Half it or so ago for his last book and this time we have him here virtually from his home and were going to talk about his new book about the 1948 election so were going back 72 years to another Election Year and youre going to be amazed at how similar it sounds in some ways, in other ways its different but in some ways, the politicians were all younger than they were today so thats one big difference but aj, take it away and tell us about the overview of the book. Just a very good read by the way. I want to say a couple of things first. Thank you so much for having me. The Commonwealth Club is a wonderful place to be and a lot of people are going through a lot of pain and suffering. For myself, im reminded why i fell in love with reading when i was six years old because bookscan transport you to another time and place and during all of this thats been a blessing. Regarding my last time i was with you i had already started this book. It was to that 2017 when i was with you, you talked about the accidental president and i planned this book to come out during the 2020 election cycle because i thought this is a book about the 1948 election. It will give me an opportunity to talk about things that matter but two things happened that i didnt expect. One is during the research i found a bunch of material i didnt expect to find and secondly elements in our life conspired in such a way that it began to feel i was writing the book that everything i was writing about was no longer taking place in 1948, it was taking place now so i want to show you a few pictures to give you an idea of what im talking about. 1948 is the first election to play out on the Television Machine so what youre looking at is a picture of the first Election Night broadcast on cbs and here we are, a new kind of media is going to change the way elections take place and today we have social media doing the exact same thing so heres an image that is going to startle you, i hope it startles you. In 1948 there was a massive surge inwhite nationalism in the United States. This is charlottesville. In 1948 there was a massive wave of violence against africanamericans and in this particular picture this is a man named isaac watered four hours after he was released, honorably discharged from the United States armyserving in world war ii. He had an altercation with a white Police Officer and he was blinded and he became a cause cclcbre. There you see him being escorted by a fighter, orson welles got fired from his radio show for speaking out for isaac and what happened to him became politicized and part of the political conversation in a way that were feeling exactly the same way now withgeorge floyd. The alger has, the story breaks during the 1948 elections and its suddenly theres so much talk in washington and people all over the country trying to figure out is there a communist conspiracy infiltrating washington . What is a fact, what is a Conspiracy Theory . These were conversations among the electorate in 1948 that seems relevant today. To relevant. The fbi on the trail of a major president ial political candidate with regard to a possible russian conspiracy. Heres Henry Wallace, such a fascinating page picture by the way. But was wallace a stooge for the kremlin in moscow . Now we know he wasnt but this was the conversation in 1948 andcertainly thats relevant today. During the 1948 election cycle truman launches the berlin airlift. This is not an apples to apples comparison but during the election cycle we were nose to nose with the soviets on the brink of world war iii and fear and anxiety gripped the country and that is happening in our election cycle now for completely Different Reasons and that is the reason whyim talking to you my Basement Office and not on stage. A couple more to go. This is one picture that should not feel relevant today and we should cross our fingers that it remains that way. Its amazing to think during the election cycle Nuclear Bombs are literally going off as were testing larger and larger weapons in the pacific. And ultimately we get to harry truman. One thing i want to make one last point for i Start Talking about the candidates in 48. I want to give you one quote from the most surprising document i found through all my years of research. This is a Republican NationalCommittee Memorandum written in 1947 so about a year before 48 election. Im going to give you one sentence. The United States is fair game for moscow and has been for years and as far as anyone is willing to see the year 1948 will be theyear in which soviet russia will do everything in its power to influence theelection here. See if that fails earlier. Im going to give you a brief introduction and our conversation will begin. What i wanted to do with this book is follow all four candidates through their campaign odysseys. In real time to read them out so the leader could experience what america was experiencing but also the candidates themselves. All leading up to this climactic moment on november 2, 1948. So heres Henry Wallace. Wallace was extraordinary candidate who won those states but his story is fascinating and we can learn a lot from it and wallace was the one candidate who breaks away from the democrats who says we have this new cold war. And its not the soviets fault, its Harry Trumans fault and he says theres only one man in this country who can stop world war iii and thats me so he becomes the candidate of protest and to me hes really the beginning of an antiestablishment movement that goes right through the 1950s and 60s. You can see on the left thats pc or and we certainly heard a lotfrom him in the future. Wallace is Camp Politics were so controversial, he goes to