from New York to Buffalo. The bridge was located where it was, Dewey explained, for sheerly political reasons—30 miles north of the City of New York and just beyond the jurisdiction of the New York Port Authority and the formidable highways czar, Robert Moses.

The Deweys had a rather remote, underwater manner: she was faded and self-effacing; he was studied and deliberate, as if he had already been embalmed by history and could no longer alter the image. He had been one of the idols of my childhood—the gangbuster, the fearless district attorney—and if I had been old enough to vote for him in 1944,I most certainly would have done so. In those days, politicians were largely defined by their radio voices—the guttural snarl of Hitler, the patrician vowels of Roosevelt, and, for people who lived in New York, the commanding resonance of Dewey. It made him governor of New York in 1943 and a presidential contender in 1944. But, by 1948, that magnificent voice had begun to sound a little synthetic beside the smart-alecky chirp of Harry S. Truman, and sympathies had shifted or sharpened, so, when I voted that year, I voted not for Dewey, Truman, or even Henry Wallace, but for Norman Thomas, whose voice I had never heard. Time had diminished Dewey. And now, less than 15 years later, he had come to seem what his enemies had begun calling him: the little waxen figure on a wedding cake.

By the time The Highlander pulled up at the dock at West Point, everyone had been wined, dined, and overwhelmed with hospitality, and there were buses waiting to carry us from the riverside to choice seats in the stadium at the top of the cliff. I don’t remember the game or who won, but I remember what happened thereafter.

Two or three hours later, the buses took everyone back to the dock again. But The Highlander had disappeared. One of the great side-wheelers of the Hudson River Day Line had pulled up at the dock—the Alexander Hamilton perhaps—and when we piled out of the bus, one of the yacht stewards announced that we would have to wait a half hour or so until the Day Line had collected its passengers and departed. The boat was jammed.

And so, we huddled together in small groups on the dock watching the crowds stream down the hill onto the gangway. They were a rumpled, raucous, exuberant lot, all fired up by the briskness of the air and the excitement of the game. We sat on some benches by the pilings on the wharf—Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Dewey, Willard and Connie Rockwell, the Douglas Aircrafts, and ourselves—and made small talk until it was time to go aboard. Not really impatient. Resigned. You could see The Highlander, now at anchor out in the middle of the river, bobbing like a toy boat on the tide. The conversation was fitful. Everyone

was pretty much talked-out.

And then, in one of the interstices in the conversation, as we sat watching the crowd streaming down the hill to the wharf, Tom Dewey sighed and said slowly, deliberately, with a sort of wry laugh, “You know, in the old days, they would have waited for us.”

I have always thought that, in 1948, the voters sensed that he had such an attitude toward them, and that was why, in the end, Harry Truman beat him out—in the election that he couldn’t lose—by a nose.