Good afternoon, and welcome to our third year offering a six-week series of conversations with noted historians, scholars, and journalists about the American presidency, brought to you by the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, the UT Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and Humanities, Texas. I'm Phil Barnes, and it is my privilege to chair the UT Ollie Sage Enrichment Committee. In 2022, we brought to you a series of interviews with presidential biographers, each of whom offered special insights into the lives behind the legends of Washington, Jefferson, Tyler Coolidge, Nixon, and JFK. Last year, we focused on the complex and difficult presidential decisions for war and peace. Lincoln after the Civil War, Wilson after World War I, both Kennedy and Nixon on Vietnam, Reagan at the end of the Cold War, and George W. Bush on Iraq. This year, Americans will go to the polls to vote in what many commentators have called a pivotal election, perhaps one of the most consequential in American history, but it's hardly the first time such claims have been made. And this year, 2024, we will hold our 60th presidential election since the first in 1788. In this series from the American presidency, we will look back at six of those elections, 1860, 1896, 1948, 64, 68, and 80, from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan. Exploring the races that elevated these folks to the Oval Office and the implication of the races that they won. Mark Lawrence, the director of the OBJ Presidential Library, and himself a widely respected historian will again host our conversations this year. As a member of the audience, you may participate in the Q&A segment of our program by using the chat function to write and submit questions. Our Q&A host today is my UT Olly colleague, Sandy Criss. Today we welcome A.J. Bain, an American author and journalist. He is well known for his two excellent books on Harry Truman, including, of course, Dewey Defeats Truman, but also for his work as a car guy. His regular call of my ride has appeared in the Wall Street Journal now for 10 years. And his best-selling book, Go Like Hell, Forge Ferrari and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans, was made into a high-grossing and great fun movie. I guess in some ways A.J. just likes all kinds of races. His writing puts you aboard the whistle-stop train trips alongside the indomitable Harry Truman and Truman's 1948 long shot race through the White House. You gain from him an insight up close and personal sense about the campaign was waged as well as insights into the character of the people mostly men who were making history. The author also has the ability to step back and identify the forces of history that played out with relevance for our times. Let me read briefly from his introduction. A groundswell of white nationalism, impeachment headlines, a president caught in a better public feud with his own Congress, a resurgence of populism, a game-changing new form of media, a chief executive aiming fake news accusations at the National Press, war and terrorism in the Middle East, a building economy with historically low unemployment, the FBI on the tail of a major presidential candidate regarding a possible Russian conspiracy. The year was 1948. We do have much to learn from history. So it is with great pleasure and anticipation that we welcome for today's interview A.J. Bain, the author of Dewey Defeats Truman, the 1948 election and the battle for America's soul. And now, Denmark Lawrence. Well, thank you so much, Phil, and thanks everyone for joining me today for the start, as Phil says, of this series about pivotal elections in American history. It's such a pleasure and an honor really to lead this program, and I'm grateful to all of you who are out there today for making time to dive into a subject that holds such obvious importance as we turn the calendar to 2024. And A.J. Bain, I can't think of a more appropriate guess to help us get started. Your new book is a terrific read and full of insight about what has to stand out as one of the most remarkable elections in all of American history, the election of 1848, which gave us, among other things, this indelible image of Harry Truman holding up the Dewey Defeats Truman banner headline in November of 1948, the image, of course, that graces the cover of your terrific book. A.J., thanks so much for being here. It's such a pleasure to be with you. Thank you. And I want, of course, in our time together, to dive into the incredibly colorful cast of characters who are at the heart of your story, but let's sort of start at a higher level of altitude and address the broad significance of the 1948 presidential race. You write in your preface, and Phil has just captured a lot of this, that the election of 1948 is uncannily relevant. Those are your words to our own moment in history. Phil's given us some ideas here, but tell us why you make that claim right at the start of your book about this election now many decades past. Thank you, Mark. One of the things I can say is that every time I get asked a question, I wish that I had an hour to answer it. Let me just give you some very specific examples. Let's take Israel, what's happening in Israel right now, and what's facing the administration, and all the candidates who are going to be looking to 2024, how do we deal with this? What is it we're supposed to be doing? Who do we support? All of that was happening during 1948 when Israel was brand new. That's the most striking parallel, but also Ukraine. Here we have this Ukraine situation, which if you really look at it, the Cold War started at the Potsdam conference in 1945. This is toward the end of my book, The Accidental President, where the Soviets and the Americans, they're sitting at these tables together. They have this argument over the government of Poland, right? And the Soviets are saying, Moscow is saying, hey, look, we should be able to control the government of Poland. We don't really understand why you think you even should have a say. And the Americans are saying, well, in Poland, they should have free and fair elections. They should get to choose their own leader according to the Atlantic Charter. This is democracy in action. And we had this disagreement. The same exact thing is happening in Ukraine in the same exact part of the world. Those are the two most glaring parallels, I think. In 1948, we faced a situation, this argument over Poland that led to us nose to nose with the Soviets at the brink of World War III. We don't want that to happen again. You also make clear, it seems to me in the book, that the 1948 election was in some ways a watershed in the way campaigns unfold in American society, what they look like, how they feel, and all the behind the scenes maneuvering that goes into them. The campaign in your words highlights some of the hallmarks that we take for granted in American political races. Both sides had elaborate campaign organizations. The GOP pioneered the first ever polling apparatus. Television started to be a factor. Can we say that the 1948 campaign deserves attention for this reason as well? Absolutely. Look, 1948, it's the first election in the television age. The first election in the atomic age. And really, but I think the most important thing that we can say, just, you talked about elevation, we're above and we're looking down. This was the situation, excuse me, coming out of World War II, where the two major parties and all politicians, basically, anybody who held any power, this was a moment, a line in the sand. Coming out of the war, this historic moment, all of the political parties, they had to say, this is who we are going forward. The first election in the post-war world, this is what we stand for. All political parties go back and forth within their ideology, ideological silos. And sometimes they explode those silos and go far to the left or far to the right. In 1948, you had the Republicans full on identity crisis. They had to choose a candidate and say, this is who we are going forward. And the same with the Democrats. And I think we're seeing some of that now as well. Yeah, I'm struck by the subtitle of your book, The Battle for America's Soul. At first glance, you might say that Harry Truman and Tom Dewey were pretty similar in a lot of what they stood for. Tell