To persuade Ike of the groundswell in his favor, a group of well-heeled enthusiasts concocted a rather brazen effort to charm the reluctant candidate. On February 8, with an eye on the New Hampshire primary just four weeks away, they staged a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden to demonstrate the wide base of Eisenhower’s popular appeal. Billed as a “Serenade to Ike,” the affair was organized by John “Tex” McCrary and his stunning wife, the model and actress Jinx Falkenburg, who together had pioneered a number of radio and television talk shows. McCrary was a Texan but had schooled at Exeter and Yale, where he joined the DKE fraternity, was tapped for Skull and Bones, and played football. He was a journalist, editor, and public relations consultant with wealthy friends like fellow Yalie Jock Whitney, who bankrolled the event. McCrary made sure the “Serenade” was broadcast by NBC to radio and television markets in a dozen major cities, though with the time difference, Eisenhower in France was sleeping soundly while the raucous event unfolded.31
McCrary used his connections to rope in some of the country’s most famous talent to tout the Ike-for-President movement. Clark Gable, Henry Fonda, Ethel Merman, television hostess Faye Emerson, Noel Coward, and a dozen other high-profile entertainers popped up on the stage. Fred Waring, the universally popular bandleader, acted as emcee for the night and led the audience in songs from the popular Broadway shows South Pacific and The King and I. Merman belted out “There’s No Business Like Show Business” to delirious applause. Irving Berlin crooned a humorous confection called—what else—“I Like Ike” and was joined on stage by a comical Truman look-alike, who received the loud jeers of the crowd. To top it off, the composer Richard Rodgers accompanied singer and Broadway actress Mary Martin in a rendition of “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy”—the theme of the night.32
By all accounts, this foolishness was a great success, not so much for its impact on the electorate as for its impact on Eisenhower. Two days after the rally, on February 11, Jacqueline Cochran, a former World War II flying ace, pioneer of the Women Air Force Service Pilots, and a close collaborator of McCrary’s in mounting the “Serenade,” packed up reels of film of the whole event, boarded a TWA flight to Paris, and arrived breathlessly at SHAPE headquarters with what Eisenhower called “burning enthusiasm and the spirit of the crusader.”33
Eisenhower knew Cochran from the war years and was also close to her husband, the wealthy investor and utilities owner Floyd Odlum. Watching the film of the “Serenade” with Mamie at his side in the theater they had installed in their Paris residence, Eisenhower was overcome by the outpouring of enthusiasm he saw among the New York well-wishers. He broke down, openly sobbing in front of his guest. Cochran did not hesitate: she pressed him to declare himself a candidate, resign from the NATO command, and return to the United States to campaign. After a long and emotional conversation, Eisenhower concurred: he told her he would run. The next day he composed a brief note in his diary: “Viewing [the film] finally developed into a real emotional experience for Mamie and me. I’ve not been so upset in years. Clearly to be seen is the mass longing of America for some kind of reasonable solution for her nagging, persistent and almost terrifying problems. It’s a real experience to realize that one could become a symbol for many thousands of the hope they have!”34
On February 16, just four days after Cochran’s dramatic visit, Eisenhower arranged to meet Clay in London, where Eisenhower was attending the funeral services of King George VI. Meeting secretly in the home of Brig. James Gault, Eisenhower’s British military aide, Clay pushed Eisenhower to settle the issue once and for all: Would he come home to run for the nomination? It took some hours of heated discussion before Eisenhower agreed. “He dreaded a campaign,” Clay recalled later. “He’d never been in one, and it represented a rather awesome undertaking. And I think he didn’t like being pressed for a decision. As a matter of fact, he got quite provoked with me when I kept on insisting that we had to have a decision.”35
Eisenhower finally told Clay he would ask Truman to be relieved of his post. He would then resign his commission and return to the United States around June 1, after a crucial round of NATO meetings was wrapped up. At long last, after a year or more of prevarication and delay, he was ready to get into the fight. “I only ask,” he wrote to Clay a few days later, “that you people regard my own position with some sympathy.”36
V
Eisenhower’s decision to seek the GOP nomination could not yet be made public. He wanted to finish his NATO assignment without the distraction that his resignation would create, and he needed Truman’s permission to relinquish his command. So even though he knew he was going to run, he continued to feign indifference toward the political dogfight now shaping up in the Republican primary in New Hampshire. As it happened, that contest of March 11, 1952, would have a major impact on the course of the election. Both parties had candidates on the primary ballot in New Hampshire. Truman’s name would appear for the Democrats, though he had made no formal announcement of his intention to run for reelection. His challenger was the Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, a political maverick who had made himself a national figure by chairing the televised Senate special committee on organized crime. Truman’s low popularity made him vulnerable, but no one gave Kefauver much of a chance against the sitting president. The fact that Kefauver was a southerner and campaigned while wearing a coonskin cap only emphasized his eccentricity and novelty in New England.
