MARSHALL

Thomas E. Dewey and His Times By Richard Norton Smith Simon & Schuster, 703 pp., $22.50 A decade as an intrepid prosecutor in the country’s biggest city, 12 years as an innovative and strong-willed governor of the then most populous state, and 16 final years as a Nestor disposing major influence in great affairs add up to a career deserving better than to be remembered, like Mudville’s mighty Casey, for an anticlimax. Yet the 1948 election with its crushing dénouement, recounted in a prologue, overhangs every chapter of Richard Norton Smith’s book about Thomas Edmund Dewey (1902-1971). Once he had adjusted to the reality of the wholly unanticipated and therefore devastating defeat by Harry Truman, Dewey was wont to blame a quirk of timing: his career had peaked too soon. That ascription explained nothing. The 1948 strikeout becomes in Smith’s account a catastrophe intrinsic to character rather than due to extrinsic circumstances—an event as ineluctable as the fifth act is for Hamlet.

Respectability—“tea and crumpets” gentility in the biographer’s phrase— along with diligence and reliability was in Dewey’s heritage from Owosso (Mich.) gentry. Concerning his cerebral capabilities, Smith tells of Dewey’s becoming in time “something of a thinker.” His musings on large concerns were restricted to Northeastern-establishment orthodoxies. Undoubtedly, though, he was smart. His endowments included exceptional resources of energy and physical courage exemplified in his defiance of gangland death threats by keeping interior car lights lit while being chauffeured home at night. Within him, also, as Smith twice observes in paraphrases of William Herndon’s remark on Abraham Lincoln, the engine of ambition ceaselessly throbbed.

CM

About the Author

Charles B. Marshall

Featured Tags

Manage following

Harry S. Truman

Presidential Election

Republican Party

New York

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Richard Nixon

Barry Goldwater

Thomas E. Dewey and His Times By Richard Norton Smith Simon & Schuster, 703 pp., $22.50 A decade as an intrepid prosecutor in the country’s biggest city, 12 years as an innovative and strong-willed governor of the then most populous state, and 16 final years as a Nestor disposing major influence in great affairs add up to a career deserving better than to be remembered, like Mudville’s mighty Casey, for an anticlimax. Yet the 1948 election with its crushing dénouement, recounted in a prologue, overhangs every chapter of Richard Norton Smith’s book about Thomas Edmund Dewey (1902-1971). Once he had adjusted to the reality of the wholly unanticipated and therefore devastating defeat by Harry Truman, Dewey was wont to blame a quirk of timing: his career had peaked too soon. That ascription explained nothing. The 1948 strikeout becomes in Smith’s account a catastrophe intrinsic to character rather than due to extrinsic circumstances—an event as ineluctable as the fifth act is for Hamlet.

Respectability—“tea and crumpets” gentility in the biographer’s phrase— along with diligence and reliability was in Dewey’s heritage from Owosso (Mich.) gentry. Concerning his cerebral capabilities, Smith tells of Dewey’s becoming in time “something of a thinker.” His musings on large concerns were restricted to Northeastern-establishment orthodoxies. Undoubtedly, though, he was smart. His endowments included exceptional resources of energy and physical courage exemplified in his defiance of gangland death threats by keeping interior car lights lit while being chauffeured home at night. Within him, also, as Smith twice observes in paraphrases of William Herndon’s remark on Abraham Lincoln, the engine of ambition ceaselessly throbbed.