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Impossible to Describe. The De Mille script read: "At 7:44 Mr. de Mille cues Governor Dewey's entrance from tunnel. . . ."
At 7:44, Harry von Zell had Adolphe Menjou at the mike. Von Zell: "Tell them about this great sight here tonight." Menjou: "Tell them? How on earth can I?" But the De Mille cue had been given and, suddenly, the wandering blue kleig lights turned from the flag-draped platform to focus on the concrete opening whence football teams usually come rushing out in triumph.
From this tunnel, while the bands played, the crowd cheered, cowbells rattled in the upper tiers, the Deweys appeared, in a cream-colored touring car, flanked by eight motorcycle cops. Said the script: "After Governor Dewey enters, Von Zell brings many stars to the microphone to describe the scene during the time the cars are driving around the track. After one minute of cheering, dial the mikes down so that the continued cheering becomes a background for the stars speaking. . . ."
On the platform, shaking hands with the glittering stars, even Tom Dewey became so excited by the tumult & shouting that, in an unusually prankish gesture, he tossed his grey Homburg a full ten feet into the hands of a waiting bodyguard.
One-Minute Cheer. To this crowd, buoyed up by two hours of hoopla, Tom Dewey chose to talk of expanding social security, of extending old age insurance to 20,000,000 Americans not now covered by the Social Security Act, of planning medical insurance for all. However earnest and sincere the speech may have seemed to radio listeners, it was not the fire-breather that the 90,000 had hoped to hear.
The De Mille script read: "8:30, completion of speech. Two minutes of cheering, led by young Republicans; 8:32, band plays until 8:45." But the cheering lasted less than a minute, and the radio program was quickly switched off.
The Los Angeles meeting had been the second biggest political rally in U.S. history.* What had Tom Dewey gained by it? Enough votes to overcome Franklin Roosevelt's lead in California? If so, it would be a major political achievement. But however well the speech was aimed at the Ham 'n Eggers in Southern California, at the Coliseum it was a total flop. The newsmen wrote it down as another demerit for Dewey.
The Dewey Demerits. In more than two weeks of junketing, they had noted other demerits: the Dewey lack of humor, his unwillingness to pose for trick shots for the photographers, his narrow range of facial expressions, his tinge of Scoutmasterishness (when excited, he uses phrases like "Oh, Lord," and "good gracious"), his lack of warmth (he rarely visited newsmen in the lounge car), his super-efficiency (which sometimes leads him, in normal conversation, to say "period" at the end of a sentence, as if he were dictating).