us, nevertheless, why it was a battle for the very soul of America? There's a couple of reasons. One I want to say is, let me just read a quote from the book. I can tell it just a really quick, funny anecdote. When the book first was announced, even before it came out, I remember reading online the first piece of criticism where someone trashed the book. They didn't like the subhead, the soul, the battle for the soul of America. You're overdue. It's not true. And I'm thinking, you didn't even read the book. I haven't even out yet and you're already bashing it. But there's a few reasons why I use that subtitle. But the first was because these are Truman's words himself. So this is him speaking and this is what he truly felt. It is not just a battle between two parties. It is a fight for the very soul of the American government. And just to add on to that, the media felt the same way. This is the New York Times. The fate of the nation and of civilization is at stake. I think that there was a number of reasons for this. One is there was tremendous fear at that time, tremendous fear in the new atomic age that we were on the very brink of war with the Soviet Union and we were at that time. So the idea of who was going to lead our country and save us from total nuclear annihilation was kind of important at that time. From Truman's point of view, what he meant specifically was going into the future world, we need to figure out what is the role of government and American society. And what Truman believed what he said many times is I represent who are my constituents. I represent the 99.9% of Americans who can't afford a lobbyist in Washington. And what he meant was he feared specifically the 80th Congress, but he feared that if the Republicans got an office, that Wall Street would become too powerful and the American, the common American man like himself would end up paying the price. So let's talk a little bit about some of the contenders and obviously the most well-known is Harry Truman himself, this relatively obscure Missouri Senator who became of course FDR's running mate in 1944 and then suddenly became president when FDR died in April of 1945. As Truman approached the 1948 campaign, aiming of course to get elected in his own right, it's safe to say his prospects for victory were not great. In fact, you quote Herbert Brownell I think as saying that Truman in 1946 was the weakest president the United States had had since Franklin Pierce, pretty damning commentary. What were Harry Truman's thoughts as he entered into the race? What were his prospects for success? The book I think hopefully when readers read it, it works on many levels. And I think from a basic just, you know, a basic narrative level where all stories sort of have a fabric about them, a spine if you will. And one of the greatest spines, the greatest narrative structures that you'll find anywhere in the world from the beginning of storytelling before the printing press is the idea of the great underdog of David versus Goliath. And so on a basic, very simple level, if you shed away all of the important stuff in this book and in this election, you've got the story of a man who is trying to overcome outstanding, unbelievable obstacles all around him, people saying it can't be done, it can't be done, it can't be done. I've often compared the story to the movie Rocky and people laugh at that and they think like, you know, it's sort of silly, but I was inspired to write about Truman by my father who kept this portrait in my father no longer living, but this was the portrait we always had in our home and I keep it with me so I can show people during these types of zooms and things. And my father was a Rocky fan. He was a weight lifter and I would wake up every day to the Rocky theme song while he was lifting weights and he inspired in me the whole idea is if anybody says there's something you cannot do or you cannot accomplish, that is the reason to try and prove wrong. But really, it was a lot of fun doing research in this book and putting myself in Truman's shoes and looking at this microcosm and this macrocosm around him of all of these figures, people close to him, his own wife. She might not have said it aloud, but he knew she believed it. There was absolutely no chance that he could win. Why was that? Why was he such an underdog? I mean, as you point out, at the moment of the atomic bomb, let's say, he had enormous popularity. He was no less than vice president of the United States. What was it that made him such a long shot in 1948? Well, two things. Emerging from World War II is my theory that there was no president, not Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, nobody could have led the United States out of World War II with all of the economic turmoil, the labor strikes, the housing crisis. At one point, we had 100,000 veterans of World War II homeless on the streets of Chicago. Tremendous inflation. There was no way that Truman was going to be able to lead the country out of the war in time into a peacetime economy. I wrote a book called The Arsenal of Democracy that I think really puts into perspective the degree to which our nation changed during World War II, the migration, the thousands, millions of small businesses that closed and people moving across state lines, the degree to which World War II affected the common person's daily life is unimaginable, I think, for most people today. So all it entailed to bring the country back into a peacetime economy, it was not going to go well for any candidate. Number two, second thing I think is really important, we see all through our contrary, the democratic process that happens naturally. The pendulum swings from left to right and back again. And by the time 1948, the Democrats had been in power since the election of 1932 and FDRs inauguration early in 1933. And a lot of people were tired of the New Deal. And then there's a third reason, and that is that Truman, I think that people just generally speaking following FDR's footsteps, they didn't take him very seriously. He didn't have speaking voice that FDR had. He had no college degree, had never been a mayor of a city and never governor of a state. And so when he gave his 21 point program speech after the war ended, basically reaffirming, I'm a liberal. I want to spend tons of government dollars, tons of taxpayer dollars. People got together and said, no way, that's not going to happen. We got to vote this guy out. Hey, Jay, I wonder if I could even propose a fourth reason for Harry Truman's problems as he approached the 1948 election, which is the fragmentation of his own party. I mean, he faced real competition from Strom Thurman, from Henry Wallace, essentially from within the ranks of the Democratic Party. Help us understand where Harry Truman stood in the range of political possibilities within the Democratic tent in that period. I think that Truman was considered toast, and that was the words used at the time. Long before his party really fractured. So 1946, the election of 1946, the midterm, we really saw it. The country came out and really voted for the GOP. We saw that both chambers in the house flip. So, but by the time we get closer to the election, Truman did something which was, to my mind, truly heroic and all believed would be political suicide. And that is he went out on a limb and really supported civil rights. And the Democratic Party had a huge power base in the southern states. We draw this back, basically, to the Civil War and also the compromise of 1877. And all of these moments in time where you really saw the southern states stick clinging to their ideology, clinging to Jim Crow laws and their ways of life for generations. They believed that their way of life was the correct American way. And they didn't want to see a politician in Washington tell them how they should be living their lives and what they should think and believe and who should be able to vote in their states. And Truman, during the 1948 election, it becomes the first president to campaign in the spiritual heart of Black America, campaigned in Harlem. He desegregated the military. He became the first president to address the NAACP. And there are many reasons why he did that. But it didn't have all the tremendous effect on the Democratic Party that he didn't even hope. He knew it was going to fracture his party. And