Only after great prodding by the press did Eisenhower make a statement, rather impromptu, about his former boss. He told a press conference in late August, “General Marshall is one of the patriots and anyone who has lived with him, worked with him as I have, knows that he is a man of real selflessness.” There was “nothing of disloyalty in General Marshall’s soul.” However, when pressed by reporters if this implied a rebuke to McCarthy, Eisenhower said he would not discuss “personalities” and would support all Republican candidates for election to ensure Republican control of Congress, even if he did not agree with all their methods. That meant supporting McCarthy and Jenner for reelection. And worse, in September Eisenhower spoke at Butler University in Indianapolis, where he delivered a sharply partisan speech and allowed Jenner—who had called Marshall “a front man for traitors” and “a living lie”—to stand next to him, clasping his arm while waving to the crowd.21
For a man who claimed to dislike politics as a profession, Eisenhower certainly leaned into campaigning. His speeches were combative, vague on policy proposals, and full of biting criticism of the Democrats. In Joliet, Illinois, on September 15 he reminded his audience, “We are waging a crusade, a crusade to get out of the governmental offices not only these people who are tempted by money but the people who have been venal enough and weak enough to embrace Communism and still have found their way into our government. Let’s get rid of them!” Journalist Marquis Childs observed that Ike enjoyed making these “blunt and even brutal denunciations of the Truman Administration that draw cheers from orthodox Republicans.”22
Thin on substance, Ike’s speeches thrilled his crowds anyway. Cutler said that on the campaign trail he saw “an extraordinary personal intercommunication” between Ike and the voters. “People who saw, in the flesh, the candidate’s tall, straight figure and ruddy, smiling face, and who heard from his own lips his straightforward, un-oratorical talk, caught again something they remembered from their youth. He didn’t quip; he didn’t sound erudite; he was like a member of the family.” The effect was noticed by the press. “Eisenhower’s stock is rising,” observed Roscoe Drummond of the Christian Science Monitor. “Ike is no fancy orator . . . and he occasionally will trip over his syntax.” But his audiences were huge, sympathetic, and star-struck. “He is good on the hustings not because of what he says or the way he says it but because he projects a dedicated personality. More than one listener has remarked to me after a rally: ‘That man sure is sincere.’ ”23
IV
And then, just as the campaign was gaining momentum, Eisenhower’s running mate threw a wrench into the gears. On September 18 the New York Post revealed that Senator Nixon had established a fund into which wealthy California backers had occasionally deposited contributions. The money was used to cover the cost of campaigning and disseminating political material. The sum involved was not large—about $18,000—and the fund was not illegal. It soon emerged that Adlai Stevenson also had such a fund. But one of the legs of the Republican K1C2 tripod was the cry of “Corruption,” and Nixon’s fund looked dubious. Eisenhower did not like surprises, and this was a nasty one.24
Whatever its legal status, the fund was a political disaster. It conjured up the cartoon-like image of a band of unnamed wealthy backers handing sacks of cash to a young congressman in return for political favors. After all, such an image squared with the very picture Nixon himself had been painting of corruption in Washington. The fund crisis swiftly brought to the surface the subterranean divisions within the Republican Party. The Taft men, who were still in control of the party machinery, insisted that the story was nothing but “a left-wing smear,” in Karl Mundt’s words. Herbert Hoover was roused from his slumbers to offer stalwart praise for Nixon’s integrity. GOP chairman Arthur Summerfield gave Nixon his full support. But the men in Ike’s inner circle, the pros in New York, reacted with grave concern. Brownell, Clay, Dewey—they wondered if they’d bought a pig in a poke. The official organ of liberal Republicanism, the Herald Tribune, whose publisher, Bill Robinson, was Eisenhower’s boon companion, immediately put out an editorial calling for Nixon to step down. Privately Robinson told Eisenhower that Nixon’s place on the ticket “seriously blunts the sharp edge of the corruption issue and burdens you with a heavy and unfair handicap.”25
Yet Eisenhower worried that dumping Nixon might do more damage to his candidacy. He directed Paul Hoffman, an old friend who was now head of the Ford Foundation, to undertake a careful investigation of Nixon’s records with the help of the accounting firm Price Waterhouse. He asked Nixon to release all documents relating to the fund; the senator would have to be “clean as a hound’s tooth” in order to continue the fight against corruption—a remark that, when reported to Nixon, struck him like a punch to the solar plexus. Ike told the press, “I believe Dick Nixon to be an honest man,” and then clammed up, awaiting developments. To hedge his bets, he alerted California’s other senator, William Knowland, to join the campaign train in case he was needed to replace Nixon.26
If Eisenhower assumed Nixon would immediately offer to step off the ticket, he was wrong. Nixon showed what would become his trademark resilience and refused to be bullied. He believed there was nothing illegal or unethical about the fund. He wanted to tell his story, and he had support within the Taft-dominated Republican National Committee, which swiftly raised the money to buy half an hour of television time so Nixon could explain himself. The campaign headquarters approved the television appearance, but Governor Dewey, calling Nixon from New York just minutes before his televised speech, told him that the campaign staff expected him to offer his resignation at the conclusion of the broadcast.
