Early in the morning of March 24, 1952, a car pulled up to the Hotel George V in Paris. A man traveling under an assumed name got into the car and was whisked to NATO headquarters. Arriving, the man resumed his real identity. Herbert Brownell was greeted by NATO’s supreme commander, Dwight Eisenhower. For the next ten hours, Brownell tutored Ike in American politics. The phone did not ring; no notes were taken. The two men were mutually respectful, but their conversation was anything but light. When Brownell remarked that he had been to see the Folies Bergère the previous evening, “that fell like a lead balloon.” Except for one aide who entered with a tray of sandwiches at lunchtime, Eisenhower and Brownell were left entirely alone.
Brownell was a Nebraska native born on the banks of the Missouri River, a graduate of Yale Law School, and a successful securities lawyer at the firm of Lord, Day & Lord. He had managed the New York governor Tom Dewey’s campaigns in 1944 and 1948, and though Dewey had lost both times, Eisenhower was impressed with the governor and with Brownell’s unrivaled command of national politics, particularly in the subspecialty of what was required to secure the Republican nomination. Moreover, Brownell did not fit Ike’s generally negative view of people in politics: he was neither cynical nor opportunistic. He was smart, dignified, genial, armed with a light touch and a firm resolve. On that spring morning in Paris, he was there to explain certain realities to Ike and to discern whether Eisenhower’s politics, largely unknown despite his renown, were compatible with those of the Republican Party and the American people.
Brownell traveled to Europe that March as a committed Republican and an admirer of Eisenhower. He also did so as a representative of Ike’s inner circle, an exceptionally devoted group of friends. During the war, Ike’s closest advisers had acted as an official family, loyal and protective of their boss. In the years since, Eisenhower had kept up most of those friendships while also befriending captains of industry, sturdy, competitive men who provided him with a circle of intimates with whom he could relax. They were bridge players and golfers; they were at his summons and would, throughout his presidency, travel the nation over when Ike needed a break, whether in Augusta or Pebble Beach, Gettysburg, London, New York, or Washington.
At the center of this group was Bill Robinson. Burly, gregarious, powerful, and slightly secretive (only after Eisenhower’s retirement did Robinson confess that he and his wife had been separated since the 1940s), and also a nimble, subtle writer, Robinson revered Eisenhower, imagined him a savior of the nation. Though Robinson pursued his own ambitions through the 1950s, he was always at Ike’s service.
Robinson introduced Eisenhower to some of the nation’s leading men, and they became known as the Gang: Bob Woodruff, chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola (a job Robinson himself would later inherit from Woodruff); Cliff Roberts, an investment banker and president of the Augusta National Golf Club; Pete Jones, a self-made oil executive who carried $10,000 in his wallet to remind himself of his prosperity and who, like Ike, fancied himself a farmer, in Jones’s case as the owner of two thousand Maryland acres of cows and hogs; George Allen, bon vivant and friend of Truman’s, a man so garrulous he titled his memoir Presidents Who Have Known Me; Ellis “Slats” Slater, a diffident executive who worried about tarnishing Ike with their friendship since Slater made his fortune as the head of a liquor company; Al Gruenther, a war colleague who followed Ike through Europe and to NATO, soon to head the International Red Cross. Ike considered Gruenther worthy of the presidency itself, and he enjoyed him, too: Gruenther kept a file of favorite jokes and taught himself bridge as a young officer. He was always welcome at Ike’s table—indeed, he was somewhat indispensable, as Ike was so intolerant of poor play that only Gruenther was up to serving as his partner.
Those men shared moderate politics, a firm belief that the peace of the world required American leadership, and an unshakable conviction that only Dwight Eisenhower could guide the nation through that fragile peace. They vowed that Ike would be president and set out to persuade him of it as well. At a Christmas party in 1951, they pledged to finance his campaign, and they picked an emissary to reel in the general: Brownell.
Brownell understood that this was a candidate—or at least a potential candidate—like none other. Ike was a hero on a grand, historic scale—as adored in Paris and London as in Washington and New York. Slater, along with the rest of the Gang, realized that his friend was a man of unsurpassed esteem. Brownell grasped the political implications of that regard. Ike was nothing less, as Brownell correctly observed, than “the most highly respected man in the world.”
