Flashback: Dewey-Stassen Debate, 1948

“To outlaw the communist party would be recognized everyplace on earth as a surrender by the great United States, to the methods of totalitarianism. Stripped to its naked essentials, this is nothing but the methods of Hitler and Stalin. It is thought control borrowed from the Japanese war leadership. It's an attempt to beat down ideas with a club.”—New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, May 17, 1948, in the first live electronic media debate, in which he and his opponent, former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen faced off on a single issue: “Should the American Communist Party be banned?”

Fighting off a nasty cold and pressed by work obligations, I blogged less extensively than I would have liked a few weeks ago. One event slipped through the cracks then—the Dewey-Stassen debate just before the Oregon GOP Presidential primary. 

I didn't want to forget it, however. It deserves more attention than it has received this year, both for what it represented in American electoral history and as a possible turning point in the Cold War.

The debate is important for another reason: it featured two rivals whose images not long thereafter became frozen in stereotypes: Dewey, the cold "Man on the Wedding Cake" who lost a race he should have won handily against Harry S. Truman, and Stassen, the shameless, clueless, perennial Presidential sweepstakes loser. 

At the time of their clash, however, these men were viewed as credible candidates, even Presidential timber.

In the masterly historical thriller Hour of the Cat, Peter Quinn depicts Dewey as a kind of proto-Guiliani: bruising and charm-challenged. That characterization is, I’d have to say, inarguable. But in the following episode, at least, he displayed another side to his character that doesn’t get enough recognition.

Formerly a prosecutor who, like Guiliani more recently, parlayed indictments of underworld figures into a political career, Dewey soon contracted the New York Governor's Disease: the sudden itch to raise his sights to the highest office in the land. (I'm indebted for the identification of the disease's symptoms, though not its name, to Peter Quinn.) 

He was considered the odds-on favorite after having won his battle stripes as FDR's last Presidential rival, and had compiled a respected record in Albany.

Called the nation's "boy governor" after winning the Minnesota gubernatorial race in 1939, then re-elected twice, Stasssen joined the Navy in 1943, eventually becoming chief of staff for Admiral William F. Halsey. He served with distinction as part of the American delegation to the first UN Conference at San Francisco, where he not only helped write the UN Charter but was voted the most effective delegate. In the early going of the 1948 Presidential election, he pulled off several upset victories over Dewey, with polls indicating he could beat Harry Truman in a head-to-head contest.

But, with Dewey pulling out all the stops in the run-up to the Oregon primary, the Midwesterner made a crucial error by challenging the New Yorker to a debate. 

Unlike other debates before and since, this one was confined to a single topic of all-too-real importance: the constitutional question of whether Communism should be outlawed. Stassen took the "pro" position; Dewey, the "con."

The debate was broadcast on the KEX-ABC radio station in Portland. No precise count exists on the number of listeners, but with 900 audio stations nationwide carrying the debate, the estimates ranged from 40 to 90 million people. Telephone operators claimed later that long-distance calls dropped by 25% during the broadcast.

Dewey’s opening statement packed the kind of roundhouse punch that might leave its recipient technically standing, but awfully woozy. Listeners couldn't see Stassen's lack of comfort, the way that TV viewers witnessed Richard Nixon sweating in his first debate in 1960 with John F. Kennedy, but his shaky tone gave the game away.

Why did Stassen perform so badly? Admittedly, Dewey was a skillful prosecutor used to making cogent statements to audiences. But I think Stassen might have, in his heart of hearts, found this cause not to his liking.

Remember that Stassen was considered the heir apparent of the Theodore Roosevelt brand of progressivism. During the campaign, he advocated federal funds for housing, limited regulation of labor, international cooperation, and adjustment of federal taxes and spending to prevent boom-or-bust swings in the economy. As leader of the American Baptist Convention, he would join the civil rights March on Washington in August 1963.

In other words, Stassen’s stance in this debate was not really characteristic of most of the rest of his career. You have to wonder if he felt he needed to placate what he viewed as the mainstream in his party at the time. (After all, he must have thought, he’d not only knock out Dewey but even outpoint the conservative wing’s favorite, Senator Robert Taft.)

Perhaps because the contest involved a pair of losers—Dewey, the two-time Presidential loser, and Stassen, the uber-loser of them all (running not only for President—nine times!—but also governor of Minnesota and Pennsylvania)—this event has been mostly ignored.

