“Better we lose the election than mislead the people,” Stevenson said; “and better we lose the election than misgovern the people.”
After posing on the rostrum with John Sparkman of Alabama, his vice-presidential nominee, Stevenson took the train to Springfield. There he resolved to disassociate himself from Truman and fashion his own identity. His headquarters would be here, not in Washington or even in New York. National Chairman Frank McKinney, a Truman man, would be replaced by Stephen A. Mitchell, a Chicago lawyer and Stevenson friend.
In declaring his political independence, he went so far as to tell an Oregon reporter that one of his major goals, if elected, would be to clean up “the mess in Washington.” Referring to this in his memoirs, Truman dryly noted, “How Stevenson hoped he could persuade the American voters to maintain the Democratic party in power while seeming to disown powerful elements of it, I do not know.”
***
In fact, political legacies meant little to either candidate. Eisenhower and Stevenson were each too strong and too genuine to be called anyone’s foil. For all that, on the eve of their great match they were very different. As John Mason Brown pointed out, the center of Ike’s celebrated smile was his mouth, while Stevenson’s was in his eyes. The general’s waves to crowds were sweeping, with his arms straight out, and while speaking he would frequently say, “I am told,” or “someone told me.” The governor would say instead, “It strikes me,” or “I am reminded by.” He gestured tentatively, keeping his elbows at his sides. He worried about the country’s smug materialism, its “spiritual unemployment.” Eisenhower would have been embarrassed by such phrases. Even “status quo” bothered him; if he had to say it in a speech, he would follow it with an apologetic, “’Course, I’m not supposed to be the educated candidate.” And material prosperity did not alarm him; he saw it as a blessing, and as an American he was proud of it.
He was not a born speaker like his adversary. He needed time to find the natural rhythm of his campaign—so much time, in fact, that along the way some of his aides despaired of his ever getting it. Winding up his fishing trip, he said, “The great problem of America today is to take that straight and narrow road down the middle.” It wasn’t an arresting phrase to begin with, and when he used it the next day, and then the day after that, there was talk among the correspondents of crossing the 38th platitude. He was drawing large crowds, Richard H. Rovere reported on September 6, but “those that show up to lend an ear when he pleads for their assistance in unhorsing the Democrats are often rather thin.”
During that first month almost the only bright note for the Republicans was their newspaper support. Just 201 daily papers were backing Stevenson, and their daily circulation was 4.4 million readers. Eisenhower, by contrast, was supported by 993 dailies with 40.1 million subscribers. But even here the news columns tended to undermine the pro-Ike editorials just by carrying quotations from the Democratic candidate. The governor’s sense of timing was superb. Picking up Ike’s concession that he would retain some Democratic programs, the governor remarked that he would be proud to stand on much of his party’s record “if only… the general would move over and make room for me.” The Republicans had lacked fresh ideas since the turn of the century, he charged, and “As to their platform, well, nobody can stand on a bushel of eels.” Ending a 6,500-mile tour of the West on September 12, he learned that Taft had brought a conservative manifesto to the general’s New York home, and that after a two-hour conference Eisenhower had agreed to it in every particular. Stevenson called it “the Surrender of Morningside Heights.” He said, “Taft lost the nomination but won the nominee,” and when an anguished Ike protested that the Presidency was no laughing matter, the governor jabbed him again: “My opponent is worried about my funnybone, but I’m worried about his backbone.”
Television critic John Crosby wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that “To both the Republicans and the Democrats it’s now fairly clear that Governor Adlai E. Stevenson is a television personality the like of which has not been seen ever before. The man is setting a pace that will not only be almost impossible for succeeding candidates to follow but one that will be pretty hard for Stevenson himself to maintain.” To discouraged Republicans the race looked like 1948 all over again, with the other man lengthening his lead. After six weeks of it, the pro-Eisenhower Scripps-Howard chain ran a desperate editorial on the front page of all nineteen of its papers. “Ike,” it said, was “running like a dry creek” because he was not “coming out swinging.” He had said that he didn’t know whether General Marshall had made mistakes. “If Ike doesn’t know,” the editorial continued, “he had better find out. For that’s one of the big issues of this campaign. Ask any mother, father, or wife of a soldier now in Korea.” It concluded, “We still cling to the hope that… he will hit hard. If he doesn’t, he might as well concede defeat.”
