ON JUNE 1, Eisenhower returned to the States. The following day he paid Truman a courtesy call. They got to talking politics. Already the Taft people were circulating stories about Mamie’s alleged drinking habits, about Eisenhower’s supposedly being Jewish, about Eisenhower’s presumed secret and continuing love affair with Kay Summersby, and other slanderous material. Truman expressed his sympathy, then said, “If that’s all it is, Ike, then you can just figure you’re lucky.”1 Eisenhower then flew off to Kansas City. There he was met by Governor Dan Thornton of Colorado, a big, outgoing man wearing cowboy boots, a ten-gallon hat, and a huge smile. “Howya, pardner!” Thornton boomed as he gave Eisenhower a powerful slap on the back. A reporter noted, “There was a tense moment as the General’s eyes blazed and his back stiffened. Then, with great control, he gradually unfroze into a smile and reached out his hand to say, ‘Howya, Dan.’ ”2
Politics, American style. In England, Eisenhower ruefully noted, men “stood” for office, but in America they had to “run.” He had feared that he was going to hate the whole process; now he was sure he had been right. Still, he had promised Bill Robinson that “if ever I get into this business, I am going to start swinging from the hips,” and he told “Gee” Gerow that “having put my hand to the plow I intend to see the job through to the end of the furrow.”3 He was determined to win, even if it meant ignoring base slurs on his personal life, mindless attacks on his public record, and affronts to his dignity. He was also willing to pander to those whose support he needed, even if it meant tailoring his views to meet their desires.
The Republican Party of 1952, after twenty years without power or responsibility, was frustrated, angry, negative. What it did best was to criticize, charge, accuse. When it went after the New Deal in general, Eisenhower was in perfect agreement, although on such specific issues as Social Security he was more inclined to take a moderate position. But on foreign policy, he had a major problem. Senator McCarthy’s assault against George Marshall (“part of a conspiracy so immense, an infamy so black, as to dwarf any in the history of man”) was perhaps a bit more extreme than most Republicans would indulge in, but only a bit. But it was from the midwestern and western Republicans, men who had voted against the Marshall Plan and NATO, that Eisenhower would have to find the delegate votes to beat Taft. Therefore his initial national appearances would not be national at all, but rather appeals to the right wing of the GOP. And for the Old Guard, of all the infamies committed by the Democrats in their “twenty years of treason,” the greatest were Yalta and the loss of China. To them, Yalta was the focal point of their hatred of FDR, China of their hatred of Truman.
Now, the truth was that Eisenhower had been one of FDR’s principal agents in carrying out his foreign policy in Europe during the war, and Truman’s Chairman of the JCS when China was “lost.” Eisenhower was hardly an unwilling agent. No matter how much he dodged, equivocated, denied, or explained his actions, it was inescapable that he had loyally, indeed enthusiastically, helped implement FDR’s policy. His refusal to race the Russians to Berlin and his attempts to get along with Zhukov in the second half of 1945 gave the strongest possible support to the Yalta agreements. His close involvements with the Truman Administration in 1948 and 1949 had given at least implied consent to the China policy. These facts were the major obstacle to his winning the nomination. He knew it, and knew he had to leap over it.
Thus in his early speeches, he reassured the Old Guard. He was an enemy of inflation, he said, and of excessive taxation, of centralization of government, of dishonesty and corruption, etc. Most of all, he deplored the secrecy of Yalta and the loss of China. Although he did condemn “the utter futility of any policy of isolation,”4 his emphasis on Yalta and China was exactly what the uncommitted delegates wanted to hear; it also set the tone for the campaign that followed.
In New York, he held a week of meetings with East Coast delegations. The most important of these was Pennsylvania, because it was split: 20 for Ike, 18 for Taft, and 32 uncommitted. The meeting was a success; Eisenhower joked and bantered with the politicians, answered their questions in his simple, forthright manner, and gave them a flash of Eisenhower anger. When he was asked whether he was prepared to wage an enthusiastic campaign, he snapped that it was a “funny kind of question to put to a man who has spent forty years of his life fighting.”5
When the New Hampshire delegation came to Morningside Heights, Eisenhower met Governor Sherman Adams for the first time. Few people actually liked Adams—thin, nervous, crisp to the point of rudeness, Adams had a face that looked as if it had been carved from New Hampshire granite, a demeanor as cold as a New Hampshire winter—but Eisenhower saw in him many of the qualities that Bedell Smith possessed, and sensed that he would have the same kind of loyalty and efficiency. Eisenhower therefore agreed to Lodge’s suggestion that Adams be designated the floor manager for the Eisenhower forces at the convention.
