the Secret Service man later recalled. “I know these people. The fact is that they were there; I have no worry at all.”
23
“The Presidency of the United States Is Not for Sale!”
THE DAY AFTER TRUMAN’S SPEECH in Dexter, Iowa, on the other side of the country, Thomas Dewey and his wife, Frances, boarded the “Dewey Victory Special” at Albany’s Union Station and departed westward on a misty afternoon, on a trip Tom Dewey believed would end in the White House in January. Herbert Brownell gave a statement to the press saying Dewey’s campaign would be “the most intensive in the modern history of the Republican party.”
The train left track 8 at 4:15 p.m. Dewey had no Secret Service contingent, as he was not an elected federal official, but six New York State police officers aboard comprised his security detail. If elected, he would rank with Ulysses S. Grant as the second-youngest man ever to become an American president, at forty-six. (Theodore Roosevelt moved into the White House at forty-two.) Not including Dewey’s speechwriters and top advisers, the staff comprised six research experts, two research secretaries, two press secretaries, a newsreel assistant, a radio assistant, a stenographer, a mimeograph operator, and two physicians. Dewey also had some help from an unlikely source.
“The FBI helped Dewey during the campaign itself by giving him everything we had that could hurt Truman, though there wasn’t much,” an assistant to FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover later told Truman biographer David McCullough. Hoover had designs on the attorney general job, in a new Republican administration.
Also on board the seventeen-car Dewey campaign train were eighty-one pressmen and -women—the A-team of the journalism world—who had elected to travel with the Republican nominee. The Alsop brothers, Robert Albright of the Washington Post, Jack Bell of the Associated Press, Leo Egan of the New York Times, and Richard Rovere of The New Yorker were among them. There were radio commentators aboard, picture artists, photographers, and enough photography equipment to start a Hollywood studio. Dewey was set to become “the most news-covered, radio-covered, still- and motion-picture covered Republican presidential candidate in political history,” wrote Roscoe Drummond from aboard the Dewey train.
At 12:10 p.m. the next day, the train pulled into Rock Island, Illinois, where the candidate made his first appearance. Ten thousand people turned out to see him. That night, Dewey gave his first major speech, at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Sheets of rain had swamped the football stadium in the afternoon, and the night’s event was moved to the university’s field house. Dewey spoke soberly of the problems the next administration would inevitably face, obstacles “as momentous as any which have ever confronted this nation,” and he warned foreign nations expecting to capitalize on America’s difficulties that no such benefits would be forthcoming.
He “spoke with special seriousness and special effect,” recalled one attendee. “The glitter of success, the air of super-efficiency which marked his whole appearance here, may have been a little putting off. But this defect of too much perfection was compensated for by the impression that Dewey undeniably gave, of sensing the magnitude, the complexity, the difficulty of the task that is ahead of him.” Commented another in the crowd that night: “Caravans from out in the state were organized to swell the audience. All that could be done by bunting, noise-makers, good radio and loudspeaker arrangements, careful seating and good crowd management was done with efficiency. The result was a meeting with such a strong smell of success about it that the observer was inclined to propose calling off the whole campaign as an unnecessary expense.”
Like Truman, Dewey’s itinerary had him making back-platform speeches at train stations in small towns, with big rallies scheduled along the way. Over the next days, the main thrust of his strategy came into focus for the American public. He was going to ignore the right wing of his party, and he was going to speak in poetic platitudes rather than make concrete commitments to any future policy. Thus, he believed, he would have a free hand to do what he wanted when he moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Dewey campaign could be summed up in a single word: unity.
In Des Moines, Dewey told a sprawling audience: “Tonight we enter upon a campaign to unite America,” adding later, “we will rediscover the essential unity of our people.” The next night in Denver, he spoke of “the unity that binds us together,” and how “this strength and unity can be increased in the years ahead.” The next night in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he stumped for a renewed “unity among our people.” (There in Albuquerque, Dewey also made a rare campaign policy commitment that was in opposition to Truman’s platform: more tax cuts for the American people.)
He would not be wearing Indian headdresses or ten-gallon hats. No gimmickry, no wisecracks, no policy bashing. Just unity.
Many of the journalists traveling with Dewey had also ridden aboard the Truman train, and they were struck by the contrast between the two campaigns. At overnight stops on the Dewey train, riders were invited to leave their laundry in marked bags in the train hallway. It was picked up by porters and delivered clean the next morning. No such luck aboard the Truman Special. Dewey speeches were mimeographed and distributed to the press well in advance, and the candidate did not deviate from them; most of Truman’s speeches were impromptu.
Dewey strove to be high-toned and dignified in his public presentations, his speeches a mix of Lincolnesque rhetoric and Madison Avenue slickness. Truman, noted one journalist, “spoke the language of Robespierre in the mild tones of the Kiwanis Club of Independence, Mo.” Dewey’s appearances were perfectly choreographed, and held generally only after 9 a.m. Truman was not above speaking in his pajamas, sometimes in the rain at sunrise.
On Truman’s train, it was whiskey and poker. On Dewey’s, martinis and
