We Like Ike
WHATEVER LIBERAL INTELLECTUALS LIKE LIONEL TRILLING MIGHT SAY about the pervasiveness of liberalism, liberal politicians were finding it hard going at home and abroad. Eighteen months after the 1948 election, President Truman’s popularity had slumped to the mid-thirties as scandals involving several of his closest associates and Missouri friends, like his military aide Major General Harry H. Vaughn, erupted. In Congress, a bipartisan coalition led by Republican Robert Taft and Democrat Richard Russell prevented passage of most of the Fair Deal, which was not, in any event, generating much public enthusiasm. And although there was general agreement about some form of federal aid to education, Protestants and Catholics were quarreling sharply over whether parochial schools should be included. In the field of civil rights, a majority of Americans favored abolition of the poll tax, but only a third supported a strong fair employment bill. As for the labor question, a solid plurality wanted retention, not abolition, of the TaftHartley Act. Finally, the administration’s new agricultural program, the Brannan Plan, “could muster little enthusiasm even from the farmers it was supposed to benefit,” according to Truman biographer Alonzo Hamby.1
For conservatives, all these signs were proof that Truman’s victory had indeed been a fluke. The supposedly errant polls had been right: Dewey would have won if he had campaigned like any normal presidential candidate. Instead, he had allowed his opponent to get away with scaring the farmer, the small businessman, and other Republican constituencies into voting Democratic.
So less than two years after the “political upset of the century,” Truman’s vaunted Fair Deal was a failure. And it was destined to fail, conservatives argued, because it was built on a political aberration: the New Deal. The New Deal had been adopted by the American people because they had lost confidence in themselves and their traditional institutions during the Great Depression. They had reluctantly accepted what seemed to be the only realistic solution: a large helping of big government. In Reclaiming the American Dream, published in 1965, libertarian Richard C. Cornuelle wrote:
That confidence has never been completely restored. Our habit of sending difficult problems to Washington quickly became almost a reflex. A oneway flow of responsibility to the federal government, begun by Depression remedies, has continued and gained speed. In less than thirty years the government has nearly cornered the market for new public responsibility.2
The American people had become even more accustomed to big government, big budgets, and big debt during the big war against Germany and Japan. But with FDR’s death and the successful conclusion of World War II, Americans decided they wanted less government, not more. Truman misread the 1948 results as an endorsement of liberalism when they were in reality a rejection of me-too Republicanism. Then, too, only Roosevelt, the master politician, could hold together the disparate elements of the New Deal coalition. And everyone, including Truman himself, agreed that Harry Truman was no FDR.
Looking abroad, questions were raised in the late 1940s about the policy of containment as the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb and China fell to Mao Zedong and the communists. In the administration’s China White Paper, Secretary of State Acheson laid China’s loss squarely on Chiang Kaishek and his Nationalist government. But congressional Republicans insisted that the U.S. government, led by the State Department, had contributed decisively to China’s going communist by, for example, delaying crucial military assistance to the Nationalists.3
At home, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury for denying his pro-Soviet espionage activities and sentenced to four years in jail. Whittaker Chambers, whose testimony about communists in government had been brushed aside by virtually the entire liberal establishment, was vindicated. In March 1949, Winston Churchill delivered a speech in Boston that did much to explain why Americans were so concerned about communists, domestic and foreign. Churchill declared that “it is certain that Europe would have been communized like Czechoslovakia, and London under bombardment some time ago, but for the deterrent of the atomic bomb in the hands of the U.S.”4
In other words, as William F. Buckley, Jr., and L. Brent Bozell put it in their study of anticommunism, “a single individual could shift the balance of power by delivering to the Soviet Union technological secrets through the use of which they could overcome their strategic disadvantage and proceed to communize Europe.” For the first time in history, a traitor could determine the outcome of not just a battle or even a war but “the destiny of the West.”5
Even most civil libertarians offered little criticism when a group of prominent college presidents, led by James B. Conant of Harvard and Dwight D. Eisenhower of Columbia, declared in June 1949 that communists should be excluded from employment as teachers.6
It was in this context of potential treason and at the height of the cold war that Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin delivered a fateful speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950.