In the Republican primary voters would elect 14 delegates to send to the national convention in Chicago in July. The ballot also featured a “beauty contest,” a simple expression of preference for president. The stakes were high: not only were delegates to be accumulated, but the winning candidate would gain valuable momentum going into the subsequent primary contests.
With Eisenhower mutely observing from France, Taft had the field almost to himself, and he swung into the primary with confidence and a strong message. The weather during his three-day tour through the state was cold and wet, with snow drifts melting into the thick slush of early spring. But his stump speech was red-hot, and he gave it 30 times in as many towns. Taft ran as the true conservative in the race and a man of principle who would offer a sharp contrast to the Democrats. He promised voters that he would launch “an all-out attack on the unlimited spending and taxing, the bureaucratic regulation of the Fair Deal; on the disastrous foreign policy which has led to Russian power and unnecessary war, and on the immorality of this Administration.” In a swipe at Dewey and the liberal Republicans, Taft declared, “We cannot win by a modification of our principles. . . . We must shun a ‘me-too’ campaign,” such as Dewey had run in 1948 that only sought to continue the FDR legacy of the New Deal. It was time to stop the growth of government, time to end the terrible war in Korea, and time to throw out an administration that “had been dominated by a strange Communist sympathy.” Taft reserved a number of pointed barbs for Eisenhower. “You would not choose someone,” he told a rain-soaked crowd in Laconia on March 6, “who never ran for office in his life and doesn’t know how to conduct a campaign.” Besides, Ike had expressed no political views at all and had worked closely with Democratic administrations.37
With Eisenhower still in Paris, the Ike-for-President team relied on the powerful influence of New Hampshire’s governor Sherman Adams. A pro-Eisenhower Republican, he had selected a very strong and well-known slate of candidates whose names were on the ballot as Eisenhower delegates. Many were proven vote-getters; they included Adams himself, the former governor Robert O. Blood, Representative Norris Cotton, and the head of Phillips Exeter Academy William Saltonstall.38
On the night of March 10 a heavy blanket of wet snow fell, but this did not depress the turnout on the following day: twice as many voters came out to the polls as in the primary of 1948. And the results were stunning: not only did Eisenhower sweep the delegates, winning all 14, but he topped the popularity poll decisively, garnering 46,661 votes to Taft’s 35,838. Perhaps more significant for the
1952 national election, Kefauver edged out Truman, winning even labor-heavy districts in Manchester. The president had not campaigned in New Hampshire, but even so it was a blow to lose to a dark-horse senator from the back woods of Tennessee.