campaign in the south and he says i will not speak in any hall where an africanamerican and caucasian american cant sit next to each other. I will not stand in a hotel where an africanamerican is not permitted so when he gets to the south that our clients and stabbing. Hes routinely pelted with tomatoes. Its a very great campaign. Even his Vice President just to go through the colored entrance to a church was , in a physical altercation of violence with the police trying to stop him and he was a us senator. Was an amazing detail. Glenn taylor, its amazing to think that there were times during those rallies where wallace would stand in front of class crowds heckling him saying i want some evidence that imin the United States of america. Strom thurmond. During the 1948 election truman was the first president ial candidate to go after theafricanamerican vote. Segregates the military and becomes the first president to address the naacp and the first president to hold a Campaign Rally in harlems actual spiritual home, black america. Not everybody is happy about this. Strom thurmond, governor of South Carolina ends up this new dixiecratparty. This is their National Convention in which hes nominated to run for president and im going to give you one brief quote from what hes actually saying in this moment. On this night he says i want to tell you ladies and gentlemen theres not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the negro race into our theaters and swimmingpools, into our homes and into our churches. He wins four states on that platform of prosegregation White Supremacy and dewey everybody believes is about to become the first republican president in 16 years. Where going to not say much now except that this is the one time the two candidates meet during the election cycle. And harry truman leans over and says tom, when you move into the white house do somethingabout the plumbing. There were real issueswith the white house. There were in fact rid the white house was literally swimming. Crumbling i should say and back to truman. Were going to talk a lot about him so why dont we start our conversation and i hope that was useful thats good. We can split up the pictures. We can start with dewey. So thomas dewey, new york governor. Young, in his mid40s Something Like that when he was running. He had already been governor before. Giuliani imitated him but he took the road to publicpower that giuliani tried to do which was be an attorney general, attacked the mafia , win cases and go on to new york governor for a while and i know that giuliani played that card because when he was attorney general came to speak in new york and he made it very clear he was going to play exactly the same political thing because giuliani and his eyes on the white house as everyone knows and hes only got the back room of the white house right now but he does get to go there. And in any case thomas dewey, quite the character and he had been an attack dog as you said earlier on when he ran he ran a Different Campaign to talk a bit about that and he was 30 points ahead, Something Like that at the beginning of the campaign. Dewey to me i was very excited at how fascinating i found him area and i thought he was going to be a byproduct of the story hes not, hes a major character in the story that i wrote because the way that he came up into prominence was so extraordinary. Hes from a small town, comes out of nowhere and becomes a young prosecutor in new york city and finds himself on thistrail , brilliant prosecutor, brilliant lawyer and he becomes this figure takes down the mafia in the 1930s when there was a lot of mafia around and he became so famous as a prosecutor, out of that happened that in two different movies hes portrayed by humphreybogart on the big screen. People say thomas dewey can successfully prosecute god. Thats how he came up and he became famous. So by the time 1948 came he had been, this is his third president ial candidate because he had been the guy that everybody said all the way back in 1940 , you are the future of the Republican Party and by the time 1948 comes he decides hes not going to run because he ran in 1944 and he lost and he became closer to fdr than anybody did but he felt in his heart he didnt want to suffer through losing a president ial election twice and he had to be convinced to run so this story becomes very fact. The obviously everyone thought, your book is clear everyone thought, all the media, all the newspapers predicted he was going to win. Not a single newspaper predicted truman was going to win in the country or at least none of the major ones so the media was all on his side and they spent time afterwards wondering why they got it all wrong just because like people in the media have done that inthe 2016 election. How did we get that wrong with polls and everything and polls were just starting then. That was another element, at least their influence. Im sure they had influence before that but they get became much moreinfluential. Just as more media feels big to us right now, at that time the fact that radio was becoming ubiquitous. Indication industry was wrapping up so pollsters were extremely powerful and one of them actually wrote and they had newspaper columns, he said im not going to have polls anymore, why spend the money on having a campaign, dewey is going to win and there were two themes for me writing about dewey that were so touching and the one is where on Election Night, ill go back. The knife he holds his final Campaign Rally in Madison Square garden, gets on the train afterwards to take the train back up to albany to the Governors Mansion and he so sure hes going to win behold an impromptu meeting