One publication that, to its credit, did not neglect the event was Esquire Magazine, which, in the 1980s, in a monster retrospective issue that I can no longer locate, included an article on the debate.

Camelot chronicler Arthur Schlesinger also took notice. In an interview with The New York Times in 2000, the venerable historian agreed with columnist Walter Lippmann’s remark that if Dewey had beaten Truman, there’d have been no Joe McCarthy.

“Dewey wasn't a bad fellow,” Schlesinger observed. “He was rather enlightened….Although a Republican, Dewey was not a reactionary. And had he won, the politics of revenge which played a large role in the McCarthy years might have subsided.”

The 19th-century historian George Bancroft, I read somewhere once, voted Democratic on every page. The same might also be said of Schlesinger, whose reputation was made with accounts of the Jackson and FDR Presidencies, even before he became the court historian of the Kennedys.

There’s a certain brand of historian who doesn’t have a nice thing to say about a Republican until he’s dead. Sean Wilentz, a longtime defender of the Clintons, is one such individual, offering, in The Age of Reagan, some surprisingly kind words about how the latter transformed his party and the nation. 

(My own take on The Gipper: He was manifestly right about the intrinsic evil of the Soviet regime, but his part in its downfall has been exaggerated by his partisans, and the economic gains made during his Presidency would not be so fondly recalled now had not successor George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton reduced his jaw-breakingly-large deficit.)

It does make you wonder about why such historians can’t be a bit more objective and nuanced while the objects of their retrospective upgrading are still in office, or, at least, alive to appreciate it. But let’s let that pass and accept the spirit of charity that has belatedly overtaken them.

Let’s consider Schlesinger’s proposition about Dewey for a second. How well does it hold up? And what did Dewey’s triumph over Stassen in Oregon accomplish?

* It gave the upper hand to the internationalist wing of the GOP over the isolationist faction. Both Dewey and Stassen appealed to elements of this same group, particularly in their reactions to the UN and the Marshall Plan. But Dewey’s victory in the debate relegated to the sidelines the Taft isolationist element that would have most favored a ban on Communism. (Taft would try again for President in 1952, only to lose to Ike.) The internationalists would remain ascendant until the Goldwater debacle in 1964, ensuring that the GOP, like the Democrats, would favor united action of the West against Communism.

* It demonstrated that Americans need not be stampeded into running roughshod over civil liberties. Though the Korean War and the Rosenberg arrests for espionage were still two years away, Dewey still had to face a decidedly unfavorable time for taking his position against the ban. The Iron Curtain had fallen over Eastern Europe, and Stalin’s grip on the region would tighten further that year as he attempted to cut off Berlin from the West and engineer a power grab in Czechoslovakia. Film studios were doing everything they could to distance themselves from the “Hollywood Ten” screenwriters and directors who refused to answer questions on Capitol Hill about their Communist associations. In that context, the format, allowing for Dewey to frame a countervailing argument over 20 minutes, represented a whole different world from today’s, which allow slittle better than a string of sound bites. To its credit, the Republican electorate accepted Dewey's reasoning.

* The contention that there would be no McCarthyism, however, is harder to sustain. Lippmann and Schlesinger were implicitly arguing that McCarthy would have found it much more difficult to defy a President from his own party than a Democrat. This was only true to an extent, however, as can be seen in McCarthy’s disastrous decision to investigate the Army—the institution at the heart of President Eisenhower’s career.

Moreover, some of Dewey’s own associates—and presumptive appointees—indicated, in their careers, that the governor would not have acted like a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union. 

(Note to ACLU lovers: As journalist Jessica Mitford wrote in A Fine Old Conflict (1977), that organization “instituted its own loyalty purge excluding from membership those suspected of harbouring subversive ideas.”) 

John Foster Dulles’ policy of “brinksmanship” toward the U.S.S.R. continued to fan the Red Scare. Most surprising is Curt Gentry’s argument, in J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, that Dewey won behind-the-scenes support from the FBI Director in the race against Truman with the promise of an appointment as Attorney-General.

Quote of the Day (Heraclitus, on Stupidity)

“Stupidity is better kept a secret than displayed.”— Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535 BC–475 BC), Fragments

The attached image of Heraclitus was created by Dutch baroque painter Johannes Moreelse (1603-1634).