Nixon refused. Instead he gave a performance on September 23 that rescued his political career from almost certain destruction. Known as the “Checkers” speech for its unctuous reference to the Nixon family dog, it was a landmark in modern American political history. Its most notable feature was that it was broadcast live on television and that 60 million voters watched it. Nixon spoke from the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood. The stage had been decorated to look like a middle-class sitting room, with bookshelves and drapes and a plush armchair in the corner on which his young wife, Pat, reposed in mute admiration. The senator, looking thin and pale, sat at a desk and faced the camera, speaking slowly with quiet emphasis.
His integrity had been questioned, Nixon began, and he wanted to reply. He had “a theory that the best and only answer to a smear . . . is to tell the truth.” He explained the need for the fund as a simple expedient to spare the American taxpayer the cost of supporting his political activities. He pointed to the audit that had been done and said it showed that he had not taken a dime for himself. His conscience was clear. He continued with a pathetic accounting of his modest finances, enumerating his income, debts, mortgage payments, even the value of his 1950 Oldsmobile. Nixon summed up with a sigh. “Well, that’s about it. That’s what we have and that’s what we owe. It isn’t very much but Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime we’ve got is honestly ours.” Except, of course, for the dog, Checkers, which had been a gift to the Nixon daughters from an enthusiastic Texan. “Regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.”
Then Nixon went on the attack. He noted acidly that Governor Stevenson, who had inherited a fortune from his father and never had to worry about money, also had a political fund and had revealed nothing about it. Senator Sparkman, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, had bilked the taxpayers by putting his wife on the federal payroll. The establishment newspapers had attacked Nixon when he went after Alger Hiss and were attacking him now. Above all, President Truman allowed corruption to thrive in his administration while thousands of fine young American men died in Korea. It was natural that such people would want Nixon out of the way, that they would use “smears to silence me, to make me let up. Well, they just don’t know who they’re dealing with.” Nixon would not give up. “I’m not a quitter,” he insisted. Defying the directive
from New York to leave the ticket, he asked his viewers to send a telegram to the Republican headquarters in Washington to tell them what they wanted.27
Watching the broadcast from a campaign stop in Cleveland, Eisenhower was furious. But although Nixon had disobeyed him by not offering to resign, Ike had to grant his running mate some respect for fighting. At the end of the speech Eisenhower strode out onto the stage of the Cleveland Public Hall, where 15,000 people had been waiting to hear his previously scheduled address. The audience had just heard Nixon’s broadcast through the loudspeaker, and the atmosphere in the hall was electric. Eisenhower knew he had little choice but to offer praise for Nixon. “I have been a warrior and I like courage. Tonight I saw an example of courage,” he began. “I have seen many brave men in tough situations. I have never seen any come through in better fashion than Senator Nixon did tonight.” The audience responded with tumultuous applause. Still, Eisenhower prolonged Nixon’s agony another day by ordering Nixon, through a public telegram, “to fly to see me at once” in Wheeling, West Virginia, where Ike would be campaigning the next day and would render his verdict in person.28
