by Nancy Gibbs
Indiana’s William Jenner, who had voted against NATO and liked to call Marshall “a living lie” and “a front man for traitors,” introduced Eisenhower at a rally in Indianapolis on September 9; the crowd roared as Eisenhower promised to cast out “the incompetent, the unfit, the cronies and the chiselers.” He made no mention of Jenner, who took every chance to slap his shoulder and squeeze into the picture, finally grabbing Eisenhower’s arm and raising it triumphantly overhead. “Charlie, get me out of here,” Ike barked to Indiana congressman Charles Halleck. “I felt dirty from the touch of the man,” he told his speechwriter Emmet Hughes. Truman was shocked by the sight. “When Eisenhower threw his arms around Jenner, he lost Truman,” said international news service correspondent Robert Nixon. “That was the end of the line.”
That same night, McCarthy won the Wisconsin Republican Senate primary by better than two to one. Eisenhower still had no desire to campaign in his state; but party officials argued that Wisconsin’s moderate Republican governor, Walter Kohler, faced a tough reelection challenge; control of the Senate was also hanging in the balance. Truman had won Wisconsin in 1948; the Republicans needed to get the state back.
Eisenhower still didn’t want to go, and some moderate advisors, especially Thomas Dewey, agreed. In his memoirs, Ike blamed a staff “blunder” for scheduling a trip. But forced into a visit, he thought he could make a point as well: he told speechwriter Hughes that he wanted to include in his big Milwaukee speech a defense of Marshall, right in McCarthy’s home state. That would have gone a long way to bolster Marshall and bury McCarthy.
No one knows who tipped off McCarthy; or maybe he just had a good enough read on Eisenhower to worry about what he might say. In any event, on October 2, as Eisenhower’s campaign train rolled through Illinois on its way to Wisconsin, McCarthy flew into Peoria unannounced and paid a visit to Eisenhower’s hotel.
The two men talked privately for a long time.
Afterward McCarthy told reporters they had had “a very, very pleasant conversation.” While he and Eisenhower didn’t agree on everything, he said, he left the meeting with “the same feeling as when I went in, and that is that he’s a great American who’ll make a great president, an outstanding president.”
One of Ike’s speechwriters, Kevin McCann, who was sitting outside the suite, told a different story. Eisenhower let McCarthy know exactly what he thought of McCarthy’s thuggish tactics and his attacks on Marshall. The fight had been so fierce it turned the air blue. “I never heard the General so cold-bloodedly skin a man.”
En route from Peoria to Wisconsin, however, Eisenhower’s determination to defend Marshall publicly in McCarthy territory got derailed. His campaign manager, Sherman Adams, had a draft of the speech, including the section praising Marshall. Governor Kohler and Republican national chairman Arthur Summerfield warned Ike that defending Marshall would be read as such an intentional attack on McCarthy that it could cost the party the state. As his advisor William Ewald recalled their argument, they told Eisenhower that “You cannot go into Milwaukee, Wisconsin, get up on the stage in the largest public auditorium in this city, have Joe McCarthy sitting there, running for the Senate—you’re running for the presidency on the Republican ticket—and punch him in the nose.”
Eisenhower’s team hashed it out; should he or shouldn’t he come to Marshall’s defense? Some advisors were adamant that the speech had to be delivered as written. Adams, however, agreed that the Marshall section seemed gratuitous and out of place. At one point Eisenhower returned from a forward car of the train, where he’d gone to talk with Adams further, looking “purple with anger.” But in the end he agreed to cut the passage. Eisenhower later told people he agreed to take it out only after he’d been warned that attacking McCarthy in Wisconsin could incite a riot at his rally. In his memoirs, he offers the reasoning that having just recently defended Marshall, doing so again “could be interpreted as a ‘chip on the shoulder’ attitude. By thus arousing new public clamor, I could be inadvertently embarrassing General Marshall.”
As the train pulled in to Green Bay, McCarthy scampered onto the train platform to greet crowds that cheered him louder than they cheered for Eisenhower. He got to introduce the general in his hometown of Appleton, after campaign aides said he wouldn’t. All day aides who did not know that the speech had been changed were telling reporters, just wait, just wait, you’ll hear what Ike really thinks of McCarthy tonight.