After a week in New York, the Eisenhowers took the train to Denver, stopping en route to address forty thousand people in Cadillac Square in Detroit. He had a prepared speech, but announced that he was abandoning it to talk from the heart. Then he asserted that he had had no personal responsibility for the diplomatic blunders at Yalta and Potsdam and that the decision not to go into Berlin was a political one beyond his control. Then he defended that decision, and in effect contradicted himself, when he reminded the audience that “none of these brave men of 1952 have yet offered to go out and pick the ten thousand American mothers whose sons would have made the sacrifice to capture a worthless objective.” He concluded by leading the crowd in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.6
In Denver, he set up headquarters in the Brown Palace Hotel, where he received delegations from the Midwest and West. On June 26, he gave a national radio-TV address before a Denver Coliseum crowd of eleven thousand. Eisenhower denounced Yalta, blamed the Democrats for the loss of China, and accused Truman of being too soft on corruption at home and on Communism abroad. “If we had been less trusting,” Eisenhower said, “if we had been less soft and weak, there would probably have been no war in Korea!” He repeated his commitment to sound fiscal practices: “A bankrupt America is a defenseless America.”7
The next morning he embarked on a ten-day trip back and forth across the Great Plains, Taft country. He met privately with politicians, and gave series of public addresses, with the emphasis on the positive things he could accomplish. Taken all together, it was an adroit campaign. It was by no means, however, a complete success. Old Guard delegates enjoyed meeting the general; they were impressed by him and by the response his foreign-policy positions brought forth from their constituents; they were satisfied that the general’s domestic views were safe. But their hearts belonged to Taft, and if not their hearts, then their pocketbooks did, because Taft controlled the party machinery and had been nurturing for years the party faithful who made up the delegates. On the eve of the convention, the Associated Press calculated that Taft had 530 delegates, Eisenhower 427.
Many of the delegates still chafed under their party’s defeat in 1948, and “Mr. Republican” was determined to use his lead to stop Eisenhower by portraying Eisenhower as a front man for the hated Dewey. Taft now brought to the fight his finely honed skills as a practical politician. He was, after all, the son of William Howard Taft, the man who had kept the 1912 GOP nomination from the most popular of all early-twentieth-century Republicans, Theodore Roosevelt.
Like his father in 1912, Taft had the southern delegations in his pocket. Lodge set out to steal them for Eisenhower. Through a complex parliamentary process, Lodge got the convention to vote on a “Fair Play” amendment that almost no one understood, except for the point that counted—a vote for “Fair Play” was a vote for Ike. By a narrow margin, Lodge got the amendment passed. Critical help came from Senator Richard Nixon, who pulled a successful power play on Governor Earl Warren to get the California delegation behind “Fair Play” (and thus kill Warren’s chances to become the compromise candidate).
Everything that followed was anticlimactic. Eisenhower swept to the nomination on the first ballot.
After winning the prize, Eisenhower’s first impulse was to be conciliatory. He called Taft on the telephone to ask if he could come across the street to meet with the senator. Taft, surprised, agreed. Eisenhower’s advisers, the men who had fought it out in the trenches with the Taft forces and were still bitter (some of them had been spat upon), were all against it. They wanted to relish their triumph and told Eisenhower that a trip to Taft would violate precedent. But Eisenhower was now the nominee, the man in command. His staff could not push him around anymore, and he insisted.
He did so because, although he might be bewildered by the actions of the politicians gathered in convention, an area in which even a lifelong expert like Taft could get lost, Eisenhower knew better than any politician how to exert leadership on a national stage. He was determined to lead a team, and to have a team he had to bring the Taft people back into the mainstream of the Republican Party. Not so much for the vote in November, which he had been told, and believed, was a sure thing. He wanted—he had to have—a team in order to govern, beginning in January 1953. He had to have a united Republican Party to achieve his program. He had not sought the Presidency for personal reasons, and he felt no great sense of personal triumph over Taft. Rather his first thought was to get Taft on the team, for without him there would be no team and nothing could be accomplished.
The meeting itself was matter-of-fact. It took Eisenhower a half hour to work his way through the crowd of cheering supporters. When he finally got to Taft’s hotel room (passing in the hall Taft workers who were weeping), he told the senator, “This is no time for conversation on matters of any substance; you’re tired and so am I. I just want to say that I want to be your friend and hope you will be mine. I hope we can work together.”8 Taft thanked him; they went into the hall for photographs; Eisenhower returned to the Blackstone Hotel.
That was all. But crossing that Chicago street set Eisenhower on a path that he would follow for the next eight years, a path whose destination was an accommodation with the Old Guard, one based on the Old Guard’s acceptance of NATO and all that it implied. Through his Presidency, Eisenhower stuck to the path, often complaining along the way about the hopelessness, ignorance, or perfidy of various Republican right-wing senators. He never really made it to his destination, and the right wing never came out of its room to meet him halfway. But he never stopped trying to educate and appease the Old Guard.
• •
Eisenhower’s second step on the path was his selection of a running mate. On this decision, his advisers were completely with him, because they too recognized the obvious factors in the situation that dictated who the running mate would be. The criteria, in order of importance, were: a card-carrying member of the Old Guard who nonetheless was acceptable to the moderates, especially the Dewey people; a prominent leader of the anti-Communist cause; an energetic and vigorous campaigner; a relatively young man, to offset Eisenhower’s age; a man from the West, to offset Eisenhower’s association with Dewey and New York; a man who had made a contribution to Eisenhower’s winning the nomination. The only name on the list to satisfy all the criteria was, as Eisenhower well knew, Richard Nixon. So it was done. Brownell called Nixon and asked him to come over to the Blackstone to meet Eisenhower.
Eisenhower was coldly formal. He told Nixon he wanted his campaign to be a crusade for all that he believed in and the things he thought America stood for. “Will you join me in such a campaign?” Nixon, somewhat bemused by the pretentious lines, answered, “I would be proud and happy to.”