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on How Information Is ‘Like a Bottle of Fine Wine’)

Tom Wambsgans [played by Matthew Macfadyen] [to protégé “Cousin Greg”]: “Information, Greg. It's like a bottle of fine wine. You store it, you hoard it, you save it for a special occasion and then you smash someone's face with it.” —Succession, Season 4, Episode 8, “America Decides,” original air date May 14, 2023, teleplay by Jesse Armstrong, directed by Andrij Parekh

Both the Trump and Harris camps are hoping that the opposition research they’ve compiled will be uncorked for tomorrow night’s Presidential debate in the—ahem—vigorous way that Tom Wambsgans describes.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Two Towers,’ With a Line Made for Use Tomorrow Night)

Gandalf [played by Ian McKellen] [to Grima Wormtongue]: “Be silent. Keep your forked tongue behind your teeth. I did not pass through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a witless worm.”—The Two Towers [Part Two of The Lord of the Rings] (2002), screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair, and Peter Jackson, adapted from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, directed by Peter Jackson 

This, folks, is an insult worthy of Shakespeare—eminently worthy of being unleased at a shameless name-caller in debate.

Quote of the Day (Jack Germond, on the Outsized Importance of a Debate Gaffe)

“[A] single stumble may cost the election. Spend hundreds of millions; talk endlessly about issues; present 12-point plans for education, the economy, and the environment. But in the end, the election of our next president can turn on a gaffe.”—American political reporter and pundit Jack Germond (1928-2013), “I Can’t Believe He Said That,” The Washingtonian, September 2007

Whatever justification Presidential debates may have had in the past, they possess precious little in 2020. The President has been in office for four years, with a record readily apparent, for better or worse. His opponent was a U.S. Senator or Vice-President for more than four decades. Voters have had plenty of time to know their positions and accomplishments by now, and if they don’t, shame on them.

Equally important, the type of gaffes that Germond examined in his essay were, in the grand scheme of things, trivial. Past brain-freeze responses to the fate of Communist-dominated Poland, a President’s invocation of a young daughter in discussing nuclear arms, or massive sighs and eye-rolls should have mattered little when it came to assessing who would lead our country.

Moreover, candidates’ opportunities to avoid answering questions and introduce their own factual distortions with inadequate chance for rebuttal are likely to rise markedly with the first debate this Tuesday and continuing into the final two. One candidate has a habit of exaggeration that he finds difficult to resist. The other purveys staggering falsehoods with virtually every breath he takes. Some reporters will not be inclined to note these, while others will simply throw their hands up at the unending task this involves.

Presidential debates offer the kind of theater that ratings-hungry news organizations crave, but this year especially, it threatens to degenerate into the worst combination of reality show and carnival act. It is time for the media to rethink their commitment to it.

(Two generations have passed since the event captured in the attached image, so, for any younger readers, this picture shows incumbent President Jimmy Carter and challenger Ronald Reagan in one of their 1980 debates.)

Joke of the Day (Donald Trump, in Debate Mode, on the Birther Issue)

“When you talk about healing, I think I’ve developed very good relationships over the last little while with the African-American community. I think you can see that. I feel that they really wanted me to come to that conclusion, and I think I did a great job and a great service, not only for the country, but for the president, in getting him to produce his birth certificate.” —Donald Trump to Lester Holt in last night’s debate with Hillary Clinton, on whether his promotion of the false “birther” issue against President Obama contributed in any way to racial healing, quoted in Amanda Hoover, “Donald Trump Had ‘Nothing’ to Say About ‘Birther’ Issue to People of Color,” The Boston Globe, Sept. 27, 2016

I got in a bit late last night, but I still felt compelled to watch for a few minutes the first debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The response I came in on was the above. My immediate reaction was simple: What the hell was that?

Normally, whenever I post a “Joke of the Day” or a quote clearly intended to be humorous, it comes from a stand-up comic or a sitcom. But five years ago, as the last Presidential election geared up, political hypocrisy so overwhelming it made me burst out laughing led me to put up a post about Newt Gingrich, that paragon of faithfulness, giving a pledge of marital fidelity—for the fourth time in his life.

I never thought I would see the likes of it again in my lifetime. But I hadn’t reckoned with this election or this nominee.

And so, I offer this to you, Faithful Reader. You and I have desperately needed a laugh for a long time, and Trump—bless his little heart and his big mouth!—has come through for us, in a hu-u-u-u-ge way.

Gary Johnson: The High—and Low—Times of a Presidential Candidate

Last week, on MSNBC, Gary Johnson flunked what may have been his most prominent appearance in this campaign to date. A simple question on the Syrian civil war from commentator Mike Barnicle—“What would you do, if elected, about Aleppo?”— elicited the following stunned, and stunning, response from the Libertarian Party candidate: “And what is Aleppo?”

