Word: truman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Harry Truman himself, he had staked the prestige of his old age on the proposition that the reign of moderation was nonsense. By his lights (primaries, said he in 1952, are just "eyewash"), a convention is still the place to get political business done, and 1956 is just like any old year except that the Democrats are out of power and he has a candidate that he wants to put in the White House...
From the moment he looked down from his train in Chicago and saw Candidate Adlai Stevenson being gouged and elbowed and jostled in the howling platform mob, Harry Truman was in his glory. Before the week was out, Truman had left candidates' headquarters heaped with bitten fingernails and transformed the 1956 Democratic National Convention from a drab dogtrot into a race of rare and exhilarating drama...
...jockeying for position with Senior Democrat Truman began at the Dearborn Street station, where Stevenson was anxious to be photographed with Harry while Candidate Averell Harriman was still back in New York. But, as photographers tried to line up the ex-President and the leading candidate, India Edwards, an old Truman friend and a queen bee of the Harriman forces, jumped in between. When Stevenson went this-a-way, so did India. When Stevenson went thataway, so did India. Finally, Adlai executed a clever flanking movement and came up alongside Truman while the cameras clicked away. Almost unnoticed...
Breaking the Bandwagon. After a ten-minute arm's length chat with Stevenson in Truman's Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel suite, Harry Truman held a press conference, and let go kersplat with his first great crusher of the week. "I will," he said delightedly, "let the people know for whom I stand before the convention meets." A newsman asked if Truman was just trying to baffle every one. Chortled Harry: "That is exactly right...
Averell Harriman's followers, who had based all their hopes on Truman's backing, took immediate heart at another Truman press conference remark: "I am not a bandwagon fellow. Don't get that in your head." Later, Stevenson's supporters found cause for optimism when Truman appeared before the Democratic Platform Committee and recommended a civil-rights plank along Adlai's moderation lines...