In his big Milwaukee speech, with McCarthy sitting behind him on the stage, Eisenhower did warn against “violent vigilantism,” but he hardly sounded hostile: “The purposes that [McCarthy] and I have of ridding the Government of the incompetents, the dishonest and, above all, the subversive and disloyal are one and the same,” he declared. “The differences apply to method.” Truman’s indifference to communist infiltration, he added, had resulted in “a calamity of immeasurable consequences.”
Gone from his remarks was this line from the original he had prepared: “I have been privileged for 35 years to know General Marshall personally. I know him, as a man and as a soldier, to be dedicated with singular selflessness and the profoundest patriotism to the service of America. And this episode is a sobering lesson in the way freedom must not defend itself.” Then the photographers finally got their picture: “Standing so far from Joe that they looked like two men reaching toward each other across a trout stream,” Time wrote, “Ike grabbed the Wisconsin Senator’s hand, pumped it once and abruptly let it go.”
What Eisenhower did not know was that the New York Times had a copy of the complete original text. And so the headline from the trip was that McCarthy had bullied Eisenhower into silence; that the hero who stood up to Hitler had been cowed somehow by the domestic fearmongers. The Times’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, sent Adams a telegram: “Do I need to tell you that I am sick at heart?” Eisenhower flatly denied that he had caved; he had defended Marshall before, his aides argued, so there was no point in doing so again. “It was a mistake,” Ewald recalled, “a grievous mistake that I feel certain pained Dwight D. Eisenhower to his last day.”
Marshall himself didn’t say anything, though his wife later described how the retired statesman would sit in front of the radio night after night, waiting to hear Eisenhower defend his honor.
His failure to do so sent Truman over the edge. “When anybody criticized Marshall to Truman it was like criticizing his own father, and he took that very strongly, personally,” explained his aide Matt Connelly. Truman had been restrained after the Jenner endorsement, offering only a “no comment.” But Truman later charged that the “ugliest and dumbest thing” Ike did was to duck the McCarthy fight, “even when good, decent people around him were being hurt by that awful and horrible man.”
Many years later a question would arise over whether there was even more to the Truman-Eisenhower-Marshall relationship than anyone knew. In his controversial oral history Plain Speaking—published in 1973, after Truman died—Merle Miller claimed that in June of 1945, with the war finally over, Eisenhower had written to Marshall saying he wanted to come home and divorce Mamie so he could marry his wartime driver, Kay Summersby. Marshall wrote back that if Ike attempted such a thing, “he’d see to it that the rest of his life was a living hell,” Miller reports Truman as saying. “General Marshall didn’t very often lose his temper, but when he did, it was a corker.” One of the last things Truman said he did as president, Miller wrote, despite his intense dislike of Eisenhower at that point, was to take the letters from the Pentagon files and destroy them.
Though some of Plain Speaking was based on taped interviews with Truman, Miller had no recording of the conversation concerning the sensational letters—and Truman was no longer alive to confirm it. The only corroboration came from Truman’s garrulous aide Major General Harry Vaughan, who claimed that there had indeed been a damaging exchange between Eisenhower and Marshall regarding divorce, which Eisenhower’s enemies got wind of and wanted to use against him in the 1952 c
ampaign. Vaughan also alleged that Truman interceded, retrieving the letters and sending them to Marshall to destroy.
The surviving evidence tells a different story. Ike did write to Marshall in June of 1945; but it was to ask that Mamie be allowed to join him in Germany for what promised to be a long occupation. It was an unusually intimate letter: “I will admit that the last six weeks have been my hardest of the war,” he confided. “My trouble is that I just plain miss my family.” Mamie had fallen ill; she weighed barely a hundred pounds. The war had been a great strain on her, he wrote Marshall, and “I would feel far more comfortable about her if she could be with me.”