Although to contemporary viewers the Checkers speech appears saccharine and insincere, colored by Nixon’s wounded pride and class resentment, at the time it was hailed as an honest and, above all, gutsy demonstration. The New York Times ran a digest of editorial opinion from the nation’s newspapers on September 25, in which the speech was seen as “a smash hit,” and Nixon was described as “honest” and “sympathetic.” The Los Angeles Times, which had backed Nixon from the start, declared him “an adversary of evil and a champion of right.” The Dallas Morning News even styled him “the sort of he-man who has made this country what it is.”29
Hundreds of thousands of telegrams flooded into the Republican National Headquarters calling for Nixon to stay on the ticket. His painstaking assessment of his debts and his modest income, combined with his antagonism toward liberal elites, resonated with millions of viewers. Nixon revealed an uncanny ability to identify with the financial insecurities and ideological anxieties of the American Everyman—who wanted to see him rewarded. There was no way to dump a fighter like Nixon. For once, Eisenhower had been outmaneuvered. “You’re my boy,” Ike told him when they met the next evening in Wheeling, but Eisenhower’s big grin hid the menace of that remark.30
Nixon had saved his skin and his career. But at what cost? Ever after, Ike would treat him with suspicion and a certain disdain. Nixon’s failure to fall on his sword, his public pleading, his naked ambition, his almost painful self-exposure on television—all this repelled the proud Eisenhower. He could admire the way Nixon had fought for survival. But he could never trust him.31
V
Just when the fund crisis seemed to be dissipating, the Eisenhower campaign stumbled again. In early October the Eisenhower Special rolled into the battleground state of Wisconsin, whose 12 electoral votes went to the Democrats in 1948 by a narrow margin. The state had a tradition of progressive politics but in 1946 had sent Joseph McCarthy to Washington. Despite his controversial reputation in the country at large, McCarthy was popular in Wisconsin and seemed sure to win reelection. Eisenhower needed McCarthy’s support. Even the moderate Republican governor of Wisconsin, Walter J. Kohler, who loathed McCarthy, found it necessary to swallow his principles and endorse the senator for reelection. Kohler concluded that a break with McCarthy would injure the party and possibly tip the scales toward the Democrats in November.32
The press was well aware of the friction between Eisenhower and the Red-baiting senator. McCarthy had made known his suspicions about Eisenhower’s faith in the anticommunist crusade, while Eisenhower was bitter about McCarthy’s continuing attacks on George Marshall. Ike’s New York–based team of speechwriters, representing the liberal faction within the campaign, urged him to use the visit to Wisconsin to speak out on Marshall’s behalf, indirectly rebuking McCarthy. They penned a speech that, while full of harsh anticommunist rhetoric, carried several lines of support for Marshall.33
But those words would never be spoken. The night before Ike arrived in Wisconsin, McCarthy met him in Peoria, Illinois. McCarthy knew about the speech and asked Eisenhower to omit the statement of support for Marshall. Ike refused, outraged by the presumption of the junior senator. But the next day, when the train crossed into Wisconsin, McCarthy jumped on board and appeared on the back platform alongside the candidate. At the day’s first stop, in Green Bay, Eisenhower endorsed all the Republican candidates running for office in Wisconsin, and specifically referred to McCarthy. “I want to make one thing very clear,” he said. “The purposes he and I have of ridding this Government of the incompetent, the dishonest and above all the subversive and the disloyal are one and the same. Our differences have nothing to do with the end result that we are seeking. The differences apply to method.” At the next stop, in McCarthy’s hometown of Appleton, the senator stood next to Ike on the back of the train and introduced the general as a man “who will make an outstanding president.”