He had returned from Europe a conquering hero, and then, as Marshall’s successor as chief of staff, he had demobilized an American force for the second time in his career, this time with a vision of continued American presence and power in the world. Eisenhower was urged to write a memoir and, after long hesitation, agreed. He began on February 8, 1948, and for weeks worked diligently, almost punishingly, on the project, typically dictating, writing, and correcting drafts from 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. He was aided by three secretaries and Doubleday’s editor in chief, Kenneth D. McCormick, who often dropped by at lunch, and by Robinson, who coordinated the project and the book’s serialization. Eisenhower was new at this, of course, but he modeled his prose on that of Ulysses S. Grant, the greatest of all presidential memoirists and a general whose writing Ike admired for its “lack of pretension.” Aided by Robinson and propelled to set down his account of the war before others solidified that history, Eisenhower met his deadline: he finished the manuscript on Friday, March 26. Crusade in Europe was published that fall.
The book was glowingly received for its objectivity and evenhandedness and for its appealing prose style: “orderly, objective, well-documented,” as one reviewer put it. Crusade in Europe codified Eisenhower’s version of events in the war—a useful counterpoint to more snippy accounts by other commanders—and also allowed him and Mamie to salt away some money. In that, they were substantially aided by a novel interpretation of the tax code under which he completed the work, then allowed it to sit for a period and claim its publication as a capital gain rather than income. The result: at a time when income over $200,000 was taxed at a marginal rate of 91 percent, Ike was paid $635,000 for Crusade in Europe, of which he paid just $158,750 in federal taxes. The arrangement was approved in advance by the Treasury Department and saved him hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The interregnum between the war and his candidacy provided Ike with yet another opportunity, this one in the form of a warning. The cause was a flare-up of his recurring intestinal troubles, one so severe that it knocked him off his feet for several days in 1949. Although some scholars have hypothesized that Eisenhower in fact suffered a heart attack—and that he later covered it up to avoid questions about his health—no medical evidence supports that theory. Instead, it is far more likely that Ike, whose stomach had troubled him off and on since Panama and who had been periodically hospitalized by pain from it, endured a particularly sharp attack in the spring of 1949. Among the evidence pointing in that direction is that Ike was playing golf and working within ten days of the episode—in an era when a heart attack was typically treated with at least a month of bed rest. Alarmed by the pain Ike was in, his doctor said the time had come for Eisenhower to quit smoking. The next day, he did. “The only way to stop is to stop, and I stopped,” Ike told Sherman Adams years later.
“Didn’t you have quite a lot of battle with yourself when you gave up a habit that you’d liked and lived with so long?” Adams asked.
“Put it out of your mind,” Eisenhower replied. “If you have anything like that to disturb you, put it out of your mind. Don’t think about it.”
Ike coveted a university presidency, which suited his desire for an intellectually stimulating, dignified sinecure. He hoped for a rural, small college, but he was offered Columbia University instead, and accepted it, joking later that he assumed the trustees had meant to offer it to his brother Milton and were too embarrassed to withdraw it from him once they had made the mistake. His installation as president provided Ike and his brothers with the opportunity for a rare reunion, and they gathered on the day he was publicly given the post. It was a happy gathering of the boys, now all successful men, as they bantered together in Dwight’s office before the ceremony. Just as they were to leave for the event, Milton tapped his brother’s mortarboard: “Father would have liked this.”
The Columbia presidency came with a residence on Morningside Drive, so Ike and Mamie, who had never owned a home, had no immediate need of one. They were, however, suddenly rich, at least by their modest standards, and flush with the proceeds of Crusade in Europe they set out to buy a place of their own (so flush were they, in fact, that the Eisenhowers splurged at Christmastime in 1948 and bought a favorite aunt and uncle of Mamie’s a Chrysler sedan, spending $2,434 on the shiny blue vehicle). They settled on a farm at the edge of the Gettysburg battlefield, a location rich with significance for Eisenhower and for the couple as well, since they had lived nearby early in their marriage, when Ike was training troops for World War I. The house was in terrible shape, and they embarked on a long and expensive renovation: Eisenhower grumpily complained of the cost in his final memoir, noting that it had come to $215,000 and pointedly adding that he had refused to use non-union labor, even though it would have cost less.