Eisenhower had been helped by his enormous popularity, by the argument that only he could beat the Democrats, by the strength of his slate of delegates, and by Taft’s stiffness and wooden manner on the stump. Taft later implied that Governor Adams had arm-twisted state employees to vote for Eisenhower, and the right-wing Manchester Union Leader darkly hinted that unnamed Wall Street bankers had flooded the state with slush funds for Eisenhower. But saner observers understood the significance of the vote: Walter Lippmann, the dean of national political columnists, asked rhetorically, “Is there any serious doubt that Eisenhower is the Republican who has by all odds the best chance to capitalize upon the discontent within the Democratic party?” Lippmann went on, putting words to what Eisenhower himself had already concluded. He was “no longer just a popular General” but “an active candidate” and so should no longer be in uniform. He must “ask the president to relieve him of his military command.”39
In Paris, Eisenhower took careful notice of what was going on. In mid-March he sent a discreet letter to New York lawyer Herbert Brownell, inviting him to his headquarters. Brownell, a longtime Republican power broker and the manager of Dewey’s 1948 campaign against Truman, had been working with Clay and others to get Eisenhower into the race. He quickly accepted Ike’s invitation and made his way to Paris, incognito, for a meeting with the general on March 24. The two men had “a confidential and extremely candid exchange of views.” Over the course of a full day, they discussed politics, ideas, and strategy. Brownell leveled with Eisenhower. He would not get the nomination through a draft; if he wanted it, he would have to campaign for it. Taft might have lost the beauty contest in New Hampshire, but he already had 40 percent of the delegates needed to win the nomination, and Ike could not delay declaring his candidacy any longer.40
Truman too had a decision to make. The double blows of New Hampshire—the Eisenhower and Kefauver victories—had concentrated his mind: if he were to run for reelection, he would not only face a wildly popular war hero and political superstar, but he would have to lead a badly divided Democratic Party into the campaign. Kefauver’s win in Yankee New Hampshire had shown the northern liberals and labor supporters were ready for a change of leadership, and down in Dixie just a few weeks earlier, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, an opponent of Truman’s civil rights policies, had announced his own candidacy. The segregationists in the Democratic Party were once again threatening to secede, as they had done under the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in 1948. It was a depressing political landscape, even for a talent as wily and indefatigable as Truman. At the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner on March 29, 1952, Truman made his announcement. He rose to the podium at 10:30 at night, before a crowd of 6,000 elegantly attired party faithful who had just dined on beef tenderloin, baked potatoes, and ice cream molded into the shape of a donkey. After a long-winded and barbed attack on the Republican Party and a full-throated defense of his own record, he declared his decision to retire from the fray: “I shall not be a candidate for re-election.”41
Truman had concluded that Eisenhower would run and that he would win. The president could not have been surprised to find, just two days later, a letter from Eisenhower on his desk, dated April 2, 1952: “I am requesting the Secretary of Defense to initiate action to bring about my relief from my current post as Supreme Commander, Allied Powers Europe, on or about June 1st of this year.” It “makes me rather sad,” Truman replied in a handwritten note, perhaps thinking not only about his own departure from office but about the decision of one of his idols to step into the dirty work of politics. “I hope you will be happy in your new role.”42
CHAPTER 4
* * *
Crusade
“You have summoned me on behalf of millions of your fellow Americans to lead a great crusade.”
I
IT HAS LONG BEEN ASSERTED that Eisenhower swept into the White House as the 34th president on a wave of personal popularity rather than for any set of ideas or policies. Certainly Eisenhower was popular, universally known and admired for his war service. Yet in the election of 1952 he did not rely on his reputation as an apolitical soldier to stay above the fray of the campaign. Quite the opposite. Rather than playing it safe, rising above faction and controversy, coasting on his name recognition, Eisenhower jumped into the mess of electoral politics with gusto. In running for president, he was vehement, polemical, and partisan. He lambasted the Truman administration, heaped abuse on the New Deal, and curried favor with the right wing of his party.
Why did he do so? Eisenhower deeply believed in the conservative, small-government, balanced-budget positions he celebrated on the hustings; he maintained an instinctive aversion toward New Deal policies and bureaucracies. But he was a much shrewder politician than he let on. In 1952 he effectively pulled off a brilliant political conjuring trick. He pretended to be a nonpartisan political amateur, just an “old soldier” incapable of duplicity, while in fact he followed a ruthless and successful strategy: attack your opponent relentlessly, stress ideological themes in order to stir up enthusiasm in the base, and promise to “fix the mess in Washington.” He posed as an outsider, speaking for the average American. For a man who had been a government employee since 1915, who had worked in Washington for many years, whose friends were among the wealthiest power brokers in the nation, and who had aligned himself closely with Truman’s foreign policies, this was as neat a political bait and switch as American politics has seen in the 20th century. And Ike did it all with a smile.