That was one of the turning points in the election. It led to a general decline in the level of the campaign, which was deplorable, but it also stiffened Eisenhower’s resolve and made him a more militant competitor, which, from the Republican standpoint, was a good switch. At about the same time, Stevenson’s wit began to generate a backlash. Louis Kronenberger has suggested that in an important context Americans “tend to fear and fight off humor.” Some voters began saying that the general was right, that the struggle for the White House wasn’t funny. Another September surprise was the realization that the Democratic candidate’s intellect might not be an unqualified asset, that there were voters who would distrust it. A broad streak of anti-intellectualism had always been part of the American national character, and the fall of Hiss and the rise of McCarthy had been accompanied by a marked rise in the political use of anti-intellectual pejoratives—“longhairs,” “do-gooders,” “highbrows,” “double-domes,” “bleeding hearts.” Now the 1952 campaign gave birth to another, a kind of watchword for Philistinism whose popularity was destined to remain high for the next five years.
Its coiner was John Alsop, the younger brother of two columnists, an insurance executive who was chairman of Connecticut’s Republican speakers’ bureau. In mid-September, when Stewart Alsop called to ask him how things stood, John said fine; it looked like a big GOP year in New England. He in turn asked how everything looked elsewhere. Stewart observed that while most intellectual celebrities had championed Eisenhower against Taft, many of them were now rooting for Stevenson. John thought a minute. As he later explained, he reflected that “while Stevenson was appealing and appealed strongly to people’s minds, Eisenhower, as a man and as a figure, was appealing far more strongly to far more people’s emotions.” As his brother awaited his comment, John’s mind’s eye pictured the countenance of a typical intellectual in politics—a smooth, faceless, haughty, and very oval head. “Sure,” he said, “all the eggheads are for Stevenson, but how many eggheads are there?”
Stewart put it in his column. Neither Alsop thought of the word as disparaging, but they quickly lost control of it. It answered a need and became a coast-to-coast sneer overnight. Louis Bromfield, an anti-intellectual intellectual, was one who seized upon it. Not knowing its origin, he wrote that “It seems to have arisen spontaneously from the people themselves.” To him it stood for “a person of intellectual pretensions, often a professor or the protégé of a professor,” who was “superficial in approach to any problem,” and who was in addition “feminine,” “supercilious,” “surfeited with conceit,” a “doctrinaire supporter of middle-European socialism,” a “self-conscious prig” and, yes, “a bleeding heart.” If Stevenson were elected, Bromfield prophesied, “the eggheads will come back into power and off again we will go on the scenic railway of muddled economics, Socialism, Communism, crookedness and psychopathic instability.”
Suddenly the campaign became a pitched battle. Descending from the high plane established by the principals, partisans of both parties let fly wild charges, innuendos, absurd hyperbole—all the excesses that offend decency but stigmatize imp
ortant elections all the same. Afterward there was some bewilderment over who had said what, understandable in the heat of the conflict and the confusion, in some quarters, over who was running. Harry Truman acted as though he was, and Henry Luce appeared to agree with him. Whistle-stopping all the way to the Pacific Northwest and back through the Middle West, the President spent two weeks questioning both Eisenhower’s acumen and his character. Anthony Leviero of the New York Times said Truman had engaged the general in “an epic political conflict,” and Arthur Krock described the tour as “a protracted assault on the personal integrity of General Eisenhower that is without parallel for a man in Mr. Truman’s position.” You could read all about it in Time and Life. You could not, however, find much there about the Democratic candidate for President. One issue of Life was devoted to pictures of the President and the general—there were none at all of Governor Stevenson.
Ike himself wasn’t responsible for that. By and large his campaigning was as irreproachable as Stevenson’s, and it is hard to fault his speeches. Doubtless he later wished that he could reword some of them. (On September 3 he said in Little Rock: “Thank goodness for a Supreme Court.”) Others were naive, most memorably his egg lecture, in which he would hold aloft an egg and express outrage that a hundred different taxes might be levied on this little product of nature, to which the government had, he would say, made no contribution whatsoever. (As Taft had pointed out, the general didn’t know much about agricultural policy.) Yet this was hardly demagogy, or even flamboyance. Emmet John Hughes was running a vigilant blue pencil over Ike’s major speeches before they were delivered, crossing out such words as “crusade” in domestic affairs and “liberation” in foreign policy. Most of what was left was honest Eisenhower wrath. He may not always have had his facts quite right, but like his audiences he knew something had gone wrong for America, and it had put his dander up.
