Almost President (21 page)

Yet, throughout his life, Dewey was abnormally conscious of image and duty. He smoked but refused to be photographed smoking. He insisted a magazine profile change a reference to him playing poker to him playing bridge. One of his great loves was the farm he purchased in rural New York and he had a genuine passion for raising livestock, but thought being photographed in his overalls seemed gimmicky, so “candid” photos of the Deweys on the farm showed Dewey and his sons incongruously lounging about in three-piece suits. Extraordinarily disciplined, while district attorney and governor, Dewey would routinely work from 9:00 a.m. until midnight. When tired, he had the uncanny ability to lie on his office couch, fall asleep immediately, and awake precisely fifteen minutes later, refreshed. He was also a creature of habit. He had the same lunch every day—a chicken sandwich, an apple, and a glass of milk—and he drank three quarts of water every day. On those occasions when he dined out, he always sat with his back to the wall—but that was perhaps a habit he picked up while a prosecutor when the mob had supposedly placed a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bounty on his head.

Yet, while wags said you had to know Dewey to really dislike him, his friends testified that in private Dewey could be warm, funny, caring—even sentimental. Once, concerned he had hurt a friend's feelings with an intemperate joke the week before, he suddenly showed up at the friend's house late at night, put his arm around the fellow, and said, “Whenever you feel you have hurt a friend of a lifetime, heal that hurt at once. I love you.” Then he turned and left, leaving his friend comforted if befuddled. A Dewey intimate said, “It was almost tragic how he put on a pose that alienated people. Behind a pretty thin veneer was a wonderful guy.”

Dewey would eventually revolutionize the methods of a criminal prosecutor, but his first calling was as an opera singer. Possessor of a marvelous, deep, rich baritone voice that would also make him the second most effective radio speaker in politics after FDR, Dewey placed third in a national singing contest in 1923. Eager to continue his training in New York City, Dewey left the University of Michigan to study law at Columbia University and to be near another singing student he had met—Frances Hutt, a five-foot-three-inch brown-haired beauty from Texas, who would later become his wife. In 1924, Dewey gave a recital attended by the renowned music critic Deems Taylor, who later narrated the Disney film
Fantasia
. Unfortunately, Dewey was suffering from laryngitis the night of the performance, and Taylor's review was sufficiently negative that Dewey decided to stick to law.

Shortly after graduating from law school, Dewey had the good luck in 1931 to be selected chief assistant to the U.S. attorney for southern New York, George Medalie. In his post, Dewey tackled cases involving securities fraud, stock manipulation, and the field with which he would be most identified: racket busting. In New York City, rackets were thought to raise the cost of living for New Yorkers by a whopping 20 percent. Racketeering drained an estimated eleven billion dollars out of the national economy each year, an amount ten times greater than what the federal government spent on national defense.

The young Dewey earned his boss's admiration and affection. To boost Dewey's career, Medalie timed his resignation in 1933 so that Dewey had to be temporarily appointed U.S. attorney in order to complete a major racketeering trial and so that he could become, at age thirty-one, the youngest U.S. attorney in history. Two years later, Dewey received another career boost from his mentor. When the State of New York decided to name a special prosecutor to bust the rackets, Medalie and other prominent Republicans declined the post and insisted Dewey be appointed instead. “This was just the chance to do the biggest job that any lawyer could do,” Dewey said. And he did it well.

Just like in the movies (and many movies were based on Dewey's exploits), Dewey was given broad autonomy and nearly unprecedented authority to bypass the civil service system and handpick a team of dedicated and incorruptible aides and experts in various specialties to take down the leaders of the underworld. The use of teams of lawyers and investigators to crack complex cases was a Dewey innovation. He also “revitalized” the grand jury system, using the panels to gather evidence that he could not have obtained otherwise. To be sure, he engaged in questionable activities in his zeal for convictions. He arrested hundreds of potential witnesses and held them in secret (sometimes for their protection, sometimes just because he could), until they agreed to testify. And not only was he able to select jurors he believed would vote for convictions, using methods that would not be allowed today, he even had the latitude to choose the judges who would hear the cases.

