Eisenhower declined to be pinned down. “We will have to wait three or four days after the television show to see what the effect of the program is.”
“General, the great trouble here is the indecision. There comes a time in politics when you have to pee or get off the pot.”32
Nixon had won the first round. He was still on the ticket, and the RNC would purchase thirty minutes of prime-time television for him to address the nation. But the cost was high. Trust between the Eisenhower and Nixon campaign teams was rapidly eroding, and at the personal level Ike saw Nixon as a potential impediment to his own success. Telegrams arriving on Eisenhower’s train were running three to one against Nixon, and on Monday the Gang waded in.33 “My personal view is that Nixon’s continuation on the ticket seriously blunts and dilutes the sharp edge of the corruption issue and seriously burdens you with a heavy and unfair handicap,” cabled Bill Robinson. “This view is shared by Cliff Roberts.”34 Late Monday, Paul Hoffman reported that Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher and Price Waterhouse had found no improprieties in the fund, and that there had been “no expenditure that couldn’t legitimately be called a campaign expense.”35 Nevertheless, the mood on Eisenhower’s train remained grim. Nixon’s fund had become, for the moment at least, the main story of the 1952 campaign, and Ike was letting Nixon take the heat. There were no words of support from the head of the ticket: no further phone calls, no telegrams, no intermediaries offering succor.
On Tuesday afternoon, Bill Robinson boarded Eisenhower’s train in Columbus, Ohio, en route to Cleveland. Ike and Robinson were closeted in Eisenhower’s compartment for the remainder of the trip. When the train arrived in Cleveland, the candidate and his party went immediately to the Carter Hotel, and Eisenhower summoned New York congressman Leonard Hall to his suite. Hall was Dewey’s liaison man on the train. Eisenhower instructed Hall to contact Dewey immediately. It was less than three hours before Nixon was to speak. Ike wanted Dewey to call Nixon and convince him to resign from the ticket at the conclusion of his speech, regardless of his defense or the public reaction.36 Having wrestled with the decision for three days, Eisenhower had bitten the bullet. Nixon must resign, and Dewey, who had been Nixon’s original sponsor, would be the messenger. With the matter settled, Ike and Robinson and Sherman Adams went off for a relaxed dinner before the television broadcast.
Leonard Hall had difficulty running Dewey down but eventually contacted him little more than an hour before Nixon was scheduled to speak. Dewey promptly called Nixon at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and delivered the message. Carefully shielding Eisenhower, Dewey said that a meeting of Ike’s top advisers had just taken place and it was their consensus that “at the close of the broadcast tonight you should submit your resignation to Eisenhower.”
“What does Eisenhower want me to do?” asked Nixon.
Dewey hedged. He had not spoken directly to Eisenhower, he said, but those who asked him to call had such a close relationship with the general that the request “surely represented Eisenhower’s view.”
“It’s kind of late for them to pass on this kind of recommendation to me now,” said Nixon. “I’ve already prepared my remarks, and it would be very difficult for me to change them now.”
Dewey replied that Nixon should continue with his planned defense of the fund but at the conclusion he should announce that he did not want to be a liability to the Eisenhower Crusade, that he was submitting his resignation to Ike, and was insisting that Eisenhower accept it. Dewey added that in his view Nixon should also resign his Senate seat and seek vindication in a special election.
“What shall I tell them you are going to do?” asked Dewey.
Nixon paused before replying. “Just tell them that I haven’t the slightest idea what I am going to do. If they want to find out, they’d better listen to the broadcast. And tell them I know something about politics too.” With that he slammed the receiver down and terminated the conversation.37
Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn (BBDO), the prestigious advertising agency handling the Eisenhower campaign, had knitted together a network of more than 60 NBC television stations, plus some 190 CBS radio stations, and virtually all of Mutual Radio’s 500 stations for Nixon’s speech, guaranteeing that it would be seen or heard everywhere in the country. The time slot on Tuesday was 9:30 to 10:00 p.m. eastern time, just after the Milton Berle show—one of the most popular television programs of the era. Subsequent reports indicated that Nixon was seen by sixty million people—48.9 percent of the possible viewers—the greatest audience for a single event in the young history of television.38
In Cleveland, Eisenhower and his campaign staff gathered in the manager’s office of the Cleveland Public Auditorium, three floors above the fifteen thousand persons who had come to hear Ike speak that evening on the topic of inflation. The crowd would watch Nixon on a large screen, and afterward Eisenhower would address them. In the manager’s office, Eisenhower sat between Mamie and Bill Robinson, armed with a yellow legal pad and pencil, and fully expecting Nixon to follow orders and take himself out of the race.
