Prior to joining Truman on what he called a “fast-moving
road carnival,” Rovere, who also traveled for a time on Dewey’s campaign train,
had taken a break from The New Yorker to
write a series of articles for Harper’s magazine
on the leading presidential contenders for 1948, including “the beleaguered”
Truman, as well as Republican senators Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenberg and
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose “party affiliation, if any, was unknown,
though both Democrats and Republicans were busy courting him,” recalled Rovere.
Rovere’s editor at The
New Yorker, William Shawn, had grudgingly agreed that upon his return to
the magazine he could spend time on the presidential campaign trains and report
on life aboard them. “The magazine had never done anything of the sort before,
and, although I had written quite a bit about national politics, neither had
I,” Rovere recalled in his autobiography, Final
Reports. In September he climbed aboard the Truman train at Washington,
DC’s Union Station, staying on it as it made its way to Los Angeles, where he
picked up the Dewey train, disembarking in Missoula, Montana, and taking the Olympian
Hiawatha Milwaukee line for his home in Dutchess County, New York. “This turned
out to be the last cross-country railroad tour of presidential candidates,” he
noted. Calling his experience “a supreme adventure,” Rovere produced two
articles for The New Yorker about
what he observed under the title “Letter From a Campaign Train,” a precursor to
the “Letter from Washington” department he would go on to write for the
magazine from December 1948 until his death on November 23, 1979.
Today, more than seventy years after the 1948 election, Rovere’s
pieces offer a tantalizing snapshot of old-fashioned presidential politics, and
insight into how each candidate approached the American voter in a campaign
that produced one of the most shocking outcomes in the country’s political
history. It was a time when the railroads were still “proud and competitive,”
Rovere recalled, showing off the best of their equipment and service personnel
on the campaign trains. And while, from a politician’s viewpoint, little was
lost when the candidates switched to travel by airplane and getting their
message across via television, from “a writer’s point of view,” observed
Rovere, “much was lost.”
Rovere remembered there being about fifty reporters during
his time on the Truman train, while approximately eighty traveled with Dewey.
“Between stops, on the long hauls over the plains, the prairies, and the
mountains, we had ample time to converse with the politicians and ample time to
write,” he said. Rovere had a compartment to himself (Car 1, Compartment 1), and kept the upper
berth down for sleeping and the occasional nap. “Hotels are more comfortable
and offer better facilities for bathing and the like, but this seemed to me a
civilized, and certainly a leisurely, way of getting on with the business at
hand,” he said.
The two campaigns were polar opposites—with Truman’s effort “an old-fashioned and rather sloppy operation, with schedules often fouled up and plans often mislaid,” Rovere remembered. Life could be rugged traveling with the president. He wrote:
The two campaigns were polar opposites—with Truman’s effort “an old-fashioned and rather sloppy operation, with schedules often fouled up and plans often mislaid,” Rovere remembered. Life could be rugged traveling with the president. He wrote:
"If you
wanted anything laundered, you did it yourself, in a Pullman basin. When you detrained anywhere for an overnight
stay, it was every man for himself. You carried your duffel [bag] and scrabbled for your food. If a man was such a
slave to duty that he felt obliged to
hear what the President said in his back-platform address, he had to climb down off the train, run to the rear
end, mingle with the crowd, and listen. Often, this was a hazardous undertaking, for the President was given to speaking
late at night to crowds precariously
assembled on sections of roadbed built up fifteen or twenty feet above the surrounding land. The natives knew the
contours of the ground, but the reporters did not, and more than one of them tumbled down a cindery embankment."
None of those inconveniences troubled the reporters on Dewey's train. On overnight stops the Dewey organization a reporter's luggage would magically vanish from his berth, Rovere noted, and could be found waiting for him in the hotel room he had been assigned. "Good Republican caterers have hot coffee and thick roast-beef sandwiches waiting in the press rooms at every stopover," he remembered. "Laundries are alerted a thousand miles ahead to be ready to turn out heavy loads in a few hours." Also, reporters had no need to attempt the dangerous task of actually leaving the train to hear Dewey's speeches, as most of the train had been wired for sound and the candidate's words were carried for all to hear over the public-address system.
