Word: truman
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...three-term Governor of New York in his 40s, and a premature but valued elder statesman of his party as early as his 50s. Nevertheless, he will be remembered chiefly as the man who blew a seemingly certain election to the presidency by his serenely somnolent campaign against Harry Truman...
...Robert Taft, Minnesota's Harold Stassen, Michigan's Arthur Vandenberg and California's Earl Warren-and the nomination was considered tantamount to election. The nation seemed weary of the frenetic days of New Deal innovation and the burdens of war and postwar readjustment. Harry Truman was a feeble contrast to the fallen F.D.R., and the Democratic Party was split (Strom Thurmond had deserted to run as a right-wing candidate, Henry Wallace as a left-wing challenger). Voters yearned for tranquillity, and Dewey, running a campaign designed to avoid controversy, promptly put them to sleep. Soothingly...
...Truman, by contrast, slugged viciously ("The Republican Party is controlled by silent and cunning men who have a dangerous lust for power and privilege") through 31,500 miles and 350 speeches, stubbornly predicting his own victory. Gamblers made Dewey an 18-to-1 favorite; some pollsters were so certain of the outcome that they stopped sampling as early as September. But Truman attracted large and noisy crowds ("Give 'em hell, Harry"). He won, mainly because of a revolt among Midwest farmers, who were angry at the Republican Congress and turned off by Dewey's cool gentility...
When the results were announced, Truman laughed gleefully, bouncing up and down on a bed in a suite at Kansas City's Muehlebach Hotel. Dewey gamely faced astonished newsmen in Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel and admitted: "I'm just as surprised as you; we were all wrong together-but it's been grand fun, boys and girls. Good luck...
...British-to whom Greece had fallen as a "sphere of influence" -disarmed the Communist-dominated resistance movement which had fought against the Nazi occupation and reinstated the royalist government under King Paul. As a bloody civil war raged throughout the country, the U.S. supplanted the British and formulated the Truman Doctrine as its policy line. Effectively undercutting a U.N. investigation of the Greek conflict, the Truman Doctrine placed the United States and its allies firmly behind any scheme-however dictatorial or repressive-which might forestall a left-wing government...