Almost fifty years later, it is still being debated whether McCarthy claimed that 205 or 57 or 81 communists were working in the State Department. McCarthy’s use of “205” referred to a letter written in 1946 by Secretary of State James Byrnes to Congressman Adolph Sabath of Illinois, in which the secretary stated that adverse security recommendations had been made against 284 employees of the State Department. As of July 1946, some 79 had been discharged, leaving a difference of 205. The other two numbers—57 and 81—referred to individual cases that McCarthy was pulling together, drawing on congressional hearings, State Department sources, and help from the FBI.7
Less than two weeks after his Wheeling address, McCarthy was summoned to explain his allegations before a special Senate subcommittee headed by Democrat Millard Tydings of Maryland. After four months of hearings and 1,498 pages of testimony, the Tydings subcommittee issued a report describing McCarthy’s charges against the State Department as a “fraud and hoax.”8
Buckley and Bozell, two of the most uncompromising anticommunists in America, admitted that McCarthy’s behavior during the Tydings hearings was “far from exemplary.” He “showed himself to be inexperienced, or, worse still, misinformed. Some of his specific charges were exaggerated; a few had no apparent foundation whatever.”9
But although McCarthy never revealed the names of the “57 card-carrying Communists,” he did expose the shockingly lax condition of State Department security. An embarrassed department felt compelled to “reprocess” forty-six of the fifty-nine McCarthy cases still employed. In short order, eighteen of them were gone, and not, we may safely conclude, because they were close to the age of retirement. National security required their departure.
The Wheeling speech and the Tydings aftermath revealed the several faults of Joe McCarthy. He was, in the words of Roy Cohn, his closest aide during this period, “impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse. He tended to sensationalize the evidence he had…. He would neglect to do important homework and consequently would, on occasion, make challengeable assumptions.”10 Cohn attributed McCarthy’s carelessness to the fact that he “was a salesman … selling the story of America’s peril.” He may have been wrong in details, Cohn argued, but he “was right in essentials. Certainly few can deny that the Government of the United States had in it enough Communist sympathizers and pro-Soviet advisers to twist and pervert American foreign policy.”11
Cohn’s analysis was echoed decades later by the liberal columnist Nicholas Von Hoffman, who conceded in 1996 that “McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much. The government was the workplace of perhaps 100 communist agents in 1943-45. [McCarthy] just didn’t know their names.”12 Von Hoffman based his startling admission on Venona, a top-secret program of the National Security Agency during the 1940s that intercepted and then decoded messages between Moscow and its American agents. Venona proved, wrote Von Hoffman, that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were “rife with communist spies and political operatives” who reported, directly or indirectly, to the Soviet government, just as anticommunists like Joe McCarthy had charged.13
A special target of McCarthy was Professor Owen Lattimore of Johns Hopkins University, a noted authority on the Far East and a long-time official of the procommunist think tank, the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). The senator declared that he would “stand or fall” on his accusations against Lattimore, whom he described as “one of the principal architects of our Far Eastern policy.”14
The Tydings Committee investigated McCarthy’s charges, heard from Lattimore at length, and found him innocent—the victim of “promiscuous and specious attacks.” McCarthy, said the committee, had subjected the respected academic to “ordeal by slander,” a phrase that Lattimore used as the title of his subsequent book about his confrontation with the allegedly reckless and irresponsible senator from Wisconsin.15
It took more than forty years to establish the truth, but in 1997 the conservative editor-author M. Stanton Evans published a definitive article in Human Events. Evans concluded that the evidence was overwhelming that Lattimore was precisely what the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee had concluded he was: “a conscious, articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy.”16 The subcommittee, chaired by Democrat Pat McCarran of Nevada, had scrupulously examined Lattimore’s influence on U.S. foreign policy. As an example of Lattimore’s “disinterested” expertise, Evans quoted from his remarks at a 1949 State Department conference, with the secretary of state present, shortly before the communists seized control of mainland China:
The type of policy expressed by support for Chiang Kai-shek has done more harm than good to the United States…. [Red] China cannot be economically coerced by such measures as cutting off trade…. It is not possible to make Japan an instrument of American policy…. Japan can keep herself alive by coming to terms economically and politically with her neighbors in Asia, principally China…. South Korea is more of a liability than an asset to the interests and policy of the United States.17
No wonder we lost China, said conservatives like intelligence expert Robert Morris.18
Anticommunism, whether of the undiluted McCarthy brand or the smoother Taft blend, achieved additional acceptability when North Korean forces invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. Two days later, President Truman condemned North Korea’s aggression and ordered American air and sea forces to give South Korean troops “cover and support.” Asserting that communism had added “armed invasion and war” to its tactics “to conquer independent nations,” Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait to “prevent any attack on Formosa,” an order that laid the foundation for the subsequent Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and the Republic of China on Taiwan.19
Congressman Walter H. Judd of Minnesota, a leading House Republican in foreign affairs, praised Truman’s action as “honorable” and having “some chance … of stopping this and further Communist aggressions in Asia.” But privately he wrote that those in charge of U.S. foreign policies “had steadfastly retreated all these years in Asia” and had placed the United States and its allies “down on our five yard line.”20
Human Events, abreast as always of communist affairs, had suggested there might be an invasion of South Korea one month before North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel. In a lead essay published on May 17, Chinese scholar Hsiang Chi-pei described “a strong Communist State” in North Korea, “in direct contact with the Communists of Manchuria and openly preparing to extend its control over the whole peninsula.”21
Taft blamed the Korean War on the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, where U.S. representatives “handed over Manchuria and North Korea as well as the Kurile Islands and Sakhalin” to the communists. But regardless of the origin of the present crisis, he saw no alternative “except to build up our Armed Forces to a point at least of equality with Russia.”22 This position was in sharp contrast to his strong opposition the previous year to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Then he had agreed with Human Events’ Felix Morley, who recalled that twice before Democratic administrations had plunged America into war while “vociferously proclaiming their desire for peace.” “The Atlantic Alliance,” wrote Morley, “appears as the parallel preliminary for war with Russia.”23 However, congressional Republicans, alarmed by communist advances in Eastern Europe and Asia, had disregarded Taft’s and Morley’s warnings and endorsed NATO.
