Fifties (2 page)

The 1948 campaign proved to be a watershed for the Republicans. They were absolutely confident that Thomas E. Dewey would beat Truman, whom they saw as a small-town haberdasher, devoid of Roosevelt’s charm and as uncomfortable with an open radio microphone as the average Republican. But there was the problem of Dewey’s stiffness. Alice Longworth described Dewey as looking like “the little man on the wedding cake.” “The chocolate soldier,” the
Chicago Tribune
called him. He had come to prominence as a crime-busting D.A. and then had proved a capable governor of New York. During the 1940s he had become a serious internationalist, thus becoming the singular target of the Republican isolationists. To Colonel Robert McCormick, of the
Chicago Tribune,
and his followers, Dewey was virtually a New Deal Democrat. “If you read the
Chicago Tribune
you’d know I am a direct lineal descendant of FDR,” Dewey once noted.

For all his bureaucratic skills, Dewey was a cold piece of work. He was, said one longtime associate, “cold—cold as a February icicle.” “The little man,” Roosevelt had called him privately, referring not merely to his lack of height. Even those who worked closely with him and who admired him thought he was unbending and self-righteous. “He struts sitting down,” said Lillian Dykstra, a close friend of Martha Taft, and thus not an entirely unbiased source. Dewey was uncomfortable with political bonhomie; he would spend as little time as possible with working politicians (and when he did, more often than not he offended them); he could not bear to go to wakes or funerals, a crucial ritual in the Irish-dominated politics of New York City. His disrespect for other politicians extended to both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, whom he referred to privately
as “those congressional bums.” Campaigning for the presidential nomination on his own train with such supporters as the governor of Connecticut, he would excuse himself from his guests after the morning’s stops and lunch alone. “Smile, Governor,” a photographer once said to him. “I thought I was,” he answered.

His strengths were his sense of purpose, his integrity, and his political cleanliness. “An honest cop with the mind of an honest cop,” William Allen White called him. When he signed autographs he would date them, so that no stranger could imply a closer relationship than truly existed. In 1948 he refused—and this was a point of honor—to use the Communist-in-government issue as a political weapon, and he refused, despite mounting pressure from the Republican right, to do any red-baiting, even as that was becoming ever more fashionable in postwar American politics. He had forbidden one of his New York colleagues to mail a letter critical of George Marshall and his policies in China to the editor of a local paper. During the 1948 campaign, when Harold Stassen had presented something of a surprise challenge to Dewey’s renomination, he and Dewey had debated during the Oregon primary on the question of whether or not the Communist party should be outlawed or not. Dewey argued that it should not. He was against outlawing it, he said, because “you can’t shoot an idea with a gun.” Some of his advisers suggested that he soft-pedal his advocacy of civil liberties, that this was not the right time for it. He refused, telling them, “If I’m going to lose, I’m going to lose on something I believe in.” The debate had been the forerunner of the televised presidential campaign debates to come twelve years later, and some 40 to 60 million people were said to have listened. Dewey carried Oregon, and won the nomination. During the regular campaign, the right-wing New Hampshire publisher William Loeb and his favorite senator, Styles Bridges, pleaded with Dewey to start hitting the Communist-in-government issue. He listened to them and then, in the words of Hugh Scott, one of his campaign aides and later a senator, he said he would “fleck it lightly.” The right-wingers were furious. As far as they were concerned, he was throwing away their best issue. Yet Dewey remained adamant. He thought it degrading to accuse the President of the United States of being soft on Communism. He was not, he told Styles Bridges, the Republican national campaign manager, “going around looking under beds.” His aides got nowhere, Herbert Brownell, his top political adviser, decided, because his wife hated the idea of partisan attacks. She wanted him to be, in her words, more presidential. This was not the first time she had blocked
the requests of the political men around him. For years Brownell and others had thought his trademark mustache—which perhaps gave him a crisp no-nonsense look as a district attorney—was a detriment for him as a national politician, because it made him look cold and unfeeling. In photographs and in newsreels, it was the only thing that people seemed to remember about him. “His face was so small, and the mustache was so large,” Brownell later lamented. Again and again his political people suggested the removal of the mustache, but every time the idea was vetoed by Mrs. Dewey.