“I’m glad you are going to be on the team, Dick,” Eisenhower said. “I think that we can win, and I know that we can do the right things for this country.”
Then he smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand. “I just remembered,” he said. “I haven’t resigned from the Army yet!” He dictated a telegram to the Secretary of the Army, resigning his commission. The scene brought tears to Milton and Arthur Eisenhower’s eyes.9
Eisenhower’s third step along the path of accommodation to the Old Guard was his acceptance of the party platform. This was an extreme right-wing document; by asserting that he could and would campaign on it, Eisenhower reached out for party unity.10 The platform charged that the Democrats “have shielded traitors to the Nation in high places,” and sanctimoniously declared, “There are no Communists in the Republican Party.” The GOP, it promised, “will appoint only persons of unquestioned loyalty.” The foreign-policy section, drafted by John Foster Dulles, who hoped to be Secretary of State, pledged the GOP to “repudiate all commitments contained in secret understandings such as those of Yalta which aid Communist enslavement.” It damned Truman’s containment policy (of which NATO was the most important part) as “negative, futile and immoral,” because containment “abandons countless human beings to a despotism and godless terrorism.” Then, in an open appeal not only to the Old Guard, which had been thundering about Yalta since 1945, but also to the normally Democratic ethnic vote, Dulles’ platform said that a Republican Administration would look “happily forward to the genuine independence of those captive people” of Eastern Europe, whom the Democrats had “abandoned . . . to fend for themselves against Communist aggression.” (The Old Guardsmen were, indeed, a strange set of isolationists. They doubted the wisdom of giving any help to Western Europe, but claimed to be ready to liberate Eastern Europe and Asia.) The platform did contain, at Eisenhower’s insistence, an endorsement of NATO, but to balance that pledge it renounced any intention of sacrificing the Far East to preserve Western Europe.11
In his acceptance speech, Eisenhower avoided foreign policy. Instead, he spoke positively. “I know something of the solemn responsibility of leading a crusade,” he told the convention. “I accept your summons. I will lead this crusade.” He would bring an end to the “wastefulness, the arrogance and corruption in high places, the heavy burdens and the anxieties which are the bitter fruit of a party too long in power.” He vowed a “program of progressive policies, drawn from our finest Republican traditions.” He asked all the delegates to join his team, then concluded that “since this morning I have had helpful and heartwarming talks with Senator Taft, Governor Warren and Governor Stassen. I want them to know, as I want you now to know, that in the hard fight ahead we will work intimately together.” Nixon followed with his acceptance speech, in which he praised Taft to an almost embarrassing degree.12
• •
Then Eisenhower was off for a ten-day vacation at Aksel Nielsen’s ranch at Fraser, Colorado. At 8,700 feet, on the western slope of the Divide, it was a perfect place to be in late July. Eisenhower fished, cooked steaks and trout, and painted. George Allen and other members of the gang were there; Allen insisted on listening to the Democratic convention on the radio. Eisenhower joined him to listen to the acceptance speech of the nominee, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. Eisenhower was impressed by Stevenson’s speaking ability. Allen snorted, “He’s too accomplished an orator; he will be easy to beat.”13 Eisenhower was not so sure. With the nomination behind him, and a specific rival to worry about, the candidate and his advisers could suddenly think of all sorts of things that might go wrong. Dewey’s supreme confidence, right up to election night in 1948, was always there to haunt them. The Democratic Party was by far the majority party in the country, it controlled federal patronage, it was accustomed to winning against the heaviest of odds. Taft had withdrawn into a shell; his supporters continued to snarl at Eisenhower; the Republican Party was beset by the twin obstacles of overconfidence and internal division. At Fraser, Eisenhower began preparing for his campaign, working almost as hard as he had in preparing Overlord.
The first problem, as with Overlord, was to pick a staff. Lodge, the obvious man to serve as campaign manager and chief of staff, had his own senatorial campaign to run in Massachusetts. Eisenhower had been much impressed by Sherman Adams’ performance at the convention and asked Adams to travel with him through the campaign and serve as his chief of staff. Jim Hagerty, Dewey’s press secretary, took on that job for Ike.
With these men, Ike then planned his campaign. What worried him most was the Yalta issue. He wanted to denounce Yalta, but he did not want to hold out hope of American military aid to an uprising in Eastern Europe. He did want to hold out the hope of liberation, but he did not want another tragedy like the premature Warsaw uprising of late 1944.
Despite the obvious dangers and risks of a call for liberation, the rewards were too great to ignore. Liberation was what the Old Guard wanted to hear; it helped disassociate Eisenhower from Yalta and FDR; it would bring thousands of voters of Eastern European backgrounds into the GOP camp for the first time. So, when Eisenhower went to New York on August 24 to speak to the American Legion convention, and to set up a new headquarters in the city, he took the theme with him. He told the Legion that the United States should use its “influence and power to help” the satellite nations throw off the “yoke of Russian tyranny.” He said that he would inform the Soviet Union that the United States would “never” recognize the “permanence” of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, and that American “aid” to the “enslaved” peoples would not stop until their countries were free.14
But Eisenhower was never comfortable with loose talk about war, much less thinly veiled threats to use the atomic bomb. Earlier, in April, when Dulles had said that the United States should develop the will and the means to “retaliate instantly against open aggression by Red armies, so that if it occurred anywhere, we could and would strike back where it hurts, by means of our own choosing,” Eisenhower had protested. What if the Communists moved politically, Eisenhower asked, as in Czechoslovakia, to “chip away exposed portions of the free world? . . . Such an eventuality would be just as bad for us if the area had been captured by force. To my mind, this is the case where the theory of ‘retaliation’ falls down.”15 Dulles, always anxious to please, replied that Eisenhower had put his finger on a weakness in his theory.
