The right-wingers were furious. As far as they were concerned, he was throwing away their best issue. Yet Dewey remained adamant. He thought it degrading to accuse the President of the United States of being soft on Communism. He was not, he told Styles Bridges, the Republican national campaign manager, “going around looking under beds.” His aides got nowhere, Herbert Brownell, his top political adviser, decided, because his wife hated the idea of partisan attacks. She wanted him to be, in her words, more presidential.
