Historical Figures Series Tom Dewey and His Battle for the Republican Party, Conclusion: His Final Campaign and His Legacy

 

 

Harry Truman’s presidency has been viewed by most historians as one of the greatest of all time, and he is traditionally ranked among the second tier of great Presidents. What is frequently forgotten is that his second term was viewed by contemporaries as a great disaster and in a sense, the scorched earth electoral campaign he ran that fall helped assure it would be.

It shouldn’t haven’t been that way in the immediate aftermath. Truman’s surprise victories had led to the Democrats retaking both the Senate, which had been expected and the House of Representatives, which had been a huge shock to Republicans. The Democrats gained a whopping 78 seats in the House to a margin of 263 seats. With one exception, the Democrats would maintain control for the next forty-six years, usually by massive margins. The Senatorial shift was less significant but the Democrats did pick up nine seats. (I mentioned some of the victories in my first article on Hubert Humphrey.) It looked like the Republicans were going to be a minority party and not much of a factor.

However Truman’s remarks about the Do-Nothing Congress and calling Republicans handmaidens for fascists did not go away.  Republicans in both houses of Congress went back into session that January determined to make Truman’s second term a living hell. And almost inadvertently, Truman had handed the GOP the tools to do it.

The House Unamerican Activities Committee had been formed in 1939 but had been under the control of the Democratic majority. During both Dewey’s 1944 Presidential campaign and the 1946 midterms, the Republicans had raised the issue of Communist infiltration in the federal government. When Republicans took control of Congress in 1947, they took control of HUAC – and in a real sense, created the horror show that would follow for the next decade.

During much of 1947 and 1948, the focus of HUAC was famously on Hollywood and the prominent directors and screenwriters that would be part of the blacklist. Among those jailed would be Edward Dmytryk and the legendary Dalton Trumbo; many more would have their careers more or less destroyed.

But Truman’s strategy to call Congress back into session would inadvertently lead to the rise of a future Republican president – and one of Dewey’s initial allies. On July 20, 1948 federal officials arrested several prominent members of the American Communist Party, including a self-confessed former Soviet agent named Elizabeth Bentley. On July 30, Bentley testified before the Senate subcommittee. She named several prominent government officials, many of whom were connected to Henry Wallace’s now dominated by Communist sympathizers presidential campaign. The big fish, however, was the assistant secretary of the treasury Harry Dexter White. His name is lost to history because three days before he was scheduled to testify he dropped dead of a heart attack.

More important was the man they chose to testify against him: senior editor of Time Magazine Whitaker Chambers. Chambers named names and the biggest was Alger Hiss, whose government record included FDR’s adviser at Yalta, and significant presence as both the Dumbarton Oaks Conference and the secretary general at United Nations Conference in San Francisco.

When Hiss was called to testify he blatantly denied it and both sides were inclined to let his testimony stand – except for a thirty-five year old freshman Congressman from Southern California.

During his testimony, Richard Nixon had noted something significant. Alger Hiss, rather than simply deny the charges or plead the Fifth had denied knowing Whitaker Chambers. Based on a reinterview of Chambers, Nixon fiercely queried Hiss and confirmed the details that Chambers revealed.  Chambers would go on Meet The Press and confirm Chambers was a Communist. This would begin the series of events that led to Hiss being convicted of espionage and Nixon’s rise to national prominence.

During Truman’s second term, most of the Midwestern bloc of the Republican Party  became the strongest Congressional backers of the Red Scare. These including South Dakota’s Karl Mundt, Indiana’s Jenner and of course, Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. One of the issues that has always been talking about is why so many members of the GOP were willing to let men like McCarthy and Nixon run so roughshod over civil rights and destroy so many lives. The answer, at least, for the first four years couldn’t be simpler. They saw it as a campaign issue, just as significant as America First had been a decade earlier. And it was not as if foreign events were not in their favor. By the end of 1949, Mao Tse-Tung and his Chinese Communists had taken control of one of the largest countries on Earth, The cries: “Who lost China?” was one that Republicans intended to make use of.

By the beginning of the 1952 campaign cycle, the Republicans were sure that they had a winning strategy: a formula that they would call: K+ C2. It stood for Korea, Communism and Corruption. The Korean War, which had at first looked like an easy victory, was locked in a stalemate and Truman’s public disagreements and subsequent firing of General Douglas MacArthur had worsened his opinion nationwide. Communism was a common theme, both at home and abroad. And corruption, the bribery scandals that were no becoming revealed in the administration itself were so widespread – and had been since the beginning of Truman’s presidency – that it was hard not to argue the Democrats were deadweight. The 22^nd Amendment had been passed in 1951, arguing no President could serve more than two terms. Because Truman had been president before it was passed he was exempt from it, but he had tired of the White House and at the beginning of 1952, announced he would not run again. His decision had been made clearer when Tennessee Estes Kefauver had run a primary campaign against Truman in New Hampshire and routed him. (Truman, blunt as ever, had made it clear any primary challenger of a President was committing tantamount to treason.)