there's this tremendously dramatic moment that we see in the book during the Democratic National Convention where all of these people from the southern states, they stand up, they wave Confederate flags, and they say, Truman can't win. And we're out of here. And boom, people thought that they were witnessing the death of a major American political party at that time. It turns out it didn't happen. And then there was Henry Wallace also emerging from a particular wing of the Democratic Party. How did Harry Truman think about the challenge from Wallace and how did he manage that problem? Another excellent question. So earlier, someone alluded to the cast of characters in this book. Really, the way I've structured due to defeat Truman is to follow the campaigns of all four. There were four candidates. And one reason is because I think we have as much to learn from political castaways and failed candidates as we do sometimes from the winning candidates. The other thing is I think they were just fascinating because they represented these narratives within the fabric of America. All of these candidates had a number of people who were really supporting them and supporting what they were saying. One of them, obviously, as you said, was Henry Wallace. Henry Wallace was a vice president under FDR. And I'll give you as an anecdote. One time I was on live radio on NPR in Washington, D.C., nationwide. And I described Henry Wallace in a certain term that was used at the time. He was so far to the left. And so in many people's minds, strange that I used the word crackpot on the air. And the switchboard lit up. People got really upset and they started calling in because there are people still alive to date and a number of them who think that Henry Wallace would have been the best candidate in 1940. Who was he? He was to the left of Truman. He split from the Democratic Party like the Dixie Crats did. And his idea was that the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Truman administration was going to lead us into World War III with the Soviets. And Wallace was the man who was going to stop it. He ran a peace campaign. And surprisingly, he was highly supported by the Communist Party at that time.  And that upset a lot of people. But those were his politics. He was not a Communist himself, but he was part of the left. And you have to imagine this guy was packing Yankee Stadium in customers who wanted to hear and speak and believed what he was saying. In fact, the level of Communist involvement in his campaign is something that struck me as an important theme of your book and something that I wasn't terribly familiar with. Is this one of the contributions, would you say, of your book in terms of making new revelations about the history of the campaign? I would like to think so. And I mean, it was so plain from the research because these people were outspoken. John Abbott, you know, ABT, that was his name. He wrote a memoir. And, you know, he had a lot of personal papers. And we were able to dig out some of the stuff that I had never seen myself elsewhere. I remember having a conversation with a very famous Yale professor who was giving a speech at the Truman Little White House. I was giving a small talk and he was giving a big one. And I had this conversation with him and he refused to believe that the Communist Party in the United States was active in the 1940s. Huge in the 30s for obvious reasons. But, you know, he was saying the Communist Party by the 40s was gone. And I was like, I don't think so. And this was a professor at Yale. So hopefully, yes, there's some. So the last of the of the cast of four characters that we need to talk about is and certainly last but definitely not least is the governor of New York, Thomas Dewey, who became, of course, the Republican nominee. Tell us about Dewey. How had he emerged as the Republican candidate in 1948? Well, it begins for Dewey way back in the 20s and 30s. I'm actually working on a book that I'll do someday. I have a proposal all done about the early years of Tom Dewey. And my publisher is saying like, I don't know, or people are going to want to know about Tom Dewey, you know? But the guy's story is incredible. It's incredible. So as a lawyer, an attorney and a prosecutor in New York City, Tom Dewey took down the mob in the 20s and 30s during that heyday of organized crime and prohibition. This guy pretty much single-handedly put together a prosecuting office and took down the mob in a heroic fashion. He was so famous at the time that on more than one occasion, Humphrey Bogart played a Dewey like, you know, crime buster, big Hollywood pictures. He was played on screen by Humphrey Bogart. That's how famous Tom Dewey was in the 1930s. Early in the book, I talk about the fact that when he's governor of New York, the GOP is trying to get him to run for president. He says, I don't think I want to do that. I don't want to be remembered as the guy who loses presidential election. And of course, that is what he's remembered for today, which is said a couple of things to say. And we should get more because he's such an important character. We can talk more, I hope. But suffice to say this, to make the story short, the GOP was having a massive identity crisis coming out of World War II. You had the 80th Congress, who was led by the conservative faction of the party, notably Bob Taft, who was Mr. Republican, whose father had been a president of the United States and represented that old school Republican thinking of small government, no spending, isolationism. And then you had Thomas Dewey. Thomas Dewey was born the son of a guy who was this crazy Teddy Roosevelt fan. And so Tom Dewey, his father called him Ted after Teddy Roosevelt, because his initials were Tom E. Dewey. That's how into Teddy Roosevelt this family was. And in a matter of fact, Tom Dewey, when he was born in the newspaper in his town, it said an eight-pound, six-ounce Republican voter was born today. That actually happened. So Tom Dewey represents the Teddy Roosevelt liberal wing of the GOP. And during the convention, they had this tremendous clash. Dewey wins. And the story of how that happens is incredible. Once chapter is the first ever live broadcast presidential debate, which is during the primaries in Oregon, Dewey is up against Harold Stassen. And he wins heroically. He just smashes Stassen and goes on and becomes the candidate. But this was very unsettling to a lot of people in the Republican Party who really didn't believe in his politics. It seems to me, 1948 is such a significant election in part because it was the first opportunity for the Republican Party, host Second World War, really to establish itself vis-a-vis the New Deal. Was the Republicans going to overturn the New Deal or accept the New Deal or revise the New Deal? And essentially, it seems to me after reading your book, Dewey accepts the broad contours of the New Deal. And so this is a decision with enormous consequences. Am I thinking about how Dewey responded in that particular moment in the right way? Was this in some ways kind of an important test case about where the Republican Party but American politics would go in terms of decisions about preserving, prolonging, altering the course of the set of policies that have been around for 15 years by that point? I think so. I think so. And I mean, the simple way to say it is, shockingly, if we're talking about an election that was for the battle of the soul of America, the major candidates actually agreed on a lot of major, they disagreed on tap versus Hartley. They disagreed on taxes in terms of social spending and things like that and supporting research and benefits for veterans and all of these different economic policies. Dewey was surprisingly liberal and many things in America might not have been that different had he been elected. I think he would have been a terrific two-term president. I think he would have stood up to Joe McCarthy and done a better job of that than Truman ended up doing himself. I just think he would have been a tremendous president. That's a fascinating theme. Elaborate on that if you would. Play out the counterfactual of President Dewey. In what other ways would he be different, would have been different, perhaps, from the way in which President Truman behaved? Well, I think economically that they would have been slightly