Fifties (34 page)

Of course, he had hated the idea of Luce’s American Century. Luce, a leader in the internationalist wing of the Republican party, had defined the new postwar era, even while the war was being fought, with the vision of an all-powerful America spreading democracy and riches across the globe. This was contrary to the ideals of the American people, Taft said, adding with more than a touch of prophecy, “It is based on the theory that we know better what is good for the world than the world itself. It assumes that we are always right and that anyone who disagrees with us is wrong. It reminds me of the idealism of the bureaucrats in Washington who want to regulate the lives of every American along the lines that the bureaucrats think best for them.... Other people simply do not like to be dominated and we would be in the same position of suppressing rebellions by force in which the British found themselves during the nineteenth century.”

The crisis of the postwar years was for him still the crisis of isolationism versus internationalism. Taft had no use for Soviet Communism, but his innate isolationism and fear of military involvement were so powerful that he would not join the broad bipartisan consensus of containment, which bound both parties together in the years immediately after World War Two. In 1946–47
Fortune
magazine (a Luce publication) described his image as “one of that vast group of Americans to whom other countries seem merely odd
places full of uncertain plumbing, funny-colored money, and people talking languages one can’t understand.”

In 1948 he was at the height of his political powers, so dominating a figure in the Senate that
The New Republic
wrote that “Congress now consists of the House, the Senate, and Bob Taft.” His career was also on a collision course with political realities. Despite others’ attempts to make him better at public relations, he retained a basic wariness of any attempts to shape his public image. Photo opportunities were arranged to show him with a dead turkey, which readers were apparently to believe he had shot. He posed in a business suit with the dead bird; he and the turkey seemed to have no connection to each other. On another occasion he was photographed landing a very dead sailfish from a boat still obviously tied to a wharf. Why are all these people complaining about “Bob’s lack of color?” asked his uncle, Horace Taft. “They seem to think he should be standing on his head or turning somersaults.”

He tried for the nomination in 1948, but Dewey crushed him at the convention. There had been a clear regional division: Taft with his true-blue conservatives from the Midwest and a good number of delegates from the South; Dewey with New England, New York, and the Middle Atlantic states. Dewey’s eventual defeat did nothing to bring the party closer together; if anything it inflamed both wings. Dewey’s people believed he had been sabotaged by the conservative congressional leadership, which had given Truman his issues; Taft and his people were convinced Dewey had failed to offer the voters a real choice.

It seemed Taft’s best chance was in 1952. The others who had taken the nomination away before were gone. Willkie had been a comet, fueled by the approach of World War Two; Dewey had had his chance twice. On the liberal side there was no strong opposition: Stassen was already beginning to show the political promiscuity that would later make him a joke on late-night television, and Earl Warren was formidable in his own territory, California, but had no discernible base outside it.

The only cloud on the political horizon was General Dwight David Eisenhower. Who was Ike? Was he a Republican? Did he want the presidency? On these questions the general himself was coy. Right after the war, MacArthur had given a large dinner for him in Tokyo, and after the guests had all left, MacArthur predicted that one or the other of them was bound to be President. But the Pacific commander speculated it would not be himself: He had been away too long and was too out of touch with the Republican leadership.
Eisenhower was irritated by his words and by the suggestion that he had a covert political agenda. He launched into a long lecture about the separation of the military from civilian politics, as well as his own lack of desire to run for office. When he was finished, MacArthur patted him on the knee and said, “That’s all right, Ike. You go on like that and you’ll get it for sure.”

The heads of both parties wanted Eisenhower as their candidate. In 1948, immediately following his defeat, Tom Dewey told the general’s brother Milton Eisenhower that Ike’s appeal was so great that he was “a public possession.” In the four years that followed, Eisenhower issued no Sherman-like disclaimer. But just as he’d told MacArthur, there was no driving desire for the job. After all, he had already handled a more important one—the invasion of Europe: He had commanded the mighty force that eventually defeated Nazi Germany. As for politics, in his own mind, it turned out, he
was
a Republican, conservative at heart, more comfortable with powerful businessmen than with their liberal critics. Yet he had strong ideas about internationalism, and he was reluctant to turn the Republican party, and possibly the country, over to isolationism.

