The Age of Eisenhower

by William I Hitchcock

  Watching Eisenhower in action, Stewart Alsop, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, called him the “most effective personality to emerge on the political scene since the death of Franklin Roosevelt.” He had a kind of “political magic,” Alsop wrote, evident from the “electric undercurrent of excitement” that filled the room. His words mattered less than his sincerity and his lack of guile. Alsop concluded, “He will be a remarkably hard man to beat.”5

  II

  And yet there was nothing inevitable in his winning the Republican nomination at the national convention in Chicago in July. While Eisenhower had been stationed at NATO headquarters in Paris, Senator Taft had been working hard to secure the commitment of state delegates across the country. Taft had won many state primaries and had used his enviable political connections with governors, senators, and congressmen to nail down an impressive slate of committed delegates. The states would send 1,206 delegates to the convention; a nominee would need 604 to win. By the time Eisenhower gave his speech in Abilene, Taft could say with some confidence that he had already lined up 500 delegates. Eisenhower showed strength in northeastern and mid-Atlantic states and the Pacific coast and had won almost 400 delegates. But Taft was ahead. “The campaign has gone just about as we programmed it,” Taft said. He expected to have the nomination within reach by the time the convention opened.6

  With both sides fighting so fiercely for every slight advantage, it was perhaps inevitable that a bit of old-fashioned political chicanery would erupt into a national scandal just a few weeks before the convention. In Texas, with 38 delegates at stake, the Republican Party was deeply divided over which candidate to support. In local precinct elections the voters went for Eisenhower, but the party bosses were pro-Taft, and they appointed a Taft slate of delegates anyway, claiming that many Democrats had voted for Ike in the primary—they were legally allowed to do so—and had thus skewed the results. The Eisenhower forces promptly labeled the affair “the Texas Steal.”

  So serious was the issue that Eisenhower himself traveled to Dallas in late June to give a searing speech denouncing the tactics of a “small clique” of Texas Republicans who were trying to steal delegates. He pointed out that no party could “clean up the government of the United States unless that party—from top to bottom—is clean itself.” In the meantime the pro-Eisenhower forces in Texas named a rival delegation to go to the national convention, where they would continue the fight to be recognized. This nasty conflict loomed as the convention opened.7

  There was further drama over which side would win the votes of state delegations controlled by “favorite sons,” that is, state leaders who had won their own state primaries and whose name would be placed in nomination in the distant hope that a rally to them might occur at the convention. Governor Earl Warren of California held 70 delegates—a powerful voting bloc in a tight race—and former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen held 28. The Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Louisiana delegates were uncommitted or in dispute, and in the close race it was unclear which way these vital votes would turn. Taft’s men dominated the Republican National Committee, but the dynamics of a convention were impossible to predict. The pressure was on: everything would come down to the politicking on the floor of the convention, which opened on a blazing hot July 7 in the International Amphitheatre in Chicago’s south side, just across the street from the vast reeking works of the Union Stockyards.

  With Eisenhower ensconced in his suite of rooms in the Blackstone Hotel and watching the convention on television, the four days of mayhem and chaos began. The first stage of the battle was led by the clever veteran Brownell. He had been Dewey’s campaign manager in 1948 and had intimate knowledge of how the convention process worked. It was his idea to attack Taft’s weakness: his reliance upon delegations whose votes were contested. Brownell wrote a “Fair Play” amendment to the convention rules that proposed that contested delegates not be allowed to vote on the seating of other contested delegates. It was a technicality, but an important one, for it meant that only secure and legitimate delegates would be allowed to vote on which slate of delegates—Taft’s or Eisenhower’s—would be seated from the contested states.

