The pollster George Gallup once described Dewey as "the ablest public figure of his lifetime... the most misunderstood man in recent American history." On the other hand, President Franklin D. Roosevelt privately called Dewey "the little man" and a "son of a bitch", and to Robert Taft and other conservative Republicans Dewey "became synonymous with ... New York newspapers, New York banks, New York arrogance – the very city Taft's America loves to hate." A Taft supporter once referred to Dewey as "that snooty little governor of New York." Herbert Brownell, Dewey's campaign manager in his 1944 and 1948 presidential campaigns, later recalled that Dewey was "a tough man to herd...He'd see a local political leader who wasn't doing a very good job and he'd tell him so. Well, he should have left that to his managers to do...he could tell another person what to do brilliantly, but he wouldn't do it himself. He'd give me the perfect formula for handling a difficult person, but then he'd get annoyed at something the guy said." According to Brownell, "perfectionism had its price, and Dewey paid it...He didn't really like handshaking, and he wasn't good at it...he'd climbed up the [political] ladder the hard way. He worked harder, studied longer than anyone else. He could take a problem, break it down into component parts, assign it to talented people. He was a real fighter. As president he would have been boss, but the glad handing, small talk, personality side of politics, he just could not do." When asked if Dewey was happy in politics, Brownell replied "I don't think he was ever happy. He got joy out of attainment. He was satisfied with many of his accomplishments. But as for happiness, in the usual sense of the word – he wasn't really geared to our political system." Appearance and knowledge Dewey grew his mustache when he was dating Frances, and because "she liked it, the mustache stayed, to delight cartoonists and dismay political advisers for 20 years." During the 1944 election campaign, Dewey suffered an unexpected blow when Alice Roosevelt Longworth was reported as having mocked Dewey as "the little man on the wedding cake", alluding to his neat mustache and dapper dress. It was ridicule he could never shake. Dewey alienated former Republican president Herbert Hoover, who confided to a friend "Dewey has no inner reservoir of knowledge on which to