Taft had a challenge much closer to home that he had to meet in 1950: his reelection to the U.S. Senate.
Typically, Taft went all out for his reelection, visiting every one of Ohio’s eighty-eight counties and spending an estimated $5 million, an astronomical sum for a Senate race at that time. The stakes were raised when the national leaders of organized labor marshaled all their horses and all their men to unseat the author of what they called the “Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Law.”
Unlike Dewey two years earlier, Taft went on the offensive—and stayed there. “The general program of the Truman crusade,” Taft declared, “is clear—promise everyone everything and hope to back it up with government money. Every American knows in his heart that such a policy will wreck the United States and reduce it to bankruptcy. It will bring first inflation and then depression.”24
His energy astounded even old friends. Up at dawn, he campaigned until late at night, often driving his car, making three or four major speeches a day, striding through factories to shake the hands of startled union workers who were being told to hate him. What are your main assets as a candidate? he was asked. “A cast-iron stomach and good digestion,” he answered dryly.25 By election day, he later estimated, he had given 873 speeches, spoken 147 times over radio, and toured 334 industrial plants.
In his speeches, Taft called repeatedly for the election of orthodox Republicans. “We need a Congress,” he asserted, “which will not hesitate to pass the Mundt-Ferguson bill to require the registration of every Communist organization.” And he charged that Truman was seeking “complete and arbitrary power” over the country’s economy. Taft had never conceded that government controls would defeat inflation, and he did not intend to start now.26
Taft beat his opponent, Joseph Ferguson, by 431,184 votes, one of the greatest margins ever given any candidate in Ohio, and he carried eighty-four of the eighty-eight counties. He was enormously proud that large numbers of people not remotely identifiable as “fat cats” had voted for him along with many thousands of union members. As Taft wrote Herbert Hoover, his reelection showed that “the American workman will not listen to a class appeal, but proposes to vote as an American first…. We certainly upset the theory that a heavy vote is necessarily radical.”27 It was the most impressive triumph scored by any Republican senator in 1950, which included victories by Richard Nixon in California and Everett McKinley Dirksen in Illinois.
Taft decided he would again offer himself and all he represented—what he felt was true Republicanism—as a presidential candidate in 1952. “I don’t think there is any solution to the present situation,” he wrote privately, “except to throw out the present administration at the first opportunity. Their policies have led America into a dangerous situation, and they are utterly incapable of getting us out.”28
The most dangerous policy of all was Truman’s foreign policy, which had produced “a useless war” in Korea and had permitted the conquest of China by communists. “Is it any wonder,” Taft asked in a Minneapolis speech, that Americans “pay some attention to charges of pro-communist sympathy in the State Department?” He called for “supreme” U.S. air and sea power but opposed the building of a great land army or the waging of war on the vast land areas of Europe and Asia, “Russia’s chosen battlegrounds.”29
By mid-1951, nearly every political observer agreed that the GOP would probably win the White House in 1952, but conservatives insisted that the party had to nominate the right sort of Republican—Taft or someone very much like him. Pointing to the 1948 debacle, Taft argued that the Republican party could not survive unless it turned away from “the Deweys and the Eastern internationalists in general.” The senator was not concerned about the possible defection of easterners if he were the candidate. He was convinced that “millions of his kind of Republican had not been voting for years in Presidential elections” because the candidates invariably were Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Taft saw his duty as not to convert the heathen but to bring the faithful back into the fold.30 But he would discover, yet again, that the Sanhedrin of the GOP still controlled the presidential nominating machinery.