Eisenhower agreed with Dulles’ position that it would be immoral to abandon the peoples of Eastern Europe, but he insisted that moral means had to be used for moral purposes, and he was upset at Dulles’ continuing belligerent tone. He got Dulles on the telephone and told him that from then on he absolutely had to use the words “all peaceful means” whenever he discussed liberation.16
Having given the Old Guard what it wanted on liberation, Eisenhower tried to put some distance between himself and McCarthy. At an impromptu press conference in late August, reporters confronted him with a recent Nixon statement that Eisenhower would support McCarthy and other Old Guard senators as members of the Republican team. Eisenhower said he would support McCarthy “as a . . . Republican,” but added forcefully, “I am not going to campaign for or give blanket endorsement to any man who does anything that I believe to be un-American in its methods and procedures.” Pressed about McCarthy’s charges against Marshall, Eisenhower became angry, got up from his desk, began to pace around the room. “There is nothing of disloyalty in General Marshall’s soul,” he said, stating what most would have thought to be the obvious with great emphasis. He described Marshall as “a man of real selflessness.” In an oblique reference to McCarthy (whom he never mentioned by name), Eisenhower said, “I have no patience with anyone who can find in his [Marshall’s] record of service for this country anything to criticize.”17
Eisenhower’s advisers told him not to waste his time campaigning in the South, but he insisted on going, and indeed began his formal campaign with an early September swing through Dixie. He traveled on his special train nicknamed the “Look Ahead, Neighbor,” accompanied by Mamie, Adams, more than three dozen political advisers and staff members, and the working press.
It was the last whistle-stop barnstormer campaign. All the hoopla of American politics was there. The train would stop; the local Republicans would have the crowd waiting; Eisenhower would appear on the rear platform, accompanied by Mamie; he would deliver a set speech that concentrated on cleaning up the mess in Washington and asking the audience to join him in his “crusade”; the whistle sounded; they were off again. Between stops, Eisenhower conferred with local Republican candidates, all of whom wanted their pictures taken with the general.
He carried out a brutal schedule. So brutal, indeed, that the Democrats never dared make an issue of his age. At sixty-one, he was a much more vigorous, active, energetic campaigner than Stevenson, who was nine years his junior. He traveled more than his opponent, spoke more, held more press conferences, and never displayed the kind of utter exhaustion that Stevenson sometimes did. In private, he exercised the soldier’s right to grouse: “Those fools on the National Committee!” he once growled when told of yet another motorcade. “Are they trying to perform the feat of electing a dead man?” But he always bounced back, ready to go full speed again the next morning, after enjoying what speech writer Emmet John Hughes described as “the physical miracle that is a soldier’s night’s sleep.” 18
As always, the crowds responded to his presence, the power of his personality, his appearance, his confidence and sincerity. No matter how corny his speech—in truth, the more corny it was—he managed to make the most commonplace utterances sound like inspired insights, the most unsophisticated and timeworn expressions of his patriotism and religious beliefs sound like fresh and profound conviction.
Mamie proved to be a great asset. She was uneasy with crowds, did not much like politicians, gave no speeches, granted no interviews, and found the whole experience exhausting. But she was a trouper and she seized this opportunity to make a positive, public contribution to her husband’s career. No matter how weary, she roused herself at every stop, stood by her husband’s side, smiled and waved at the appropriate moments. She looked smashing; her bangs became an overnight fad. The most famous picture of the campaign came in Salisbury, North Carolina, when a crowd gathered around the train at 5:30 A.M. and began chanting for Eisenhower. The general and his wife woke, groaned, put on their bathrobes, and groped their way to the rear platform, where they waved back at the crowd. Ike had his arm around Mamie’s shoulder; they both had big grins spreading across their faces. The photograph, as Jim Hagerty said, was “dynamite.”
Nixon, meanwhile, was campaigning vigorously, concentrating on K1C2 (Korea, Communism, and corruption). He called Stevenson a graduate of Dean Acheson’s “Cowardly College of Communist Containment,” and poked fun at Stevenson’s urbane manner and intellectualism. He also took a holier-than-thou attitude toward the corruption that had plagued the Truman Administration in its last years, where gift giving of such items as home freezers and fur coats to public officials had assumed—according to Nixon—alarming and scandalous proportions. Repeatedly, Nixon assured audiences that the Eisenhower “crusade” would clean the crooks and Communists out of Washington.
On September 18, Nixon was hoisted with his own petard, “SECRET NIXON FUND!” screamed the headline in the New York Post, “SECRET RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND KEEPS NIXON IN STYLE FAR BEYOND HIS SALARY.” The Post story said that Nixon had accepted contributions in the amount of some $18,000 from California millionaires. Nixon helped blow the story up by his own overreaction; he immediately, and instinctively, labeled the story a smear by the Communist elements that were out to get him.
