Harry Truman and the Tribune’s unprescient headline (AP Photo/Byron Rollin)
Soon – perhaps by the time you read this – the Democratic National Convention in the City of Brotherly Love will be in session and, no doubt, Hillary Clinton will have made known her selection of a running mate. She has said she wanted that person, whoever, to be someone well qualified to fill her shoes as president.
Pundits said that she was giving priority to diversity and was weighing a range of candidates: female, black, white, Hispanic. Top contenders included Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro of Texas.
If she truly wanted someone beyond question best qualified to fill her shoes, God forbid, it seems to this Democrat, her obvious, no-brainer choice should have been Elizabeth Warren. It doesn’t matter. Whoever she selects I am voting for Her.
While I cannot look a few days into the future and tell you whom Hillary will choose, I can look back 68 years when the Democrats met in Philadelphia in 1948 and nominated Harry S. Truman. Truman was given little chance to defeat Republican Thomas E. Dewey. In his acceptance speech, give ’em hell Harry told the delegates: “In the next four years there will be a Democrat in the White House and you’re looking at him.” The morning after the election, the Chicago Tribune jumped the gun and its headline proclaimed most proudly and most wrongly: Dewey Defeats Truman!
The Tribune’s editors couldn’t look into the future either.
Don Woodard is a Fort Worth businessman and author of Black Diamonds! Black Gold! The Saga of Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company.