Nixon’s speech was indescribably maudlin. “A slick production,” said Variety, the show business weekly. “Nixon parlayed all the schmaltz and human interest of the ‘Just Plain Bill’–‘Our Gal Sunday’ genre of weepers.”39 After describing his humble origins and inventorying in excruciating detail how hard-pressed he and his wife, Pat, were to make ends meet, Nixon plucked the heart strings. “Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she looks good in anything.”
The audience in the Cleveland Public Auditorium, as in the rest of America, watched intently, many with tears in their eyes. Mamie dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief, as Eisenhower looked on, impatiently drumming his pencil against his yellow tablet.40 The emotional high point of the speech came when Nixon aped Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous Fala imagery with a soliloquy about his family dog Checkers. FDR was poking fun at his Republican critics in the 1944 election; Nixon seemed on the verge of weeping.g His daughters, Tricia and Julie, had received a cocker spaniel puppy as a gift from a well-wisher in Texas. “And our little girl—Tricia, the six-year-old—named it Checkers. And you know the kids love the dog and I just want to say right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.”
Nixon played offense as well as defense. Having laid bare his own financial status, he challenged Stevenson and his running mate, Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, to do the same. “If they don’t it will be an admission that they have something to hide. And I think you will agree with me. Because, remember, a man who’s to be President and a man who’s to be Vice President must have the confidence of the people.”
In Cleveland, while others nodded their approval, Eisenhower stopped tapping with his pencil and jammed it down hard onto the yellow pad. The back of his neck turned red and the signs of anger were evident. Nixon had not mentioned Eisenhower, but the implication could not be missed. All candidates should release their financial records. That meant Ike would have to disclose the favorable tax treatment he had received for Crusade in Europe.h More tellingly, perhaps, Nixon had turned the tables on Eisenhower. The general had forced him to reveal his finances; now he would compel Ike to do the same.
As Eisenhower’s blood pressure rose, Nixon approached his conclusion. “And now, finally, I know that you wonder whether or not I am going to stay on the Republican ticket or resign. Let me say this: I don’t believe I ought to quit because I’m not a quitter.” Wham! Ike stabbed his pencil down so hard he broke the point.
“The decision, my friends, is not mine,” Nixon continued. “I would do nothing that would harm the possibilities of Dwight Eisenhower becoming President of the United States. And for that reason I am submitting to the Republican National Committee tonight, through this television broadcast, the decision which it is theirs to make.… Wire or write the Republican National Committee whether you think I shoul
d stay or whether I should get off. And whatever their decision is, I will abide by it.”41
Eisenhower was furious. Nixon had not only defied his instructions and failed to resign, but he had removed the final decision from Eisenhower’s hands and placed it in those of the RNC. The Republican National Committee—the party regulars, the hard-nosed, old-school politicians who were generally sympathetic to Nixon—would be the arbiter of his fate and not Ike.
“Well, Arthur,” Eisenhower said to Summerfield, “you surely got your seventy-five thousand dollars’ worth.” In the auditorium below, the audience, which had been worked into a frenzy by Ohio congressman George Bender, a Taft stalwart, was chanting, “We Want Nixon! We Want Nixon!” and shaking the rafters. Eisenhower jettisoned his talk on inflation and marched out to greet the partisan crowd. “I have seen many brave men in tough situations,” said Ike, “but I have never seen anyone come through in better fashion than Senator Nixon did tonight.”
When the cheering died down, Eisenhower deftly reasserted his authority. “I am not intending to duck any responsibility that falls upon me as the standard bearer of the Republican party,” said Ike. The final decision would be his regardless of what Nixon had proposed, and he had not made up his mind. “It is obvious that I have to have something more than a single presentation, necessarily limited to thirty minutes.” Eisenhower was responding to Nixon’s insubordination, and Ike’s spur-of-the-moment performance deserves textbook recognition. The supreme commander was reminding everyone, Nixon included, of the chain of command. “I possibly am now guilty of being a little egotistical. But in critical situations in service to my country I’ve had to depend on my judgment as to men … whether a man was fit to command … or whether this man should be saved from the executioner’s squad. Except for asking for such divine guidance as I may be granted, I shall make up my own mind, and that will be done as soon as I have had a chance to meet Senator Nixon face-to-face.”