  Brownell and his allies, especially Governors Sherman Adams of New Hampshire and Arthur Langlie of Washington, appealed to the convention on moral grounds: the GOP nominee would fight the Democrats on the issue of corruption, so he had to guarantee integrity in his own campaign. This accusation put the Taft forces back on their heels; in a series of narrow votes the convention agreed to accept the “Fair Play” language and awarded to Eisenhower the delegates from Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas. The tumultuous first day was, as Brownell put it, “a disastrous day for Taft.” He was stuck 100 votes short of the nomination, and the momentum was moving swiftly toward Eisenhower.8

  Behind the scenes, Brownell, Dewey, Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the Eisenhower team now put intense pressure on the delegates to get on the Eisenhower bandwagon. They made a simple and powerful argument: Taft could not win a national election, and Eisenhower could. With Ike on the ticket, the Republicans would be back in the White House after 20 years. It worked: early in the afternoon of Friday, July 11, the balloting began, and as state after state voted, it became clear that Eisenhower was leading—slightly. By the time the last delegate had spoken—the Virgin Islands named its single delegate for Eisenhower—the vote stood at 595 for Eisenhower, 500 for Taft, 81 for Earl Warren, 20 for Harold Stassen, and 10 for Douglas MacArthur. Ike was nine votes short. The leader of the Minnesota delegation, Senator Edward J. Thye, leaped to his feet and asked to be recognized, whereupon he switched his state’s votes, formerly pledged to Stassen, to Eisenhower. Other delegations rose to do the same, making a second ballot unnecessary. By the time all the votes were counted, Eisenhower had 845 votes to 280 for Taft. Governor Warren, still hoping a deadlocked convention might turn to him as a fallback choice, held on to his delegates until the bitter end.9

  And for the Taft delegates in Chicago, the end was indeed bitter. The sharp-tongued New Yorker correspondent Richard Rovere took the measure of the Taft supporters: “Nominating Dwight Eisenhower was an act of hard sacrifice and self-denial for most delegates here. It was clear from the time the first throngs began to gather in the lobby of the Hilton that a lot of them, including those who wore “I Like Ike” buttons the size of saucers, really did not like the General at all. . . . They grumbled publicly over a fate that forced them to reward a man they regarded as a parvenu, an amateur, a boob, and a heretic of sorts.” Said one forlorn delegate about Taft, “My God, I love him. . . . It kills me to have to do this to him.” In fact the right wing of the party would never forgive Eisenhower or be reconciled to his leadership.10

  Eisenhower could offer an olive branch to these disaffected Tafties in his choice of a vice-presidential running mate. He and his advisers would not consider the darlings of the Old Guard like Taft himself or MacArthur, but Dewey suggested just the right man for the job: the junior senator from California, Richard M. Nixon. At first glance Nixon was not an obvious choice. He was only 39—the youngest Republican in the Senate. He’d been in politics for all of six years, and before that had been a struggling lawyer fresh out of the navy. In late May a poll of national political reporters discounted Nixon as a nominee for the second spot on the GOP ticket. They expected Warren or Senators Everett Dirksen of Illinois, William Knowland of California, or Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Of the 50 leading writers interviewed by Newsweek magazine, only one thought Nixon would be chosen.11

  Yet Nixon did have some attractive features for the Eisenhower team. His youth would counteract Eisenhower’s 62 years; his home state of California would balance out Eisenhower’s New York residency (and the impression of Dewey’s influence); and he was both a conservative and an internationalist who had the respect of the Old Guard and the Taft camp while not being beholden to them. He had also developed a reputation—appalling to some, thrilling to others—as an avid Red hunter,
the man who unmasked Alger Hiss, the dapper State Department official who had passed secret documents to a communist spy. “Nixon seemed an almost ideal candidate for vice-president,” Brownell suggested. “He was young, geographically right, had experience both in the House and Senate with a good voting record, and was an excellent speaker.” According to Sherman Adams, “Eisenhower wanted above all a vice-presidential nominee with a demonstrable record of anti-Communism.” The Eisenhower campaign strategists needed an aggressive campaigner on the ticket. In Nixon, they got their man.12

  Dewey had had Nixon in his sights for some time. In May 1952 he invited Nixon to speak to an audience of leading New York Republicans at a dinner at the Waldorf Astoria. Dewey introduced the young senator as the tough courageous fighter who had exposed Hiss. Nixon knew the speech was an audition for national office and treated it as such. “I devoted a full week to preparing it,” he later admitted, though he spoke without notes, having memorized his remarks. He laid out a strategy for winning the presidency, stressing the “survival of the nation,” which was under siege by international communism. After the speech, Dewey invited Nixon to his suite at the Roosevelt Hotel and told him he was on the short list for vice president.13

