A President In Peril

Author’s Notes

The preceding is a work of fiction and all of its principal characters, except those mentioned below, are creations of the author. Also, all of the occasions in which historical characters interact with fictional ones are strictly products of the author’s imagination.

The Presidential Campaign of 1948 was among the most spirited and contentious in U.S. history. Harry S. Truman, who had become president on the death of Franklin Roosevelt in April 1945, was running for his own full term against former New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, who had lost to Roosevelt in the 1944 election. The major polls all had Dewey pegged as the clear winner in ’48. Truman’s victory was viewed by the pollsters and the media as a stunning upset, although Margaret Truman, in her book “Harry S. Truman” (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1973), wrote that her father was fully confident throughout the campaign. She recounts the family going to the polls in Independence, Mo., where “reporters asked Dad for a final prediction, and he said, ‘It can’t be anything but victory.’”

Despite being seen as the underdog in almost every major poll, Truman won the election somewhat handily, winning 303 electoral votes to Dewey’s 189 and State’s Right’s candidate Strom Thurmond’s 39. Henry Wallace received no electoral votes. Truman won 28 states to Dewey’s 16 and Thurmond’s 4. Truman got 49.6 % of the popular vote to Dewey’s 45.1 %. Thurmond and Wallace carved up most of the remaining 5.3 %.

The controversial United States’ recognition of the State of Israel came on May 14, 1948. The U.S., in the person of President Truman, became the first nation to recognize the newly established country. Truman’s own advisors were sharply split over his decision, some of them feeling it would look like a ploy to win Jewish votes at home, while others thought it might endanger U.S. access to oil in the Arab countries.

The “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline in early editions of the Chicago Tribune on the day after the election stands as one of the most storied gaffes in U.S. journalism history. In his book “Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American Newspaper” (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1979), Lloyd Wendt described how the paper stuck with Dewey as the winner until late into the night, when West Coast results came in heavily favoring Truman and the headline was finally changed — but only after 150,000 copies of the paper had been printed with the infamous headline.

Wendt also wrote that in 1972 a bronze plaque of the front page with the incorrect headline was presented by the Tribune to the Truman Library in Independence, Mo. The plaque read, in part, “Presented with admiration and affection to Harry S. Truman, whose election victory in 1948 made this one of the most unforgettable front pages ever published by the Chicago Tribune.” Sadly, the former president died just before the scheduled presentation.

The Truman assassination plot described in this story is fictional. However, on Nov. 1, 1950, an attempt was made on the president’s life. At that time, the Trumans were living in Washington’s Blair House during extensive and long-overdue renovations to the White House. Two fanatic Puerto Ricans stormed the residence with guns blazing. One of the Puerto Ricans was shot dead, as was a White House guard. Two other guards were wounded in the gun battle.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “Truman” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), David McCullough described the scene in the street: “There were screams, shouting. People everywhere were running for cover. The noise of the gunfire was terrifying — twenty-seven shots in two minutes.” The surviving Puerto Rican nationalist was sentenced to death, but Truman commuted the sentence to life in prison. Decades later, President Jimmy Carter pardoned the man.

Col. Robert R. McCormick continued to head the Chicago Tribune as its editor, publisher, and principal owner until his death in 1955 at the age of seventy-four. He remained a staunch Conservative and Republican throughout his life, vigorously opposing Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, Harry Truman and the Fair Deal, and foreign aid to countries including the United Kingdom and China.

J. Loy (Pat) Maloney started his Chicago Tribune career in 1917. Through the years he steadily rose through the ranks at the paper and became its managing editor in 1939 on the death of Bob Lee. He directed the Tribune’s news coverage throughout World War II and into the Post-War era, retiring in 1950 for health-related reasons. He died in 1976 at the age of eighty-five.

John C. Prendergast began his 43-year career with the Chicago Police as a traffic cop in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. He served as police commissioner from 1945 until his retirement in 1950. He died in January 1958 at the age of seventy-four.

The Tucker Automobile never went into mass production. From the beginning, the company was plagued by design problems, a lack of financing, and continued difficulties in obtaining steel and other materials. Preston Tucker contended that the Detroit automakers and the Federal Government were thwarting his attempts to bring out his revolutionary vehicle. In all, only 51 Tuckers were manufactured in the giant Chicago plant, all of them hand-tooled. Forty-seven of the cars are still operable, according to the Tucker Automobile Club of America, and the Club reports that 20 of the cars were used in the well-reviewed 1988 theatrical film “Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Jeff Bridges as Preston Tucker. Lloyd Bridges, Jeff’s father, played Sen. Homer Ferguson of Michigan, whom Tucker felt was bent upon seeing the company fail.

Tucker and six aides were tried in Federal Court in Chicago for fraud, with the government charging he never planned to mass-produce the automobile. In the four-month trial, the seven defendants were acquitted of all charges. One irony: The trial’s presiding judge, Otto Kerner Jr., later was elected governor of Illinois and in 1973, after his years in office, he was sent to federal prison after having been found guilty of numerous counts of bribery, conspiracy, and perjury. After the trial, Tucker was approached by a group of Brazilian investors about building a sports car there, to be called the “Carioca.” He died of cancer in 1956 at the age of fifty-three before the project got off the ground.

The former Dodge Plant on Chicago’s Southwest Side, where the Tuckers were briefly manufactured, was taken over in 1950 by the Ford Motor Co., which built aircraft engines for use in war planes during the Korean Conflict. Ford continued to produce piston engines and later jet engines there before vacating the buildings in 1959. In 1965, the facility reopened as Ford City, a mixed-use complex that includes manufacturing facilities, offices, and an extensive shopping mall.

The Chicago Municipal Airport on South Cicero Avenue, which Steve Malek passed on his way to meet Preston Tucker, was renamed Midway Airport in 1949. It was Chicago’s principal air terminal before O’Hare Field’s ascension.

Scrabble, the popular board game that first hit the retail market in 1948, was the Depression Era brainchild of out-of-work architect Alfred Mosher Butts, who wanted to create a game that combined the verbal skills used in crossword puzzles and anagrams, with the additional element of chance thrown in. It was first called Lexico, then Criss-Crosswords, before Scrabble was settled on as its title (one of the word’s definitions is “to grapple frantically”). Letters are given numeric values, with the most-used ones, such as vowels, having the fewest points, while rarely used letters such as Z, X, and Q have the highest point values. Organized Scrabble competitions are popular in bars and other social gathering places, and each year a national tournament is held, as well as a national school competition.

The Maccabees mentioned in the story was a fictional group only in the sense that it never operated in Chicago. However, a vigilante organization called the Maccabees, named for a famous family of rulers and warriors in Israel in the Second Century B.C., was formed in New York City in the early 1960s.

The civilian patrol group was founded in racially-charged Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood by a rabbi who saw the need for civilian patrols to combat crime. These patrols worked with local authorities and were unarmed. Later, the Maccabees were absorbed by a larger civil patrol organization called Shomrim (from the Hebrew word “Shomer,” meaning custodian). Shomrim groups now operate in several U.S. cities in cooperation with law enforcement authorities.