Before formally declaring his candidacy in mid-October 1951, Taft set down on a legal pad the pros and cons of his running:
The one word underlined in the memo was duty—a principle that drove Taft all his life. There was also the opportunity—one could say obligation—“to save liberty in U.S.”
Although there were other candidates (like Harold Stassen, Earl Warren, and Douglas MacArthur), the 1952 presidential nomination race was essentially between Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Taft, between the eastern liberal wing and the midwestern conservative wing, between “modern” Republicans and “regular” Republicans, between pragmatists indifferent to political principle but eager to win and idealists for whom principle was as important as victory.
According to Gallup, Taft was a three-to-one choice over Eisenhower among members of the Republican National Committee and had a three-to-two margin when Republican governors and state chairmen were added to the sample. But Eisenhower was popular with rank-and-file Republicans, and he was the overwhelming choice of Democrats and independents asked to name the Republican they preferred. And despite his impressive senatorial victory in 1950, Taft lacked Eisenhower’s broad appeal beyond the party regulars.32
Taft pursued his last, best chance for the presidency the only way he knew how—vigorously. Before he finished campaigning in late June, the senator had visited thirty-five of the forty-eight states, had made some 550 speeches, had traveled fifty thousand miles, and had been seen by an estimated 2 million people.
New Hampshire was the first, crucial primary. Taft was the early favorite, but enthusiastic supporters of Eisenhower (who was still in Paris as NATO commander and never set foot in the state) covered every city and hamlet of New Hampshire like a heavy winter snow. They also used dirty tricks. Eisenhower supporter Tex McCrary later admitted that he planted women in every Taft audience who would ask the senator, “I have a son who is being drafted—and he wants to ask you why your voting record is the same as Marcantonio’s,” referring to a well-known left-wing congressman from New York City.33 It was a loaded and nonsensical question based on Taft’s public skepticism about the conduct of the Korean War. But such questions, which Taft patiently answered, had a harmful impact.
Eisenhower won in New Hampshire, and his supporters followed up by mounting an effective write-in campaign in Minnesota one week later, securing 108,000 write-ins, only 12,000 behind the tally for the state’s former governor, Harold Stassen, who was on the ballot. The Minnesota results led Eisenhower to admit that he was “reexamining” his past position against running, and two weeks later, Ike asked President Truman for permission to resign as NATO commander, effective June 1.34
Now Taft had to win a primary, and he spent twenty-two days in Wisconsin, enduring cold, snowy weather and spending some $100,000, a huge sum for the time. In a large turnout, he received 315,000 votes and captured twenty-four of thirty-six delegates. On the same April day, he also won Nebraska.
Over the next month, Taft showed his strength in the Midwest, the South, and parts of the Plains and Rocky Mountain states. By mid-May, the Associated Press gave Taft a lead of 374 to 337 delegates over Eisenhower, based on his victories in the Illinois, South Dakota, and Ohio primaries and at state conventions in West Virginia, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Just before the opening of the national convention in Chicago, half of the nation’s fifty top political reporters thought Taft would win the nomination. But Eisenhower still led the Gallup polls of independent voters by an overwhelming margin and led Taft among Republicans by 44 to 35 percent. Much of Eisenhower’s delegate strength was in the populous northern states, while Taft’s resided in the southern and border states that since 1932, the Eisenhower people pointed out, had usually voted Democratic.35
On Sunday evening, July 6, 1952, the day before the Republican convention opened, Taft held a news conference at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago. He displayed a large bundle of telegrams—530 of them—from delegates pledged to Taft until hell froze over. “It was perhaps the most impressive display of personal strength,” wrote political journalist Richard Rovere, “made by any political leader in American history.”36 Rovere was not the only journalist to note the strong emotions that Taft aroused among his delegates, who saw in the Ohio senator not just a candidate but a political savior.
Taft needed 604 delegates to secure the nomination, which seemed a sure thing, because his organization had apparently covered every possible base. Both the temporary and the permanent convention chairmen were pledged to Taft. He had a majority in the platform committee, the credentials committee, and the national committee. As delegates arrived, they were welcomed by Taft supporters who accompanied them to their hotels and informed them of upcoming events. The Taft people knew what would interest them, for they had compiled detailed notebooks about the delegates, carefully listing political information and personal gossip about each of them. Nothing had been left to chance. They had even picked the music that would be played during the convention.
