1940 Dewey sought the
1940 Republican presidential nomination. He was considered the early favorite for the nomination, but his support ebbed in the late spring of 1940 as
Nazi Germany invaded its neighbors, and Americans feared being drawn into another European war. Some Republican leaders considered Dewey to be too young (at 38, just three years above the minimum age required by the US Constitution) and too inexperienced to lead the nation in wartime. Furthermore, Dewey's
non-interventionist stance became problematic when Germany
quickly conquered France and
seemed poised to invade Britain. As a result, at the
1940 Republican National Convention many delegates switched from Dewey to
dark horse candidate
Wendell Willkie, who was a decade older and supported aid to the
Allies fighting Germany. Dewey led on the first ballot, but was well below the vote total he needed to win. He steadily lost strength to Willkie in succeeding ballots, and Willkie was unexpectedly nominated on the convention's sixth ballot despite having no previous political experience and having only joined the Republican Party a year prior. Willkie ultimately lost in a landslide to
Franklin D. Roosevelt in the general election.
1944 Dewey's foreign-policy position evolved during the 1940s; by 1944 he was considered an
internationalist and a supporter of projects such as the United Nations. It was in 1940 that Dewey first clashed with
Robert A. Taft. Taft—who maintained his non-interventionist views and economic conservatism to his death—became Dewey's great rival for control of the Republican Party in the 1940s and early 1950s. Dewey became the leader of moderate Republicans, who were based in the Eastern states, while Taft became the leader of conservative Republicans who dominated most of the
Midwest. Dewey was the frontrunner for the
1944 Republican nomination. In April 1944 he won the key Wisconsin primary, where he defeated
Wendell Willkie and former Minnesota governor
Harold Stassen. Willkie's poor showing in Wisconsin forced him to quit the race and he died later that year. At the 1944 Republican Convention, Dewey's chief rivals—Stassen and Ohio governor
John W. Bricker—both withdrew and Dewey was nominated almost unanimously. Dewey then made Bricker (who was supported by Taft) his running mate. This made Dewey the first presidential candidate to be born in the 20th century. As of 2021, he was also the youngest Republican presidential nominee. In the general election campaign, Dewey crusaded against the alleged inefficiencies, corruption and
Communist influences in incumbent president Roosevelt's New Deal programs, but mostly avoided military and foreign policy debates. Dewey had considered including the
conspiracy theory that Roosevelt knew about the
attack on Pearl Harbor beforehand and allowed it to happen and to say: "...and instead of being re-elected he should be
impeached." The allegation would have suggested the then-secret fact that the U.S. had broken the
Purple code still in use by the
Japanese military. Dewey eventually yielded to
Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall's
urging not to touch this topic. Marshall informed
Harry Hopkins of his action in late October that year; Hopkins then told the president. Roosevelt reasoned that "Dewey would not, for political purposes, give secret and vital information to the enemy". During the campaign, in a first, Roosevelt provided Dewey with information on the war efforts, such as the breaking of
Japanese naval code. This was the first time that an opposition presidential candidate was given briefings by the incumbent presidential administration. Given Truman's sinking popularity and the Democratic Party's three-way split (the left-winger
Henry A. Wallace and the Southern segregationist
Strom Thurmond ran third-party campaigns), Dewey seemed unbeatable to the point that the Republicans believed that all they had to do to win was to avoid making any major mistakes. Following this advice, Dewey carefully avoided risks and spoke in platitudes, avoiding controversial issues, and remained vague on what he planned to do as president, with speech after speech being nonpartisan and also filled with optimistic assertions or empty statements of the obvious, including the famous quote: "You know that your future is still ahead of you." An editorial in the
Louisville Courier-Journal summed it up: No presidential candidate in the future will be so inept that four of his major speeches can be boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead. , September 1948Another reason Dewey ran such a cautious, vague campaign came from his experience as a presidential candidate in 1944, where Dewey felt that he had allowed Roosevelt to draw him into a partisan, verbal "mudslinging" match, and he believed that this had cost him votes. Dewey was accordingly convinced in 1948 to appear as non-partisan as possible, and to emphasize the positive aspects of his campaign while ignoring his opponent: this strategy proved to be a total failure, as it allowed Truman to repeatedly criticize and ridicule Dewey, who never answered any of Truman's criticisms. Although Dewey was not as conservative as the Republican-controlled
80th Congress, the association proved problematic, as Truman tied Dewey to the "do-nothing" Congress. Near the end of the campaign, Dewey considered adopting a more aggressive style and responding directly to Truman's criticisms, going so far as to tell his aides one evening that he wanted to "tear to shreds" a speech draft and make it more critical of the Democratic ticket. However, nearly all his major advisors insisted that it would be a mistake to change tactics. Dewey's wife Frances strongly opposed her husband changing tactics, telling him, "If I have to stay up all night to see that you don't tear up that speech [draft], I will." '' headline on November 3, 1948, the day after the election. The
Chicago Daily Tribune printed "
DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN" as its post-election headline, issuing 150,000 copies before the returns showed Truman winning. Dewey received 45.1% of the popular vote to Truman's 49.6%. In the Electoral College, Dewey won 16 states with 189 electoral votes, Truman 28 states with 303 electoral votes, and Thurmond four states (all in the South) with 39 electoral votes. Summarizing Dewey's campaign, a biographer wrote that "Dewey had swept the industrial Northeast, pared Democratic margins in the big cities by a third, run better than any Republican since
Herbert Hoover in the South, and still lost decisively." After the election, Dewey told publisher
Henry Luce that "you can analyze figures from now to kingdom come, and all they will show is that we lost the farm vote which we had in 1944 and that lost us the election." A biographer noted that Dewey "rarely mentioned 1948 in the years thereafter. It was like a locked room in a musty mansion whose master never entered ... he seemed a bit bewildered at the unanimous front put up by his Albany advisers [during the campaign], regretted not having taken a final poll when his own senses detected slippage, and couldn't resist a potshot at "that bastard Truman" for having successfully exploited farmers' fears of a new depression." Pre-election planning by Dewey and his advisors for a potential
presidential transition was much greater in 1948 than in any previous election cycle, and included selection by Dewey of potential cabinet officers. Though these efforts were ridiculed after Dewey was defeated, pre-election transition planning later became standard practice. Dewey played a major role in helping California Senator
Richard Nixon become
Eisenhower's running mate. When Eisenhower
won the presidency later that year, many of Dewey's closest aides and advisors became leading figures in the Eisenhower Administration. Among them were
Herbert Brownell, who would become Eisenhower's
Attorney General;
James Hagerty, who would become
White House Press Secretary; and
John Foster Dulles, who would become Eisenhower's
Secretary of State. Dewey's campaign to secure the nomination for Eisenhower saw Dewey at odds with his two former running mates. 1948 vice presidential nominee Warren was a candidate for the presidential nomination, while 1944 running mate John W. Bricker backed Taft. == Rivalry with Robert A. Taft ==