That would not wash with Ike’s gang, however; every member urged Ike to dump Nixon. Most of Eisenhower’s professional advisers also urged him to get rid of Nixon. The reporters on the Eisenhower train were forty to two in favor of dropping Nixon, and they told Eisenhower that unless he did so, his crusade was doomed.
Eisenhower, the supposed political novice, realized immediately how much was at stake. His first comment to Adams was “Well, if Nixon has to resign, we can’t possibly win.” 19 He was one of the few to recognize this central fact.
Eisenhower’s response was patient, calculated, clearheaded, and in the end he turned apparent disaster into stunning triumph. In the process, however, he lost whatever chance there was of establishing a warm, close, trusting relationship with Nixon.
Eisenhower scarcely knew Nixon. The two men had met fewer than half a dozen times, only once alone, and all their discussions had been formal affairs, primarily about scheduling speeches and other campaign appearances. They had held no philosophical or political discussions of any substance; they had never played cards together, or shared a meal, or a drink. At thirty-nine years of age, Nixon was young enough to be Eisenhower’s son. Eisenhower’s reputation rested on a lifetime of accomplishments as manager, organizer, commander; Nixon’s reputation, aside from his slashing campaign style, rested on a single investigation, that of Alger Hiss. Except for the delivery of the California vote at the convention, Eisenhower owed Nixon nothing.
Eisenhower’s virtues included patience and fair-mindedness. “Make no mistakes in a hurry” was one of his favorite maxims, and it would have been patently unfair to simply dump Nixon without hearing his side, just as it would have been foolish to endorse him without knowing the facts. Eisenhower also wanted to let the uproar die down a bit before taking any action, if only to gauge the public response.
Eisenhower held an informal press conference on his train. “I don’t care if you fellows are forty to two [against Nixon],” he declared. “I am taking my time on this. Nothing’s decided, contrary to your idea that this is a setup for a whitewash of Nixon.” Then he added, “Of what avail is it for us to carry on this crusade against this business of what has been going on in Washington if we, ourselves, aren’t clean as a hound’s tooth?”20 The following day, the colorful “hound’s tooth” phrase made headlines across the country.
At this point Dewey, always the broker, called Nixon to suggest that Nixon go on national TV to explain the fund. Dewey said that the people around Eisenhower, both on the train and in the New York headquarters, constituted a “hanging jury” and that the proposed appearance was the only way to take the decision out of their hands. “At the conclusion of the program,” Dewey advised Nixon, “ask people to wire their verdict in to you.” If the replies ran no better than 60–40 in Nixon’s favor, he should offer his resignation; if they were 90–10, he could stay on. “If you stay on,” Dewey concluded, “it isn’t blamed on Ike, and if you get off, it isn’t blamed on Ike.”21 Dewey, it is important to note, had not cleared this suggestion with Eisenhower, who had no intention of leaving the decision in Nixon’s hands.
That evening, Eisenhower called Nixon. He said he had not decided what to do, then paused waiting for a reply. Nixon let the line hang silent. Finally Eisenhower said, “I don’t want to be in the position of condemning an innocent man. I think you ought to go on a nationwide television program and tell them everything there is to tell, everything you can remember since the day you entered public life.” Nixon asked if, after the program, an announcement could be made, “one way or the other.” Eisenhower quibbled. Nixon, furious, said that there came a time to stop dawdling, that once he had made his speech, the general ought to decide.
“There comes a time in matters like this when you’ve either got to shit or get off the pot,” Nixon said. Catching himself, he added apologetically, “The great trouble here is the indecision.”
There was another long silence, as Eisenhower caught his breath and regained his composure. Then he said, “We will have to wait three or four days after the television show to see what the effect of the program is.”22 Eisenhower was, in short, going to let Nixon hang until he—Eisenhower—had had an opportunity to judge the speech itself, and its impact.
The conversation was a crucial moment in their relationship. Nixon’s people were already outraged at Eisenhower’s people for their obvious anti-Nixon attitude, and for their determination to protect the general’s reputation, no matter at what expense to Nixon’s career. From the time of the fund incident onward, the relationship between the two camps was always characterized by tension, hostility, mistrust. As for the two principals, Nixon could never forget or forgive Eisenhower for not backing him unhesitatingly during this crisis, while Eisenhower would never forget Nixon’s unfortunate phrase—no one, not Churchill, not de Gaulle, not FDR, not Marshall, had ever presumed to talk to Eisenhower like that.
So far as the Eisenhower-Nixon relationship was concerned, there was worse to come. The RNC gathered the money; Nixon went on television. Eisenhower, together with Mamie and a couple of dozen members of his team, watched in Cleveland, where he was about to make an appearance. Nixon’s speech itself is one of the great classics of American political folklore, so well known that it need not even be summarized here.
There was, however, one part to the speech that affected Eisenhower directly and personally which has not received the attention that has been given to the dog Checkers or Pat Nixon’s cloth coat. It had just been revealed that Stevenson too had a fund, which he had not accounted for and which he used to supplement the salaries of some of his personal appointees in Springfield. Further, Nixon knew that Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Sparkman had his wife on his Senate payroll. After Nixon had laid bare his own (modest) financial position, and demonstrated that he had used the fund for legitimate political expenses, he called on Stevenson and Sparkman to make full revelations of their financial history, because, Nixon said, “a man who’s to be President and a man who’s to be Vice President must have the confidence of all the people.”