different, but I think that judging from their characters, they were very similar character-wise and very different character-wise, but one of the things that Dewey was really good at was getting his way. I think morally they were two really brilliant, wonderful men and men that could be trusted in the White House. I think that Dewey's skills as a prosecutor would have been very helpful during the McCarthy era. Essentially, I think that when you look at the Cold War, for example, I think that some of these things would have played out not much different than they actually did. Let's talk a little bit about the Cold War. Henry Wallace obviously lashed out at Truman for, as Wallace saw it, unnecessarily antagonizing the Soviet Union, but most Americans by 1948 were, clearly, I would say, convinced of the dangers posed by the Soviet Union. How did Truman handle the Cold War as he tried to position himself for the 1948 vote? Well, I think the word, to me, heroism is the first thing that comes up, because here you have a candidate who everybody's counting him out, a candidate who is generally speaking, looked down upon intellectually, who was not thought of as a big speaker, not thought of as a big intellect, a deep intellect the way Roosevelt was, and he's down, he's got his back against the wall, and what happens next, he saves the world. Here we are, Cold War, we're worried, the bombs are about to go off, we're about to have to send our troops abroad, people are terrified. And the Truman administration, not Truman alone, but the Truman administration comes up with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, which are these two programs that basically cast the whole future of foreign policy of the United States, extraordinarily radical thinking at this time and took a tremendous amount of convincing to get the Republicans on board, which they did. There's a tremendously dramatic moment in Dewey defeats Truman, where Truman invites Republican members of Congress and said, look, we have this radical idea, this is what we're going to do. And he starts describing the Truman Doctrine to Arthur Vandenberg, who's this very powerful Senator from Michigan, Republican, head of the Foreign Affairs Committee, stands up and says, Mr. President, if you give a speech and tell the American people what you intend to do, I'll support you. And you have to imagine how divided America was, we're headed into an election. Here Truman comes up with this radical idea of the Truman Doctrine, not Truman by himself, and the country comes together, Congress comes together, and they accomplish this, these tremendously, to some high bizarre programs that actually worked and literally probably saved the world. I don't know that Tom Dewey would have done that. Right, right. And back for a second to race relations, you mentioned this already, but tell us a little if you would about the extent to which Truman's rather remarkable behavior on the race issue sprang from his own internal convictions as opposed to political calculation. Now, maybe both were part of the way in which he was thinking about this issue, but where do you see the balance? And what did Truman believe in his core about what would eventually become known as civil rights? That's an excellent question. And one that I get some frequently, not just about race, but also Truman's position on Israel. Was he just doing this for politics or was he doing this for reasons? And if you put this stuff really and look at it really in context, they were extraordinarily big risks politically. They could have backfired just as likely as they could the other way around. Now, let me just paint a picture here of a meeting in the Oval Office that to me is really important. Truman is sitting there one day and he has Walter White come in who's head of the NAACP. I wrote a whole biography of Walter White called What Lies. I hope people read it. I think it's a good book, but there's this dramatic moment where Walter White comes into the Oval Office in the years 1946. And he describes these situations where Black soldiers who had served their country in war had come back and were brutalized in their own right here in America. So they had fought abroad for democracy and were murdered with impunity right here in the United States. And then Walter White tells this story about a guy named Isaac Woodard. Isaac Woodard had returned from overseas. He had fought in the war and he was on a bus to be reunited with his family who hadn't seen in three years. He's still in uniform. He's got a few bucks in change and he's got his discharge papers in his pocket with the mimeograph signature of Harry Truman on them. He has an argument with the bus driver. He's returning to Jim Crow South, right? So he signs everywhere. You're not allowed to use this water fountain. You're not allowed to use this bathroom if you're Black. He's returning to a place where he doesn't have the rights that are supposed to be guaranteed to him through the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence. And he's not happy.  He can no longer find work. He has no money. And this is a veteran of World War II who fought for our country. Walter White tells Truman this story and Truman literally says, we've got to do something because he hears these collective stories of Black people who fought for a country returning and being brutalized and murdered with impunity here in America. That's not democracy. Next day, the very next day, Truman writes a letter, and I have the letter, it's in the Truman Library, to Tom Clark, the Attorney General of the United States, who is from Texas, which I think is important. And he says, this can't go on. This is not democracy functioning. We have to do something about that. And from my mind, that's literally the beginning, that memorandum, the beginning of the civil rights movement from the point of view of mainstream power in the Oval Office. That's when it all starts for Truman. And why, to me, I really think that this was a moral issue. He had more to lose than he had to gain by supporting civil rights. And he went way out on a limb. You can watch it and listen to it on YouTube. His NAACP speech is very plain spoken. Yeah, and it's worth pointing out that Harry Truman came from a border state where all the political incentives were on the side of upholding the Jim Crow system, it seems to me. From a family where both of his grandparents were slave owners and his fascinatingly, he invited his mother to the White House and she refused to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom because she believed so firmly in the Confederacy and the morality behind it. So yeah. Fascinating. So Truman, it seems to me, deserves high marks for his handling, very deft handling of the race issue, probably of the Cold War as well. But at the end of the day, it seems to me, after reading your book, where you put the most emphasis in terms of explaining Harry Truman's unlikely victory in 1948, it has to do more with his personal style, the demeanor that he exuded out on the campaign trail. What sort of persona did work for Harry Truman on the campaign trail? Tell us about Give Him Hell, Harry. Yes. Okay, so one of the reasons why he was so counted out, why the odds were so far against him is because he wasn't a particularly good speaker. And it turns out when you're campaigning for the Oval Office, you have to be good in front of a microphone. And he wasn't, especially coming after you. So there was this one day where he's holding a meeting with a bunch of newspaper editors in the Oval Office. And he suddenly goes off script. And he's like, look, and he stops being the president of the United States. And he speaks as Harry, right? And there are a number of people in the room that day that kept diaries. One I can think of is David Lillianthal. Is this fascinating character who wrote in his diary? That is what will win the presidency when he stops being trying to be President Truman. And he just speaks like Harry. He connects. He's brilliant. He's amazing. We can all identify him. We want to pull for him. He's the common man. He is America. And so what we see, that sets the tone for the campaign itself. And the book is set up as like the premieres, the conventions, the campaigns, and then election night. But we see him go out. They devise this idea to create this train