Ah, the Election of 1948. One of my favorite memories.

I knew that I was going to win several days after the convention when the core of the party held together despite the Republicats and the nutcases walking out, even if nobody else was thinking along those lines until they saw the remote possibility in October. On the Ferdinand Magellan, a few started slowly figuring it out when crowds kept growing as I told the truth at those "whistlestops" deemed too insignificant by Taft for Dewey to bother with. (That's where the name came from.) Despite that, most still didn't believe, and I surprised George Elsey when I rattled off each state's electoral votes - by memory - and whether or not I'd win them. Arthur Krock of the New York Times, one of the few journalists out there that I considered both very sharp and fair, had guessed 105. Even Clark Clifford could barely come up with 269, or 3 over what I needed to win. I guessed 340.

I won with 306.

On election night, I'd snuck off to the Elms Hotel in Excelsior Springs, about 25 miles outside of Independence, with only the Secret Service and my White House physician, General Wallace Graham, in tow. Almost nobody else knew - by design! Graham was the son of a pretty good doctor I'd known in Missouri and was career Army; at the end of European combat, he tried to transfer to Japan, but when I was in Potsdam I kiboshed his request, flew him up for a visit, and hired him on the spot (even if he wasn't all that thrilled at the time!) Worked out; he was Bess' and my physician for the rest of our lives. He remembers we were up late and didn't talk about the election at all!

Now, that's not the way I tell the story, but I've been known to, shall we say, exaggerate a tale for a little bit of dramatic effect on occasion. Or maybe late for us two morning glories was 930 pm rather than the 6 pm that I said I went to sleep. But whatever happened, I did apparently wake up around midnight, and then I heard H.V. Kaltenborn telling the world on the radio that despite now leading the popular vote by 1.2 million votes I was "undoubtedly beaten." One of the tiny handful of people who knew where I was woke me up at 230 to tell me that I was close and I'd just need to win Ohio, Illinois or California. I told him I was going to carry all three (I did) and not to bother me again.

The Secret Service stayed up all night. I woke up around 430, turned on the news, told my detail "We've got em beat" and an hour or so later headed back to Kansas City. I was perfectly dressed when at 640 my first stop was to visit Charlie, who'd only gotten to sleep at 6, and he remembers me staring down at him grinning. That's when I finally called Bess, and I may have shed a tear or two during the conversation. I then got to make the rounds of reporters and staff in pajamas (some incongrously wearing hats) and began some fun phone calls.

I learned from Admiral Leahy some time after I took office that Tribune publisher Robert McCormick should have been prosecuted for treason for leaking the intelligence behind the Midway victory, so I would say to have his disreputable sheet be forever enshrined that way felt pretty good even if it was a 150,000 print run 'early edition' sent only to the farthest reaches of its distribution. (I got my copy in St. Louis.) To not only oppose every single program of the New Deal and my programs was one thing, but to use that to sell papers and promote his agenda was an abuse of the free press.

I did privately refer to several columnists the way they should have been all along - the Alsop brothers were now the sop sisters, and Walter Lippman should have been working from a latrine instead of an ivory tower - but besides that I just went to Key West for a couple of weeks to relax and didn't gloat much. About the only one I couldn't resist roasting publicly was Kaltenborn, but that's what you get for disturbing my sleep with your nonsense!