among all these reporters who been covering his campaign for months and he tells them whos going to be in his cabinet and he says he cant tell anybody. Heres going to be the secretary of treasury because he was sure he was going to win and the other scene i can remember which is so touching to me was on Election Night is in his suite at the Hotel Roosevelt with his family and friends at some point the night isnot going as planned and he locks himself in a room with a yellow legal pad and he listens to the radio all mylong and slowly realizes whats about to happen to him. A solitary man on the edge. He definitely left his mark anyway on the Republican Party. He was very influential and he was a progressive republican. I think another element i felt was very machiavelli and move that you talk about that truman does is the republicans after their convention, a picked dewey it was a tight race and he was a progressive Teddy Roosevelt type republican and then taft who was the son or the son of the president taft, he was the leader of the conservatives and a lot of people thought he should be the nominee. So it was very close but because conservative republicans were in charge of the congress, what truman did did was the platforms between deweys platform and trumans platform were almostidentical. Thats what you wrote. Thats right. He put a pin in this by calling congress back to try to enact deweysplatform. Were going to talk about thedemocratic National Convention and i think we will show a piece of video. I think you raised a really wonderful interesting point. Coming out of world war ii everybody understood this election was going to be an alliance between the past and future, world war world was shaping up and which Political Party was going to be in charge and in print their vision on america and both Political Parties coming out of world war ii had to figure out who they were and what they stood for and the republicans had an interesting situation but they had a rivalry within the party there was a conservative faction headed up by robert half, a republican on capitol hill and dewey was a liberal with a Republican Base cause he had been raised to think Teddy Roosevelt was the definition of the Republican Party. So he even through the primaries, the oregon primaries, fascinating story. Dewey is the front runner all along and suddenly hes about to lose and his staff comes up, hes this dark horse and all of a sudden their neck and neck and oregon primary will decided and they have the first ever broadcast radio president ial debate and its neat because you can look it up and you can watch it, listen to it on youtube today that theres only one question, should communism be outlawed dewey being a prosecutor won the nomination. So thats how it happened but a lot of the republicans were very uncomfortable with his platform because a lot of it agreedwith harry truman. Will come back to that Harry Trumans maneuver against but anyway, they both did thesame thing. They both took these whistles doctors everywhere and were crossing each others paths althoughtruman had a good joke about that. Thats dewey was following him everywhere but you will be able to follow him to the white house, should i tell that joke . At the end of the campaign it came down to this amazing onetwo punch where they visited the same five cities, each of them one after another. Chicago, cleveland, boston, new york and by that i mean for states so during one of those dewey had followed truman throughout the country and in one of them turned out to be the first daughter marking his favorite speech of the campaign where truman star trek cracking these jokes and he does it on Live National radio , totally offthecuff and he makes up the story. Well, theres this guy following me everywhere i go and he tells the soul story about hes following me and theres one place hes not going to follow me and the crowd goes crazy. The Truman Library website is an amazing resource because you can go there and you can listen to these speeches. Theyre all up on the website so there are a lot of fun to listen to. That brings them alive when their voices are there to and its interesting seeing old pictures but its strange because they dont look the same as politicians do today and they dont seem like they act thesame and they look so young relatively speaking right now. One little personal note about dewey, at the end of the book when you bring everybody up to date on the epilogue of different people you mentioned dewey when he lost that he returned to the Governors Mansion in new york and was there for another six years and went into private life and it didnt do any more publicservice stuff. And what he did was he went to a new York Law Firm and as the main partner. There was an old law firmfrom 1906 on , ballantyne bush palmer and would and he got put on the head of that. He became a very famous firm. I actually, thats where i started my legal career in 1984 and i work for a partner who was in his early 50s and he had done some work for dewey when dewey was running the place so dewey had died in 71 as you mentioned so this is about 13 years later and one day we were chatting about something after we were together for six months and the partner said that dewey really scare the hell out of me. He said when i was in my ninth year so he should have been made a partner around. He was up for partner and dewey asked me to do a special tax memo on an issue i didnt know anything about and im not a tax lawyer, im a corporate lawyer but he asked me to do this i did this quickly and i got it all done and it was a 20 page thing so i gave it to him as he was walking out the door to fly down to florida for the week