FDR, Dewey, and the Election of 1944 [Paperback]

Although the presidential election of 1944 placed FDR in the White House for an unprecedented fourth term, historical memory of the election itself has been overshadowed by the war, Roosevelts health and his death the following April, Truman's ascendancy, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb. Today most people assume that FDRs reelection was assured. Yet, as David M. Jordans engrossing account reveals, neither the outcome of the campaign nor even the choice of candidates was assured. Just a week before Election Day, pollster George Gallup thought a small shift in votes in a few key states would award the election to Thomas E. Dewey. Though the Democrats urged voters not to change horses in midstream, the Republicans countered that the war would be won quicker with Dewey and Bricker. With its insider tales and accounts of party politics, and campaigning for votes in the shadow of war and an uncertain future, FDR, Dewey, and the Election of 1944 makes for a fascinating chapter in American political history.

David Jordan has produced a lucid, highly engrossing account of a fateful but little chronicled episode in American presidential politics. His narrative of the 1944 election campaignwritten with savvy and encyclopedic range and featuring a large cast of personalities rendered in deft cameosdeserves a place alongside Theodore White's histories of how high and low character, fierce ambition, and dumb luck play their part in the nations choice of its chief executive.A fast-moving, blow-by-blow account of the often neglected wartime campaign that pitted Franklin Delano Roosevelt against Republican Thomas E. Dewey, with pollsters divided to the very end. For political junkies there is suspense, backroom dealing, and surprises about both presidential and vice-presidential nominations, as well as where the parties would stand on the future both at home and abroad. And while today we worry about partisan extremism, in 1944 a sitting commander-in-chief al3