He was a heavy favorite to win, and he took the high road. Thus there was not a great deal dividing Truman and Dewey on foreign policy, and on domestic issues Dewey had no great desire to emphasize whatever differences existed. Dewey was also wary of attacking too hard; he did not want to appear as the prosecutor he had been. He would be above pettiness, above partisanship. His platform, said Samuel Rosenman, the Roosevelt-Truman speechwriter, was fit for any good New Dealer to run on.

In truth he campaigned not as the challenger but as the incumbent, as a man who had already been elected President by endless polls and surveys. He would be the good administrator who cleaned out the mess in Washington after sixteen years of Democratic rule. The idea of a Truman victory seemed impossible to nearly everyone. George Gallup even told the Republican high command that it was a waste of their money to continue polling, since the results were a foregone conclusion. But Harry Truman had not spent all those years in the Pendergast machine for nothing. That summer he ambushed Dewey; he called the Congress back into session and fed it legislation that underlined the vast differences between Dewey the modern Republican as presidential candidate and the Republican party as embodied by those conservatives still powerful in the Congress and still fighting the New Deal. It was the defining moment of the campaign. It resurrected Truman and gave him something to run against. Even so, no one really believed he could win. Dewey’s chief campaign tactic was to make no mistakes, to offend no one. His major speeches, wrote the
Louisville Courier Journal,
could be boiled down “to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. The future lies ahead ...” In the final few weeks a few Republicans sensed that the tide had turned against Dewey. Among them was Bob Taft. He knew Dewey was going to lose, he told
The New York Times
writer Bill White, when his wife Martha stopped listening to his speeches on the radio and watching his occasional appearances on television.

On election eve, the
Chicago Tribune
had its famous headline proclaiming Dewey’s victory, and Alistair Cooke had already sent in his piece for the
Manchester Guardian
entitled, “Harry S Truman, A Study in Failure.” But even with Roosevelt gone, the Republicans blew the election. But Truman won and the Republicans now faced four more years out of office. The bitterness within the party grew. So much for the high road in American politics. The Communist issue would be fair game in the near future. It was the only way they knew how to fight back.

It was a mean time. The nation was ready for witch-hunts. We had come out of World War Two stronger and more powerful and more affluent than ever before, but the rest of the world, alien and unsettling, seemed to press closer now than many Americans wanted it to. An unwanted war had not brought a true peace, and there would be many accusations that the Democrats had won the war but lost the peace. As David Caute wrote in
The Great Fear,
the true isolationists thought that Roosevelt had dragged us “into the wrong war: wrong allies, wrong enemies, wrong outcome.” A peace that permitted Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe was unacceptable to many Americans. There had to be an answer; there had to be a scapegoat: These things could not merely have happened, not in a fair and just world. Nor would anyone in the United States Congress score points with the folks back home by pointing out that the Soviets held Eastern Europe because they, more than anyone, had borne the brunt of the Wehrmacht, and at a terrible price—the loss of some 20 million people. We knew of the war what we chose to know; to most Americans it had begun only on December 7, 1941, and as for the action in Europe, it had begun only
after
the American forces landed on the continent in June 1944.

The domestic coalition to fight the war, which Franklin Roosevelt had put together, had been more fragile than anyone realized. Republican politicians had been out of power for too long, and their postwar political rhetoric had a basic purpose and tone: It was about getting even. There were, in those days following the war, a great many speeches given in civic clubs and chambers of commerce in towns throughout America about the need to get back to Americanism, returning to the American way, and the domestic dangers of Communism and Socialism. Included under the label of Socialism, in the minds of those giving the speeches (and among many of those hearing them), was almost any part of the New Deal. In 1946 B. Carroll Reece, the Tennessee congressman and chairman of the Republican
National Committee, said the coming election would be a choice between “Communism and Republicanism.” George Murphy, an actor, singer, and dancer turned politician, told one Republican fund-raiser, “Party labels don’t mean anything anymore. You can draw a line right down the middle. On one side are the Americans, on the other are the Communists and Socialists.” No matter that in the dramatic wartime and postwar expansion of the American economy many of these heads of industry had become substantially wealthier. It was time to get even for the New Deal. Whittaker Chambers, who would be the key witness against Alger Hiss, wrote in his book
Witness,
“When I took up my little sling and aimed at communism I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely and somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for the last two decades.”