  At least two weeks before the Republican Convention, Dewey, Clay, Lodge, and Brownell settled on Nixon as their choice. Just after Eisenhower’s nomination was secured, Brownell and Dewey convened a meeting of two dozen leading Republicans at Chicago’s Hilton Hotel to consider vice-presidential nominees. For an hour or so, a desultory discussion considered and ruled out Taft, Dirksen, Knowland, and Governor Daniel Thornton of Colorado. Dewey then spoke up. “What about Nixon?” he asked, as if the name had suddenly popped into his head. He spoke eloquently about the strengths Nixon would bring to the ticket, and within a few minutes it was settled. Brownell left the room to place a call to Eisenhower, who approved the choice.14

  Brownell then called Nixon, who was napping in his underwear in a stifling un-air-conditioned hotel room near the convention hall, and told him to come meet Eisenhower at the Blackstone Hotel. Nixon and his trusty aide Murray Chotiner jumped into a limo with a police escort, dashed uptown to the hotel, and were ushered into Eisenhower’s suite. Nixon, always sensitive to slights of any kind, was acutely aware of the enormous gap of prestige and power that separated the two men. Just a few years earlier he had been a junior naval officer doing desk work in New York City when Ike was driven through the streets to a hero’s welcome; peering out a window on the 20th floor, Nixon could just make him out through the snowstorm of confetti. Now he stood before the famous general, who formally asked him to join his “crusade.”

  Nixon accepted eagerly. “July 11, 1952 was the most exciting day of my life,” he wrote 10 years later. But there was no warmth here. “Despite his great capacity for friendliness, Eisenhower also had a quality of reserve which, at least subconsciously, tended to make a visitor feel like a junior officer coming in to see the commanding General.” And no matter how hard he tried over the next decade, Nixon would never close the distance between them.15

  With the ticket now set, Eisenhower delivered his acceptance speech to the convention. He declared that he would “lead a great crusade for freedom in America and freedom in the world.” “Today is the first day of our battle,” he told his Republican followers. “The road that leads to November 4th is a fighting road. In that fight I will keep nothing in reserve.” And by his side would be the brawler Dick Nixon. In a memorable backhanded compliment, Eisenhower praised Nixon to the assembled delegates as “a man who has shown statesmanlike qualities in many ways, but has a special talent and an ability to ferret out any kind of subversive influence wherever it may be found.”16

  III

  Was there any Democrat in 1952 who could beat Eisenhower? With Truman out of the picture, the Democratic Party seemed rudderless. Estes Kefauver desperately wanted the nomination, but he was a nakedly ambitious, self-centered maverick and widely disliked in his own party. Vice President Alben Barkley, much loved by Democrats after many decades of public service in Congress, was, at age 75, too old. Averell Harriman, with a distinguished career as an ambassador and public servant, had close ties to the liberal wing of the party, but he was painfully awkward as a public speaker and probably too rich to be appealing to Democratic voters. And there really was no one else. Except, perhaps, for the one-term, reform-minded moderate governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson.

  Stevenson, a rumpled, affable man with a bald pate and a fringe of dark hair around his ears, looked like everyone’s favorite English professor, or perhaps the town pediatrician. He had a gift for combining lighthearted wit with soaring idealism. At the Democratic National Convention, also held in Chicago, the delegates heard a kind of talk they thirsted for like weary travelers crossing a desert of parched rhetoric. “Intemperate criticism is not a policy for the nation,” Stevenson said, chiding the Republicans. “Denunciation is not a program for our salvation. . . . What counts is not just what we are against but what we are for.” Listening to the convention over the radio 1,000 miles away in New Hampshire, a young aspiring reporter named Mary McGrory heard Stevenson’s words crackling through the night. “Stevenson’s speeches seemed beautiful to me,” she confessed. “Politically speaking, it was the Christmas morning of our lives.”