That gaffe makes Johnson the latest victim of what I call the “Bush-Perry Syndrome.” This ailment, which invariably leaves the victim abashed, even stricken, occurs when a candidate’s inability to grasp either the policies or people he’ll encounter in the Oval Office occurs in a particularly high-profile setting. The syndrome is named for two Texas governors who, despite their common wilting under blinding scrutiny, do not seem to have had much affection for each other.

In November 1999, facing an interrogator from a Boston TV station, George W. Bush came up with only one of four international statesmen recently in the news—a pop quiz that his father could have aced. 

Fortunately, Bush had a vast retinue of retainers and other supporters from his father’s days as a politician—along with a reputation of his own that was not yet sullied by a mismanaged war—which allowed him to survive, though it was a portent of the inattention to detail that would plague him in the Oval Office.

Rick Perry, however, was not as lucky in the 2012 primaries. He had just boasted of his tax plan when he segued into how he’d reduce the number of regulations and the size of government by eliminating three government agencies: Commerce, Education, and—oh, what was the third one? The best he could come up with after a minute, in front of a moderator, his opponents in that November 2011 debate, and an audience that would make his flub go viral before the world, was “Oops!”

These were, according to a Washington Post story last September, moments that would “forever define his brief time as a national figure”—effectively ending not only Perry’s first campaign for the Presidency, but fatally overshadowing his second one, four years later.

Which brings us back to Johnson, who—at least till last week—was being eyed by a not-inconsiderable part of the electorate as a viable alternative to the two wildly polarizing Republican and Democratic candidates. Barnicle couldn’t hide his astonishment over Johnson’s blank response: “You’re kidding, right?” In short order, through the commentator and a host of news articles, Johnson was reminded (or, some might be less charitable in thinking, informed) that, as Syria’s largest city, Aleppo had become the epicenter of that sad country’s ferocious free-for-all.

Others might believe that Johnson might have gotten around to learning about its sad plight, except that, instead of reading Steven Coll’s signed commentary in The New Yorker about the crisis, the former governor of New Mexico had been reading (and maybe re-reading) in the same magazine something that is always a politician’s favorite subject: an article about himself.

The Ryan Lizza article, in the July 25 issue, depicted Johnson as an amiable politico willing to go off the Republican reservation when it came to issues such as abortion, gay rights, and immigration. 

Oh, yes, and willing to make an eyebrow-raising concession to political norms: If elected President, stated this recent C.E.O. of the marijuana-branding company Cannabis Sativa, Inc., a marijuana-branding company, “I will not indulge in anything. I don’t think you want somebody answering the phone at two o’clock in the morning—that red phone—drunk, either.” He last ingested a pot edible a few months ago, he said.

For Johnson, his new-found abstinence also robbed him of the only plausible explanation besides lack of intellectual substance for why he had royally messed up his answer to Barnicle’s question: i.e., that he was too high to grasp it.

“Candor” is a politician’s word for nothing left to lose. At this point in the campaign, Johnson’s surge in the polls resembled nothing so much as the New York Yankees after getting rid of much of their high-priced older talent at the end of July: the younger talent brought aboard, with no expectations on their shoulders, promptly reeled off a string of victories until some tough losses brought them back to earth again.

With yesterday’s news that Johnson’s sub-15% share of polls has led to his exclusion from the first Presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the Libertarian standard-bearer may rue what might have been but for his response to Barnicle. At the same time, his new-found freedom to speak could make him an even more credible alternative to the Democrat and Republican Presidential nominees among voters who want to register their chagrin with current politics without doing something completely insane.

After all, nuttier things have already happened in this election—just about every day.

Quote of the Day (Samantha Bee, on What We Missed With the Canceled GOP Debate)

“I think the reward for sticking with the Republican debates until the 11 o’clock hour was hearing Jeb Bush suggest Margaret Thatcher should be on our American currency.”—Samantha Bee quoted in “Party Lines,” New York Magazine, Oct. 5-18, 2016

Serendipity led me to come across the above quote just after the announcement that the previously scheduled campaign for last night was being canceled because of the withdrawal of Donald Trump and John Kasich. The conjunction of the discovery and the cancellation led my mind to roam, then think: Was it really August 6 of last year when the round of Republican primary debates began?