And they had the warm endorsement of the only living Republican ex-president, Herbert Hoover, who praised Taft’s forthrightness, integrity, and leadership against “the currents of collectivism in the country.” Hoover articulated what every Taft delegate believed in his heart: “This convention meets not only to nominate a candidate but to save America.”37 There did not seem to be any way that Taft could be denied what he had so clearly earned.
But the Eisenhower forces found one by challenging accredited delegates from the South. Since the Civil War, Republican party workers in the South had two responsibilities: to serve as postmasters when there was a Republican president and to vote at the national conventions. These party regulars were 100 percent behind Mr. Republican, Bob Taft.
Regular Texas Republicans had met and selected the delegates who would go to Chicago: thirty for Taft, four for Eisenhower, and four for MacArthur. Eisenhower’s managers placed ads in Texas newspapers and mailed thousands of postcards addressed to “Occupant” that invited Democrats to come to Republican party meetings and “vote” for General Eisenhower. The ads stated: “You are not pledged to support the nominee of the Republican Party nor does it prohibit you from voting in the July Democratic Primary nor does it prohibit you from voting for whomever you please in the November election.”38 The ads and the postcards were wrong: Texas law expressly prohibited Democrats who intended to remain Democrats from electing delegates to a national Republican covention.
Nevertheless, Eisenhower “Republicans” convened separately in Texas and picked thirty-three Ike delegates and five Taft delegates. As a result, two Texas delegations showed up in Chicago, each claiming to be the legitimate representative of the Lone Star State.
The convention officials who would decide which would be seated were Taft men, but the Eisenhower people denounced what they called “the Texas steal” and demanded that Taft repudiate such tactics. Masked bandits with guns roamed the Chicago streets carrying placards that read “Taft Steals Votes,” while oversized signs appeared proclaiming that “RAT” stood for “Robert A. Taft.”39 Taft replied heatedly, and accurately, that he had never “stolen” anything in his life and that the delegates had been chosen according to accepted party procedures of more than eighty years’ standing. Taft was right: The issue was, to use one of Ike’s favorite words, tommyrot. The Eisenhower delegates were no more representative of the Texas Republican party than the Taft delegates. At least the Taftites were lifelong Republicans, not Johnny-come-latelies.40
But the Eisenhower managers had taken off their gloves. They used the GOP’s lust for victory and the general’s five-star aura to challenge slates in Georgia and Louisiana as well as Texas. And they persuaded their candidate that fair play was being denied in Chicago. The man with the broad grin who had led America to victory in World War II and was still the idol of a grateful nation vowed to fight “to keep our party clean and fit to lead the nation.” He deplored “smoke-filled rooms,” “star chamber methods,” and “chicanery.” He demanded “fair play.”41
There is little question that the convention delegates wanted to nominate Taft and would have chosen him and later campaigned for him around the clock. So why didn’t they? Because the polls showed Ike beating any Democrat by a wide margin. A Gallup Poll showed Eisenhower handily defeating Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, the likely Democratic nominee, by 59 percent to 31 percent. In a similar test between Taft and Stevenson, the Illinois governor held a slim 45-to-44 advantage. Republicans loved Taft, observed William Manchester, but “they loved victory more.”42
Taft was also badly served by his managers on the convention floor. Governor Arthur B. Langlie of Washington, an Eisenhower man, offered a motion that the contested delegates from Texas, Georgia, and Louisiana remain unseated until their qualifications had been decided by a majority of all the delegates. It was a reversal of long-standing convention rules but was democracy in action. The Taft response came from Ohio congressman Clarence J. Brown, who clumsily offered an amendment that conceded the Eisenhower people almost everything but retained Taftite control of the convention. Brown seemed to be admitting that the Taft forces had indeed been guilty of theft. It was all the convention, eager to embrace Ike, needed. The Brown amendment was defeated 658 to 548, and control of the Republican party passed to Dwight Eisenhower.43
Not even Senator Dirksen of Illinois, a renowned orator, could sway the convention when he turned to the New York delegation, leader of the Eisenhower forces, and roared, “When Dewey was the candidate in 1944 and 1948, I went into twenty-three states and fought for him. Reexamine your hearts on this [delegate] issue because we followed you before and you took us down the road to defeat!”44 Taft believers bellowed their approval, but they did not have the votes to match their emotion.
There were nominating speeches yet to be made and standing ovations for former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy, but everyone, including Robert Taft, knew that the nominee had been decided. On the first ballot, the count stood Eisenhower 595, Taft 500, Warren 81, Stassen 20, and MacArthur 10. There was no second ballot: Minnesota asked to be recognized and changed its vote from Stassen to Eisenhower. Senator John Bricker, for Taft, and Senator William Knowland, for Warren, then moved that the nomination be made unanimous.