Eisenhower had a pad of legal paper in one hand, a pencil in the other. When Nixon called for full financial disclosure from Stevenson and Sparkman, Eisenhower jabbed the pencil into the pad so hard that he broke the pencil point and made a hole in the paper. The blood rushed to his face. Nixon had turned the spotlight on Eisenhower, because if three out of the four candidates made their finances public property, Eisenhower would have to do so too.23
Eisenhower had spent a lifetime learning how to control his temper. He realized that Nixon had saved himself with his brilliant presentation, that he was now stuck with Nixon. When Nixon concluded, Eisenhower dictated a message to Nixon, praising him for his “magnificent” performance, but still leaving Nixon hanging: “My personal decision is going to be based on personal conclusions.” (At the end of his speech, Nixon had asked viewers to write or wire the RNC as to whether or not he should remain on the ticket, a bold attempt to take the decision out of Eisenhower’s hands.) Just in case Nixon still did not get the point as to who was in charge, Eisenhower added, “I would most appreciate it if you can fly to see me at once. Tomorrow I will be at Wheeling, West Virginia.” He concluded, “Whatever personal affection and admiration I had for you—and they are very great—are undiminished.” Not enhanced, just undiminished. Nixon was distraught. “What more can he possibly want from me?” he angrily asked one of his aides. He said he would not go to Wheeling, that he would not humiliate himself any further. Calmer heads in the camp prevailed, and he agreed to go.24
Eisenhower, meanwhile, went out to face the Cleveland audience. It had listened to Nixon over the radio, and it roared with enthusiasm: “We want Dick! We want Dick!” Eisenhower had anticipated that reaction, and when the crowd finally quieted down, he declared, “I like courage. Tonight I saw an example of courage. . . . When I get in a fight, I would rather have a courageous and honest man by my side than a whole boxcar full of pussyfooters.”25
Inwardly, he continued to seethe. Stevenson and Sparkman both said the following week that they would release their tax returns extending over the past decade. Reporters asked Hagerty whether Eisenhower would also make his financial situation public property. Hagerty said he did not know, but turned to Milton, who was with him. Milton said that of course Eisenhower would follow the example of the others. Twenty years later, Hagerty—who was at Eisenhower’s side daily through eight years—recalled that he never, ever saw Eisenhower madder than when he was informed of Milton’s remark. Eisenhower “blew his stack.” He told Hagerty that he would not do it, ever.
Eventually, of course, he had to yield. In early October, Hagerty released Eisenhower’s tax returns, which showed earnings over the past ten years of $888,303, including $635,000 for the one-time sale of the rights to Crusade, and taxes of $217,082, including $158,750 in capital gains taxes on the book. No one protested or raised any questions, but Eisenhower nevertheless was furious. He hated having to make his private finances public knowledge. It went against every fiber of his being. And he never forgave Nixon for making him do it.
Still, Eisenhower emerged from the crisis as the man unquestionably in command. He had not panicked when others had; he had resisted the pressure from both wings of the Republican Party to either endorse or dump Nixon; he had kept the final decision in his own hands. If anyone, including Nixon, had any doubts on the point of who was the commander in chief, Eisenhower set them straight in his first words to Nixon when they met at the Wheeling airport. By that time, the evening after the speech, it was obvious that Nixon had received an overwhelmingly positive response from the public. As Nixon was helping his wife put on her now famous coat, Eisenhower rushed up the steps to the plane, hand outstretched.
Astonished, Nixon mumbled, “General, you didn’t need to come out to the airport.”
“Why not?” Eisenhower grinned. “You’re my boy!”26 As far as Eisenhower was concerned, that “my boy” phrase put their relationship in the proper perspective.
In late September, Eisenhower flew to New York for strategy sessions before embarking on a train trip through the Midwest. After Illinois, he was going to Wisconsin, which meant that the question of what to do about McCarthy had to be faced. Eisenhower said to Emmet Hughes, “Listen, couldn’t we make this an occasion for me to pay a personal tribute to Marshall—right in McCarthy’s back yard?” Hughes, the self-styled liberal in Eisenhower’s headquarters, was enthusiastic. He drafted a paragraph that praised Marshall “as a man and as a soldier . . . dedicated with singular selflessness and the profoundest patriotism to the service of America.” Charges of disloyalty against Marshall, the paragraph concluded, constituted “a sobering lesson in the way freedom must not defend itself.”27
Someone at headquarters—it was never discovered who—told the Wisconsin Republicans of Eisenhower’s intentions. On October 2, while Eisenhower’s train was in Peoria, Illinois, for an overnight stop before heading north to Wisconsin, the Wisconsin governor Walter Kohler, the national committeeman Henry Ringling, and the junior senator Joe McCarthy, flew by private plane to Peoria to confront the general. Eisenhower, staying at the Pere Marquette Hotel, was told that they were in town and wanted to see him. He said he would meet with McCarthy, alone. They met for half an hour. McCarthy asked Eisenhower to make his defense of Marshall in another state.