Eisenhower’s tenure at Columbia was not altogether a success. The faculty was not quite sure what to make of its military leader, a president conspicuously lacking a Ph.D. But Ike made the most of it: among other things, it was at Columbia that he took up painting. As in so many things, Churchill supplied an example. The prime minister relaxed by painting and encouraged Ike to take it up. Eisenhower did not at first, but then he stumbled upon paints and brushes that the artist Thomas Stephens was using to produce a portrait of Mamie. He tried them out and enjoyed it. It became a source of relaxation and concentration, akin to bridge or golf. Eisenhower’s first attempt at a painting was to copy Stephens’s portrait of Mamie. It was, Ike said, “weird and wonderful to behold.”
Barely had Eisenhower settled into his Columbia post than duty commanded again, this time in the form of what he regarded as effectively an order from President Truman to take charge of forging the European mutual-defense agreements that would form the basis of NATO. He left Columbia on January 1, 1951, intending to resign his post but persuaded to accept a leave of absence. He stopped in Washington to pay his respects to a fallen colleague, then proceeded, once again, to Paris, returning this time with the responsibility of securing America’s allies against Soviet Communism.
Through much of 1951, Ike closely monitored and subtly influenced the lobbying for him to become a candidate. Working through a trusted emissary and former military aide, General Lucius Clay, one of the rare men who could lecture his vaunted comrade, Ike tracked the calls for his candidacy and allowed Clay to encourage them. Though a military man, Clay intuited politics and recognized that Eisenhower’s distance from partisan squabbles only enhanced his appeal. “You are,” he said, “in an unassailable position.”
As the urgency of Ike’s supporters increased, so did the complexity of nurturing the campaign without committing the candidate. Again, Clay played the key role. He brokered understandings between Eisenhower’s leading backers, settling disputes in Ike’s name. By the middle of 1951, Eisenhower’s support had become so broad—and the matter so delicate—that Clay devised a code to keep Ike abreast of developments. Each of the principals was assigned a letter: A was for the Pennsylvania senator James “Big Red” Duff, B for Brownell, and so on. The code grew increasingly elaborate until, in September, Eisenhower confessed to being unable to follow it.
His supporters visited him with increasing frequency and ardor through late 1951 and early 1952. And yet Eisenhower would not commit. He knew enough to know that he alone could disdain politics and remain at its center, so he took his time, gauged his choices.
Hoping to coax him with a demonstration of popular appeal, one group of enthusiasts scheduled a rally at Madison Square Garden at the conclusion of the Friday night fights in February. Expectations for the event were low: it was held late on a winter night, and the candidate, of course, refused to attend. Nevertheless, fifteen thousand people turned out in what was billed as a “Serenade to Ike.” Veterans pleaded, so did children. A Truman impersonator drew big laughs. Irving Berlin and Ethel Merman sang. A group of Texans passed a saddlebag that they filled up with silver dollars. Over and over, the thousands chanted and sang: “I like Ike.”
As soon as the event ended, a film of it was rushed to processing, and then Jacqueline Cochran, a pioneering aviator and friend of Eisenhower’s—and one of the event’s organizers—crammed into an upper berth of a transatlantic flight and headed for Paris.
She arrived at Eisenhower’s home on an unseasonably warm evening in February, a mild breeze drifting across the channel and over the French countryside. Inside the Villa Saint-Pierre, where Napoleon II once resided in surprising modesty, above ordered gardens and a calm pond (which Ike had stocked with trout and where he practiced his fly casting), against the incongruous but portentous backdrop of a Communist-led general strike outside, Cochran arrived bearing the film canisters and loaded the projector.
Eisenhower’s sense of duty cabined his response to flattery or strain—this was the same Ike who spent half an hour mourning the death of his father. But as he watched the yearning expressed by the Madison Square Garden crowd, his reserve was tested. So many Americans were worried and, he believed, with good cause. The Truman administration was exhausted, the war in Korea stalemated, the threat of Communism growing. America’s problems, it seemed to Ike, were “nagging, persistent and almost terrifying.” Its citizens were desperate. He watched with Mamie as those men and women cried out for him. Eisenhower was, he realized as the two-hour film rolled on, “the symbol of that longing and hope.” “I’ve not been so upset in years,” he confided to his diary.
When the film stopped, Cochran raised a glass: “To the President.” Eisenhower was overwhelmed; tears ran down his cheeks.