ride all the way across America into these tiny little towns where no president had ever spoken before and exposed people to the magic of the American presidency. People thought they would never get a chance to actually see the president of the United States. There he is. And then he speaks to them, not as the president, but as Harry. He speaks in his bathroom in the rain. He speaks to massive audiences. He speaks to people at sunrise where there's only 10 people there. And every speech he gave was annotated. We have all the speeches. We have a lot of the recordings and they are fascinating. One of my favorite parts about doing this research was something called the research division. They set up the Democratic Party. They set up a secret research office in Washington, D.C. that would come up with these fascinating facts and they would throw it in briefcases, fly it on small planes. It would land in the morning. The Truman train would come right through because remember, there's no facsimile. There's no email. There's none of this. There was one telephone on the campaign train that only worked when it was in a station and they could plug it in. So the research division came up with these note cards, fly it across the country. Truman would be able to walk out in front with a note card and say, you guys just opened a new sausage factory. Congratulations. Johnny Johnson died in the war and he was a great man. And he would be able to connect with immediately and they would sense, well, this guy actually knows something about us. And then he would just be hairy and say, look, you got a fight. You got to vote for me. If you're a farmer, you're doing great. You have to vote for me. If you're a laborer, you're doing great. The economy is looking good. Vote for me. And he becomes during the process a folk hero, an American folk hero. You see him as the campaign is going on. The crowds are getting bigger and bigger and more enthusiastic until the end. The final speeches in Boston and Cleveland and New York, these just massive crowds who have come to hear the president speak and they've come to because they've fallen in love with Harry. Whereas Dewey, by contrast, acted as though he was already president in some ways, right? I think you take him to task a little bit for making assumptions about the fact that he was the next man in the oval office and not engaging with the American public in quite such an authentic way. That's absolutely right. I think that Dewey was actually a very fine candidate. I think his strategy was completely misguided. And I think if you read the book, he would say every, even the people all around him, even before it started, they said that might be problematic. He comes up with this idea. He thinks that all he has to do is not make a mistake and he'll be elected. So he comes up with this term called unity. And he bases his entire campaign on the idea of unity. America needs to come together. We need unity. And he supports that idea through all of these platitudes and these flowery language and these beautiful speeches. He had a beautiful speaking voice. And people would walk away from his speeches and say, you know, the only problem with that speech is it was too perfect. But in reality, over the course of the campaign, Americans realized he really wasn't saying anything. And so all he was trying to do is not make a mistake and lose rather than attacking. And the campaign panicked toward the end because they started to realize that they had made a huge mistake and they realized after election night it was too late. And I suppose that language of unity was unsuccessful in part as well simply because it papered over, tried to paper over divisions within the Republican Party that were very real and obvious, particularly in the Republican wing in Congress. That's absolutely true. There wasn't unity. The whole turnip day session is something that's difficult to explain in the time. But Truman saw this. He saw the schism that there was no unity between the candidate and the 80th Congress.  But yeah. So Truman gained a lot of momentum through this very authentic persona. I have to mention one of my favorite lines in your book is when you suggest that on the Truman campaign, it was all whiskey and poker. And on the Dewey train, it was all martinis and bridge. I think that captures the different feelings that surrounded both of these champions. I appreciate you saying that so much because one of the things I really try to do is put the reader on the train. You want to feel the train. You know how much a beer costs at the confession stand. You know what's for breakfast. What's on the menu for breakfast.  There's no shower. It's hot. It's packed in there day after day. So hopefully, but I love that line. Yeah, those are wonderful passages. So you write a little further in the book that Truman's victory was the most shocking electoral upset in the history of the United States. A big question that hangs so heavy is why did the American media and the political elites, ordinary Americans, perhaps get it so wrong? What did they miss that we can see now in retrospect? Everybody had a different opinion about that, which to me is telling. Okay. So Truman, he thought big city labor really came out for me. Do we thought that the farmers of America who typically voted Republican abandoned him? And one of the reasons for that is because Truman was a farmer. You know, as we know, he was I think 31 years old farming and obscurity never expected to leave Jackson County, Missouri.  That's one of the things that makes the story so unbelievable to me at least. So Truman thinks that big city labor came out big for him. Do we think that the farmers abandoned him? All the pollsters who got it wrong slinked away and none of them could really answer. None of them could get, and I certainly address it because it's such a glaring episode. How could they have gotten it so wrong? None of them really had a good reason. And they had shown in the past that they were quite successful. So we don't know. My personal opinion, and we can't prove this, but I do think, well, there's two things. One is I think Truman's campaign was just tremendously, tremendously successful. That's simple. Another thing is I think there were a few GOP voters who didn't turn out because they had been told for months and months that the election was a foregone conclusion. Right. So some of the answers lie more on the Republican side, weaknesses and problems with the Dewey campaign, as you've mentioned. Yeah, Dewey did not run a very effective campaign and ran an extraordinarily effective campaign. And that probably has something to do with why it turned out the way it did. One of the most dramatic moments to me is election night itself. I spent a lot of time in the book just on election night. I wanted readers to really feel what that just tremendous heroic victory felt like, but also what it felt like to be on the other side of that. So I do go deep into like, what do he was thinking? What he was feeling? What he was doing? Where was he when? What was he thinking? What was he doing? What was he writing down? What was he saying? You know, in his wife seeing his wife in tears. Pretty hard tough. And by the way, what became of Dewey after that election? He continued to be a successful governor and then he retired quietly. One of the things that I really speaks to his character is that when Truman sent troops into Korea with the United Nations forces without the approval of Congress, he got a letter from Tom Dewey saying, I would have done the same thing. When there was an assassination attempt and one of the secret servicemen was killed at the Blair House when a Truman secret servicemen was killed. Truman got a nice note from Tom Dewey saying, so sorry to hear of this loss and so thank you for moving your family are okay. Let me by the way remind our audience to please put questions in the chat and I'll turn the floor over to Sandy Cress in just a a couple more minutes here so that we can turn to that part of the program. But AJ, before I let you go, I'd love to ask you a couple of questions by way of kind of tying the 1948 race to our current moment in politics. Are there any lessons or implications of the 1948 election that candidates running for office today would do well to bear in mind? Two things. Make sure you get