Eisenhower (10 page)

As the urgency of Ike’s supporters increased, so did the complexity of nurturing the campaign without committing the candidate. Again, Clay played the key role. He brokered understandings between Eisenhower’s leading backers, settling disputes in Ike’s name. By the middle of 1951, Eisenhower’s support had become so broad—and the matter so delicate—that Clay devised a code to keep Ike abreast of developments. Each of the principals was assigned a letter:
A
was for the Pennsylvania senator James “Big Red” Duff,
B
for Brownell, and so on. The code grew increasingly elaborate until, in September, Eisenhower confessed to being unable to follow it.

His supporters visited him with increasing frequency and ardor through late 1951 and early 1952. And yet Eisenhower would not commit. He knew enough to know that he alone could disdain politics and remain at its center, so he took his time, gauged his choices.

Hoping to coax him with a demonstration of popular appeal, one group of enthusiasts scheduled a rally at Madison Square Garden at the conclusion of the Friday night fights in February. Expectations for the event were low: it was held late on a winter night, and the candidate, of course, refused to attend. Nevertheless, fifteen thousand people turned out in what was billed as a “Serenade to Ike.” Veterans pleaded, so did children. A Truman impersonator drew big laughs. Irving Berlin and Ethel Merman sang. A group of Texans passed a saddlebag that they filled up with silver dollars. Over and over, the thousands chanted and sang: “I like Ike.”

As soon as the event ended, a film of it was rushed to processing, and then Jacqueline Cochran, a pioneering aviator and friend of Eisenhower’s—and one of the event’s organizers—crammed into an upper berth of a transatlantic flight and headed for Paris.

She arrived at Eisenhower’s home on an unseasonably warm evening in February, a mild breeze drifting across the channel and over the French countryside. Inside the Villa Saint-Pierre, where Napoleon II once resided in surprising modesty, above ordered gardens and a calm pond (which Ike had stocked with trout and where he practiced his fly casting), against the incongruous but portentous backdrop of a Communist-led general strike outside, Cochran arrived bearing the film canisters and loaded the projector.

Eisenhower’s sense of duty cabined his response to flattery or strain—this was the same Ike who spent half an hour mourning the death of his father. But as he watched the yearning expressed by the Madison Square Garden crowd, his reserve was tested. So many Americans were worried and, he believed, with good cause. The Truman administration was exhausted, the war in Korea stalemated, the threat of Communism growing. America’s problems, it seemed to Ike, were “nagging, persistent and almost terrifying.” Its citizens were desperate. He watched with Mamie as those men and women cried out for him. Eisenhower was, he realized as the two-hour film rolled on, “the symbol of that longing and hope.” “I’ve not been so upset in years,” he confided to his diary.

When the film stopped, Cochran raised a glass: “To the President.” Eisenhower was overwhelmed; tears ran down his cheeks.

Supporters kept up their pressure. A few days after he watched the film of the Madison Square Garden rally, nineteen leading, moderate Republicans—including Jacob Javits, Hugh Scott, Christian Herter, Norris Cotton, and Gerald Ford—beseeched him on behalf of the American people to seek their party’s nomination. Those politicians reported that their constituents wanted Ike. “They want you to come home; they want you to declare yourself on the pressing issues of the day; they want the inspiration of your dynamic honesty and the forthrightness of your statesmanship,” the group wrote. “The demands of these patriotic Americans have a right to be heard, and we beg you to listen to them because we agree with them.”

For Eisenhower, the essential call was always to duty. When leaders he respected urged him onward, when thousands called his name, his duty to those men and women overcame his doubts. “My attitude,” he confided to Clay, “has undergone a quite significant change.”

But it was one thing to consider accepting the presidency, another to actively seek it. With his permission but without any action on his part, supporters campaigned for him in New Hampshire, which was predictably billed as “the first big test of Eisenhower’s voter appeal v. Taft’s.” Eisenhower won the March 11 primary handily, puncturing Robert Taft’s command of the party loyalists. A week later, Ike finished second to the favorite-son candidate Harold Stassen in Minnesota, another stunning showing for a noncandidate. In some ways, Minnesota made an even bigger impression on him than New Hampshire did. Thousands returned ballots with the word “Ike” scrawled across them.

