Consternation spread through the train cars as the president of the United States made phone calls. His staff joined in. It was not only money that was short. The staffers were out of energy also. Clark Clifford called the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, David Lilienthal, from Oklahoma City, saying that he was “ready to crawl into a hole and die, but working on a second wind.” On the final night aboard the train on this campaign swing, Clifford’s assistant George Elsey wrote that he was “more dead than alive.”
The Truman Special finally pulled into Union Station in the nation’s capital at 10 a.m. on October 2. Another marching band. Another parade. Truman’s campaign swing had made for endless newsprint, but few believed it had done the candidate any good. On the day the president returned to Washington, the nation’s most influential newspaper—the New York Times—came out in favor of Dewey. The Times had endorsed only three Republicans in the past seventeen presidential elections and had gone against Dewey four years earlier. On this same day, the betting commissioner in Truman’s home state of Missouri, James J. Carroll, set the odds of Truman winning at 15 to 1.
When the First Family arrived at the White House—then under construction and filled with scaffolding—the British ambassador to the United States, Sir Oliver Franks, was waiting for the president, wanting to debate solutions for the Berlin emergency. For Truman there would be no rest. The First Lady and the First Daughter went to their rooms and collapsed. They had just a few days to rest before their final campaign trip aboard the Ferdinand Magellan—this time across the northern United States.
“It’s all over,” Margaret wrote in her diary. “Until next week!”
Part V
Election Climax
For six to eight weeks the voters had been increasingly aware that something out of the ordinary was going on . . . It was so far from the ordinary that every rule in the lexicon was violated, political contradictions became the order of the day, and all laws of human nature blew sky high.
—Robert C. Albright, Washington Post, October 31, 1948
26
“This Was the Worst Mistake of the Truman Campaign”
THE GLAMOUR OF POLITICAL SPARRING in Los Angeles, Truman’s thrill ride through Texas, the sense that the Republicans were about to take power for the first time in sixteen years—the nation was in the grips of election fever as never before. “Beyond any election in the nation’s history, the verdict . . . will monopolize the interest of the world,” wrote columnist John G. Harris in the Boston Daily Globe. “Many nations feel their destiny, too, is involved.”
The 1948 campaign featured some historic firsts. There was the surging power of the pollster. The newly born television pundit. One in eight US families now owned a TV. Radio was ubiquitous as never before, even in rural backwaters. Circulation of daily weekday newspapers was well over fifty-two million, the highest in the history of any nation. Madison Avenue advertising agencies were richer and more powerful than ever. Never had candidates for major office had so many weapons at their disposal, so many ways to spread their truths and falsehoods and to spin the words of their opponents.
Both major parties were in the process of painful rebirth—Dewey leading the charge to liberalize the GOP, and Truman leading his own charge to keep the Democratic Party from coming undone. The fate of the Jews in the Middle East, the fate of African Americans in the South, the fate of helpless war refugees in Palestine and all over Europe, the emergency in Berlin, the new Cold War, fear of Communism abroad, fear of Communism at home, the threat of atomic bombs—all of it seemed wrapped up in the ’48 election.
The irony remained that—as fiercely dedicated as both major candidates were to their fight against the other—their platforms remained similar. They clashed on tax cuts and the Taft-Hartley labor law. But they agreed on increased government spending for Social Security and education. Both supported the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan—the overriding internationalist concept that the United States had a duty to provide world economic and moral leadership. Both supported a strong stand against the Soviet Union and a bipartisan foreign policy. Both supported programs to root out Communist conspirators at home without employing “thought police” tactics and the outlawing of political beliefs in a free society. Both wanted to raise the minimum wage, to use federal funds to confront the housing crisis and clear urban slums, and to develop hydroelectric power.
Both Truman and Dewey supported the partition of Palestine and the formation of a Jewish state. Both supported immigration reform—the admission into the United States of “displaced persons,” refugees of war and from politically unstable nations. Both supported civil rights programs.
In terms of policy, the Eightieth Congress clashed with many of these ideas. But for the two candidates, the most obvious thing that separated them was that one was considered a shoo-in and one, by public opinion, had no chance. The choice for voters was, in large part, in the fabric of the man, and which party was going to control the Eighty-First Congress.
Dewey’s first major campaign swing seemed to uphold his commanding lead, and he had stayed true to his strategy. He would make few commitments and keep his campaign on a high plane.
Truman, on the other hand, was doing something wholly unexpected. He was painting a portrait for the public of a David-versus-Goliath fight, and of himself as a leader who had come from common folk. His language was the language of the common man—stripped bare of “two-dollar words,” in Truman’s parlance. He was out to protect the hundreds of millions of Americans powerless against the forces of greed that unrestricted capitalism could sometimes foster, to keep power in America where he believed it belonged: in the hands of the people. In doing so he was becoming more than a political candidate. He was becoming