By late 1951, the Eastern wing of the party was working harder than ever to bring him home from Paris, where he served as the first commander of NATO. His supplicants explained that it was not going to be that easy, that he could win the Republican nomination, particularly if he got in early enough, but in fact the nominating process would most likely be harder than the general election—an all-out battle against passionate, well-entrenched Republican conservatives. Slowly, Eisenhower began to inch toward running. There were signs that his hesitation was not entirely uncalculated. He told his friend Bill Robinson, one of the many Eastern Republican power brokers who came to court him: “The seeker is never so popular as the sought. People want what they can’t get.” In addition, he was pushed by his intense dislike of two other potential Republican candidates, Douglas MacArthur (“now as always an opportunist,” he told Cy Sulzberger) and Robert Taft (“a very stupid man ... he has no intellectual ability, nor any comprehension of the issues of the world”).

In May 1951, Eisenhower wrote his brother Milton a letter that reflected his continuing uncertainty: He did not want a political career, he said, and he had no intention of “voluntarily abandoning this critical duty [NATO] unless I reach a conviction that an even larger
duty
compels me to do so.” As he was being pulled into the political arena by forces outside his control, his reservations remained
strong: “Anybody is a damn fool if he actually seeks to be President,” he told friends. “You give up four of the very best years of your life. Lord knows it’s a sacrifice. Some people think there is a lot of power and glory attached to the job. On the contrary the very workings of a democratic system see to it that the job has very little power.”

Nevertheless, it was gradually leaking out that he was a Republican, had voted against Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, 1936, and 1940, voting for him only in 1944 because the war was on; in addition he had voted for Dewey over Truman. A representative from
McCall’s
came to see him and offered him $40,000 for a yes-or-no answer to the question Are you a Republican? As the political pressure grew, Ike became increasingly tense, and Dr. Howard Snyder, the general’s personal physician and a member of his bridge-playing inner circle, started mixing stronger cocktails in order to relax him. But even as he came nearer and nearer to announcing, the question of whether he was actually a Republican was still not entirely settled. Sherman Adams, the governor of New Hampshire, needed by law to be able to show that his candidate was, in fact, a Republican in order to enter Ike’s name in that first, crucial primary. Adams asked his attorney general to write to the county clerk in Abilene, Kansas—Eisenhower’s hometown—to see if Ike had ever registered with either party. In return he got a memorable letter of regret from a crusty old clerk, C. F. Moore, who wrote that Eisenhower had not voted in the county since 1927, and then added: “Dwight’s father was a Republican and always voted the Republican ticket up until his death, however that has nothing to do with the son as many differ from the fathers of which I am sorry to see.... I don’t think he has any politics.”

In early January, Eisenhower gave Cabot Lodge permission to enter his name in the New Hampshire primary, and on January 27, he finally announced that he was a Republican. On March 11, the night of the New Hampshire primary, he got together as usual with his pals in Paris for a game of bridge. Dr. Snyder left early so that he could go home and listen to the returns. Snyder promised to call if there was any important news. “Don’t call me,” Eisenhower said. “I’m not interested. Call Al [Gruenther, a man who bet on almost everything] if you want to speak to anyone. He’s got some money on it.” In New Hampshire, without even showing up, he beat Taft 46,661 to 35,838. The race was on, like it or not.

The real driving force behind getting Ike to run was Dewey, whose talents, it turned out, were far better suited to being campaign manager than candidate. He spoke regularly to Ike via transatlantic phone. He knew exactly which buttons to push with Ike and finally got him into the campaign by suggesting in early April that if he did not enter, the nomination might well go to Douglas MacArthur. A week later, on April 12, 1952, Dwight Eisenhower asked to be relieved of his military command so he could come home to fight for the Republican nomination.

Ike came home to Abilene in early June, knowing that he would not get the nomination by acclamation and that he was getting a late start. The homecoming did not go well; it was virtually obliterated by a downpour. CBS covered the homecoming live and the camera caught Ike buttoned up in his slicker, with his rain hat on. Perhaps it was not only the weather but the strain of the arduous new role of politician that seemed to dim Ike’s ever-present grin and immense aura of personal vitality. Instead, he looked like a tired, somewhat dispirited old man doing something he did not want to do. When he took his rain hat off, what little remained of his hair blew in the wind, making him seem even more forlorn and lost. The next day he held a live press conference, which did not go much better. Whenever he was asked questions about the chasm within the Republican party, he answered that he was not going to engage in personalities. In general he appeared just short of querulous. The aura of warmth and confidence that had always endeared him to others suddenly seemed to have deserted him. The charm, the ruddy good looks, the almost tangible inner strength disappeared on television. Instead of the heroic conqueror of Nazi Germany, he seemed a rather shaky, elderly Midwestern Republican. In fact, he resembled no one so much as Robert A. Taft.

