CHICAGO -- President Harry S. Truman offered to name Thomas E. Dewey as the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain two years after the men fought bitterly in the 1948 presidential campaign, a new Dewey biography says.
According to 'Thomas E. Dewey and His Times,' the offer was relayed by Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
Dewey was New York governor and turned down the job.
The book, written by Richard Norton Smith, will be published later this month. Details were printed today in the Chicago Tribune.
Smith says Dewey turned down the ambassadorship on the ground that diplomacy was not his field and that he could not afford the extensive social chores of the London Embassy.
Acheson said special funds would be available to help meet the costs, Smith wrote.
Dewey, instead, decided to run for a third term and was re-elected handily.
According to the book, Dewey helped select Richard Nixon as Dwight Eisenhower's running mate and told Nixon, then a young congressman, 'don't get fat, don't lose your zeal and you can be president someday.'