As a matter of protocol, the request was unnecessary; MacArthur, serving in Asia, had simply sent for his wife to join him. But even though they were now of the same rank, Eisenhower respectfully asked Marshall for permission, and Marshall took the letter to Truman for his advice. Truman told him no, it would not be fair to other soldiers who were separated from their families. Eisenhower’s response? He apologized to Marshall for even asking.
On the Warpath
Eisenhower’s very public failure to defend Marshall, for whatever reason, turned the 1952 campaign into what the New York Times called “a bitter Eisenhower-Truman affair,” to the point of overshadowing Adlai Stevenson completely. Truman went on the warpath, with a carefully prepared speech in Colorado Springs. Eisenhower, Truman charged, was a coward. Rather than condemn the “moral scoundrels” and “pygmies” like McCarthy and Jenner who “tried to stab an honored chief, friend and benefactor in the back,” Ike had embraced them and “humbly thanked [McCarthy] for riding on his campaign train. And why? Because he thinks these two unprincipled men will bring him votes in November.” Any man who would bow to such political pressures, Truman charged, was unfit to be entrusted with the presidency or the nation’s atomic arsenal. “I skinned old Ike from the top of his bald head to his backside,” Truman later told a Washington Post reporter.
And that was just the beginning. Truman climbed aboard his armor-plated presidential railroad car, the Ferdinand Magellan, for his first whistle-stop tour of the campaign, through twenty-four states. In a lovely bit of political jujitsu, he attacked Eisenhower by embracing him, reminding voters that he was “the man I chose to be a chief lieutenant in some of the greatest and gravest undertakings of my Administration.” But now Ike was attacking the very policies he’d helped shape, Truman charged. In just one October day of stops across New York state, Truman called Eisenhower a liar, a fool, a hypocrite, so ignorant of government after a life in the military that he was at the mercy of the party bosses, “a babe in the woods of Senator Taft . . . a military man who doesn’t know anything about civilian problems, in the hands of the reactionaries who speak and work for the banker, the power lobby, the real estate lobby, and all the other special privilege boys.”
“I knew him. I trusted him,” Truman confessed to his party faithful in the heat of the campaign. “I thought he might make a good president. But that was a mistake. In this campaign he has betrayed almost everything I thought he stood for.”
Like a brass band building to the coda, Truman ran higher and hotter, and always, it came back to Marshall and McCarthy: “This much is clear to me. A man who betrays his friends in such a fashion is not to be trusted with the great Office of President of the United States.”
Eisenhower wasn’t exactly wearing kid gloves when he referred to Truman as an “expert in political demagoguery.” But for all the charges of political naivete, Eisenhower was as shrewd as he could be about reading public opinion and private motives, and understood that his political “inexperience” actually gave him an advantage. His language and demeanor were designed to set him apart from the bar fights of recent political life. While the hard-liners in his party wanted him to take Truman down at every chance, he knew he needed the votes of independents who were already alarmed by his handling of McCarthy.
And he may have understood what reporters covering the race discovered: that Truman, blinded by his own disillusionment, underestimated people’s personal devotion to Eisenhower, the sheer power of his presence. “It is not uncommon for people to risk injury from rotten branches and high tension wires,” wrote New Yorker columnist Richard Rovere in September, as spectators climbed the trees along a parade route to get a better view. “Three times during the tour of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the crowds broke through the police cordons, forcing the motorcade to stop.” Especially at his whistle-stops, Truman would be all but drowned out by crowds shouting “We like Ike! We like Ike!” When Truman started accusing Eisenhower of “moral blindness” and anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, it backfired. “Many Believe He Is Harming Stevenson’s Chances” read the New York Times headline.
Having found in Herbert Hoover how vitally useful a former president could be to a new one, Truman seemed unaware that he was precluding such a role for himself. There was little chance that even a remnant of his friendship with Eisenhower could survive the campaign brawl. Eisenhower was a supremely confident leader, and might never have felt inclined to turn to Truman in any case; but the wounds of the 1952 race ruled out even the most minimal club camaraderie. Eisenhower, his onetime friend Averell Harriman later told his grandson David Eisenhower, “just didn’t understand politics. He had no idea of the difference between opposing a man politically and personally.” Eisenhower came away from the campaign doubting Truman’s honor and leadership and respectability.