The crowds were with him now. The chant “We like Ike” was less a political call to arms than a hymn of praise. As John Alsop had noted, Stevenson sought to persuade men, but Eisenhower wanted to move them. And he was succeeding. The public, wrote James Reston, “likes his angry little outbursts against corruption, and his essays on America.” Afterward Marquis Childs wrote that Ike had represented “strength, triumph, unswerving confidence. Millions were happy to take him on faith, on his face, on his smile, on the image of American manhood, on the happy virtue of his family life.”
This was on a far higher level than Karl Mundt’s formula for a Republican victory: K1C3 (Korea, Crime, Communism, Corruption). There were a lot of Mundts in the GOP, and by becoming the Republican nominee Ike had inherited them. He would have pleased their critics if he had repudiated them outright, but that wasn’t his way. (It is fair to add that it wasn’t FDR’s way with Frank Hague or Stevenson’s with Pat McCarran.) We know how the general felt about the Republican ultraconservatives. When Jenner tried to embrace him on a public platform in Indianapolis, Eisenhower recoiled. “I felt dirty,” he told Hughes afterward, “from the touch of the man.” In Green Bay, Wisconsin, on October 3, he refused to pose for photographers with Joe McCarthy, telling an audience that “The differences between me and Senator McCarthy are well known to him and to me, and we have discussed them.”
McCarthy stalked off, furious, though the incident was soon forgotten in the candidate’s failure to break openly with the senator later that day in Milwaukee. Feeling belligerent when the Milwaukee speech was being planned, Ike had said to Hughes, “Listen, couldn’t we make this an occasion for me to pay a personal tribute to Marshall—right in McCarthy’s backyard?” It was so decided, and a Marshall encomium was included in the advance copies of the speech distributed to the press. Then Governor Walter J. Kohler Jr. boarded the train in Peoria. He convinced Adams and General Wilton B. “Jerry” Persons, Eisenhower’s military aide, that the tribute might split Republican strength in the state. When they approached Ike, he said, “Are you trying to suggest that I take out that paragraph on Marshall?” Adams said, “That’s right, General.” Ike said, “Well, take it out. I covered that subject thoroughly in Colorado a few weeks ago.”
He hadn’t, though. Praising his old superior in Colorado wasn’t the same as going after Tailgunner Joe in Wisconsin. As he himself had been the first to see, Milwaukee would have been a superb place to strike a blow for decency. He had forfeited it, and the press had let the country know why. That was not the first time the general had taken a bold stand and changed his mind. He had said he would remain in Paris and then asked to be relieved, had said he would not go to Chicago and then did. It was to become a disconcerting habit of his political years, giving his adversaries the impression that he was weak and giving his staff apoplectic moments, but it did not mean that he was afraid of McCarthy—he would later prove that he was not—or that he himself was any readier to campaign in the gutter.
Some Democrats said he was. That was probably inevitable. Any election with McCarthy in it was going to be the occasion for squalor. McCarthy himself was seeing to that. There is no way of determining his impact on the November outcome. While he was picking up votes from people who believed him or thought Eisenhower in the White House could handle him better than Stevenson, others, affronted by his tactics, were being driven into the Democratic camp. Election results were inconclusive. Four Democratic senators against whom he campaigned, Tydings among them, went down in defeat. At the same time, however, his own showing at the polls was unimpressive. Eisenhower carried Wisconsin 979,744 to 622,175. McCarthy won 870,444 to 731,402, which was not only smaller than the general’s plurality; it made him low man on the winning state ticket.
Still, he was a force. His most striking performance was his televised attempt to pin a Communist tag on Stevenson. “Alger,” he began, smirking as he corrected himself, “—I mean Adlai.” No one else plumbed the political depths so thoroughly as McCarthy, but plenty of others were knee—or hip—deep. Either it was impossible to be elected without suggesting that Democrats were treasonous, or Republicans thought it impossible. Even in Green Bay, where Eisenhower had drawn the line between himself and Joe, he had felt obliged to add: “I want to make one thing very clear. The purposes that he and I have of ridding this government of the incompetents, the dishonest, and above all the subversives and the disloyal are one and the same. Our differences, therefore, have nothing to do with the end result we are seeking. The differences apply to method.”