There were plenty of theories and recriminations as to why Taft lost. Certainly his staff had made mistakes. There had been overconfidence about New Hampshire and a failure to appreciate the importance of the Texas “steal.” Clarence Brown, one of Taft’s closest advisers for many years, fumbled by first barring television from the deliberations of the national committee and then trying to amend the Langlie resolution at the wrong time and in the wrong way.
And most important, Taft had no conservative movement to help him. As Frank Hanighen wrote in Human Events the year before, the “Capitalists” who should have been supporting Taft’s ideas were “either stupidly donating money to foundations which oppose his ideas or complacently waiting for his triumph at the polls.”45 One of the few evidences of movement conservatism was the formation, in the spring of 1952, of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), whose organizers argued that the push toward socialism in America began with the Socialist Clubs on college campuses over forty years earlier. ISI’s plan was to “foment the organization of campus cells for the study and discussion of Individualistic ideas.” Its founding father was libertarian writer Frank Chodorov; its first president was a recent Yale graduate, William F. Buckley, Jr.46
But the essential truth about Taft’s defeat, as biographer James T. Patterson pointed out, was that the senator carried the burden of being seen as a regional candidate who lacked substantial support in the populous Northeast and Pacific Coast. And it was the eastern states—the eastern establishment—that still ruled the Republican party at convention time.47
The easterners, led by Thomas Dewey, did not like Taft because they thought him an isolationist, a small-government Jeffersonian, and a loser. They wanted to win and believed they would win with war hero Eisenhower, a strong internationalist and sympathetic, they thought, to “modern” Republicanism with its belief in efficiently managed government.
But their dreams of victory would have evaporated without the generous public support that Taft, ever the faithful Republican, immediately tendered his rival. Taft supporters were crying and cursing and threatening to walk out when Ike, reversing the usual practice, visited Taft in his Hilton Hotel headquarters. The meeting of the two men, Human Events wrote, was “like Grant and Lee at Appomattox.”48 As they stood side by side in the crowded, noisy hall, reporters noted with some surprise that it was Eisenhower who seemed drawn and emotional while Taft was calm and poised.
“I came over to pay a call of friendship on a great American,” said the general. “His willingness to cooperate is absolutely necessary to the success of the Republican party in the campaign and the administration to follow.” Taft responded in kind: “I want to congratulate General Eisenhower. I shall do everything possible in the campaign to secure his election and to help in his administration.”49 Taft’s refusal to display any public bitterness, his quiet acceptance of defeat, awed friend and foe alike. Taft “had no petty jealousy and hatred,” journalist Edwin Lahey recalled. “He was freer of them than almost any man I’ve ever seen in public life.”50
But many conservatives were not so willing to forgive and forget what had happened in Chicago. Taft was flooded with letters from resentful supporters who vowed, “I will do everything I can to defeat General Eisenhower and I know there are many other men like me.” A midwestern politician told Human Events that he had never “seen the like” of “the bitterness of the rank and file of Republicans.”51
Knowing that a divided party spelled defeat, anxious Eisenhower aides contacted Taft and proposed a summit meeting between the two Republican leaders. Taft agreed to a September date but said that Eisenhower would have to agree to “certain assurances” in advance. They included no discrimination against Taft people during or after the campaign; no censorship of Taft’s proposals, which included a 15 percent cut in 1954-1955 federal spending and a tax cut; a firm defense of Taft-Hartley; a “reasonably conservative farm policy”; and a sharp attack on Truman’s foreign policy as developed at “Yalta, Tehran, Potsdam, and Manchuria.”52 It was strong medicine, but the large spoonful of sugar for the Eisenhower people was Taft’s assurance that he would campaign “vigorously” for the ticket.
