Thomas E. Dewey and His Times

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This is the first full-scale biography of Thomas E. Dewey - the famous gangbuster of the thirties, twice candidate for president, a maker of the modern Republican party, the key behind-the-scenes strategist of both Dwight Eisenhower's and Richard Nixon's Presidential nominations.

On whatever level he acted, Thomas Dewey made government work, as he made the judicial system work when, as the famous New York district attorney, he rounded up the city's most powerful and infamous gangsters. He was ruthless as well as imaginative, ambitious as well as able. Dewey's record deserves to be known and his personality explored. Richard N. Smith has done both, against the backdrop of the political and economic desperation that launched Dewey to national prominence while he was still in his early thirties.

Thomas E. Dewey and His Times profiles the system as well as a man who worked within it. Dewey was a creative adapter and his achievements and his failures say a great deal about the appeal of men "who get things done."

What is always recalled is the fateful and ironic November in 1948 when Dewey unexpectedly lost the Presidency to Harry S Truman, but his continuing enormous influence over the Republican party is less well known. For fifteen years Tom Dewey and Robert Taft did mortal battle over the soul fo the Republican party - and Dewey was the last liberal to win the fight. His predominant behind-the-scenes role in nominating both Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon in 1952 has never before been documented as it is here, nor have Dewey's private activities in later administrations of both parties. Likewise, his relationship with FDR, and his agreement to bury Pearl Harbor as a campaign issue in 1944, is explored in detail for the first time, supported by recently declassified National Security council papers, memoranda from the FDR library, and interviews with Dewey's own associates.

Thomas E. Dewey and Richard M. Nixon have often been compared, and there are some striking surface parallels. They were small-town boys who clawed their way to the top of their professions, who won office in spite of their personalities that inspired little public affection, who did not shy away from innovation and who cared passionately about making their party more relevant to the age. Yet Dewey had a fundamental integrity that complemented his gut-fighting instincts. In some ways he was a tougher, harsher, more honest Nixon. His record in Albany is a blueprint for Republicans who want to make government work without sacrificing humane considerations. He founded a state university, built a thruway, enacted the first civil rights laws in America, did battle against tuberculosis and cancer -- and never submitted an unbalanced budget. When he left office in 1955, state taxes were 10 percent lower than when he took the oath of office for the first time, ten years earlier.

Richard N. Smith spent a year going through the Thomas E. Dewey Collection in Rochester, N.Y., and interviewed hundreds of Dewey associates, friends, family, and foes. Thomas E. Dewey and His Times is about the world Dewey inhabited as well as the party he led through tumultuous years. But it is also a sensitive and, in the end, moving portrait of a much misunderstod man. In private life, as Smith makes clear, there is about Dewey a poignant sense of what might have been, of youthful genius pressed too far too fast, an almost tragic element at work behind the cool, precise exterior.