IV
The black Ford pulled in front of the Muehlebach a few minutes before six o’clock, just as it was getting light. The street was empty.
At presidential headquarters, the penthouse on the seventeenth floor, Truman found only four who were up and about—Matt Connelly, Bill Boyle, and two Kansas City attorneys, Jerome Walsh and young Lyman Field, who had been barnstorming for Truman on his own all across Missouri, and who now, as the one nearest the door, had the honor of being the first to shake the President’s hand and wish him congratulations.
Charlie Ross, sprawled across one bed, appeared to be dead drunk, but 1 he was only exhausted. It had been a rough night for all of them, but for Ross especially. The press had been furious with him for not saying where Truman was, and Ross, finally, had lost his temper, showing “his first case of nerves” since the campaign began. He didn’t know where the President was, nor did Matt Connelly. None of them knew.
The rooms were a shambles. “The`re wasn’t a drop of liquor around, by the way,” wrote Jerome Walsh later, trying to describe the scene. “It was all black coffee and cigarettes and four telephones jangling…. At 6:00 we were out on our feet.”
Truman, though unshaven, appeared rested and bright-eyed, “as refreshed as a man with two weeks’ vacation behind him.” Shedding his coat, he sat down on the couch and asked “how things were going.”
Though Dewey had carried New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, Truman had won in Massachusetts, carried all the Old South but four states—South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, which had gone to Thurmond—and was leading in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Colorado. He was ahead by slim margins in Illinois, Ohio, and, so far, crucially, in California. In the popular count he was ahead by nearly 2 million votes. Dewey had yet to concede.
But what most impressed those in the room was Truman’s perfect calm at such a moment. To Lyman Field, the President seemed “wholly unconcerned.” Here, by every sign, was a man on the verge of pulling off the biggest political upset in American history. He had confounded the experts, the professionals in both parties, not to say a nationwide chorus of columnists and poll takers. The President who had had to fight just to get the nomination from his own party was beating the opponent everybody had said was unbeatable. It was not only a supreme moment of triumph in a long political life, but one of the greatest personal victories of any American politician ever. Yet here he sat as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. “He just seemed the same old Harry Truman,” Field would say forty years later, the memory of that morning still a wonderment to him.
Jerome Walsh was so moved by Truman’s total composure that he decided to record the scene while everything was still fresh in his mind, in a letter to a friend written just days later:
He displayed neither tension nor elation. For instance someone remarked bitterly that if it hadn’t been for Wallace, New York and New Jersey would have gone Democratic by good majorities. But the President dismissed this with a wave of his hand. As far as Henry was concerned, he said, Henry wasn’t a bad guy; he was doing what he thought was right and he had every right in the world to pursue his course. Someone else pointed to a Kansas City Star headline which read, “Election in Doubt” or something like that. The President grinned. “Roy Roberts will change that in a few hours,” he said. I did not hear the name Dewey mentioned by the President.
I am trying to give you…a sense of the astonishment we all felt at the unbelievable coolness with which the President faced up to the whole situation, the manner in which he took the thing for granted, as if he had read the answer in a crystal ball two weeks before. At 6 A.M. there still was plenty of reason for Governor Dewey to refuse to concede. Conceivably Ohio might have switched in late returns. California or Illinois might have toppled and the President’s lead been sharply reversed…. Actually, Mr. Truman, at 6 A.M., hardly seemed interested in the matter. To him the election was won, had always been won since the day he began carrying his fight to the people, and his mind was already turning to other aspects of his program…. The serenity of the President…suggested to all of us, I think, that his years of crisis in office have equipped him with a very large reserve of inner strength and discipline to draw upon.
Walsh, as he further wrote, could not help but think of Abraham Lincoln. “Is this sentimental outpouring?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”
Charlie Ross would remember being awakened by somebody shaking him at 6:30. “I looked up and there was the boss at my bedside—grinning. We all started talking at once.”
Truman put through a call to Bess and Margaret, both of whom burst into tears at the sound of his voice.
He called in a barber, had a shave and a trim, then changed into a fresh white shirt, blue polka-dot tie and double-breasted blue suit.
By 8:30, Ohio went for Truman, putting him over the top with 270 electoral votes. A celebration broke out in the Presidential Suite. Vivian Truman, Ted Marks, Eddie Jacobson, Al Ridge, Tom Evans, and Fred Canfil arrived. The hall outside was jammed with exuberant well-wishers.
At 9:30 Truman was declared the winner in Illinois and California. By now, too, it was clear the Democrats had won control of both houses of Congress.
At 10:14 (11:14 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York), Dewey conceded the election. A wild cheer went up on the seventeenth floor of the Muehlebach, and as the doors to the suite were thrown open, more friends, politicians, and reporters pushed their way in.
“Thank you, thank you,” Truman kept saying, shaking hands, and behind the thick glasses there were tears in his eyes.
At Independence, minutes later, every bell, whistle, siren, and automobile horn seemed to go off at once. It had never occurred to anyone in town to plan a victory celebration, but now Mayor Roger Sermon quickly declared a holiday. Schools were let out and at day’s end in a roaring spontaneous outpouring of pride and goodwill forty thousand people jammed the Square to see and honor the victorious native son.
Speaking from a small podium, visibly touched by what was the biggest crowd in the history of the town, with his courthouse behind him, Truman called it a celebration not for him but for the country.