The long-awaited Eisenhower-Taft meeting took place on September 12 over a two-hour breakfast at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Morningside Heights in New York City. There was no joint statement or press conference, but the two smiling men posed for photos. Taft then went across the street to a hotel and warmly endorsed his rival, asserting that the fundamental issue of the campaign, as accepted by Ike, was “liberty against the creeping socialism in every domestic field.” It was a triumphant moment for Taft.53
Dismayed liberal Republicans dubbed the meeting the “Surrender at Morningside Heights,” and Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, always a maverick, publicly declared his independence from the Republican party.54 Conservative Republicans, on the other hand, were reassured by Taft’s unqualified declaration:
I am completely satisfied that General Eisenhower will give the country an administration inspired by the Republican principles of continued and expanding liberty for all as against the continued growth of New Deal socialism which we would suffer under Governor Stevenson … a representative of the left-wingers if not a left-winger himself.55
The Morningside Declaration formed a powerful alliance between two very different men and two very different political wings of a national political party.56 So long as both sides stood by the declaration, the alliance might last not just for an election but for an administration and even a generation. But as we shall see, for the pragmatists, the declaration was just that: a piece of paper, a commitment to be honored for the moment but not necessarily any longer. After all, who knew what challenges and opportunities might open up in the coming months and years? Surely no one could or should expect a political party, or an administration, to tie itself down to a document composed in the heat of a political campaign.
But for conservatives, the word was all-important. A declaration was a bond to be kept and honored. It was a foundation on which to build an alliance, a party, a movement, a nation. What people said and wrote and promised was important. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address were not just documents but principles and beliefs that constituted an enduring contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn. The Morningside Declaration was in this honorable tradition, at least in the eyes of conservatives.
Although not indifferent to the Burkean sentiment, eastern Republicans were tightly focused on a more immediate “contract” they wanted the American electorate to sign: putting the GOP in the White House after twenty years. Accordingly, their candidate accepted the Morningside Declaration, signaling he would not wage a “me-too” Deweyite campaign. Ike approved a symbol that became the official campaign slogan, K1C2—for “Korea, Communism, Corruption.” And he campaigned on the 1952 Republican platform, drafted by Taft Republicans, which promised:
We shall eliminate from the State Department and from every Federal office, all, wherever they may be found, who share responsibility for the needless predicaments and perils in which we find ourselves.
We shall also sever from the public payroll the hordes of loafers, incompetents and unnecessary employees who clutter the administration of our foreign affairs….
We shall see to it that no treaty or agreement with other countries deprives our citizens of the rights guaranteed them by the Federal Constitution….
[There will be] reduction of expenditures by the elimination of waste and extravagance so that the budget will be balanced and a general tax reduction can be made.57
A loyal Taft campaigned unstintingly for the nominee and new leader of his GOP, appearing in twenty states of the West and Midwest and rallying, where necessary, his still resentful supporters. He sharply delineated the differences between the two candidates, charging that Stevenson’s election “would mean a continuation of the wavering, unstable, pro-Communist philosophy that has almost brought this country to destruction.”58 It was strong stuff, but not a match for the stinging rhetoric of vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon, who invariably described Stevenson as “Adlai the Appeaser” who had received a “Ph.D. from Dean Acheson’s Cowardly College of Communist Containment.”59
And then there was Senator Joseph McCarthy, who, in his travels through ten states campaigning for conservative candidates, referred often to “Alger” Stevenson. The Illinois governor had opened himself up for the gibe by volunteering that Alger Hiss had a “good” reputation so far as he knew. Stevenson’s subsequent protest that he had “never doubted the verdict of the jury which convicted him” was ignored by both conservatives and liberals.60 But it was not only ardent anticommunists like Nixon and McCarthy who sounded the tocsin across the country.
Eisenhower himself took full advantage of the public mood by asserting that a national tolerance of communism had “poisoned two whole decades of our national life” and insinuated itself into our schools, public forums, news channels, labor unions, “and—most terrifyingly—into our government itself.” He attributed both the fall of China to Mao Zedong and the “surrender of whole nations” in Eastern Europe to communists in Washington.
“This penetration,” Ike declared in a Milwaukee speech, with Joe McCarthy seated behind him on the platform, “meant a domestic policy whose tone was set by men who sneered and scoffed at warnings of the enemy infiltrating our most secret councils.” In short, he said, “It meant—in its most ugly triumph—treason itself.”61 Eisenhower went so far as to delete a paragraph praising former Secretary of State George Marshall, a favorite target of McCarthy, who vigorously pumped Ike’s hand after his address. Liberals were disgusted at what they called Eisenhower’s “cravenness,” but conservatives felt vindicated.62 Ike may not have cared for McCarthy’s methods, but he shared the Wisconsin senator’s objective: get the communists out of the government. And he wanted to win the election.