The following day, as the train headed toward Green Bay, Adams showed Kohler the draft of Eisenhower’s Milwaukee speech, his major address in Wisconsin. It was pretty much standard Republican anti-Communist rhetoric, well laid on, but it did contain, almost as a gratuitous afterthought, a paragraph defending Marshall. Kohler told Adams he liked the speech but wanted the Marshall paragraph removed, as it was unnecessarily insulting to McCarthy in his home state. He suggested that Eisenhower could defend Marshall somewhere else.
From Green Bay, the train headed south, stopping first in Appleton, McCarthy’s home town. McCarthy made the introduction and stood by the general’s side as he delivered a twelve-minute address that contained no reference to McCarthy or his methods. As the train moved toward Milwaukee, the argument over the Marshall paragraph continued. Kohler told Adams that he felt it stood out as an “unnecessarily abrupt rebuff to McCarthy” and said that it would cause serious problems for the Republicans in Wisconsin in the election (Wisconsin had gone Democratic in 1948).
Adams then went to the rear of the train to argue Kohler’s case with Eisenhower. “Are you suggesting that the reference to George Marshall be dropped from the speech tonight?” Eisenhower asked. Adams responded, “Yes, not because you’re not right, but because you’re out of context.” The general then said, “Well, drop it. I handled the subject pretty thoroughly in Denver and there’s no reason to repeat it tonight.”
In their various reminiscences, Eisenhower’s staff tried to make it all sound just that simple—the general dropped the paragraph because it was out of place—and they expressed surprise at the uproar that followed, which came about, they claimed, because someone had leaked an advance copy of the speech and thus the excision of the paragraph became known. But Eisenhower’s aides had been telling reporters all day, “Just wait till we get to Milwaukee, and you will find out what the general thinks of Marshall.” Everybody on the train was talking about the stinging rebuke McCarthy was going to get. Further, Eisenhower did not merely remove the paragraph; in deference to the senator he also weakened some paragraphs denouncing McCarthy’s methods.28
In Milwaukee, Eisenhower made no reference to Marshall. Instead, he said that the Truman Administration had been infiltrated by Communists. The loss of China and the “surrender of whole nations” in Eastern Europe to the Communists was due, he said, to the Reds in Washington. Their penetration of the government, he added, in his most McCarthy-like statement of the campaign, “meant—in its most ugly triumph—treason itself.” Lamely, he added that “freedom must defend itself with courage, with care, with force and with fairness,” and he called for “respect for the integrity of fellow citizens who enjoy their right to disagree. The right to question a man’s judgment carries with it no automatic right to question his honor.”29 As much as the general may have been convinced that he had thereby established a clear distinction between himself and McCarthy, with McCarthy behind him on the stage they sounded like pretty naive quibbles. When Eisenhower finished, McCarthy reached awkwardly over a few rows of chairs to vigorously shake Eisenhower’s hand.
The reaction was immediate and intense. The New York Times editorialized, “Yesterday could not have been a happy day for General Eisenhower . . . nor was it a happy day for many supporters.”30 Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger privately cabled Adams, “Do I need to tell you that I am sick at heart?” Joseph Alsop later reported that Eisenhower’s personal staff on the train were soon referring to the Milwaukee visit as “that terrible day.”31 Herblock published a cartoon in The Washington Post (which was supporting Eisenhower) showing the leering ape-man McCarthy standing in a pool of filth and holding a sign reading, “ANYTHING TO WIN.” About the only public figure who had no public reaction, either then or later, was Marshall himself.
Perhaps the best thing that can be said about the incident is that Eisenhower, having decided to run for the Presidency, was so determined to win that he was willing to do whatever seemed necessary to do so. That he was ashamed of himself, there can be little doubt. He tried to never refer to the Milwaukee speech. When he came to write his memoirs, ten years later, he wanted to ignore it altogether; when his aides insisted that he could not simply pass it over, he wrote, discarded, wrote again, discarded again, and finally printed a version in which he said that if he had realized what the reaction to the deletion was going to be, “I would never have acceded to the staff’s arguments, logical as they sounded at the time.” He claimed that the reaction constituted a “distortion of the facts, a distortion that even led some to question my loyalty to General Marshall.”32 That was as close as he ever came to making a public apology to Marshall; whether he made a private apology or not is unknown.
The Nixon fund and the never-delivered Marshall paragraph were the two most famous incidents of the campaign, the ones remembered for decades afterward. Other incidents, recalled with fondness, chagrin, or disgust, depending on the point of view, included McCarthy’s “slip of the tongue” when he confused the names “Alger” and “Adlai”; Nixon’s rampaging assaults on the Democrats, highlighted by his constant association of Stevenson and Hiss; and Truman’s late but enthusiastic entry into the debate, as the President gave back a bit of what the Republicans were dishing out, including some personal attacks on Eisenhower. Taken all together, 1952 is recalled as one of the bitterest campaigns of the twentieth century, and the one that featured the most mudslinging. Few, if any, of the participants could look back on it with pride.