On March 20, two days after the Minnesota results, Ike announced that he was reconsidering his refusal to run for president but still declined to declare himself a candidate. It was at that juncture, hovering on the edge of a monumental decision for himself and the United States, that Herb Brownell arrived to seal the deal.

He was there by invitation. The day of the Minnesota primary, Ike wrote to Brownell to encourage the visit and to “assure you of a warm welcome.” Arrangements were delicate: Brownell was so associated with politics generally and Dewey specifically that his contact with Eisenhower would certainly have signaled Ike’s presidential ambitions. Brownell thus booked his tickets under another name, and Eisenhower made sure his visit was not included in the general’s daily schedule, often reviewed by reporters.

Although Ike had been courted for the presidency since the end of the war—during a break in the Potsdam Conference in 1945, Truman startled Eisenhower by offering to secure him anything he wanted, adding, “That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1948”—his views of domestic politics were so vaguely known that both parties fancied he might belong to them. Now Brownell asked Eisenhower to clear up those mysteries, quizzing him about his political beliefs so that Brownell might ascertain whether they could carry the electorate.

Responding to Brownell’s questions, Ike revealed that he believed in limited federal government, favoring the private economy over government spending and states’ rights over federal power—he sided with Texas, for instance, in its claims to offshore oil rights that the federal government asserted belonged to it. He felt strongly that the government should balance its budgets and was shocked at Truman’s latest spending plan, which anticipated a $14 billion deficit. Unsurprisingly, he felt strongly that the United States had an obligation to provide a stalwart national defense.

He was, portentously, murkier on the emerging domestic issue of the day, civil rights. Brownell was an ardent supporter of the gathering call for elimination of American apartheid, and the issue had helped give moderate Republicans a broader appeal in an era when southern Democrats continued to restrain the ambitions of more liberal members of their party. But Ike was raised in Kansas, where segregation had been practiced, and he rose through a segregated military, so Brownell was concerned about where he might fall on this issue. “I was relieved that his views were generally in accord with the pro-civil rights stance of the moderate wing of the Republican Party,” Brownell wrote. Still, Ike sent mixed signals. He noted that some of his supporters were southern Democrats who opposed civil rights legislation, an ambiguous remark that left Brownell convinced that though Ike’s “heart was in the right place,” he “would not lead the charge to change race relations fundamentally in the United States.” Brownell was to be proved half-right in that prediction; to the extent that he was wrong, he himself would largely be the reason.

Having sized up Eisenhower’s politics and concluded that they would fall comfortably within the moderate-to-liberal wing of the Republican Party, Brownell then moved to the other part of his presentation. He forcefully insisted that Eisenhower stop being coy. Neither the nomination nor the presidency would be handed to him, Brownell insisted in terms so adamant that he feared he was being brash. To gain the Republican nomination, Ike would have to return home and fight for it. Eisenhower, who had already fared well in two primaries without being a candidate, seemed surprised at that, but Brownell was expert where Ike was not, in the machinery of American politics. Ike had learned from Marshall to place faith in capable subordinates. He took heed. “It was,” Brownell said later, “an important turning point in his thinking.”

After ten hours, the two men parted. Brownell returned to his hotel and then headed home. Two weeks later, Eisenhower resigned his NATO position. On June 1, he returned home to campaign for the presidency.

PART TWO

THE FIRST TERM

4

From Candidate to President

I
t is natural to think of landmark American elections as destined. In retrospect, George Washington seems to have ascended to the presidency rather than to have won it, and Abraham Lincoln’s election is recalled as a matter of faith as much as politics. The thought of Roosevelt losing in 1932 seems preposterous given our memory of the New Deal and the war. So it was with Ike. His renown after World War II makes him seem, with hindsight, an insurmountable candidate, and his identification with the 1950s renders it difficult to imagine the era without him at its head. In fact, however, Ike fought hard to be president and stood a good chance to lose.