What followed was one of the most bitterly contested struggles for a nomination in American history: Taft against Eisenhower, with Warren and Stassen hoping for a deadlocked convention. Politics seemed uglier than usual; the Korean War dragged on; McCarthy was in full bloom.

A few weeks before the convention, the Associated Press showed Taft with a lead of 458 delegates to Eisenhower’s 402, with 604 needed to nominate. On the very eve of the convention, Taft had 504 votes. The problem was that after that, it got very hard. There was no capacity to grow; if you were for Taft, you were already for him. He could not make a deal with California, committed to Warren as a favorite son and where a young senator named Richard
Nixon was already challenging Warren’s hold on behalf of Eisenhower. Warren had already run for Vice-President and had not much liked the experience.

In the end, the Taft people were crushed by a combination of Eisenhower’s popularity and Dewey’s muscle. Eisenhower’s supporters were better organized and better on the floor, and their communications gear was more modern than that of their opponents. They knew how to play to the media, including television. But the mood was nasty. At one point John Wayne, who was a Taft man, jumped out of his cab to shout at an old mess sergeant running an Ike sound truck, “Why don’t you get a red flag?” The issue, as the Taft forces saw it, was what did the general stand for. “I like Ike,” said Eisenhower’s buttons, so the Taft people countered with buttons of their own that said, “But what does Ike like?” On the floor, during a struggle over rules, Senator Everett Dirksen announced that he was addressing himself to “all our good friends from the Eastern seacoast.” Then he turned bitterly on Dewey. “We followed you before,” he said, looking right at the New York governor, “and you took us down the path to defeat.” It was as if Dirksen had ignited all the anger in the room; suddenly people were shouting at each other and fistfights even broke out. Taft himself seemed immobilized by the events: Just before the first ballot started, he turned to an aide and suggested he talk to Senator Bill Knowland, a conservative in the California delegation. Perhaps, said Taft, he and Knowland could meet after the first ballot and strike some kind of deal. Back came the message: “Knowland says there isn’t going to be any second ballot.” The nomination was Ike’s.

It was a bitter moment for Taft. He would never be President, and he would fall short of his father’s accomplishments. Embody the Republican party’s heart and soul he might, but his own colleagues believed he could not win. Yet he was gracious when Eisenhower called on him. A short time after, John Foster Dulles visited him as well and tried to lighten the mood in the room by saying, “How many of you can remember who was President when Webster, Clay, and Calhoun were functioning?” Taft was amused and replied, “Some of my friends have been trying to retire me to the vice-presidency, but, Foster, you’re trying to retire me to history.” In fact, he was already seriously ill with cancer and had less than a year to live.

Richard Nixon was nominated as Vice-President on Eisenhower’s ticket. He reflected the duality of the Republican party. His fierce anti-Communism, as manifested in his 1946 victory over Jerry
Voorhis, his relentless pursuit of Alger Hiss, and his unusually harsh Senate victory over Helen Gahagan Douglas had made him immensely popular with the Republican right. If Nixon had a record of being highly partisan on the issue of domestic subversion, he was not an isolationist. He had grown up not in the Midwest, but in California—the new America—and had served in the Navy during World War Two. As such he reflected all the contradictions of a party that had been out of power for so long. Though he was popular with the anti-Communist right, his champion within the highest circles of the party was Tom Dewey. In early May 1952, Nixon was invited to speak at the annual Republican fund-raiser in New York, and he argued forcefully for the nomination of a Republican candidate who would appeal to Democrats and independents. It was, in effect, an audition for the Vice-President spot on Eisenhower’s ticket, and Dewey was impressed. Afterward, he shook Nixon’s hand and said, “That was a terrific speech. Make me a promise: Don’t get fat, don’t lose your zeal, and you can be President someday.” Dewey invited Nixon up for a drink in his room later that night and told him that the Eisenhower people were interested in him. From then on, Nixon became Dewey’s man: He was good on the anti-Communist issue, Dewey would say, and yet he was “someone who knew the world was round.” Nixon had already figured out that his best chance for national office was to balance a ticket with Ike. California might be locked up for its favorite son, Earl Warren, but Nixon covertly worked hard for Eisenhower in the weeks before the convention. He was, in the words of Dewey’s own people, “a fifth column” for Ike among the Warren forces. It was the first example of his talent for bridging difficult gaps, for bringing together factions that were bitterly divided.