In the end, there is probably nothing Truman could have done that would have changed the outcome either way. Eisenhower won thirty-nine of forty-eight states, including Stevenson’s and Truman’s home states, with a six-million-vote edge—the most votes ever received by a candidate to that point—while carrying the House and Senate. Stevenson conceded at 1:30 A.M.; after a brief speech, Eisenhower went back to his hotel suite and collapsed on a bed. But there was one last task before sleep.
It was Clare Boothe Luce, the former lawmaker Ike would name ambassador to Italy, who came to him. “I know how tired you are,” she said. “But there is one more thing you have to do.” Obediently, he went to the phone and called Herbert Hoover, the last Republican to win the White House, twenty-four years before.
The mere mention of Truman’s name to Ike after the 1952 campaign “would forever bring a tightening of the jaw and a reddening of the face,” observed Ewald. Eisenhower’s wrestling coach at West Point had taught him to always come back off the canvas with a grin on your face—but “Eisenhower’s insouciance was an exercise in iron self-discipline,” Ewald said. “Underneath, the venom worked; and it shaped the course of history.”
The Very Ugly Handoff
“Congratulations on your overwhelming victory,” Truman cabled to Eisenhower. “The 1954 budget must be presented to Congress before January 15th. . . . You should have a representative meet with the Director of the Budget immediately.” Truman already had a clear vision for handling the first turnover of power between parties in two decades. It just didn’t happen to be one that Eisenhower shared.
Eisenhower and Mamie, with their daughter-in-law and three grandchildren, had just settled in to Bobby Jones’s cottage at the edge of the Augusta National golf course when another telegram arrived, inviting him to the White House. Truman, who had had no chance to prepare for his ascension at Roosevelt’s death, was determined that his successor have a better foundation to build on. So he also urged Eisenhower to send in his top advisors to meet their counterparts at key agencies, and instructed people at every level to offer any cooperation they could.
Right away, Eisenhower’s aides made it clear that until inauguration, Eisenhower would possess “no authority of any kind.” As for Truman’s outreach, they believed it warranted only the most limited response. “Ike and his advisors are afraid of some kind of trick,” Truman wrote in his diary on November 15. He understood that outgoing presidents were perfectly capable of setting booby traps for their successors: “I could have clotted things up so he
wouldn’t get straightened out for a year,” he told one reporter on the eve of the inauguration. But that was not his intent. “I am very much afraid that Ike’s advisors have convinced him that he is dealing with a man who wants to embarrass him,” he wrote. “That is not true. All I want is to make an orderly turnover. It has never been done.”
That wasn’t precisely true, but it was close. When Eisenhower came to the White House just before two on the afternoon of November 18, it was only the fourth meeting of its kind in U.S. history, and like the first, between Jefferson and Adams, produced only acrimony. The second and third such meetings were between Hoover and Roosevelt, and those were positively toxic. For Truman and Ike this would be the first face-to-face meeting since Eisenhower’s return in June. Following the Roosevelt script, Eisenhower insisted the meeting would be “wholly informal and personal,” with no joint action whatever.
It was Eisenhower’s first time back in the capital since the election; half a million people turned out to see him as his motorcade moved from the airport to the White House; Truman had even given government workers time off to see his successor.
“Good morning, folks,” Eisenhower said cheerily to the newsmen and White House staffers who packed the lobby. He and Truman met privately at first in the Oval Office. Truman concluded right away that Ike “had a chip on his shoulder.” Truman offered to leave various pictures of Latin American liberators given to the office. “I was informed, very curtly, that I’d do well to take them with me—that the governments of those countries would, no doubt, give the new President the same pictures.” Truman returned the magnificent globe Eisenhower had given him back in the summer of 1945. “He accepted that—not very graciously.” (Eisenhower actually tried to correct that awkward moment about two weeks after he took office. “I have just noticed the inscribed plate you had attached to the globe in this office,” he wrote to Truman, “and I remember that I failed to thank you for your courtesy in returning it to me. It was a friendly gesture that I much appreciate.”)