The Last Campaign - by Zachary Karabell (Paperback)

About the Book

This account of the 1948 presidential election between Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey tells the fascinating story behind Truman's legendary victory and turns a probing eye toward a by-gone era of political earnestness, a time before television fundamentally altered the political landscape. of photos.

Book Synopsis

In The Last Campaign, Zachary Karabell rescues the 1948 presidential campaign from the annals of political folklore ("Dewey Defeats Truman," the Chicago Tribune memorably and erroneously heralded), to give us a fresh look at perhaps the last time the American people could truly distinguish what the candidates stood for.

In 1948, Harry Truman, the feisty working-class Democratic incumbent was one of the most unpopular presidents the country had ever known. His Republican rival, the aloof Thomas Dewey, was widely thought to be a shoe-in. These two major party candidates were flanked on the far left by the Progressive Henry Wallace, and on the far right by white supremacist Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. The Last Campaign exposes the fascinating story behind Truman's legendary victory and turns a probing eye toward a by-gone era of political earnestness, when, for "the last time in this century, an entire spectrum of ideologies was represented," a time before television fundamentally altered the political landscape.

Review Quotes

"The greatest presidential contest in modern American history. . . . In this vivid, entertaining book, Karabell brings all four candidates to life, skillfully re-creating a tumultuous time." --The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Zachary Karabell was educated at Columbia and Oxford, and at Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in American history in 1996. He is the author of What's College For? The Struggle to Define American Higher Education and Architects of Intervention: The United States, the Third World, and the Cold War, 1946-1962. He has taught at Harvard, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and Dartmouth. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Salon.com, Boston Globe, The Nation, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Christian Science Monitor.