people out to vote. It's that simple. I mean, that's a cliche. We know it, but don't think you're going to win. Make sure if you have any opinion, make sure you get people out to vote. If you have feelings or you have the thoughts, vote. The other thing is I don't think enough can be said about a politician on the campaign trail really connecting with people. This is something that Truman did extraordinarily well. Listen, we have a very, very different in certain ways and I think problematic media landscape right now and the way elections exist in our society are very different in one respect. In 1948, you probably got most of your news from a local newspaper. That local newspaper would have put political news in the context of all the things that are going on that are really affecting your day-to-day life. A new school is opening. Whatever it is your local news is, that is important to you. The highway is going to be closed. Government is going to invest in a road, new highway through your town, whatever it is that's local news. In 1948, all through in my childhood, I grew up reading the North Star Ledger every day and political news was in the context of more broader local news and things that were affecting my daily life and put things in perspective in certain ways. The death of local news I think has completely changed the media landscape and social media has turbocharged all of the forces that are putting all the news making and the campaigning within the hands of a very few very powerful people. All these silos today. So most people, a lot of people out there, you're getting your news from Fox News or you're getting your news from CNN and MSNBC. That makes those media channels tremendously, tremendously powerful. You watch Fox News. I'm sorry I'm droning on, but this is important. If you watch Fox News, you're going to say, the Biden administration, we're going to do everything we can to sink it, the future of our country to stake. If you watch NBC, you're going to think we have to do everything we can to support the Democrats and make sure Trump doesn't become president. The future is of our country is at stake. And there's no middle ground. And those media channels and the people who run them make a lot of money by keeping us really, really inflamed so we come back and get more. So in a way, it's very different now. And I think more dangerous now than it was then. So interesting. And let me ask you about parallels between the 1948 election and the 2016 election. In fact, you say in your preface that 1948 was the most astonishing upset in American political history until 2016, or maybe impossibly until 2016. I forget exactly how you phrase that. But talk about the parallels, if any, between those two races. Well, I mean, they're ample. And one of them is on page one, a rise of populism, economies that are strong with low unemployment, high inflation, but also Russian conspiracy, which you can compare to. At that time, we had the Red Scare. And this time, we had the Russian conspiracy. My favorite document that I found was right here in the Dewey papers. I always keep it here. If you have to go back to what people were talking about in 2016, this is a campaign document from the GOP in 1948. And it says, the United States of America is fair game for Moscow and has been for years. And as far as anyone is willing to see, the year 1948 will be the year in which Soviet Russia will do everything in its power full to influence the election here. So look, you have potential Russian conspiracy. You have the whole idea of conspiracy theories. At that time, we call it, you know, we call it the deep state now. At that time, it was the Red Scare and Alger Hiss, a wide rise of white nationalism, huge rise in Ku Klux Klan activity. And, you know, we saw that at Charlottesville. Voting rights, voting rights, particularly for black people, tremendously important. You know, 1944, the Supreme Court decided Smith versus All Right. So that said, basically, it's illegal to say black people can't vote. So in the southern states, that was really important. We're still fighting these arguments over voting rights. Indeed. And let me let me ask you one final question about the kind of long term significance of the 1948 election. We've touched on this, but let me ask you for a little bit more elaboration. You can tell the story, it seems to me, of the 48 election where that is a seminal moment in the reorient, the political reorientation of the American South. You have the Strom Thurman campaign. You have the Democratic Party candidate, Harry Truman, really struggling to maintain that white support in the American South. How would you tell that story of the development of the Democratic Party and the place of 1948 in these broad currents that, of course, have had enormous consequences in more recent decades? Well, I guess one way to answer that is that we're still experiencing it. Like everything we're happening in, these power struggles in 1948, they were there for a reason because they're built into the fabric of our country. There is no country like America out there. There's no country that is made up of people from Scotland, from Germany, from Poland, who are black, who are white, or Latino. There's no country quite like ours, which makes it a very difficult country to govern and very tricky process to elect our leaders democratically.  And that is this. What's good for an individual can't be what's the best thing for the entire society. What's best for the entire society can't be the best thing for every individual within it. So democracy, I think, American democracy, the way it's been devised, is probably the greatest system that humanity has come up with in an attempt to morally and systematically address that problem that can never be solved. And so basically what you saw in 1948, we're still confronting that same situation. And we're still confronting leaders who are telling us that the future of our society is at stake if we don't elect them to office. Well, AJ Baim, thank you so much for this fascinating conversation. As you said, we could go on for hours and hours. And I wish we had that opportunity. But I'm going to turn things over to Sandy Kress, but not without first saying congratulations on Dewey Defeat-Strueman, the 1940 election, and the battle for America's soul, a wonderful read. Thank you so much for spending time with me. Thank you, Mark. I really appreciate it. Excellent questions. Wonderful to talk with you and thank you. AJ, it's so good to be with you. I want to express my own gratitude to you. It's just been a fascinating experience for me to follow what you've written in this and other books and your answers to Mark's questions. I want to challenge you a little bit on one of them, just so that we can create through more light than heat, maybe an avenue to truth on a particular issue. But before I ask that question, let me ask this. What part did the 80th Congress, that is the Republican-dominated Congress in 1948, and what they did and what they didn't do, what part did they play in the development of the campaign and the outcome of the election? Well, I guess one way to address that is that you have a number of opposing forces. You have the schism between Dewey and the 80th Congress that we've already discussed. But I think one way of addressing the question is to talk a little bit about Taft-Hartley. When Taft-Hartley passed Congress over Truman's veto, a lot of Democrats were so crestfallen, they thought this was just the end of the world. What Taft-Hartley was, basically, it was a law that gave power to corporations to dictate certain rules about how labor unions could strike and could not strike. This was very important at the time, because particularly after World War II, we had this movement into a peacetime economy. A lot of people thought that we were going to run into another Great Depression. That was a very real fear at the time. So labor strikes were really problematic. Taft-Hartley was created by conservatives in the 80th Congress to address this issue. Truman was virulently opposed to it, and that set those two opposing forces against each other. That's why during the campaign, Truman didn't really campaign against Dewey, because they agreed on a lot of stuff. He really campaigned against the do-nothing 80th Congress. So hopefully that addresses