Thomas E. Dewey - Later Career

Later Career

Dewey's third term as governor of New York expired in 1955, after which he retired from public service and returned to his law practice, Dewey Ballantine, although he remained a power broker behind the scenes in the Republican Party. In 1956, when Eisenhower mulled not running for a second term, he suggested Dewey as his choice as successor, but party leaders made it plain that they would not entrust the nomination to Dewey yet again, and ultimately Eisenhower decided to run for re-election. Dewey also played a major role that year in convincing Eisenhower to keep Nixon as his running mate; Eisenhower had considered dropping Nixon from the Republican ticket and picking someone he felt would be less partisan and controversial. However, Dewey argued that dropping Nixon from the ticket would only anger Republican voters while winning Eisenhower few votes from the Democrats. Dewey's arguments helped convince Eisenhower to keep Nixon on the ticket. In 1960 Dewey would strongly support Nixon's ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaign against Democrat John F. Kennedy.

By the 1960s, as the conservative wing assumed more and more power within the Republican Party, Dewey removed himself further and further from party matters. When the Republicans in 1964 gave Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Taft's successor as the conservative leader, their presidential nomination, Dewey declined to even attend the GOP Convention in San Francisco; it was the first Republican Convention he had missed since 1936. President Lyndon Johnson offered Dewey a number of positions on several blue ribbon commissions, as well as a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, but Dewey declined them all, for he preferred to remain in political retirement and concentrate on his highly profitable law firm. By the early 1960s Dewey's law practice had made him into a multimillionaire.

Although closely identified with the Republican Party for virtually his entire adult life, Dewey was a close friend of Democratic Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, and Dewey aided Humphrey in being named as the Democratic nominee for vice-president in 1964, advising Lyndon Johnson on ways to block efforts at the party convention by Kennedy loyalists to stampede Robert Kennedy onto the ticket as Johnson's running mate.

Frances Dewey died in the summer of 1970 after battling cancer for six years. Later in 1970 Dewey began to date actress Kitty Carlisle, and there was talk of marriage between them. However, he died suddenly of a massive heart attack on March 16, 1971, eight days before his 69th birthday, while vacationing with friend Dwayne Andreas in Miami, Florida, following a round of golf with Boston Red Sox player Carl Yastrzemski. He was 68 years old. Both he and his wife are buried in the town cemetery of Pawling, New York; after his death his farm of Dapplemere was sold and renamed "Dewey Lane Farm" in his honor.