The 1950 midterms had not been as successful as 1946 had been for the Republicans – they gained only 28 seats in the House and five in the Senate, gaining control of neither body -  but the warning signs were just as obvious as they had been in 1946. Majority Leader Scott Lucas was defeated in Illinois by Everett Dirksen. Republicans retook seats in Pennsylvania and Maryland. Richard Nixon took his seat in the Senate in a landslide – and Bob Taft was re-elected in a landslide in Ohio.

Tom Dewey had also been reelected to Governor of New York but he knew that the GOP would never return to him as a serious candidate. Instead in the fall of 1950 he reached out to a man many Republicans were thinking of as their savior – Dwight Eisenhower.

After Dewey’s defeat in 1948, Eisenhower had begun to rethink his earlier decision to stay out of politics. Returning home he became President of Columbia and later Supreme Commander of NATO. While this was happening, prominent members of the East Coast establishment including Dewey were trying to force Eisenhower to run. Prominent among their thinking was the certainty that Taft was going to run for the Republican nomination again in 1952. Considering that the Republicans had gone down to defeat twice when they had picked Willkie in 1940 and Dewey himself in 1948, it was likely Taft would have  support from far more than the Midwestern conservatives. Eisenhower’s aides said later on that if Taft had gotten the GOP nomination in 1948, he would have accepted the draft from the Democrats because he knew just how much a threat Taft meant to the international order of. This had becoming clear in a conversation with the Ohio senator in which he had waffled on committing to NATO. If Taft had been willing to make that commitment, Eisenhower had intended to announce that he had no intention of ever running for President.

Eisenhower spent much of 1951 trying to decide if he wanted the nomination. While he spent time making his mind up, other candidates considered the issue, many of them also holdovers from 1948. MacArthur and Harold Stassen were once again campaigning. So was Earl Warren, but this time he actually had a strategy in mind. He expected Taft and Eisenhower to each come to the convention with a sizable block of delegates: Taft’s would be from the South and Midwest and that Dewey would use his influence to win delegates for Eisenhower, who was yet undeclared. Warren intended to enter the Oregon and Wisconsin primaries, pick up additional delegates and come to California with at least eighty delegates. If Taft and Eisenhower deadlocked – a pattern that had held between the Eastern and Midwestern blocs of the party in previous conventions – the party could turn to him.

Even before Eisenhower had officially declared his candidacy, his name had been entered as a write in candidate against Harold Stassen and Taft in New Hampshire. Eisenhower flattened both declared candidates, winning 50 percent of the vote and all 14 delegates. Stassen’s candidacy would never recover. He would only narrowly win the primary in his home state of Minnesota.

Dewey and his aides spent much of the next several months trying to get Eisenhower to appear to be a more polished candidate, particularly on television. In the meantime, the primary contest was pretty much evenly divided between Taft and Eisenhower and followed the pattern that Warren would predict. Taft would win midwestern states such as Nebraska, Illinois and West Virginia, Eisenhower’s major victories were in the east, including Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Warren would end up winning six delegates in Wisconsin but took none from Oregon, the only two primaries he would compete in besides California. As expected, Taft and Eisenhower went into the convention neck and neck. Taft claimed that he had 525 delegates, Eisenhower roughly 500.604 were required to nominate a candidate.

Eisenhower’s chief strategist at the convention was Herbert Brownell, Dewey’s loyal counsellor for more than a decade. When it began, three major delegations were contested – Georgia, Texas and Louisiana, which combined controlled seventy votes. The credentials committee was controlled by Taft’s forces and voted to seat the delegates for Taft. Brownell suggested a ‘Fair Play’ Amendment that would force a floor vote on any contested delegation. If Taft won the vote, he would be assured them.. If Eisenhower could, the momentum might shift.

Critical to both sides was the California delegation.  Neither Warren or Eisenhower knew that Dewey had been making overtures to him. They had no idea of Warren’s intentions past the first ballot, they knew that William Knowland, the senior Senator from California was pro-Taft and they thought Nixon supporting Eisenhower could fend off Knowland’s influence. Dewey also believed that Nixon would be a strong vice-presidential candidate: he was thirty-nine to Eisenhower’s 61, vigorous, a tough campaigner, and represented California. When the California delegation went to Chicago, Nixon did not get on board Earl Warren’s campaign and privately argued that Warren’s candidacy was a lost cause.

At the convention Nixon argued impassionedly for the Fair Play amendment and urged them to vote for it as a unit. Warren was less public about his opinion and the delegation overwhelming supported it. The floor vote narrowly approved the resolution.

