The Campaign Spectator/Dirty Harry and the Whistle-Stop Caper
Gold, Victor
THE CAMPAIGN SPECTATOR DIRTY HARRY AND THE WHISTLE-STOP CAPER "I will not get down into the gutter with that fellow" —Famous last campaign words: Thomas E. Dewey to Republican National Committee...
...Myth No...
...And also a feeling that a 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988 headline-making detour around Secretary of State George Marshall—then involved in negotiations to condemn the Soviet blockade at the United Nations—might just wean some far left votes away from Henry Wallace in New York...
...As Presiby Victor Gold ent, he looked to government controls and when those failed, raw federal muscle, i.e., military takeover of plants and personnel, to solve all postwar economic problems...
...From the beginning it had been regarded as undignified for a president seeking re-election to take to the hustings . . . and [not until] 1912, when Taft was in political trouble, did a president make a few speeches...
...He was totally dedicated to being President, but at least equally dedicated to beinga good one...
...Consider the legend of Give 'em Hell Harry Truman, spawned forty years ago this fall...
...But it was in Seattle, Washington, that Truman uttered the most memorable words of the campaign, after someone in the crowd (possibly planted by one of those sixty-six aides) called out, "Give 'em hell, Harry...
...The Communists would like nothing better than to bring about my defeat and elect a Republican president...
...Stalin, not having had the benefit of a heart-to-heart with Fred Vinson, went to his grave still plagued by "inhibitions...
...on the right was the fourth-party "Dixiecrat" ticket, headed by then-Democrat J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina...
...Otherwise he might be remembered, forty years later, as a legend...
...The presidential entourage consisted of sixty-six personal aides and sixty reporters and photographers...
...Truman, his wife and daughter aboard, occupied the rear car, a lavish tram with room enough for two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a sitting room, dining room, and kitchen...
...There were three campaign whistle-stop tours, beginning in mid-September...
...the same Jerry Ford who later that fall assured his countrymen that, contrary to rumor, "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe...
...THE CAMPAIGN SPECTATOR DIRTY HARRY AND THE WHISTLE-STOP CAPER "I will not get down into the gutter with that fellow" —Famous last campaign words: Thomas E. Dewey to Republican National Committee Chairman Hugh Scott, October 1948...
...Now, assuming that Fahrenkopf speaks for Bush and Bush's faith in "the ultimate good sense of the people" is justified on November 8, we face the prospect of a Republican President with a Truman fetish...
...Give 'em Hell Harry has also been represented as being "the little man's candidate," though nothing about the man, including his ego, was small...
...on the other, a rival caught up in the certainty of his triumph...
...Marshall, on hearing of Truman's plan, threatened to resign...
...It was, to the eyes of one foreign observer, "an elaborate affair...
...To an Irish-American audience in Boston: `411 this Republican talk about Communism is in the same pattern with their appeals to religious prejudice against Al Smith...
...Put those on the credit side, but in the debit column two incidents took place during the 1948 campaign that tell us something about Harry Truman's underlying naivete regarding Communist aims...
...Too bad...
...For eight years we've had FDR-cuddling and JFK-cozying in presidential rhetoric...
...It was the tortoise and the hare . . ." The legend is pervasive, to the extent that even Republican leaders, from Gerald Ford to current national committee chairman Frank Fahrenkopf, have tried to buy into the Truman image...
...as has Frank Fahrenkopfs recent Fordian slip to the effect that George Bush, trailing in the polls as of mid-summer 1988, is the spiritual descendant of Give 'em Hell Harry, who trailed in the polls forty years ago, yet won his race and emerged a folk hero...
...Martin's Press...
...to which, Truman replied: "I never give anybody hell...
...I just tell the truth on the Republicans and they think it's hell...
...To a whistle-stop audience in Illinois: "Powerful reactionary forces are silently undermining our democratic institutions...
...Imperial would have been a better word...
...That's Joseph Stalin he was talking about, and it wasn't a slip of the lip but a reflection of Truman's world-view, as he demonstrated a few months later when—under attack from the Wallace left for being a warmonger—he worked up his own secret plan to end "old Joe's" Berlin blockade...
...Even centrist Democrats—including FDR's sons—were cool toward Truman...
...went unchallenged...
...Truman was the first president to make an extensive tour...
...Ford once compared Give 'em Hell Harry to Abe Lincoln in having reposed "great faith in the ultimate good sense of the people . . . and in 1948 they went to the polls and proved his faith fully justified...
...He is a decent fellow...
...Two cars up, a traveling newsroom...
...A pure product of Kansas City machine politics, he was an inner circle member of the U.S...
...But Harry Truman a lonely campaigner...
...This technique broke all precedents in American history...
...then came the Signal Corps cars...
...But Joe is a prisoner of the Politburo...
...Truman decided to employ the extended campaign tour by train as his principal campaign technique," writes Harold Gosnell in Truman's Crises...
...On the left, he was flanked by Henry Wallace, running for President as an undiluted Soviet apologist on a third-party, "Progressive" line...
