by Nancy Gibbs
Both Eisenhower and Truman denied that they had talked politics; when asked about Krock’s story, Truman said “no comment.” For all the public denials, in private Truman wanted Eisenhower to know there were no hard feelings. He still had made no announcement about whether he’d be running again, though he had privately decided more than a year earlier that he would not. “There is a lure in power,” he observed in a note he had written and stuck in a drawer. “It can get into a man’s blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do.”
In mid-December he wrote to the general. “The columnists, the slick magazines and all the political people who like to speculate are saying many things about what is to happen in 1952. As I told you in 1948 and at our luncheon in 1951, do what you think best for the country.”
But then he said something extraordinary. For all their domestic policy differences, both men were fully committed to America’s role in leading a Western alliance. So long as the next president shared that vision, they would each be quite content to retire to a quiet life. For Truman, “my own position is in the balance. If I do what I want to do I’ll go back to Missouri and maybe run for the Senate.” But if Eisenhower declined to run, he went on, it would be Truman’s mission to keep the isolationists out of the White House. If that meant breaking his private vow not to run again, so be it. “I wish you would let me know what you intend to do. It will be between us and no one else.
“I have the utmost confidence in your judgment and your patriotism.”
Eisenhower wrote back to Truman. “I’d like to live a semi-retired life with my family,” he said. “I do not feel that I have any duty to seek a political nomination.” But by now he was discerning a difference between seeking the nomination and responding if called. So five days later, his most ardent backer, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, forced the issue by entering Eisenhower in the New Hampshire primary, and preemptively revealing that Eisenhower was indeed a Republican. Though annoyed at being cornered, Ike finally affirmed that if the Republicans offered him their nomination, he would accept it.
Now that his affiliation was finally cleared up, reporters were desperate to get Truman to dish about Eisenhower. But he wouldn’t play. At a January 10 press conference, he declared once more that he thought Eisenhower was “a grand man. I have the utmost confidence in him, and I gave him one of the most important jobs that this Government has to offer.” As far as his NATO assignment went, the timing was now in Eisenhower’s hands—though Truman was not subtle about the choice he hoped he’d make. “If he wants to get out and have all the mud and rotten eggs and rotten tomatoes thrown at him, that is his business, and I won’t stand in his way.”
And then they came to the crux of the matter, since Truman’s intentions were still a mystery. “Mr. President,” one reporter asked, “how could you run against a fellow you liked so well?”
“Easily,” Truman replied. “I have done it before.”
That led Truman to write to Eisenhower once again, in a remarkable exchange of letters between two men dancing around each other and the most powerful office in the world. Truman enclosed a full transcript of the news conference, just so there would be no misunderstanding about what had been said. “As usual,” Truman wrote to Ike, “the news hounds are trying to drive a wedge between us. As far as I am concerned, that will never happen.”
Eisenhower wrote back from Paris, wondering why people seemed so keen on producing “irritation or mutual resentment between us. I suppose the hope is for an impulsive and possibly critical statement from one of us with respect to the other, thus making news. I deeply appreciate your determination to avoid any such thing—a purpose which does and will govern my own conduct.”
To which Truman replied, “You can rest assured that no matter what the professional liars and the pathological columnists may have to say, you and I understand each other.”
In March Eisenhower won the New Hampshire primary in a walk, without shaking a single voter’s hand; he declared himself “astonished” and “deeply moved.” A few weeks later Truman finally announced what he’d known for two years: that he would not be running again in 1952, even though he was constitutionally eligible, having served only part of Roosevelt’s term. This meant that Eisenhower would not be in the position of challenging his commander in chief, and freed him to announce that he would step down as Allied commander and return to the United States in June to take up his campaign. “I clearly miscalculated,” he wrote to Truman, when he assumed anyone would believe his statements about aspiring to no political office. He needed to step down, he wrote, “so that any political activity centering about me cannot possibly affect the military service.”
Truman remained respectful and supportive. Asked at a May news conference whether Eisenhower’s health was strong enough for the White House, Truman declared that “he’s in perfect health. He’s as fine a man as ever walked.” In June of 1952 when Eisenhower returned once and for all to launch his campaign, Truman was asked if he still thought Ike was a nice guy.
“Yes, of course I do. I am very fond of General Eisenhower, and he is entitled to his political views. It’s all right with me. This is a free country. But I still like him as well as I ever did.”
But once he met Ike the politician, all that would change.
4
“The Man Is a Congenital Liar”
—DWIGHT EISENHOWER
When Eisenhower finally returned to the United States in June of 1952 to throw himself into the presidential race, he reported first to his commander in chief. Rather than meeting in the Oval Office, Truman took the general upstairs to the study. Already the incoming fire seemed fierce: Taft’s people were spreading stories about Mamie’s drinking, about Ike’s relationship with his aide, Kay Summersby, about Eisenhower being secretly Jewish. Eisenhower was furious; Truman basically told him to brace himself. “If that’s all it is, Ike,” he said, “then you can just figure you’re lucky.” He urged that Eisenhower “go right down to the office of the Republican National Committee and ask them to equip you with an elephant hide about an inch thick. You’re going to need it.”