The standing room only crowd in the Cleveland Auditorium was now hushed as Eisenhower read to them the telegram he had just sent Nixon:
YOUR PRESENTATION WAS MAGNIFICENT. WHILE TECHNICALLY NO DECISION RESTS WITH ME, YOU AND I KNOW THE REALITIES OF THE SITUATION WILL REQUIRE A PERSONAL PRONOUNCEMENT, WHICH SO FAR AS THE PUBLIC IS CONCERNED WILL BE CONSIDERED DECISIVE.
IN VIEW OF YOUR COMPREHENSIVE PRESENTATION, MY PERSONAL DECISION IS GOING TO BE BASED ON A PERSONAL CONCLUSION.… I WOULD BE MOST APPRECIATIVE IF YOU COULD FLY TO SEE ME AT ONCE. TOMORROW EVENING I SHALL BE IN WHEELING, WEST VIRGINIA.42
Nixon had been taken to the woodshed. Ike’s telegram was tantamount to a command, and to make it public, as Eisenhower did, left Nixon little choice. He was to be in Wheeling tomorrow night. Period. Eisenhower was not only reasserting his authority, but he was doing it visibly for all in the country to see.
Reactions to Nixon’s speech varied. “I watched it at home on television,” said Lucius Clay. “I thought it was so corny that it would be an immediate flop. I went downstairs to get a newspaper. I found the elevator man crying and the doorman was crying, and I knew then that I was wrong.”43 Across the nation there was an outpouring of sympathy for Nixon. More than four million telegrams, letters, and calls flooded in. The New York Times reported the early messages running two hundred to one in Nixon’s favor.44 Dewey said the speech was “superb”; Senator William Knowland expressed his “full confidence” in Nixon; and Harold Stassen, who had previously urged Nixon to withdraw, wired his support as well.45
Nixon momentarily flirted with ignoring Eisenhower’s command and resuming his campaign. He made a brief appearance in Missoula, Montana, and then yielded to force majeure and flew to Wheeling. Eisenhower met Nixon’s plane when it arrived, bounced up the steps, and embraced the senator. “You’re my boy,” said Ike, condescending just enough to make it clear who was in charge.
Nixon remained on the ticket, and his speech proved to be an asset for the campaign. With a shrewd, emotional delivery he had gone over Eisenhower’s head, forced his hand, and rehabilitated himself.46 But the episode left permanent scars. From that point on Eisenhower never trusted Nixon.i The vice president was never given an office in the West Wing of the White House, he was not consulted on policy issues, and he and Pat were never invited to social functions in the family quarters or to the farm in Gettysburg. Nixon, for his part, never forgave Ike for putting him through the wringer. The relationship between the two, as one Nixon biographer noted, was similar to that between Ahab and the whale: awe and fascination on Nixon’s part, “soured with fear and a desire to supplant; along with a knowledge that whatever nobility one may aspire to will come from the attention of the Great One.”47
Having dodged the bullet over the Nixon fund, the Eisenhower campaign rolled on. On October 3, Ike was whistle-stopping in Wisconsin with a major speech scheduled for Milwaukee that evening. Because of Eisenhower’s discomfiture over the Jenner episode in Indianapolis, Dewey and Clay had urged him not to visit Wisconsin, where McCarthy’s presence would become an issue.48 Eisenhower so instructed his staff, but his instructions were apparently overlooked and the campaign train was routed from Illinois to Minnesota, passing through Wisconsin. “This occasioned the sharpest flare-up I can recall between my staff and [me] during the entire campaign,” said Eisenhower.49
1952 Herblock cartoon, copyright by The Herb Block Foundation (illustration credit 19.1)
With a visit to Wisconsin inevitable, Ike decided to stand up for General Marshall “right in McCarthy’s back yard,” as he put it to his staff before embarking.50 Eisenhower then wrote out a paragraph that he inserted into the major speech slated for Milwaukee:
I know that charges of disloyalty have, in the past, been leveled at General George C. Marshall. I have been privileged for thirty-five 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.51
When Wisconsin Republican leaders, including Governor Walter Kohler, who was up for reelection, saw advance copies of the speech, they pleaded with Eisenhower to delete the paragraph. The reference to Marshall, they said, was unduly provocative and would divide the party, perhaps even throw the state to the Democrats.j Sherman Adams agreed. Eisenhower cut the paragraph, but he always regretted it.52 The original text of the speech had been distributed to the press, and when Ike omitted the paragraph he was charged with surrendering to McCarthy. Five days later, Governor Stevenson, campaigning in Wisconsin, quipped, “My opponent has been worrying about my funny bone. I’m worrying about his backbone.”53 The damage was done, and Eisenhower had to live with the omission for the remainder of his life.