His campaign for president started in Abilene on June 4, 1952, a date the hometown selectmen hastily named “Eisenhower Day.” Fifty thousand people flocked to this quiet Kansas hamlet to see the great war leader open his bid for the White House. Every hotel and rooming house for 40 miles was booked by reporters and television crews. Hawkers of popcorn, candy apples, foot-long hot dogs, and trinkets lined Abilene’s main street. Two (Republican) elephants were shipped into town on a long trailer from Kelly’s Circus in Holyoke, Colorado. Eisenhower, who had returned from Paris to Washington on the first of June, flew into Kansas City that morning and took a special train to Abilene. It was set to be a terrific day.
An hour before the general was scheduled to make his nationally televised speech to a crowd of well-wishers in Abilene’s “stadium” (a generous term for an open field of weeds and dirt ringed by a few bleachers), the skies erupted. Rain poured down, churning the ground into ankle-deep black mud. Onlookers fled for their cars or nearby shelters, leaving Ike almost alone on a simple wooden platform, a few flags snapping in the wet wind behind him. “Like his invasion of Europe eight years ago,” one reporter quipped, “General Eisenhower’s political invasion of the Middle West turned out this afternoon to be an amphibious operation.”1
It was a miserable start, and it looked even worse on television, as Eisenhower donned a pair of foggy spectacles, bowed his head, and read out a long prepared speech devoid of much punch or pizzazz. A few wisps of hair blew from his bald pate, and his wet slicker made him look like an elderly crossing guard on a windswept street corner. Back in New York, Governor Dewey and his team of professionals were appalled as they watched the speech. Herbert Brownell, who was going to play a central role in getting Ike elected, recalled that “everything went wrong.” It was “absolutely dismal,” he said of the kickoff event, “about as disappointing an opening campaign speech as I’ve ever experienced.”2
Through the rain and wind, though, Eisenhower’s speech carried an accusation: 20 years of Democratic rule, from Roosevelt’s New Deal to Truman’s Fair Deal, had left America feeble, anxious, and vulnerable. The nation faced terrible problems, he asserted, from persistent labor unrest to unchecked inflation, a spike in taxes, a bloated national debt, the spreading tentacles of a
grasping bureaucracy, and pernicious corruption inside the federal government. All these problems he laid at Truman’s doorstep. It was time, Eisenhower argued, to scale back the government and return to “thrift, frugality and economy.” James Reston of the New York Times likened the speech to an old revivalist Chautauqua meeting, in which “the virtues of frugality, austerity, honesty, economy, simplicity, integrity” were solemnly invoked.3
The next day Eisenhower held his first press conference as a candidate in Abilene’s Plaza Theater and revealed his skill at handling the news media. The Eisenhower team wanted to dispel accusations from the Taft camp that Ike was out of touch with America’s problems after his long service overseas. To the astonishment of his interrogators, Eisenhower was masterful. He reaffirmed his lifelong support for the Republican Party and its principles, saying he had “never voted the Democratic ticket.” He spoke frankly about the Korean War, insisting that there was no “clear cut answer” to the conflict because of the size and scale of the Chinese military forces now in the region. Asked about civil rights legislation, he gave what would become a sort of mantra for him: “I do not believe we can cure all of the evils in men’s hearts by law.” This was both his personal belief and a pitch to southern white voters that he would be no crusader in this field.
In reply to a question about compulsory national health insurance, a policy Truman wanted but failed to secure, Eisenhower invoked his opposition to socialism: “Beyond pure socialism lies, I believe, dictatorship.” He deftly reaffirmed his anticommunist credentials while distancing himself from Joe McCarthy. “No one could be more determined than I am that any kind of communistic, subversive influence be uprooted,” he said, but it could be done “without besmirching the reputation of any innocent man.” Combined with his opening speech, this press conference aimed to deflect Taft’s accusation that Eisenhower was just another “me-too” Republican, willing to accept the legacy of the New Deal. Ike tried to reassure the Old Guard Republicans and put the Democrats on notice that he intended to bring the fight to them.4
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