your question. Well, it does. And I think you might add to that the various actions that were taken in that Congress on subsidies for farmers. Truman, I think what you're saying, and I think it's absolutely right, is Truman really ran against that Congress. And one of the documents, I don't want to get you to focus on a little bit. And then I've got several questions from the audience, but I want you to talk a little bit about Clark Clifford's remarkable campaign plan, which he presented to Truman. And I want to just sort of, I love the way you tell stories. I have a vision of a different story where, and you might just say this is not true or wouldn't be true, but I can see Clifford and Truman sitting, having a drink maybe in the Oval Office, looking at this plan they put together and saying, if we implement this plan, and certainly more so during the course of the year, if we implement this plan, this election is going to be a lot closer than people think. Clifford recommended action to help labor, Taft-Hartley, farmers on these subsidies to farmers, civil rights. In fact, he made a major case for Truman being very aggressive on civil rights. And the results from the election were just phenomenal. Truman did better with African Americans than Roosevelt did. And then on the Cold War, to stay the course and let Wallace do what he did, and Wallace would go off in another direction, the voters would stay with him. Clifford made the case that if he was strong on all those things in the campaign, the election would be close and he probably would win. So how do you deal with that possibility? That they were optimistic about, it was going to be a close election. It was going to be difficult, but that if they followed through on that plan, they had a path to victory. It's an excellent point, and that document is fascinating to read. It's long, and Truman actually took that document, he kept it in his desk drawer so that he would always be able to refer to it because he thought it was such a brilliant plan. And it really had to address nuances within the party that hadn't been addressed in generations because for generations, the Democratic Party could be depended to be what it was envisioned at that time. But during the post-war world, everything was different. It was all new. They had to recreate this identity. And so that document was politically what set Truman on his road to victory. The rest of it, he did himself through sheer brilliance of campaigning and connecting with people. But that document is actually available. You can read it. It's on the Truman website, and if I can find it right now, I put it in the chat group so people can see it. But I encourage everybody to read it because it's so fascinating. It really puts into perspective the identity crisis that these major political parties were having coming out of World War II. And in this specific instance, through the brilliant minds of a certain people, another guy was named ROE, their idea of what the Democratic Party should become in the future. And it worked. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. And I do encourage people to read it. I've read campaign plans of several presidents going way back. And it's one of the finest and most effective I've seen. And I think that, plus Truman's incredible energy and effectiveness as a candidate, I think you're right. It made for this to be a close election and maybe a winning election from the beginning. Ask the civil rights. Why didn't Dewey push civil rights more? Is a question we get from Marsha? I think he did. But he did support civil rights and he did support Israel. The thing, but the answer to the question is Truman, I mean, Dewey really didn't go out on a limb on anything because he thought for two reasons. One is if he went out on a limb on anything, he would be required once he became president to back up those words or he'd be criticized. So he really didn't go out on a limb on anything. But he did support civil rights and that was, the GOP had no problem doing so because they didn't really have any voting route in those southern states. So they paid no cost for supporting civil rights the way Truman did. So Dewey did support Truman civil rights during that time, but he didn't really talk about it because he didn't think he had to. I got you. Do you think that the extra turnout in the black districts in the north and midwest pushed Truman across to victory? What role, I know you talk about this in the White Book, but Walter White Book, to what extent did that make the difference in pushing them across in states that ended up being fairly close? I think that the statistic analysis I don't have at my fingertips, but we know in certain centers that he got the best turnout, even greater than Roosevelt. And you have to remember that up until 1932, it would have been a sin for any black person in America to vote for the Democratic Party because of the American South. They would have voted for the Republicans because of Abraham Lincoln. But we saw that change, and that change really happened under FDR, under the New Deal. New Deal policy had a lot to do with it, but in fact, the FDR sort of courted that vote as it hadn't been done before. So 1936 was the first time you saw the black vote go to the Democratic Party in generations, if not ever. And the Democratic Party, they feared, and that's part of the Clifford in that Clifford document. They feared that the black vote was going to go back to the Republicans again in 1948 if Truman didn't do something about it. Talk a little bit. Annie asked, what were some of the major civil rights steps that Truman took as president? Well, the obvious is that he desegregated the military. And how that happened is very dramatic in the book. It was very, it was absolute surprise. Nobody expected it to happen. And there were two executive orders that came out on the same day, and it was absolute bewildering shock to the country when that happened. Of course, we know the actual desegregation of the military took a long time. But from the terms of federal power, that was instant. But the other thing was just to say that, as I said earlier, that he addressed the NAACP that had never happened, specifically that he went out on a limb to prosecute the white police officer who blinded Isaac Woodard. I mentioned Isaac Woodard before, the idea that a white police officer in the South would be brought to justice for beating up a black man in 1948. That shocked America. And that was the Truman administration. Jim asked, what role did the Berlin airlift play in the election? And I want to sort of expand upon that to what happened in Europe during these years that may have made it more difficult for Wallace to have any sort of constituency beyond that, which he had sewn up just being who he was. But were there things that happened in Europe that made it hard for a person that far on the left with those views about the Soviet Union and so forth to win a bigger share of the electorate? Absolutely. So you have to imagine, and I talk about obviously in the book a lot, you have to imagine the open nerve that this country was at that time, because we feared we were going to have a massive war with the Soviets. And when the Berlin airlift started, you have to imagine we're exploding nuclear weapons in the Bikini Islands. During the election season, we're having nuclear tests. And this was in the bomb was pretty new. And the Soviets didn't have the bomb, but any day now they were going to get it. So here we are setting off nuclear devices and we're nose to nose. What happened in Berlin is technically pretty difficult to explain in a short period of time. But essentially, we split up Germany, we had a region, Soviets had a region, and the city of Berlin was entirely within the Soviet region. So Berlin was an island within the Soviet region of Germany, and they blockaded it. So we had no way to get in and out and no way to feed our people there, no way to get them cold and in the winter. And really, this is where we were nose to nose with the Soviets on the very brink of World War Two. Now that made people obviously terrified that we were going to have war and it really increased the anti-communist sensibility in America and really made the Soviets lonesome in American eyes that set the tone for generations throughout the Cold War at that time. So for someone like Wallace, who was outwardly accused of being a communist, he wasn't, but of using the support of the Communist Party to further his campaign, he was and he admitted it, accepting money from the Communist Party. He did and he admitted it. That was upsetting to a lot of people. What's surprising to me really was still the huge support he had in places like New York and LA, where he really enjoyed a passionate follow-up. And Clark Clifford seemed in that paper to be more worried about him than Thurmond or really, he was worried about Wallace taking votes away that Thurmond needed to win and he focuses a lot on this. Do you want to talk any more about, could you talk any more about steps Thurmond took? Was he worried about Wallace and what else did he do to deal with that anxiety? Absolutely, he was worried. I mean, if you can imagine right now, if you were to think Joe Biden is the candidate for the Democratic Party and a huge wellspring of his support on the left just suddenly disappears, not only disappears, but in an angry, angry way. And then the same thing happens on the right of his party, disappears in an angry sort of way. You'd think like this candidate is sunk. And that's what happened to Thurmond in 1948.  