None of those inconveniences troubled the reporters on Dewey's train. On overnight stops the Dewey organization a reporter's luggage would magically vanish from his berth, Rovere noted, and could be found waiting for him in the hotel room he had been assigned. "Good Republican caterers have hot coffee and thick roast-beef sandwiches waiting in the press rooms at every stopover," he remembered. "Laundries are alerted a thousand miles ahead to be ready to turn out heavy loads in a few hours." Also, reporters had no need to attempt the dangerous task of actually leaving the train to hear Dewey's speeches, as most of the train had been wired for sound and the candidate's words were carried for all to hear over the public-address system.
The Republican train (“like those in Mussolini’s Italy,”
Rovere slyly said) ran on schedule, but he found its efficiency monotonous. Although
he tried to be nonpolitical in his dispatches, Rovere enjoyed life aboard the
president’s train “more than life on his rival’s.” (Life in the Truman train
was like life in the back rooms at a local Democratic district headquarters, Rovere
noted, while life on with Dewey was like life in a Greenwich, Connecticut,
country club.) The reporter enjoyed the Truman train’s conviviality—something
missing when he traveled with Dewey. Truman’s train had a twenty-four-hour
poker game (seven-card stud) going on in the staff car, with the president
sitting in from time to time, while the favorite card game on Dewey’s train was
bridge. The drink of choice for the Truman train, when Rovere was on it, was
the Kentucky bourbon highball, “before, during, and after meals.” Martinis and
Manhattans were in vogue on Dewey’s train.
Truman’s train would make sometimes make stops at fourteen
to fifteen different places, often staying for no more than ten or twelve
minutes and occasionally in and out of a town within five or six minutes.
“Anywhere between twenty-five and several hundred people would gather behind
the President’s car (the armored Ferdinand Magellan, from which Roosevelt had
often campaigned), and the President—a trim, perky figure materializing on the
back platform through a parted blue-velvet curtain—would make a short speech,
working in some allusions to local industries, problems, and personalities,”
noted Rovere. From time to time Truman stumbled giving his prepared remarks,
talking about “Republican mothbags” when he supposed to be saying “Republican
mossbacks.”
As a rule, Rovere believed that Truman played better in
small towns than in large ones, and doing better with off-the-cuff remarks
rather than prepared speeches. “When he speaks without a script . . . he
inflicts considerable damage on the English language, but anything he does on
his own is not one-tenth as deplorable as what his ghostwriters do for him,”
said Rovere. The journalist discovered that Truman had a remarkable and detailed
knowledge of the small towns he visited. “The impression one gets is that he
has acquired, in his sixty-four years, a spoonful or two of information about
every community west of the Mississippi [River] and about a good many of those
east of it,” Rovere said.
The crowds that gathered to greet the president, both in
small and large towns, responded to his speeches with respect, but little
enthusiasm, according to Rovere’s reports. Nothing the reporter heard Truman
say between Washington, DC, and Los Angeles drew “more than a spot of polite
applause. Nobody stomps, shouts, or whistles for Truman.” The decibel count for
Truman’s remarks were about the same as it would be, Rovere wrote, for “a
missionary who has just delivered a mildly encourage report on the inroads
being made against heathenism in Northern Rhodesia.”
The most effective part of Truman’s train campaign came when
he introduced his daughter, Margaret, to the crowd. “Margaret’s entrance comes
closer than anything else to bringing down the house,” Rovere said. With the
festivities ended, a railroad official—usually a vice president of the line,
who sat at a telephone in the car ahead of the president’s, called the
locomotive engineer, fifteen cars, or a quarter of a mile down the track, and
told him to get under way. As the train pulled away, the Truman family would
wave goodbye to the crowd. Traveling with the president, Rovere, unaware as yet
of what would happen on election day 1948, had the feeling that Americans who saw
Truman and heard him “at his best would be willing to give him just about
anything he wants except the Presidency.”
Rovere ended his report from the Dewey train with comments
from a political adviser who had traveled with one of the trains (he did not
say which one) questioning if such efforts changed the minds of any voters.
“Hell’s bells!” Rovere quoted the adviser. “Everybody knows that we don’t go
through all this business to win friends or influence people. We go through it
to keep the friends we’ve already got.” The best way to keep a party
organization together, the adviser told the reporter, is “to have the big men
in the party get out and say nice things to the little men. I don’t care which
party it is. . . . If you think party organizations are not a good and
necessary thing in a democracy, then you can write all this off as a lot of
nonsense. If you think they’re important, then you can’t deny the usefulness of
these trips.” Stated, in those terms, Rovere noted, the "question is a weighty one."
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