Dewey then blamed the administration’s foreign policy failures for the Cold War. “In a little more than three years,” he said, “the Soviet Union has extended its sway nearly half way around the world and now rules more than five hundred million human beings.”
By almost all accounts, Dewey’s speech was a hit. Senator Arthur Vandenberg gushed in a letter to the candidate the next day: “Your Cleveland speech was one of the greatest of our time.”
Six days left. “I remember coming into Pittsfield, Massachusetts, about 6 o’clock on a very frosty morning,” recalled John Franklin Carter, a speechwriter on board the Truman Special. “Pittsfield has a population of something like thirty thousand people and there were fifty thousand people waiting to see the train. And then I realized that something really phenomenal was happening.” In Hartford, Connecticut, on this same day, a police-estimated one hundred thousand people came out to see “Give ’Em Hell” Harry—“a human sea,” the Hartford Courant described the scene.
Clark Clifford recalled the excitement generated by the campaign in its final push. “That last month you could actually feel it,” Clifford said. “The last ten days of the campaign were something of a triumph. Now we were all indoctrinated with the fact that he had a real long shot on our hands; but that last ten days, that last five days even, you could sense there was something going on. I remember thinking, ‘Well, I don’t know whether we’re going to make it or not, but, by god, I bet if we had another week we would surely make it.’”
The advance man Oscar Chapman noticed too. Arriving a day or two ahead of time in the towns Truman was set to speak in, Chapman could sense the shift in the attitude of the people. “The month of October absolutely confirmed my conviction that he was going to be elected,” he recalled.
Now late in the game, a surprising list of Truman supporters had come to the candidate’s aid. Eleanor Roosevelt finally went public urging voters to choose Truman, in a radio address (DNC officials had scrambled to raise the $25,721 fee to ABC for the radio time, delivering it in cash in a brown paper bag). Twenty-seven leading writers endorsed Truman, including Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Conrad Aiken and Archibald MacLeish. Truman Capote and Carson McCullers endorsed Truman. Thirty-six FDR associates came out in support of the president, including Harold Ickes, who had been Truman’s most outspoken critic a year earlier. The new president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan, came out for Truman, saying he was “more than a little impatient with those promises the Republicans made before they got control of congress a couple of years ago.”
Press reports told an entirely different story from the one the Truman campaigners were seeing. The day before Truman reached Massachusetts, the Boston Daily Globe printed a front-page story that Dewey “has a safe lead over President Harry S. Truman in Massachusetts,” and that the state would tip to the GOP for the first time in twenty-four years. That same day, the New York Times published a front-page story that read: “Thomas E. Dewey and Earl Warren, Republican nominees for President and Vice President, respectively, appear certain to defeat President Harry S. Truman and Senator Alben W. Barkley, their Democratic opponents, by a large plurality in the Electoral College.”
Robert Nixon of the White House press corps remembered filing a pre-election story with the New York office of the United Press Service at the end of October. “The tenor of this story,” he recalled, “was that there was a snowballing tide of public opinion for Truman that indicated very strongly that he would be the winner in a great political upset. My New York office was part of the Hearst organization, which blatantly opposed any and all Democrats. They had hated Roosevelt with a passion, and they despised Truman because they considered him a very inept man.” The upshot: “They never used my story. They never put it on the wire. They thought I was crazy.”
In Boston, the Truman party checked into the Statler Hotel. The reception was near pandemonium. “I’ve never seen such a mob in a lobby,” recalled campaign staffer and speechwriter Frank Kelly. “They had to fight to get him [Truman] through, and people were just cheering madly.” Kelly looked over at an anxious police officer.
“How does this crowd compare with what Roosevelt drew when he came through Boston?” Kelly asked.
“Roosevelt never drew a crowd half as big as this in Boston,” the officer replied. “We like Harry better up here.”
Truman and his family were escorted via a private elevator to his thirteenth-floor quarters in the Statler. Then it was off to Mechanics Hall, where he delivered his Boston speech—a scathing attack on his “red herring” critics, and a shot across the bow of Communists who, Truman said, were trying to influence the outcome of the election.
“Get this straight now,” the president barked. “I hate Communism. I have fought it at home. I have fought it abroad. I shall continue to fight it with all my strength. I shall never surrender. The fact is, the Communists are doing all they can to defeat me and help my Republican opponent,” he said. “I’ll tell you why. The Communists don’t want me to be President because this country, under a Democratic administration, has rallied the forces of all the democracies of the world to safeguard freedom and to save free people everywhere from Communist slavery.”
Truman finished with a plea: “We are engaged in a great crusade . . . This is Roosevelt’s fight. And now it is my fight. More than that, it is your fight. We are going to win.”
The applause lasted for several minutes. The evening was notable