There were 17 candidates back then—not far off the total number of debates for the entire season—and numerous enough that they could have hired a small bus. There was so much squabbling for attention that Fox News, the network hosting that night, felt compelled to separate them into two tiers.

Nobody can say that Republican voters lacked choices. But in the end, look what they ended up with: As of this late, desperate hour, a front-runner with no attachment to principle but a decided propensity to alienate some group or person virtually any time he runs his mouth off.  I never thought, prior to this year’s lineup, that I’d hear candidates talking about rivals’ energy levels, hand size, sweat glands, water retention, female physiognomy, child molesters, etc. Altogether, hardly an edifying spectacle.

But even when candidates have had a chance to talk about something more wholesome—something that, while not illuminating an issue or their reaction to potential crises, still can sum up their values—they’ve still managed to muff it. Case in point: A topic that came up in mid-September, the U.S. currency.

Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper which woman they’d like to see on the $10 bill, the then-GOP Presidential hopefuls offered predictable but sound choices: Rosa Parks, Clara Barton, Susan B. Anthony, Abigail Adams. (Eleanor Roosevelt, a well-known Democratic First Lady, was conspicuous by her absence, but did you really expect otherwise?) Others flipped off what they undoubtedly saw as an absurd question with an equally absurd response (wives and mothers). One candidate, Trump, offered an unexpectedly serious choice (Parks) with an expectedly creepy one (daughter Ivanka, whom, you might recall, he once said that he might have dated had circumstances been different).

Kasich’s choice, Mother Teresa, was certainly offered with an eye on Catholic voters, some of whom might object that he had embraced another faith in midlife. But aside from that (the more cynical might say, because of that), his choice was all the more brilliant, as it: 

* took the question seriously without, thankfully, mentioning a female relative that only he could relate to; 

* satisfied the one longstanding legal requirement—that the honoree on the currency has to be deceased; 

* represented out-of-the-box but not downright nutty thinking;

* rested on morally non-objectionable grounds (come on: besides the late contrarian Christopher Hitchens, who’s going to argue with a saint?); and

* reminded audiences of his own professed commitment to maintain the social safety net (he told one mega-donor furious over his decision to expand Medicaid to more than a quarter-million Ohioans, “I don’t know about you, lady, but when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor”).

In contrast, former Gov. Bush (excuse me, Jeb!) (pictured, in all his tortured glory) demonstrated so much combined shameless pandering, tone-deafness and all-around bone-headedness that it called into question the conventional wisdom that he was the smart one among the sons of George and Barbara Bush. His response? Margaret Thatcher.

Even those with today’s average attention span—the length of a tweet—would surely be reminded in debate post-mortems about the irony of citing “The Iron Lady” who felt compelled to q=warn Jeb’s father not to “go wobbly” on invading Iraq. But there are other reasons why it might not have gone over well with the rank and file who eventually doomed his campaign:

*A tough, partisan female who gave no quarter against males who stood in the way of her rise to the top: Didn’t that sound like—well, Hillary?

*Only the National Review of the early 1990s regarded Thatcher, together with Ronald Reagan, as part of “The Heroic Age of Conservatism.” You remember the National Review, right—the opinion magazine with a special “Against Trump” issue with contributions from nearly two dozen Establishment GOP figures? An issue that maybe influenced six people?

*Thatcher is a reminder of “The Special Relationship” that, at its height, featured the United States and Great Britain allying against the two worst dictatorial regimes of the 20^th century. More recently, that alliance saw countless millions of dollars being sucked into a War on Terror with little sign of success or ending—a conflict that Trump got away with criticizing while incurring no lasting damage from GOP voters.

* “Margaret Thatcher” is not exactly a name to make most Irish-American conservatives stand up and cheer. They disagree with liberal and even Irish Catholics on a whole host of issues, including birth control, abortion, same-sex marriage, and the value of Mother Church.  But they stand firmly with these others in regarding Thatcher not just as obstructing talks to end “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, but also as the very symbol of the arrogant, indifferent leadership that perpetuated Irish misery under centuries of British colonial misrule.

The news media spent so much time covering Jeb Bush’s hapless attempt to counter Trump’s charge about his “low energy” that it gave scant attention to an answer on U.S. currency that would have made half of Irish-American GOP voters throw up their hands and made the other half simply throw up. It was a short moment in Bush's campaign, but it conveyed much about why he went nowhere fast, carrying with him the hopes of a now-clueless political dynasty.