  Although Stevenson had deep reservations about running for president, his party clamored for his leadership and, on July 26, nominated him as its standard-bearer. To reassure southern Democrats, the convention added Senator John Sparkman of Alabama to the ticket, a New Dealer but a man who had consistently opposed civil rights for African Americans. Liberals, ignoring Sparkman, cheered Stevenson’s high-minded invocations of good government and his paeans to FDR. Where Eisenhower spoke the simple vernacular of the parade ground, Stevenson’s speeches were carefully written gems, suited for a university lecture hall. Eisenhower relied on clichés and leaden one-liners; Stevenson quoted St. Francis of Assisi, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, even Christ himself. Was he too sophisticated for American politics? His liberal supporters didn’t seem to mind. “He lighted up the sky like a flaming arrow,” his young aide George Ball remembered.17

  Republicans, by contrast, did not rely on oratory. They had a blunt election slogan: “Time for a change.” After 20 years of Democratic rule, this resonated. “Indignation,” observed Rovere, was “the emotional keynote of Eisenhower’s campaign.” Allegations swirled around Truman’s administration that a New Deal agency, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, had been approving loans in return for political favors. Republicans cried foul, condemning corruption in high places. They bemoaned bloated federal budgets and expansive bureaucracy, reviled Truman’s alleged failure to combat communist subversion at home, and denounced the stumbling diplomacy that had lost China and invited North Korean aggression in June 1950. Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota tried to summarize the case against the Democrats in a scientific formula: “K1C2”—Korea, Communism, and Corruption.18

  Eisenhower chose to make the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver his headquarters, the better to stress his western roots and to escape to the mountains for an occasional weekend. From there he would make forays across the country by train on the elaborately decorated Eisenhower Special, 24 Pullman cars crammed with 150 aides, journalists, bodyguards, a teletype machine, and Ike’s personal physician, Brig. Gen. Howard Snyder. The Denver staff and the campaign train were tightly managed by Sherman Adams, the taciturn New Hampshire governor with cropped white hair, a natty bow tie, and razor-sharp elbows, who brooked no guff from anyone and kept a close hand on the reins. Robert Cutler, a Boston bank president who had served under Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Army Chief of Staff George Marshall during the war, rising to the rank of general, vetted policy papers and speeches and later became Eisenhower’s first national security adviser. James Hagerty, a seasoned reporter for the New York Times, signed on as press secretary. Back in New York, a large staff of advisers, speechwriters, researchers,
and typists, as well as political hacks mostly from the Dewey machine, took over the ninth floor of the Commodore Hotel under the loose direction of Herbert Brownell. They produced countless speeches and briefing papers, cabled across the country to the Eisenhower campaign train.19

  Eisenhower covered 20,000 miles by rail and flew 30,000 miles across the country, visiting 45 states and 232 towns and cities. In every town where he appeared, an advance team arrived many hours before in a giant truck labeled “The Eisenhower Bandwagon.” From this emerged an army surplus jeep with a shrieking sound system that blared out “I Like Ike” songs and broadcast the message that Eisenhower would soon be passing through town. The campaign used new technology, saturating the airwaves with pioneering television commercials. Eisenhower (who grumbled about it) made a series of short ads in which citizens asked him questions about high prices, taxes, military preparedness, and more. Viewers would then see Eisenhower respond directly with a few lines of campaign boilerplate, always ending with “It’s time for a change!”

  Stevenson, facing this well-funded, media-savvy Eisenhower juggernaut, needed to attack early. He went after one of Ike’s most tender spots, asking whether he condoned the shameful behavior of the Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, who for over a year had been attacking the distinguished public servant and war hero George Marshall. McCarthy, along with William Jenner of Indiana and a few other zealots in the Senate, alleged that Marshall, as Truman’s envoy to China after the war, bore responsibility for the loss of China to the communists. Marshall’s actions were so inept, they claimed, and so beneficial to the communists that the only explanation was treason. The wartime chief of staff, alleged McCarthy, was part of a conspiracy “spun from Moscow.”20