Clifford passed through the Ferdinand Magellan shortly after. Truman was sitting on a couch next to Margaret, reading a newspaper. Clifford tucked the magazine into his jacket.
“What have you got under your coat, Clark?” Truman asked.
“Nothing, Mr. President.”
“Clark. I saw you get off the train just now and I think that you went in there to see if they had a newsstand with a copy of Newsweek. And I think maybe you have it under your coat.”
Clifford reached into his jacket and handed over the issue. Margaret watched her father: “Dad stared at the magazine for a moment and then grinned.”
“Don’t worry about that poll, Clark,” he said. “I know every one of those fifty fellows, and not one of them has enough sense to pound sand into a rat hole.”
When Dewey arrived back in Albany for a short break before his final campaign swing, he found his mailbox filled with letters from angry voters. Truman’s populism was getting to these Republicans. Why wasn’t Dewey fighting back? How could he let Truman say all those things about the Republican Party? This was not the Thomas Dewey many voters expected. This was not the fearless and irascible Dewey of 1944, the attack dog whom FDR had labeled “a son of a bitch.”
“The greatest danger that could exist would be for too many people to feel that we have a ‘push-over,’” wrote J. E. Broyhill of the Broyhill furniture factories in Lenoir, North Carolina.
“If you don’t open up on the one hundred and one iniquities of the Truman administration, the New Deal termites will win by default!” wrote one Earle S. Clayton of Greenfield, Ohio. “Strike while the iron is HOT!”
The Vinson-mission fiasco offered a golden opportunity for Dewey to go on the attack. He debated the matter with advisers in person and by phone. “No, I won’t do it,” the candidate reportedly said. “I’d rather lose the election than add to the damage this country has already suffered from this unhappy incident.”
Dewey had a different plan. The perception was that Truman had somehow changed his thinking on US foreign policy, and so Dewey aimed to reassure the world that the United States had not changed course, that UN negotiations in Paris would continue, and that soon enough there would be a more steady hand on the wheel. Dewey was going to make a statement as if he was already the president, in an attempt to heal the wound that Truman’s bungling error had created. On October 10, two days after the Vinson mission leaked to the newspapers, Dewey invited fifty reporters to the Executive Chamber in Albany, where he read aloud a short statement. Britain, France, and other nations west of the Iron Curtain—“our friends of the free world,” Dewey said—should be reassured that Americans “are in fact united in their foreign policy.”
“The people of America wholeheartedly and vigorously support the labors of our bipartisan delegation at Paris and specifically its insistence on a prompt lifting of the blockade of Berlin,” he said.
In the crowd in Dewey’s office that day was the Washington Post’s political reporter Edward T. Folliard, who called Dewey’s move “perhaps without precedent in American history.” A presidential candidate was attempting to counteract the damage done by the acting president, in terms of the nation’s foreign relations, in the middle of a presidential campaign.
One reporter asked Dewey if he was going to keep his foreign affairs adviser John Foster Dulles at the UN meetings in Paris, or whether he would call Dulles back to the United States. Implicit in the question was that Dewey would soon be the one to be shaping foreign policy, after he was elected, and that Dulles was about to become Dewey’s secretary of state. Dewey answered, “Certainly.” He would keep Dulles in Paris when he took command in Washington.
Six hours later, the governor and his wife were back aboard the Dewey Victory Special, blasting out of Albany for points west on a nine-state campaign swing, which would end with a climactic pre-election weekend extravaganza in New York City. Dewey was headed for the Midwest, where he would find friendly crowds. Gallup’s latest numbers, released three days before the Republican candidate left Albany, had him ahead in Illinois (49 to 40 percent over Truman), in Michigan (52 to 41 percent), Indiana (52 to 40 percent), and Ohio (51 to 42 percent).
Still, at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee in Washington, GOP officials had noticed some unnerving trends. They were hearing the same stories as everyone else, about the size of the crowds that the president was drawing. They also noticed that the Republicans’ bank account was starting to run low. While Dewey’s campaign had a list of donors that included some of the oldest moneyed families in the country—Mellon, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller—plus industrialists Alfred Sloan (chairman of the world’s largest corporation, General Motors) and Walter Chrysler, the donations were not coming in from farmers and from other places where the Republicans had expected. Complacency and overconfidence had caused donors to keep their checkbooks in their pockets. Why donate to a campaign that has effectively already won?
For the first time, GOP officials started to believe that this election might be closer than anyone thought—maybe not in the electoral college, where they felt entirely confident, but in the Senate and in the presidential popular vote. In mid-October, the head of the Republican National Committee, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, attended a meeting of the United Republican Finance Committee of Greater New York at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Manhattan, to make a plea.
“We need the money and we need it early,” he asserted. “I have been all around the country, have traveled 22,000 miles and have been in 32 states,” he said. “The polls indicate a heavy electoral vote for Dewey and Warren, but that the popular vote is