Inside the train, however, a fierce debate had broken out. Governor Kohler was urging the Eisenhower team to change the speech their man planned to make that evening in Milwaukee. The paragraph of support for Marshall would be seen as provocative, a slap in the face to McCarthy, and it would damage Eisenhower’s chances of winning the state. Sherman Adams agreed, but the New York team was appalled: Why buckle under to McCarthy? Surely Eisenhower would win more votes nationwide by showing his independence from the toxic senator.34
To his everlasting regret, Eisenhower did in fact buckle, allowing his praise of Marshall to be excised from his speech. Why? The answer that is often given is that he was a novice in politics and didn’t understand the significance of the issue. But nothing could be further from the truth. Eisenhower understood exactly what he was doing. To win in November he felt he needed to shore up his support from the Old Guard and the right wing of his party; the moderates would be for him anyway. He would grit his teeth and appease McCarthy.35
That night in Milwaukee, Eisenhower delivered a blistering attack on the Democrats and the Truman administration that sounded very much like a speech that could have been given by MacArthur or Nixon. Unbeknownst to Eisenhower, however, his staff had released to the press the original text of the speech, including the praise for Marshall. Journalists who had been expecting a bold statement of support on behalf of Marshall listened in vain. Eisenhower’s condemnation of the communist penetration of government, delivered in McCarthy’s home state and shorn of any tempering words of praise for Marshall, left him open to a wave of criticism that he had caved in to the worst demagogue in his party. And so he had.36
Truman was roused to fury by the events in Milwaukee. He adored Marshall, and he was outraged at Eisenhower’s decision to place party unity above personal loyalty. Truman decided to go on the attack. In speeches in Oakland and San Francisco just a day after Eisenhower’s Milwaukee fiasco, Truman linked Eisenhower with “a wave of filth” that he claimed Republicans were spreading. The president spoke with unabated anger about his old associate: “The surrender has been complete—to the Old Guard—to the lobbies—to the mossbacks of every description. But it is more than a surrender. It is the tragedy of an able and amiable human being, torn out of the life he was trained to follow and shoved around as a tool for others.”37
The following day, in a speech in Colorado, Truman blamed Ike for appeasing those “moral pygmies,” Senators Jenner and McCarthy. Such “moral blindness brands the Republican candidate as unfit to be president of the United States.” Hearing these attacks, Eisenhower swore that if he won the presidency, he “would never ride down Pennsylvania Avenue” with Truman. “How low can you get!”38
Truman’s attacks compelled Eisenhower’s speechwriting team to attempt to change the focus of the campaign away from McCarthyism and the Marshall affair and toward an area of strength for the general: foreign relations and, in particular, Korea. In Detroit on October
24, Eisenhower offered his personal pledge to grapple with the ongoing crisis in Korea and to do everything possible either to win or to end the war there. If elected, he vowed “I shall go to Korea.” Here at last was a concrete promise to fix a problem most Americans cared deeply about, far more than communists in government. The comment infuriated Truman, who was in the midst of negotiating an armistice in Korea. But politically it was a powerful move, conjuring the image of America’s most successful soldier finally bringing an end to a bitter war. When reporters on the campaign train saw the text of the Detroit speech, they simply concluded, “That does it—Ike is in.”39
On November 4, Eisenhower won a smashing electoral and popular victory, amassing 55 percent of the vote to Stevenson’s 44 percent. The electoral total was crushing: 442–89. Stevenson won only nine states, all in the South, and he lost his home state of Illinois by 10 percentage points. Eisenhower even chipped away at the Democrats’ southern stronghold, picking up Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas, and Florida, all of which Truman had won in 1948. At age 62, Eisenhower was the oldest man to be elected president since James Buchanan in 1856.
The 1952 election was not Eisenhower’s finest hour. He made regrettable mistakes on the campaign trail, allowing Nixon to outmaneuver him during the fund scandal, refusing to break with right-wing zealots like McCarthy and Jenner, and failing to rally to the defense of George Marshall, his mentor and a true national hero. His criticisms of Truman were acidic and hypocritical, given his own role in forging America’s security policy under Truman’s leadership. The campaign needlessly poisoned his relations with the outgoing president.
The Age of Eisenhower Page 12