Both men reaffirmed that nothing in the coming campaign could damage their friendship. Ike gave Truman one final NATO briefing, and the next day Truman presented the general with his fourth oak leaf cluster in the Rose Garden. When, in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, Eisenhower declared that his goal was to “sweep from office an administration which has fastened on every one of us the wastefulness, the arrogance and corruption of high places . . . the bitter fruit of a party too long in power,” Truman didn’t take it personally; he had been in politics a long time, and he knew the rules of the game.
But even he did not expect that Eisenhower would so quickly find a way to annoy him—a way matched only, as it happens, by the Democratic nominee, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson.
Stevenson and Eisenhower shared a similar problem: creating a hygienic distance between themselves and an unpopular and scandal-plagued administration whose policies—domestic for Stevenson, foreign for Eisenhower—they basically supported. It was one thing for Eisenhower to try to shine as a beacon of courage and conviction, floating high above the fray, a hero leading his next “Great Crusade.” He was revered by people who were tired of ugly politics and looking for a nice, commanding figure to help America settle into a prosperous middle age.
But it was quite another to try to wrap that aura around the fretful, fractious, increasingly desperate Republican Party. Eisenhower had never been a party man and was as hostile to what he called the “disciples of hate” in the party as he was to the opposition. He believed the president, like a military commander, should be above politics. He still had not decided how to handle powerful bottom-feeders like McCarthy and Indiana’s William Jenner; he’d been warned by his advisors about denouncing them, but was appalled by the idea of embracing them. His party, now twenty years in the wilderness, included many for whom purity mattered mor
e than victory. That would never be Eisenhower’s way, and there were plenty of Republicans who were skeptical about his devotion to their principles.
So his first task upon winning the nomination was to unite his party behind him. Eisenhower holed up in an eighth-floor suite at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, getting a crash course in obscure corners of domestic policy, brokering peace with the Taft wing of the party, and conceding to one friend the possibility that “some day I shall conclude that I made a mistake in allowing myself to be drawn into the political whirlpool.” In his military world his judgments were solid, born of instinct and long experience; in this new political arena he had to weigh the conflicting advice of myriad advisors and well-meaning but inexperienced friends, many of whom were now looking to him to lead them to political war. “The whole atmosphere is so different from that to which soldiers of long service become accustomed,” he wrote plaintively to George Marshall, “that I sometimes find it difficult indeed to adjust myself.”
The first “adjustment” occurred in mid-August, when news came that Stevenson had been invited to the White House for an intelligence briefing by national security officials. Between Korea and the unfolding tensions in Europe with the Soviets, the need for continuity was greater than ever. Truman, a man who landed in the Oval Office with no preparation whatever, was determined that whoever succeeded him be fully up to speed. It was an unprecedented gesture born of a patriotic instinct, but it also ignited a political firefight.
Stevenson did attend the intelligence briefing, followed by lunch with the entire cabinet and a tour of the restored White House. Then he and the president talked campaign strategy in the Cabinet Room. While Truman was eager to help any way he could, Stevenson was noncommittal. The whole Republican message was that it was “Time for a Change,” and vice presidential nominee Richard Nixon was hammering Stevenson as the apostle of “Trumanism.” Stevenson couldn’t afford to be seen as just a new name on a tired empire. Party officials speculated that he’d ask Truman to limit his campaign appearances to a few big cities.
Eisenhower meanwhile was under growing pressure to sharpen his rhetoric, especially from party regulars who weren’t quite convinced he was on the team. Some Taft loyalists publicly suggested that Republicans forget about the presidency and just concentrate on electing a Republican majority to Congress, rather than wasting energy just to turn the White House over to a “crypto Democrat” like Ike. They had no patience with the high-minded rhetoric of his Great Crusade, which New York Times reporter James Reston described as appealing “not to the mind but to the heart. . . . His language was filled with the noble words of the old revivalists: frugality, austerity, honesty, economy, simplicity, integrity.” One late-August front-page editorial in the New York World Telegram and Sun said plaintively: “We still cling to the hope that when he does start campaigning, he will come out swinging.” But at the moment, “Ike is running like a dry creek.”
The Stevenson briefing offered a perfect opportunity for Eisenhower to put some righteous distance between himself and the White House. Privately he told CIA director Walter Bedell Smith—Ike’s chief of staff during the war—that his campaign headquarters was in “a steaming stew” over the Stevenson meeting, though he added that “I am amazed to find out how important these things are considered in the political world.” In public, Eisenhower called the meeting an “unusual spectacle” that raised “disturbing questions” about whether Truman was using government resources to influence the campaign. The American people, he said—in what the New York Times called “the bluntest statement of campaign issues” since his nomination—wanted a genuine change from the “corruption . . .reckless spending . . . mismanagement in foreign affairs” of the Truman presidency.