Human Events backed Eisenhower in the hope that his victory would mean “the beginning of the end of the Republican Party—and the rise of a new conservative party.” It argued that realignment of the parties was inevitable inasmuch as Ike could win only by attracting voters “hitherto outside the Republican Party” whose convictions he would not later be able to disregard. The conservative publication conceded that its “apologia for Ike” was speculative but nevertheless warranted: “Big political changes loom.”63
The election results did not startle anyone, including the Democrats: Eisenhower captured 33.9 million votes (55.4 percent of the total) to 27.3 million for Stevenson. Ike’s impressive vote was almost 12 million more than Dewey had received in his lackluster 1948 campaign. Eisenhower swept the electoral college, 442 to 89, and cracked the so-called Solid South, carrying Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Ike’s coattails helped Republicans gain narrow majorities in both houses of Congress: 48 to 47 with 1 independent in the Senate (including a new senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater) and 221 to 214 in the House. For the first time since 1930, Republicans controlled both the White House and Capitol Hill.
While the Republican triumph was due in large measure to the general’s extraordinary personal appeal, other factors were also in play. The Republican party was a united party, thanks to Robert Taft. Many Catholic Democrats, especially those of Irish and Polish background, voted Republican because of K1C2 and Joe McCarthy. Arthur Krock of the New York Times wrote that “the voting majority indicated approval of the objectives of what the Democrats and independents have assailed as McCarthyism.”64 Ike carried four southern states because he was forced to the right by the Republican platform, the Morningside Declaration, and other conservative pressures. And finally, for all his wit and intelligence, Adlai Stevenson was unable to hold the old FDR coalition together. Political erosion and demographic shifts combined to make the suburbs the new electoral centers of power, and the suburbs were becoming Republican territory, with Democratic strongholds like Levittown, Long Island, and Park Forest, Illinois, voting GOP by two to one.65
Stevenson was even challenged in an aspect of campaigning thought to be almost exclusively his: television. While refraining from delivering speeches on television (a Stevenson specialty), Ike did film a number of television commercials. Carefully coached by his advisers (including film actor Robert Montgomery), Eisenhower gave short, simple answers to questions he had encountered in the campaign: “Mr. Eisenhower, can you bring taxes down?” “Yes. We will work to cut billions in Washington spending and bring your taxes down.”66 The campaign spent about $800,000 to air twenty-eight different thirty-second television spots, usually during popular programs. The spots beamed Ike’s all-American smile into the living rooms of millions of Americans and were worth every penny. Television had become an indispensable weapon of American politics.
Republicans had begun using visual-sound advertising in the 1950 congressional elections. The technique was developed by Robert Humphreys, a veteran political reporter hired by the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee to be its publicity director. Under Humphreys’s direction, the committee provided Republican candidates with color strip films and records containing commentaries on three key issues: the Korean war, the Brannan Plan dealing with agriculture, and “America’s Creeping Socialism.” Also distributed were material for television appearances, recorded radio spot announcements, newspaper advertisements, and a “speech kit” with data for speeches on more than twenty issues.
Leonard Hall, then a New York congressman and chairman of the Congressional Campaign Committee, reported “an amazing voter response” to the audiovisual presentations, which had never been used before in political campaigns. Republican candidates discovered that people “could be instructed in half the time and were willing to listen twice as long.”67
By 1952, Humphreys correctly predicted, “television will probably affect every congressional contest in the country.” Indeed, and all of American society.68
Looking at the 1952 results, a question comes inevitably to mind: What if Taft rather than Eisenhower had headed the ticket? Taft was convinced he too would have won. Although Ike was enormously popular, he needed the Republican vote and the “negative enthusiasm against what had been going on in Washington.”69 Taft believed that the independent vote would have gone—as it did in his 1950 senatorial campaign—to an aggressive, partisan candidate like himself. Political pollster Samuel Lubell agreed, telling a Washington audience several years later that while Taft would not have won by as large a margin as Eisenhower, “still, he would have been elected.” According to James T. Patterson, the consensus of analysts was that “Taft would have won, but on nothing like the scale amassed by the beloved Ike.”70
As to what kind of president he would have made, Taft again had little doubt, writing a friend in December 1952, “I am confident that my administration would have given the people what they want much more than the General’s will.”71 That is, a Taft administration would have reduced federal spending, balanced the budget, cut taxes, provided carefully prescribed government services in areas like public housing and education where assistance was demonstrably necessary, cleaned out the State Department, ended the conflict in Korea, and met the Soviet challenge with an expanded air force and navy while keeping American armed forces overseas to an absolute minimum.
Still, as he considered the future in late 1952, Taft had good reason to think that he as head of the legislative branch and Eisenhower as head of the executive branch could be an effective team for their party and their country. Tragically, they would have the opportunity to forge such a relationship for only five short months before Robert A. Taft, the requisite link between regular Republican and modern Republican, Midwest and East, internationalist and nationalist, was dead of cancer.