When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998, members of the Washington press corps were quick to hop in front of a camera and predict that President Clinton would resign in disgrace by the end of the year. When the public responded to the uproar by goosing Clinton's approval ratings, those same pundits scratched their heads and wondered just how they could have so badly misread the mood of the country. Well, it wasn't the first time. Historical essayist Zachary Karabell's The Last Campaign looks back a half-century to the press and the pollsters' notorious bungling of the 1948 presidential campaign, which ended with Harry Truman smirking while hoisting a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune with the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman." Scraping off the folklore, Karabell analyzes the conditions that led to Truman's upset, and to the surprised look on the media's collective face. The author relies on his own interpretation of others' accounts rather than first-hand interviews, and his method of interjecting personal opinions into the timeline occasionally leads to awkward jumbling of the order of events, and to repetition as he belabors a few points. But the story itself remains a thriller, and Karabell's analysis is often incredibly astute. Of particular note is the way he weaves the narrative to include the stories of Truman's opponents—not just bland Republican Thomas Dewey, but also former vice president turned Progressive Henry Wallace and the Strom Thurmond-led, civil-rights-fearing States Rights Party. Karabell argues that 1948 was the last time Americans have been able to witness such a public political debate about the role of government in helping the impoverished, making international enemies, and imposing moral order on its citizens. Since then, the omnipresence of television cameras has forced candidates to be less candid, picking tiny holes in their opponents from behind a wall of non-commitment. But Karabell is not interested in waxing nostalgic; he views the bygone with pragmatism and details the ugliness and complacency that were as much a part of 1948 as the ideological grappling. As The Last Campaign relates what happened on Wallace's ill-received integrated tour of the South, or the appalling racist displays that undercut the message of the Dixiecrats, or Truman's increasingly demagogic attacks on the Republicans (for which he would later be repaid with McCarthy-led assaults on his administration), the gulf between then and now shrinks, and the mysteries of the past become plain as text.