On this same night of October 27, The Truman Story debuted in movie theaters across the country and was an instant hit. Jack Redding, the Democratic National Committee’s publicist, would remember sitting with Tom Meade, who had supervised the making of the Universal Newsreel film, as they watched the completed version. Redding would remember Meade laughing “as I’ve seldom seen anyone laugh,” in response to what both perceived as the brilliance of the film, which had been cobbled together using existing newsreel footage. They had shot not a single frame. The film played to Truman’s authenticity; nothing about it was staged.
“It’s fantastic,” a delighted Meade observed. “I was told that this film would be a flop because there’d be no time to do any shooting. But this thing is the best I’ve ever seen.” Remembered Redding: “Thus, during the last six days of the campaign no one could go to the movies anywhere in the United States without seeing the story of the President. It was probably the most important and most successful publicity break in the entire campaign.”
The following morning, Truman was back on the train, making way for the finale in New York City. “We worked all through the campaign on New York,” remembered Clark Clifford. “We knew that it was critical. We knew at the time that that was Wallace’s major bastion of support . . . The whole Democratic organization was set to work.”
Boston gave Dewey the biggest crowd he had seen yet. Still, it did not measure up to the one Truman had drawn the night before; an estimated fifty thousand fewer people came out to see the Dewey motorcade.
Here in New England, Dewey was polling far ahead, however. Gallup had him running 52 percent to Truman’s 45 percent in Massachusetts. Dewey was determined to snag the state’s sixteen electoral votes. Onstage, he was joined by Speaker of the House Joseph Martin—a favorite Massachusetts son. Martin sat in a chair onstage and, ignored by Dewey, listened to a speech that shocked him.
In Boston, Dewey went all out for Social Security and a higher minimum wage, ideas that were not very different from the proposals Truman had made. Martin was among those anti-Truman conservatives in Congress who refused to pass the Social Security legislation that Truman—and now Dewey himself—had called for.
Dewey said, “A social security program that leaves so many people out in the cold is not good enough for America.” The “pittance” the federal government paid to the average retired worker or his widow “is not security enough,” the governor continued. “We must take action to bring about an increase of these benefits to our older people and their dependents.” One reporter called the speech “a GOP ‘New Deal’ in social security.”
Sitting on the stage, Martin remained silent. At one point he glanced at a group of friends in the audience and smiled with embarrassment. In Boston, the GOP’s identity crisis was on full display.
Truman’s reception in New York “surpassed anything in our history,” the national committee’s J. Howard McGrath recorded. From the moment the president stepped out of his train in Grand Central Station, police had their hands full keeping the crowds behind ropes. A motorcade of open cars cruised down Forty-Second Street as ticker tape poured from open windows in steady streams. The police escort—101 motorcycles—was the largest the city had ever deployed.
Meanwhile, many floors up above Grand Central at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Biltmore Hotel, campaigners were dialing through lists of phone numbers, in a frantic effort to urge voters to make it to the polls. A day earlier, McGrath had sent out a telegram to the state chairmen of the Democratic Party in all forty-eight states. “Suggest you contact wives of all Democratic officials and committees asking them to spend as much of the day as possible telephoning friends and neighbors to get out and vote. This can be built up in an endless chain fashion.”
The president made stops at an Amalgamated Clothing Workers rally in Union Square at 4:45 p.m. (“We’re going to lick ’em, just as sure as you stand there!”), then at City Hall at 5:20 p.m. (“90 percent of the press is against us; 90 percent of the radio commentators are against us; and the only way you can find out the truth is for me to come out and tell you what the truth is”).
By the time Truman reached the Biltmore Hotel at 6 p.m. to ready himself for the night’s rally at Madison Square Garden, a police-estimated 1.4 million New Yorkers had seen him, over a nine-mile tour through the city. The moment Truman reached the Biltmore, however, he faced yet another crisis.
Oscar Ewing and Clark Clifford had been waiting for the president at the hotel, and they were obviously concerned. Ewing produced a cable he had received from a Zionist journalist named Lillie Shultz, who worked for the liberal magazine The Nation. Ms. Shultz claimed to have information regarding the UN negotiations in Paris. She said that Secretary of State Marshall was about to publicly announce to the United Nations his approval of the Bernadotte Plan. This was the peace proposal that would recognize statehood of both Arabs and Israelis in Palestine. The Israeli government had rejected this proposal, because it offered the new nation a smaller territory than it was fighting to obtain. Marshall, Ms. Shultz now claimed, was about to endorse the plan before the UN, without Truman’s approval.
The humiliation for the president would be extreme, and it would surely cost him the Jewish vote on November 2.
Truman was set to give his biggest speech yet on the subject of Israel, in roughly two hours, at Madison Square Garden. The speech was going to go