In June 1952, Eisenhower swiftly completed his transition from general to political candidate. Although his campaign had been under way for weeks, he gave his first official speech in Abilene, delivered at the conclusion of a drenching rainstorm—a “gully washer,” as Ike recalled it. With it, he sketched the broad themes of his candidacy. “America must be spiritually, economically and militarily strong, for her own sake and for humanity,” Eisenhower told a damp, sparse crowd. “She must guard her solvency as she does her physical frontiers.” For a public waiting to hear more about his specific policies, the speech was as disappointing as the weather.

Henry Cabot Lodge, an old friend and early political supporter, tried to tutor Ike in politics. Soon after Eisenhower announced, Lodge sent him a list of sixty questions for him to be prepared to answer, as well as some general observations on how he might be viewed. “I think I have no quarrel with your general observations,” Eisenhower wrote. “I merely want to make the point that I am wary of slogans, and if I have a real conviction I am not to be deterred from expressing it merely because I am afraid of how it will read in the headlines.” Lodge had suggested no such thing, but Ike, sensitive at the outset to being above politics, insisted that he did not “intend to tailor my opinions and convictions to the one single measure of net vote appeal.”

Those were the grumblings of a man new to campaigning for office. By contrast, Eisenhower’s primary opponent was a seasoned, experienced politician with a deep, loyal base of supporters. Indeed, despite Ike’s great appeal as an American hero and strong showings in the early primaries, smart political money that summer favored Robert Taft, who had a narrow lead in delegates and thorough command of the party apparatus. The son of a president and chief justice—William Howard Taft being the only man ever to hold both those offices—Robert Taft was a leader of the U.S. Senate and an ideological archetype, a sharp critic of labor unions and the New Deal, an isolationist so committed to American nonintervention that he opposed war against Nazi Germany until the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor. Clever, vindictive, and tough, double chinned and yet curiously dapper, Taft possessed “the almost evangelical loyalty of his followers.” His reach through the party ranks was unequaled. Taft allies picked the convention’s key speakers and even controlled the seating, relegating rivals to distant corners of the hall. Not for nothing was he known as “Mr. Republican.”

That gave Taft a strong advantage on an obscure rules matter that ultimately proved decisive: the seating of delegates from Louisiana, Texas, and Georgia, where competing slates of Eisenhower and Taft delegates were vying for voting slots at the convention. The conflict grew from the general’s late entry into the campaign and the efforts by the Taft forces to impose caucus rules intended to favor their candidate. In Texas, for instance, the Taft-sponsored rules held that only Republicans who had been registered as Republicans in 1948 were permitted to participate in the 1952 delegate-selection process. That had the effect of excluding new party members drawn to Eisenhower’s candidacy. The result was a strongly pro-Taft slate. Eisenhower’s supporters responded by electing a slate of their own, and the two camps stomped into their respective corners. The question before the Republican Party was which delegation to seat—and whether the contested delegates would be allowed to vote on that contentious question.

Eisenhower had the support of an intelligent campaign apparatus, led by Brownell. Having helped persuade Ike to run—and convinced of his electability—Brownell now plotted the strategy to secure the nomination. His role was largely unappreciated at the time, as he stayed out of public view for most of the campaign, careful to avoid pricking the animus of those who blamed Dewey for letting the party down in 1944 and 1948, when Brownell managed his campaigns. This time, Brownell formulated his strategy from the stacks of the New York Public Library, poring over records from earlier Republican conventions, including the complete transcript of the 1912 contest that pitted Theodore Roosevelt against Taft’s father in a debate over delegates.

Brownell emerged with a proposal that was part legal brief and part public relations strategy. Its central argument was that Taft’s strength among Republican stalwarts might earn him the nomination but would almost surely fail in the general election. Republicans savored a return to power, and Brownell knew that the choice was between pragmatism and idealism: a vote for Taft was an opportunity to assert old values; one for Eisenhower was a chance for victory. Brownell wooed wavering delegates with the promise of the White House and simultaneously challenged Taft’s tactics as suppressive and unfair. He wrote what he brilliantly branded the “Fair Play Amendment” and arranged for Governor Arthur B. Langlie of Washington, an Eisenhower supporter, to submit it to the convention.