Supporters kept up their pressure. A few days after he watched the film of the Madison Square Garden rally, nineteen leading, moderate Republicans—including Jacob Javits, Hugh Scott, Christian Herter, Norris Cotton, and Gerald Ford—beseeched him on behalf of the American people to seek their party’s nomination. Those politicians reported that their constituents wanted Ike. “They want you to come home; they want you to declare yourself on the pressing issues of the day; they want the inspiration of your dynamic honesty and the forthrightness of your statesmanship,” the group wrote. “The demands of these patriotic Americans have a right to be heard, and we beg you to listen to them because we agree with them.”
For Eisenhower, the essential call was always to duty. When leaders he respected urged him onward, when thousands called his name, his duty to those men and women overcame his doubts. “My attitude,” he confided to Clay, “has undergone a quite significant change.”
But it was one thing to consider accepting the presidency, another to actively seek it. With his permission but without any action on his part, supporters campaigned for him in New Hampshire, which was predictably billed as “the first big test of Eisenhower’s voter appeal v. Taft’s.” Eisenhower won the March 11 primary handily, puncturing Robert Taft’s command of the party loyalists. A week later, Ike finished second to the favorite-son candidate Harold Stassen in Minnesota, another stunning showing for a noncandidate. In some ways, Minnesota made an even bigger impression on him than New Hampshire did. Thousands returned ballots with the word “Ike” scrawled across them.
On March 20, two days after the Minnesota results, Ike announced that he was reconsidering his refusal to run for president but still declined to declare himself a candidate. It was at that juncture, hovering on the edge of a monumental decision for himself and the United States, that Herb Brownell arrived to seal the deal.
He was there by invitation. The day of the Minnesota primary, Ike wrote to Brownell to encourage the visit and to “assure you of a warm welcome.” Arrangements were delicate: Brownell was so associated with politics generally and Dewey specifically that his contact with Eisenhower would certainly have signaled Ike’s presidential ambitions. Brownell thus booked his tickets under another name, and Eisenhower made sure his visit was not included in the general’s daily schedule, often reviewed by reporters.
Although Ike had been courted for the presidency since the end of the war—during a break in the Potsdam Conference in 1945, Truman startled Eisenhower by offering to secure him anything he wanted, adding, “That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1948”—his views of domestic politics were so vaguely known that both parties fancied he might belong to them. Now Brownell asked Eisenhower to clear up those mysteries, quizzing him about his political beliefs so that Brownell might ascertain whether they could carry the electorate.
Responding to Brownell’s questions, Ike revealed that he believed in limited federal government, favoring the private economy over government spending and states’ rights over federal power—he sided with Texas, for instance, in its claims to offshore oil rights that the federal government asserted belonged to it. He felt strongly that the government should balance its budgets and was shocked at Truman’s latest spending plan, which anticipated a $14 billion deficit. Unsurprisingly, he felt strongly that the United States had an obligation to provide a stalwart national defense.
He was, portentously, murkier on the emerging domestic issue of the day, civil rights. Brownell was an ardent supporter of the gathering call for elimination of American apartheid, and the issue had helped give moderate Republicans a broader appeal in an era when southern Democrats continued to restrain the ambitions of more liberal members of their party. But Ike was raised in Kansas, where segregation had been practiced, and he rose through a segregated military, so Brownell was concerned about where he might fall on this issue. “I was relieved that his views were generally in accord with the pro-civil rights stance of the moderate wing of the Republican Party,” Brownell wrote. Still, Ike sent mixed signals. He noted that some of his supporters were southern Democrats who opposed civil rights legislation, an ambiguous remark that left Brownell convinced that though Ike’s “heart was in the right place,” he “would not lead the charge to change race relations fundamentally in the United States.” Brownell was to be proved half-right in that prediction; to the extent that he was wrong, he himself would largely be the reason.
Having sized up Eisenhower’s politics and concluded that they would fall comfortably within the moderate-to-liberal wing of the Republican Party, Brownell then moved to the other part of his presentation. He forcefully insisted that Eisenhower stop being coy. Neither the nomination nor the presidency would be handed to him, Brownell insisted in terms so adamant that he feared he was being brash. To gain the Republican nomination, Ike would have to return home and fight for it. Eisenhower, who had already fared well in two primaries without being a candidate, seemed surprised at that, but Brownell was expert where Ike was not, in the machinery of American politics. Ike had learned from Marshall to place faith in capable subordinates. He took heed. “It was,” Brownell said later, “an important turning point in his thinking.”
After ten hours, the two men parted. Brownell returned to his hotel and then headed home. Two weeks later, Eisenhower resigned his NATO position. On June 1, he returned home to campaign for the presidency.