The 1952 campaign saw the introduction of spot television advertising for political candidates. Pioneered by Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates agency, the thirty-second political commercial soon set the tone of the Eisenhower campaign. Never one to overestimate the intelligence and attention span of his audience, Reeves sold Eisenhower to the television audience just as he sold soap and aspirin. Eisenhower took a day off from the campaign trail in September to film the spots—“To think that an old soldier should come to this,” said Ike—and the GOP ran the advertisements repeatedly in key states with devastating effect.54
Stevenson and the Democrats, pursuing a more traditional campaign, derided the spots as Madison Avenue hucksterism. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard of,” Stevenson told Lou Cowan of CBS. “Selling the presidency like cereal. How can you talk seriously about issues with half-minute spots?”55 Liberal journalist Marya Mannes, writing in The Reporter, a slick Cold War journal designed to appeal to the intellectual community, mocked the role of Madison Avenue in the election.
Eisenhower hits the spot.
One full general, that’s a lot.
Feeling sluggish, feeling sick?
Take a dose of Ike and Dick.
Philip Morris, Lucky Strike.
Alka Seltzer, I like Ike.56
The Democrats were behind the curve. Stevenson, whose low-key manner played quite well on television, nevertheless detested the medium. David Halberstam suggests it was a class thing. “Many of the people in [Stevenson’s] circle refused to admit that they even watched television, let alone owned one.”57 In a sense, Stevenson appealed to the voters’ minds while Ike appealed to their hearts. The irony, as Robert J. Donovan of the Los Angeles Times put it, was that Stevenson was a warm, friendly man whose eloquence caused him to appear cool and distant. Eisenhower, on the other hand, “is quite a cold man, yet that smile of his, that expression, throws a light over a hall.”58
The 1952 campaign was also one of the nastiest on record. While Eisenhower took the high road, Nixon, Jenner, and McCarthy took the low road. Not only were there bogus claims of a Communist conspiracy within the Truman administration, but the GOP launched a whispering campaign about the sexual orientation of Governor Stevenson. Stevenson was a bachelor, recently divorced, and his cultured, almost scholarly demeanor made him a potential target.
In 1940, the Republicans had been furnished with documentary evidence pertaining to the homosexual activities of Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, but they declined to use it.k Wendell Willkie was consorting openly with a woman other than his wife (New York Herald Tribune book review editor Irita Van Doren). As a result, the GOP chose to ignore Welles’s behavior. In 1952, Republicans felt no such constraint. J. Edgar Hoover saw to it that uncorroborated FBI field reports were leaked from the agency’s raw files, and gossips had a field day. Stevenson was alleged to have been arrested in Illinois and Maryland for homosexual offenses; Stevenson and Bradley University president David B. Owen were “the two best known homosexuals” in the state of Illinois; Stevenson was known to his intimates as “Adeline”; and he was listed in the FBI card file of sexual deviants.59 Most newspaper editors and national columnists were aware of the allegations and dismissed them as unsubstantiated hearsay. But Senator Joseph McCarthy was less reticent. Preparing for a national broadcast from Chicago (the “McCarthy Broadcast Dinner”) on October 27, McCarthy let it be known that he intended to attack the Stevenson campaign as being full of “pinks, punks, and pansies.” The Democrats responded with the nuclear option. White House aides let it be known that if McCarthy attacked Stevenson on the basis of sexual orientation, they would leak General Marshall’s 1945 letter to Eisenhower harshly critical of Ike’s plans to divorce Mamie and marry Kay Summersby.60 McCarthy backed down, and his broadcast was relatively innocuous.l
Eisenhower in War and Peace Page 60