On the first ballot, Eisenhower finished with 595 votes, just ten short of the nomination. Taft was next with 500, Warren had 81, Stassen 20. Before the second ballot began Stassen asked that the Minnesota delegation shift its votes to Eisenhower, which put him over the top. When Dewey and his advisors suggested Nixon for the vice presidency, he put up little debate.

Victory over the Democratic nominee, Governor of Illinois Adlai Stevenson seemed almost certain before he was selected. The Democrats had been in power for twenty years and Eisenhower was one of the most popular men in the world. The biggest problem to the campaign occurred in September when a newspaper story revealed a slush fund for Nixon paid by his wealthiest supporters.

Eisenhower’s closest advisors, including Dewey and Brownell, wanted Nixon off the ticket right then. Eisenhower refused to publicly commit but he was greatly worried.

The fund, for the record, was not illegal or unethical; indeed Stevenson himself had such a fund. But the story wouldn’t go away and Eisenhower and his advisers arranged for a nationally televised address in which we provide a thorough explanation of the fund and offer to resign. Eisenhower called Nixon and the two men had an intense conversation where Nixon refused to resign and Eisenhower refused to support him. Before the speech, Dewey called Nixon and said the general wanted him to offer his resignation. Nixon asked if that would change if their was positive support for the broadcast. Dewey didn’t give a direct answer, and Nixon famously told him: “There comes a time to either piss or get off the pot.” Their relationship had never been warm and after the famous ‘Checkers’ speech – which led to overwhelming public support for Nixon and Eisenhower chose to keep him -  the two men never trusted each other again.

Still the Republican ticket won election in a landslide.  Eisenhower took thirty nine of forty eight states and 442 electoral votes. He also made major inroads in the South for any Republican candidate, carrying Tennessee, Virginia, Florida and Texas.  There was less of a mandate  for the party in Congress: the Republicans would only gain two seats in the Senate enough for a majority and while the Republicans also retook the House, their margin would only be eight seats. By the time of the 1954 midterms, the Democrats would have retaken both houses of Congress and would control them for the next quarter of a century, and then only the Senate. (They would not retake the House until 1994.)

Dewey would leave elected office in 1954 and spend the rest of his life out of the limelight, mostly at a major law firm where Nixon would briefly hang up a shingle in that period after he famously declared ‘You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore’ and his second successful run for the Presidency.  When Nixon was elected President, he offered Dewey a role in the administration, including Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. (Ironically, he would have replaced his former running-mate Earl Warren.) Dewey declined. He died two years later at the relatively young age of sixty eight.

 

Conclusion

Thomas Dewey never won the Presidency. His battle for a successful brand of Republicanism that would lead to long term success for the party was not truly successful in his lifetime – Eisenhower’s landslide victories did not lead to a Republican dominance of Congress and the order of liberalism prevailed throughout his lifetime. And the model he used was under stress while he was alive with the rebellion of Barry Goldwater in 1964 that would eventually lead to the conservative wing essentially becoming the party as a whole.

So what was Tom Dewey’s true legacy? Paradoxically his biggest victories were for battles he did not benefit from. The decade long fight he had kept Robert Taft from directing the Republican party at one of the most critical junctures in America’s history. Given Taft’s isolationist leanings which not even the Second World War ever suppressed, Taft’s becoming President would almost assuredly have been disastrous for the nation or for the world had he been the party’s nominee in either 1948 or 1952. (In the latter case, it would have the responsibility of whoever he chose for vice president; Taft would die of cancer a little more than six months into Eisenhower’s first year in office.)

His legacy was also critical because of the men who advised him. Herbert Brownell, his closest adviser would serve as Eisenhower’s first attorney general.  He had critical roles in several civil rights cases, including Brown V. Board of Education,  helped draft the legislative proposal that would become the civil rights act of 1957 and did not step down as attorney general until Eisenhower followed his advice on the desegregation of Little Rock. His position on civil rights almost certainly caused Eisenhower not to nominate him to the Supreme court when vacancies would open in 1957 and 1958, as he feared the segregationists in the South would fight and defeat Brownell’s nomination.

And in a way, Dewey’s defeat in 1948 led to a great victory for the nation. Earl Warren, who had never wanted to be Vice President, won reelection to the governorship in 1950. When Eisenhower was elected president, he called Earl Warren and promised the first vacancy that came on the Supreme Court. That September Chief Justice Fred Vinson suffered a heart attack and died. Earl Warren was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. When Vinson had been alive, it had looked like the decision to override Plessy V. Ferguson would be the passage of a divided court. Warren made sure that Brown was upheld by a unanimous decision.  For the next fifteen years the Warren Court, as it has gone down in history, would be one of the most groundbreaking in the court’s history and Warren would rank as perhaps the most renowned Justice in its long tenure.

Dewey never achieved his goal of the highest office in the land and the Republican Party has down much to abandon his legacy. But few politicians in our history have done more good for our country in failure than many have in success. He deserves to be known for that more than not defeating Truman.