Not surprisingly, he had a remarkably high conviction rate (94 percent, to be exact), though not always for the crimes of racketeering. Just as Al Capone was convicted not for murder but for income tax evasion, so Dewey's most famous conviction of a racketeer was for an offense not directly related to racketeering: prostitution.

There remains debate about how important a mobster Salvatore Lucania, better known as “Lucky” Luciano, really was. The one-time bootlegger and sometime associate of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel was certainly a major criminal force, and his lavish lifestyle attracted public attention. Dewey, however, was successful in portraying Luciano as America's arch gangster, and the legend grew that Luciano created the modern Mafia and was the chieftain of the underworld. Yet, Dewey had difficulty building a case against Luciano for racketeering, including his alleged control of various labor unions, such as the longshoremen. “Sometimes I feel the entire town is against me,” Dewey said. “You'd be surprised at the places where people like these defendants have friends.”

It was Dewey's lone African-American and only female assistant, Eunice Hunton Carter, a “street smart” lawyer who had once worked as a social worker, who persuaded him to investigate Luciano's control of prostitution in New York City.
6
Dewey discovered, according to one madam working for Lucky, that Luciano had grand plans to syndicate prostitution “the same as the A&P.” A massive raid on eighty houses of prostitution led to witnesses and evidence that identified Luciano as the prime operator of prostitution in New York City. Luciano was found guilty on an astounding 538 counts and was sentenced to thirty to fifty years in prison.
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Luciano's conviction made Dewey a national hero. Warner Brothers quickly churned out a film based on the case called
Marked Woman,
with Bogart and Bette Davis, and many other films with titles like
Racket Buster
and
Smashing the Rackets
soon followed. Dewey declined offers to portray himself in movies, but it was reported that whenever he appeared in newsreels, theater audiences would wildly applaud and cheer.

Despite his diminutive five-foot-eight-inch stature, Dewey cut a dashing figure. He had high cheekbones, a jutting jaw, dark brown hair, and, in the words of an associate, “the only piercing brown eyes I've ever seen. Those eyes tell you this guy doesn't crap around.” Then there was the mustache. Dewey had grown it after graduating from law school while on a trip to Europe with a Columbia classmate (and future Supreme Court justice) William O. Douglas. He intended to cut it off when he returned, but Frances liked it and so, to the gratitude of editorial cartoonists, it stayed. He later trimmed it short when a campaign advisor said it would be easier to raise contributions if he looked more like Clark Gable.

Dewey was eager to cash in on his newfound fame and weighed an offer to earn $150,000 per year at John Foster Dulles's law firm, but the New York Republican Party had other ideas. To avoid being thought a “skunk,” Dewey agreed to run as the party's nominee for New York district attorney with its $20,000 annual salary instead.

Dewey's reputation as a crusader for decency and good government (he began the first public defender program) received additional boosts when he secured convictions against the purported “head” of Murder Inc., Louis “Lepke” Buchalter (though Dewey's conception of a corporation of professional killers was fanciful); against Tammany Hall boss Jimmy Hines for selling protection to the city's numbers racket for thirty thousand dollars a year; and against former New York Stock Exchange president Richard Whitney for embezzlement. “No! Not Dickie Whitney!” Franklin Roosevelt exclaimed when told of his fellow aristocrat's indictment.

Dewey lost a bid for governor of New York in 1938, but his vote totals were the highest of any Republican in twenty years. William Allen White compared Dewey's loss against Herbert Lehman with Abraham Lincoln's loss to Stephen Douglas in the 1858 Illinois Senate race. It prepared Dewey for a run for national office. So, as 1940 approached, Dewey, a thirty-seven-year-old whose only elected office was as a local district attorney, was now, remarkably, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president.

Dewey would acknowledge late in life that “everything came too early for me,” and his first campaign for the White House betrayed his lack of seasoning. The resident curmudgeon of the Roosevelt administration, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, mockingly announced, “Tom Dewey's thrown his diaper in the ring,” while the
New Republic
characterized Dewey's campaign as “Pollyanna for President.”

