(See Cover)
The year was 1925. In a Manhattan office a very young lawyer, who had only recently abandoned his ambition to become an opera star, looked up from a brief he was studying and inquired of a colleague: "How do you get into politics?" On that day, at that hour, Thomas E. Dewey's campaign for the presidency began.
Early last week Tom Dewey found himself in Philadelphia for his most critical battle. He had already been beaten once before.* If he lost this time, he was through. He had no intention of losing.
After his defeat in 1944, he told friends that he would never again seek the office; the office could seek him if it wanted to. But his staff had carried on an assiduous underground operation, their eyes always on 1948. They cultivated contacts in key states, formed alliances which would be useful later, collected intelligence reports on local problems, local people. The Wisconsin and Nebraska primaries almost made all this work useless. Tom Dewey looked like a gone goose. He was told that if he wanted the nomination, he would have to go after it—and hard. He did. In Oregon's rainy spring he made 92 speeches in 20 days, made obeisance to every traditional ritual of the successful campaigner. He won the primary. That was the turning point.
When he came to Philadelphia last week, he had in his pocket the almost certain votes of some 350 delegates. To win, he needed 200 more. That was the last salient. He was ready to take it.
Nerve Center. The Dewey machine was a complex affair. The front which it turned to the public in Philadelphia was the Bellevue-Stratford ballroom. There on the stage a gigantic photograph of the candidate, tinted somewhat too vividly, gazed steadily out over the throngs. Around the balcony hung other photographs: the Dewey family playing with their Great Dane; the Dewey family at the circus; Dewey on the farm. Dewey infantrymen passed out soft drinks and small favors to gawking visitors and gave every 200th visitor a door prize. William Horne, a Philadelphia bank employee, was clocked in as the 45,000th visitor and got a sterling silver carving aid.
But the nerve center was on the hotel's eighth floor. There Dewey's large and highly competent staff operated. There were John Foster Dulles, adviser on foreign affairs, and Elliott Bell, state superintendent of banks and adviser on national policies. In charge of campaign fund-raising was Harold E. Talbott, onetime polo player, director of the Chrysler Corp.
In charge of influencing fellow Senators: Senator Irving Ives. In charge of intelligence and publicity: Paul Lockwood, Dewey's secretary, and James C. Hagerty, onetime political reporter on the New York Times, now Dewey's press secretary. In charge of practical politics and the panzer divisions: three of New York's smartest politicians—Lawyer Herbert Brownell Jr., National Committeeman J. Russel Sprague and Edwin F. Jaeckle, onetime state chairman. All of his staff had one thing in common: complete loyalty to Tom Dewey.