...The President's 1948 whistle-stop tours covered some 32,000 miles and produced some 350 speeches, all focused on that "do-nothing, good-for-nothing 80th Congress" and various other manifestations of Republican depravity...
...Why else would Ronald Reagan quote not Theodore but Franklin Roosevelt at every turn and borrow his favorite metaphor—John Winthrop's "City on a Hill"—from John F. Kennedy...
...A delegation of ethnics took him apart for that gaffe, but since the memory of Tom Dewey lacked vocal support from an irate voting bloc, Ford's degrading line about the 1948 Dewey-Truman race Victor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent and co-author, with Lynne Cheney, of the forthcoming Washington novel, The Body Politic (St...
...T Ike most of what passes for ultimate wisdom in the electronic news age, the Judgment of History is frequently out-to-lunch...
...I like old Joe," he told a crowd in Eugene, Oregon...
...That was vintage Jerry Ford in 1976, cheerfully pitching the memory of fellow Republican Dewey over the side in pandering pursuit of a few Democratic votes here, a few independent votes there...
...And more: "gluttons of privilege .. . predatory animals . . . bloodsuckers of Wall Street . . ." Writes Roy Jenkins, British Labourite MP, in his biography of Truman: "Everywhere he continued to berate the Republicans without much respect for restraint or even truth...
...I had a feeling [wrote Truman] that Stalin might get over some of his own inhibitions if he were to talk with our own Chief Justice...
...Some samples for Jerry Ford's and Frank Fahrenkopf's scrapbooks...
...And of Truman's Republican opponent, he adds: "Dewey behaved throughout the campaign with dignity and decency...
...The year 1948," writes Richard Norton Smith in his biography of Tom Dewey, "has come down to us as a series of myths, appealing images, and contemporary explanations of the pollsters' grievous misjudgment...
...He was uninterested in collecting cheap plaudits or scoring demagogic points along the way...
...Right...
...Senate Club, the consummate Establishmentarian...
...No denying, Harry Truman was an embattled President in 1948, his party split three ways...
...Truman's brainchild—actually the brainchild of two young presidential speechwriters—was to pack Chief Justice Fred Vinson off to Moscow to make (as the President expressed it in his Memoirs) "an off-channel approach to Stalin" which "might expose the Russian dictator to a better understanding of our attitude as a people and our nation's peaceful aspirations for the whole world...
...Anything but...
...Truman's train, originally built for President Roosevelt, was made up of sixteen cars and was called the Ferdinand Magellan...
...learly, the Give 'em Hell Harry legend is out of hand...
...Such as, the Marshall Plan and military assistance to Greece and Turkey, which laid the groundwork for Western resistance to postwar Soviet expansion...
...Too bad...
...One vodka-straight with the Chief Justice and good old Joe might have proclaimed glasnost forty years sooner...
...My opponent is a front man for the same reactionary cliques that backed Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo...
...A plan so secret he kept it from his Secretary of State...
...Indeed...
...Even a Republican folk hero...
...1: Truman the Lonely Campaigner...
...2: Truman, the Friend of the Working Man...
...Also the consummate statist, a lawmaker who never met a big government/big spending bill he didn't like...
...The first incident involved an unscripted presidential utterance in the summer of 1948...
...4: Truman the Truthful...
...One tram up was the general dining car, connected to a suite of staff offices...
...then the sleeping cars .. . Some "lonely...
...Their choice for Democratic standard-bearer was retired Army general Dwight Eisenhower (whose own party preference was still unknown...
...In short, he wouldn't get down into the gutter with that fellow...
...Myth No...
...To a blue-collar audience in Gary, Indiana: "The Republican party wants to establish an economic dictatorship to move the capital from Washington to Wall Street...
...If anybody in this country is friendly to the Communists it is the Republicans...
...Trace this back to Irwin Ross's book, The Loneliest Campaign...
...Myth No...
...Faced with demands for higher wages by coal miners and the railway brotherhoods, Truman's hot-headed reaction was to request congressional authority to draft "all workers who are on strike against their government . ." Some "friend...
...On the one hand is the courageous bantamweight pursuing vindication on a lonely, hell-raising transcontinental tour...
...He was a red-meat politician who understood the uses and trappings of presidential power, and the real story of the 1948 campaign was how that power, ruthlessly applied, overcame the cosmetics of modern political organization (Dewey was the master political organizer) and an unfavorable press (reporters didn't simply dislike Truman, they disdained him...
...3: Truman, the President who made the Big Decisions under pressure...
...One can only wonder about these Republicans, who speak reverently of the past but have no folk heroes of their own...
...Truman, who had asked for free radio time to announce the Vinson trip, scuttled the project, then blamed the press for leaking and undercutting his plan...
...For those too young to recall the Truman presidency—and to set the record straight after four decades of Democratic allegory—a few de-mythologizing points must be made, beginning with: Myth No...
Vol. 21 • September 1988 • No. 9