Dewey never really liked campaigning, shaking hands, kissing babies, and posing for photographs. For one thing, he had a phobia of germs. For another, an overbite and two missing teeth from playing football made him reluctant to smile broadly. A photographer once entreated, “Smile, Governor!” Dewey replied, “I thought I was.”

A campaign aide from 1940 said Dewey was “brilliant, thoroughly honest . . . [but] cold as a February icicle.” A man who worked on Dewey's farm claimed that Dewey's “greatest fun was finding out someone had made a mistake.” Herbert Brownell, one of Dewey's longest-serving advisors, said Dewey's talents were not his charm but that “he'd climbed up the ladder the hard way. He worked harder, studied longer than anyone else. He could take a problem, break it down into component parts, assign it to talented people. He organized people. He was a real fighter. As president, he would have been [the] boss.”

Dewey had thought the fight for the 1940 nomination would be with Ohio's new senator Robert Taft, and already the Dewey-Taft rivalry began to define the divisions within the Republican Party: city versus country; East versus Midwest; internationalist versus isolationist; pragmatic against dogmatic. But while Taft and Dewey weren't watching, a third figure, Wendell Willkie, arrived on the scene and, in one of the most improbable events in American political history, snatched the Republican nomination from both men.

Willkie, who had been a Democrat until 1938, was a New Deal critic but a strident internationalist who benefited from a new and growing concern among Americans regarding the war in Europe. Willkie aggressively supported Roosevelt's increasing calls for aid to the British and for enhancing American preparedness should the United States become involved in the fight. “We don't want a New Deal; we want a New World,” Willkie proclaimed. Taft took the opposite tack and believed the United States could and should stay out of a foreign conflict where there was no direct American interest. Dewey tried to chart a middle course, supporting some aid to Britain but insisting the United States needed to stay out of war.

The Republican National Convention, however, occurred during the very week in June 1940 when Nazi Germany invaded France, which made Willkie seem prescient. Dewey actually led on the first three ballots during the convention, but with feelings high, party delegates decided to abandon the efficient but seemingly soulless Dewey for the raucous Willkie campaign that one reporter likened to “a whorehouse on a Saturday night.”

Roosevelt handily defeated Willkie, and Republicans soon had buyer's remorse. Well before 1944, the party was ready to return to a lifelong Republican to be its standard bearer. Dewey, meanwhile, had been developing a more mature political philosophy informed by real experience. In 1942, he had won the first of his three terms as governor of New York, and he was proving that states could provide for the welfare of the public more efficiently (at least Dewey thought so) than the national government.

Dewey's record included improved mental health care, reform of workmen's compensation, enhanced cancer and tuberculosis screening and treatment, expanded minimum wage coverage, and preventing work stoppages by doubling the funding for labor mediation. He simplified tax forms, cut red tape in many departments, hired management specialists to improve efficiency, and created a new research unit to help with budget forecasting. When Dewey left the governor's office in 1955, state tax rates were 10 percent lower than when he had first been elected, but state revenues had dramatically increased.

During the war, Dewey had shown vision in refusing to spend state budget surpluses, instead setting them aside in a fund he called the “Postwar Reconstruction Fund” that he hoped would ease the transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy. He had also demonstrated the foresight in 1944 to have a state plan in place to help returning veterans quickly access unemployment assistance and prevent delay in their obtaining benefits; the federal government had taken no similar steps to prepare for the end of the war.

At the national level, Dewey called for medical insurance for the poor—but within the framework of private enterprise. As early as 1942, Dewey outlined his own proposal for foreign aid after the war, to allies and foes alike, that anticipated the Marshall Plan that the Truman administration would implement in 1947. He continued to chide Roosevelt for supposed fiscal irresponsibility, saying there needed to be a new beatitude: “Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.” Government “has nothing it does not take away from the people,” Dewey said, but added, “It is our solemn duty . . . to show that government can have both a head and a heart; that it can be both progressive and solvent; that it can serve the people without becoming their master.”