No, please, please. I think that the Thurmond, they were really unnerved to see particularly early in the camp because Wallace began his campaign before everybody else.  And he had a lot of star power, a lot of Hollywood star power, a lot of famous novelists, a lot of artists who had public personas really reaching out to support and a lot of black Americans who are powerful like W. D. B. Du Bois. He supported Frank Lloyd Wright. You know, all of these people came out of the woodwork to really support Henry Wallace. There, talk about the role. Thurmond had a business partner and a very good friend in Missouri who was Jewish. And there's been a lot said, a lot told about this fella and the friendship and the role that that friendship may have played in encouraging Thurmond to be supportive of Israel. Talk a little bit about that fellow and whether that's true, whether that friendship and whether those conversations made a difference. Eddie Jacobson was a war buddy of Thurmond's during the Great War. And after that war, they started a business called Thurmond and Jacobson and it failed. But Jacobson was a Jewish man who, you know, they weren't a lot of Jews in Kansas City at that time as you can imagine. And this is one of those things that makes this story just so stranger than fiction is that when Thurmond was faced, let me just paint this picture really quickly. The idea like the president of the United States facing, you know, essentially what we're seeing in Israel is a result of what was happening there. The president of the United States is seeing this swell of passion and support for the idea that the Jewish people should have a homeland. The Jewish people had been told through the something called the Balfour Declaration, of course, very complicated for years and years and years that they were going to get to have a homeland. And then you've got World War II where six million Jews are killed. And, you know, you can imagine when those camps were liberated, playing out in the press, the effect that that had in a society, it was shocking. As you can imagine, the photographs, the realization of the depth of evil and these people who had paid this price. And so there was a lot of support for refugees from Europe getting to have their homeland in Palestine. The only problem is there was a bunch of people already living there. And very dramatic scenes where Truman is faced with making decision whether to support a Jewish homeland in his own State Department and furious, very impassioned words saying, you cannot do this. There's two reasons why we're going to have a war with the Soviet Union. 1948 happened to be the first year that we imported more oil, most of it from the Middle East, from those Palestinian tribes. They were tribes at the time. Then we were making it hard. We were going to need that oil. And the State Department is saying, if you upset the Palestinian tribes down there where we're getting our oil, we're going to have a war with the Soviets and we're going to lose because we're not going to be able to fight because modern mechanized warfare depends on oil. The other thing is, the State Department is saying, President Truman, you cannot support the Jewish people because the only way the state of Israel is going to survive is if we support it with military troops. And after World War II, and a lot of Americans who can remember World War I, American voters, the American people are not going to support that. And one of the people who influenced Truman was Edgar Jacobson. Thank you for that. Let me ask you my final question. And it has to do with polling. I've looked at these polls on this election and it appears that Truman was catching up a little bit in the last polls that were taken in late August. But there were no polls in complete contrast to today where you have polls all the way up to the last day. There were no polls in the last few weeks. And I guess my question to you is this, that race that looked a little bit to me like the race in 1968, where Humphrey almost caught up with Nixon. In fact, he was furiously coming up largely because the economy was improving. And that was the case in 48. Some, I can't remember which article I read, but Americans put $12 billion in their bank accounts in 48 as opposed to $8.8 billion in 47. And the GNP improved a little bit a lot as well. So the economy was improving. Is it your sense that it had there been polls in October up till the first week in November? Would they have shown Truman closing the gap and maybe even being even? I think if there were accurate polls, they would have to. And I can say two things to support that.  Cleveland is one of the great speeches that Truman made where I believe that's the one where, if I'm remembering correctly, he really takes the pollsters to task. And he says, you newspaper writers have got it all wrong. You're employed by people who don't want me to get elected. I'm going to get elected and you're wrong. But you see Cleveland and Boston and then down through all through these New England villages and then where he makes the speech at Madison Square Garden to finish it up, the crowds were just massive and they were tremendously enthusiastic. And you'd have to guess that if the polls were happening and they were accurate, that would have been reflected. And the other thing is we know how it turned out statistic. You can, you know, he won the popular vote and he won the Electoral College. And so if the polls and, you know, I've gone out the day before, you'd have to assume that that would have been reflected in those polls. But as you know, and we'll close with this, they, if you had the vote been a little bit different in a couple of states, a few thousand votes here or there, as much as he won the Electoral College by a lot, the race could have gone the other way. AJ, I just thoroughly enjoyed being a part of this. I thank you on behalf of the audience who asked some fine questions that we got to many of them, but not all of them. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for what you've brought to us. It's been my honor. Thank you for having me. Thank you, Sandy. And thank you, AJ, Bame especially. I, and Mark, it was a splendid afternoon. I also want to acknowledge the endorsement of our program again this year by Humanities Texas, as programs advance education by seeking to improve the quality of classroom teaching, supporting libraries and museums and creating opportunities for lifelong learning. Many of us in the audience are members of UT Ollie or friends of the LBJ Library or perhaps both. If not, please check us out. Both organizations offer a wide variety of outstanding in-virtual and in-person in virtual programs. I thank all of you for tuning in. We will be back next Thursday, January 18 at 4 p.m. for a conversation with Luke Decker, Arthur of the Year That Broke Politics, Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968. And this is a story that will be of special interest to those of us who have longed around in the long shadow of the towering Lyndon B. Johnson. I hope to see you next time. Thank you, and goodbye.