His running mate was more direct. Nixon repeatedly charged that a Democratic victory in November would mean “more Alger Hisses, more atomic spies, more crises.” He was still flagellating Hiss, now in stir, and in a major address, televised nationally from New York on October 13, he once more took up the trial deposition which had been given then by the Democratic candidate. After declaring that the Russians had acquired hundreds of secret documents “from Hiss and other members of the ring” which meant “that the lives of American boys were endangered and probably lost because of the activities of a spy ring,” he added: “Mr. Stevenson was a character witness, or should I say a witness for the reputation, and the good reputation, of Alger Hiss. He testified that the reputation of Alger Hiss for veracity, and for loyalty was good…. This testimony… was given after all these facts, this confrontation in which Hiss had to look into Chambers’ mouth to identify him, after these papers came out of the pumpkin, after all of those facts were known… it was voluntary on Mr. Stevenson’s part.”
Democratic speakers were now charging that while Eisenhower was taking a high road to November, his running mate was on a low one. It was working out that way, though not because anyone had planned it. That was the kind of men they were. Ike was cautious and, for a general, remarkably unaggressive. That was part of his appeal. He was no readier to climb into a ring with Stevenson than with McCarthy. Nixon was by contrast a lunger, a street fighter with a long shiv and a jugular instinct. If he wounded good men that autumn, it is fair to add that there were Democrats with knives, too.
> ***
“Secret Nixon Fund!” cried the page one headline in the New York Post. A two-line banner on page two read:
SECRET RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND KEEPS NIXON IN STYLE FAR BEYOND HIS SALARY
By Leo Katcher
Los Angeles—The existence of a “millionaire’s club” devoted exclusively to the financial comfort of Senator Nixon, GOP vice presidential candidate, was revealed today….
Katcher, a Hollywood movie writer, had managed to get most of the facts wrong, including the amount of money in the fund and the legality of it. The special bank account was well within both the letter and the spirit of the law. Men in public life seldom have enough money to meet their obligations. Some men put their wives on the payroll, or accepted extravagant legal fees, or spoke at $100-a-plate dinners. Stevenson had established a fund to backstop men who had left high-salaried jobs to serve Illinois. Other businessmen contributed to it, and as Stevenson said, there was “no question of improper influence, because there was no connection between the contributors and the beneficiaries.”
There wasn’t any in the Nixon fund, either. Contributions, none of which could exceed $500 in one year, were sent to Dana C. Smith, a Pasadena lawyer who acted as trustee and manager of the fund. Over a two-year period, 76 contributors had given an average of $240 each; the $18,235 had paid for recordings of speeches, travel vouchers, postage, and Christmas cards sent to former campaign workers. All of it had been accounted for. None had gone to Nixon or his wife. In addition, it had never been “secret.” The account and Smith’s administration of it had been a matter of public knowledge from its inception. In a way, Nixon was being hoist by his own petard. In his anti-Communist evangelism he had become a master of irrelevant minutiae. What had been in Chambers’s mouth, or in the pumpkin, had nothing to do with Hiss’s reputation. Indeed, the more spotless a spy’s reputation, the more damaging the case against him, since he has been exploiting the trust of others. This was what had made Hiss’s treachery so shocking. In that sense, by testifying to the faith men had had in him, Stevenson’s deposition had made the verdict more damning. But Nixon had made it look the other way round. His syllogism had been: Hiss was a spy; Stevenson had known him; therefore Stevenson was under a cloud. The syllogism slandering him was: Some politicians take bribes; Nixon had taken money; Nixon was thus corrupt. The impact of the Post accusation was increased by the sanctimoniousness of his own campaign. His first reaction to the Post was in character. The Nixon train was about to pull out of Sacramento when a heckler yelled, “Tell ’em about the $16,000!” “Hold the train!” he shouted. “Hold the train!” It stopped, and he gave the crowd not the reasonable facts, but a muddled version of them. “You folks know the work I did investigating Communists for the United States,” he said. “Ever since I have done that work, the Communists, the left-wingers, have been fighting me with every smear that they have been able to. Even when I received the nomination for the Vice Presidency, I want you folks to know—and I’m going to reveal it today for the first time—I was warned that if I continued to attack the Communists and crooks in this government they would try to smear me….”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 94