In the early years of his administration Truman was hardly an ideal target for the angry conservatives; he was so solidly Midwestern, small-town, and unpretentious that he was perilously close to being one of their own. If there was an enemy, someone who represented a target for all the accumulated resentment of the past and all the tensions of class, region, and education, it was Dean Acheson—he of Groton, Harvard, Wall Street, and State, the very embodiment of the Eastern establishment. His timing, as he ascended to the position of secretary of state, was not exactly ideal. On January 21, 1949, the day on which Acheson was sworn in, Chiang Kai-shek turned over what remained of his command on the mainland to one of his generals and left for Formosa. The civil war in China was over, and the Communists had won. It was a bad omen.

In the face of what may well have been some of the most relentless domestic criticism aimed at a public official in this century, Acheson showed one fatal flaw: He never failed to show his contempt for his critics and their ideas. Once, when Senator Taft called for a reexamination of American foreign policy, Acheson retorted that the idea reminded him of a farmer “who goes out every morning and pulls up his crops to see how they have done during the night.” He had many qualities, but the capacity to resist his innate snobbery was not one of them. Even his clothes and personal manner, British in style, were viewed by the right-wingers as one more snobbish affectation on his part. It meant that American styles of clothes and haircuts were not good enough. “... I watch his smart-aleck manner, and his British clothes and that New Dealism ... and I want to shout,
Get out, Get out. You stand for everything that has been wrong with the United States for years,” said Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska. Even his mustache seemed to offend. Averell Harriman once told Acheson: “Shave it off. You owe it to Truman.”

Acheson came honestly by his Anglophilic tendencies. His father had been born in Ulster and, at the age of fourteen, immigrated to Canada, where he eventually married a handsome young woman from a wealthy Canadian family. They moved to Connecticut when Dean was a year old. Of his mother’s love of things English, he wrote, “My mother’s enthusiasm for the Empire and the Monarch was not diluted by any corrupting contact with Canadian nationalism.” Fearless and intellectually superior, he possessed a highly developed sense of integrity and honor. In a world in which the old order had collapsed and a new and dangerous adversary risen up, he retained a clear view of the challenges America faced: to prop up an exhausted and shattered Europe and, at the same time, to make this policy acceptable to his own countrymen. Acheson was far more successful at the former than the latter. His internationalism was instinctive, although he was far less interested in such exotic places as Asia and Africa than he was in Europe. He was not alarmed by the collapse of China, and he urged Congress not to exaggerate the consequences. China, he told them, “was not a modern, centralized state, and the Communists would almost certainly face as much difficulty in governing it as had the previous regimes.”

In his first year as secretary of state he was dogged by the turn of events in China and by the growing anger among the Republicans. However, it was when the Alger Hiss case broke that he became the perfect target for the right-wing. The case symbolized (or seemed to symbolize) the divisions of an entire era. A man named Whittaker Chambers, his own background quite shady, charged that Hiss had been a fellow member of the Communist Party while serving in the government. At first it seemed an accusation unlikely to stick. Chambers—aka David Breen, Lloyd Cantwell, Charles Adams, Arthur Dwyer, Harold Phillips, Carl Carlson, and perhaps George Crosley—was a confessed former underground member of the Communist party, an admitted homosexual (“a pervert,” as the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, often referred to him and other homosexuals in private memos), and unusually sloppy in dress and personal hygiene. His political past was so filled with dramatic changes of direction and ideology that it made even his closest friends uneasy. The man he accused of being a Communist was strikingly patrician and handsome. His aristocratic bearing seemed to confirm his political
legitimacy and sum up his perfect pedigree: Johns Hopkins, Harvard Law School, and
Harvard Law Review.
Felix Frankfurter arranged a clerkship for him with the famed Oliver Wendell Holmes, the preeminent jurist of his generation. At the time of the accusations, Alger Hiss was head of the Carnegie Endowment, the chairman of whose board was none other than John Foster Dulles.