The next day Truman sent Eisenhower a cable, offering the exact same invitation; a briefing, a lunch with the cabinet, and a chance to meet with anyone on the White House staff he chose. “I’ve made arrangements with the Central Intelligence Agency to furnish you once a week with the world situation as I also have for Governor Stevenson.”
For the first time in his life, Eisenhower rejected a White House invitation. In a telegram to the White House, which his campaign immediately made public, Eisenhower noted that since there was no “grave emergency” that would compel his attending, it was his duty as the Republican nominee to remain free to criticize the administration’s policies and those of its handpicked successor. Any communications between him and Truman “should be only those which are known to all the American people. Consequently I think it would be unwise and result in confusion in the public mind if I were to attend” the briefings.
Of course there was never any suggestion that by attending an intelligence briefing Eisenhower relinquished the right to criticize any policy he wanted to. The telegram was a little piece of theater, written for an audience well beyond the White House, and it had its desired effect: conservatives, noted Ike’s campaign manager, Herbert Brownell, “were greatly reassured.”
Truman, however, was livid. He did not play games with the country’s security. At his press conference, Truman slapped down the charge that he’d only planned to brief Stevenson until Ike protested. He had discussed briefing both candidates the week before, he said, and left it to General Omar Bradley, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to communicate with Eisenhower. Bradley said he would have issued the invitation more quickly had he known its timing would become a political issue. “Most of this information is not for general distribution,” Truman told reporters, “and it cannot be used publicly because it is top secret.”
Truman then sent Eisenhower a private letter, which suggested that the general had allowed himself to be hijacked by political opportunists. “I am sorry if I caused you embarrassment,” he began. His only goal was a stable and consistent foreign policy: “Partisan politics should stop at the boundaries of the United States. I am extremely sorry that you have allowed a bunch of screwballs to come between us.
“You have made a bad mistake, and I’m hoping it won’t injure this great Republic. . . .
“May God guide you and give you light.
“From a man who has always been your friend and who always wanted to be!
“Sincerely, HST.”
Now Eisenhower was angry too, though his response to Truman was gracious and, as ever, measured. Truman’s letter, he told the CIA’s Smith, “breathed injured innocence, and warned me solemnly of the great error I was making in allowing ‘screwballs’ to come between us and twist my thinking.”
It might have been some consolation had Eisenhower known that Truman was every bit as fed up with Stevenson, who was now treating Truman like a crazy uncle best hidden from polite company. Stevenson named his own party chairman, set up headquarters in Springfield, and, in answer to a reporter’s question, insisted that he’d be able to “clean up the mess in Washington,” which was taken as Stevenson’s confirmation that Washington was, indeed, a mess.
Publicly, Truman said he couldn’t comment because he knew of no such mess. Privately, he vented in more unsent letters: “I have come to the conclusion that you are embarrassed by having the president of the United States in your corner in this campaign,” he wrote to Stevenson. “I’m telling you to take your crackpots, your high socialites with their noses in the air, run your campaign and win if you can.”
Enter McCarthy, Stage Right
It took various misunderstandings to raise tensions in both the Truman and Eisenhower camps; but it fell to the Great Divider, Joe McCarthy, to set the two men at war. It was all the more ironic that their feud should have revolved around McCarthy, a hatemonger they both reviled, and George Marshall, a statesman both men revered.
Eisenhower owed his mentor everything; Marshall had recommended him to lead the Allied war effort while Marshall stayed back in Washington. Churchill referred to Marshall as “the true architect of victory”; Truman called him “the greatest living American.” It was Eisenhower whom Truman dispatched to Shangha
i in May of 1946 to ask Marshall to serve as secretary of state.
But to Joe McCarthy, delivering one of the more vile speeches ever made on the Senate floor, in June of 1951, Marshall was a traitor who had weakened the country by failing to prevent China from falling to the communists. McCarthy accused him of “a conspiracy so immense, an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” How else to explain continued communist successes, if they did not have accomplices in the highest branches of the American government?
Of course, Eisenhower had been a military advisor while Marshall was busy “losing” China; he had not raced the Russians to Berlin in 1945; he had been a strong supporter of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO. He was, in other words, a star player in the foreign policies that the isolationists in his party deplored, and that would require some explaining.
During the primaries, McCarthy had supported Taft, so Ike didn’t owe him anything; Eisenhower announced in August that he’d never campaign for him. He denounced any “un-American methods” of fighting communism—though without mentioning McCarthy by name. As for Marshall, Eisenhower declared at a Denver news conference that “there was nothing of disloyalty in General Marshall’s soul . . . if he was not a perfect example of patriotism,” Ike went on, “I never saw one.”
But soon Eisenhower’s arguments grew more nuanced, finding a distinction between “an endorsement” and “a blanket endorsement.” If Republican primary voters chose to nominate people like McCarthy and Jenner, then it would be presumptuous of Eisenhower to reject their judgment. He could support them as Republicans, even as he rejected their tactics. Or so he thought.