• •
The high point of Eisenhower’s campaign came in Detroit, on October 24, when he announced that, immediately after his election, he would “forego the diversions of politics and concentrate on the job of ending the Korean war. . . . That job requires a personal trip to Korea. I shall make that trip. Only in that way could I learn how best to serve the American people in the cause of peace. I shall go to Korea.”33
It was an electrifying announcement, coming less than two weeks before the election, and it practically guaranteed the result (one Associated Press reporter heard the speech, packed up his typewriter, and left the campaign trail, declaring that it was all over). Eisenhower had always maintained a comfortable lead in the polls; Stevenson had been moving up a bit in October; with Eisenhower’s Korean announcement, he re-established and then added to his lead.
Stevenson wisely kept quiet about Eisenhower’s pledge, but Truman denounced it as a gimmick of the worst sort, and said that if Eisenhower really wanted to seek peace he should go to Moscow, not Korea. But it was no gimmick; it was so obviously something that the President-elect should do that Stevenson himself, some weeks earlier, had decided that if he won he would make such a trip. But he and his advisers realized that for the governor of Illinois to make such a pledge would most certainly look like a grandstand play, and they could only hope that the idea of such an announcement would not occur to General Eisenhower. But it had always been in Eisenhower’s mind to make such a trip, which he equated with his frequent visits to the front lines during the war. In 1952, as in 1942–1945, he wanted to see for himself. The thought of making his intention public first occurred to Emmet Hughes; C. D. Jackson, an aide, brought a draft of the speech to Eisenhower, read it to him, and got the general’s immediate endorsement.
The response was enthusiastic. The nation’s number-one hero, her greatest soldier and most experienced statesman, was promising to give his personal attention to the nation’s number-one problem. It was reassuring, it was exciting, it was exactly what people wanted to hear. He had not, it is important to note, made any promises about what he would do once in Korea. Those who thought a military victory was still possible could imagine that General Ike would find a way to achieve it; those who wanted an earlier end to the war could believe that Eisenhower was the one man who could deliver it. This ambiguity was not only helpful in the quest for votes; more important to Eisenhower, who was going to win anyway, it kept his options open. The truth was that he did not know what he was going to do about Korea; he wanted to reserve judgment until he had seen for himself; in the meantime, his pledge was a dramatic and effective way to use his prestige and reputation to win votes while retaining flexibility.
After a Boston appearance, Eisenhower and Mamie took the train to New York, where they arrived early on election day, November 4. They voted, then went to Morningside Heights and went to bed. Although the professional pollsters, so badly burned in 1948, were hedging, Eisenhower was confident of success. He was right, of course. The early returns that evening showed a massive switch to the Republicans. Across the country, Eisenhower was getting 55 percent of the vote. His decision to campaign in the South was justified, as he carried Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Florida, and Oklahoma, and barely missed in Louisiana and South Carolina, thereby beginning the historic process of breaking up the Solid South.
Eisenhower got 33,936,234 votes to Stevenson’s 27,314,992, or 55.1 percent to 44.4 percent. Eisenhower received 442 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 89 (from West Virginia plus eight Deep South states). Eisenhower ran ahead of the Republican ticket everywhere, and was especially pleased that he got 100,000 more votes in Wisconsin than McCarthy received. He managed to bring a Republican Congress with him, although by the slimmest of majorities (eight in the House; a tie in the Senate, which with Vice-President Nixon’s vote meant Republican control).
It was a smashing victory. Millions of middle-aged Republicans who voted for Eisenhower had never before cast their ballot for a presidential winner. After five successive victories the Democrats, if not repudiated, were certainly rebuffed. By far the most important reason was Eisenhower’s personal popularity; it was, every analyst agreed, much more his triumph than the Republicans’.
• •
As the returns came in, the Eisenhowers watched on TV in their suite at the Commodore Hotel. The gang, plus Milton and a few other close friends and political associates, joined them. Mamie sat on the floor, tears running down her cheeks. When Stevenson conceded, at 1:30 A.M. the Eisenhowers joined the celebration in the ballroom long enough for the President-elect to make a brief speech, then returned to their suite.
Eisenhower threw himself down on a bed, exhausted. Clare Boothe Luce approached him. “Mr. President,” she said, “I know how tired you are. But there is one more thing you have to do.” She told him what it was. Groaning, he went to the phone and put through a call to the last Republican President, Herbert Hoover.34 Then he and Mamie decided to return to Morningside Heights. When they got into their car, on Park Avenue, they were momentarily astonished to see that Sergeant Dry had been replaced by two complete strangers. They were Secret Service men.
• •
Now he was President-elect. He was in that position because of his proved competence as a general, as a statesman, and as a leader. People had turned to Eisenhower not so much because of what he stood for, although that counted, as because of who he was and what he had accomplished. He was the hero who could be trusted to lead the nation to peace and prosperity. In ten weeks, he would become the most powerful man in the world. (Just how powerful was exemplified by an event that occurred on the last weekend of the campaign. On November 1, at Eniwetok, the United States exploded its first hydrogen device, 150 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Japan.) He would be directly responsible for dealing with the world’s most pressing problems. Despite his penchant for portraying himself as a political novice, few of these problems would be new ones to him. Indeed, it can be argued that no man elected to the Presidency was ever better prepared for the demands of the job than Eisenhower. The man who had organized and commanded Overlord was confident that he could organize and run the United States as it faced the challenges of the Cold War. For all his reluctance as a candidate, he was eager to assume the duties and responsibilities of his new office.