Fifties (35 page)

Eisenhower himself had no clear preference of a running mate. The night he was nominated, Herbert Brownell, one of his top people, asked whom he would pick as his Vice-President. “I thought the convention had to do that,” Ike answered. At the first meeting the Eisenhower staff held after the nomination they discussed the vice-presidency. “What about Nixon?” Dewey asked. He held the exact center of a bitterly divided party and was acceptable to virtually everyone, including McCarthy. Henry Cabot Lodge, Ike’s official campaign manager, had to herd Nixon past reporters to avert a premature press conference, but he put his arm around Nixon and told the reporters, “He has done as much to rid this country of Communists as any man I know.” So it was that Richard Nixon was introduced to the country for the first time as a national candidate.

It was not by chance that so much of the resistance to America’s new internationalism came from the great center of the country. In some ways the heartland was still apart, instinctively resistant to any greater American involvement in Europe and wary of those Eastern leaders who would tie us closer to any nation in Europe, traditional ally or not. Part of the reason for the resistance was geographic, for the American Midwest remained a vast insular landmass that bordered on no ocean and still felt confident and protected by its own size. As a region it was, wrote Graham Hulton, “surrounded, shielded, [and] insulated” by the rest of the country. The Midwesterners were supremely confident that theirs was the more
American
culture, one less imitative of the English and less sullied by foreign entanglements and obligations than those in the East. To them the Midwest was “the center of the American spirit,” in Colonel Robert McCormick’s phrase. The people back East, they believed, were essentially parasitic—they went around making money, while the good Midwesterners, purer of spirit but dirtier of hand, went around making products for the Midwest. Those resentments were deep and bitter and they were not unlike the resentments of people in a distant colony toward the leaders back in the colonial power.

Some of it was the region’s ethnicity, and a wariness of events in Europe on the part of the people who had settled the Midwest and were glad to leave Europe behind them; some of it came from Scandinavians who were essentially pacifist; some of it came from German-Americans sympathetic to Germany; some of the region’s Irish were anti-British and some were Germans who did not want to fight on the side of the British, and some were Poles did not want to fight alongside Russia.

The leading voice of Midwestern isolationism was Colonel Robert McCormick, publisher of the
Chicago Tribune,
a paper that modestly referred to itself as “The World’s Great Newspaper.” The
Chicago Tribune
shared and orchestrated those same isolationist feelings, even as technological change ended any remaining possibility of isolation. When John Gunther, one of the great foreign correspondents of his generation, had come back to America after the war to write on changes wrought in his native land, he believed that the issue of isolation had been settled once and for all. Nobody, he had thought, “can easily be an isolationist in an era when you can cross the Atlantic between lunch and dinner and when the atomic bomb can make mincemeat of an ideology. Chicago is as near Moscow as New York. Foreign policy is, or at least should be, as much a matter or survival in the Middle West as the price of corn.” Gunther was
soon to learn that he was wrong, that the forces of reaction were still powerful and that there were deeper roots to the regional isolation than he had expected, in no small part because of the intransigence of its foremost propagandist and publisher, Colonel McCormick.

In the years immediately after World War One, the
Trib
’s circulation and its influence in its region were seemingly limitless. It sold over 1 million copies daily and 1.5 million on Sunday. There was no comparable voice in the region. Within the folkways of the Midwest, the
Trib
was more than a mere newspaper; it was something larger, a critical part of the culture that unerringly reflected the attitudes and preferences and prejudices of the region. It brought a daily reaffirmation of the regional commandments, reminding the faithful of what they believed, who were their friends and, most important, who were their enemies. The singular power of Colonel McCormick and his paper within the region reminded Gunther of nothing so much as Stalin’s Russia. Not only was there, as in the Soviet Union, “a fixed dogma,” but it was, Gunther wrote, “big, totalitarian, successful, dominated by one man as of the moment, suspicious of outsiders, cranky, and with great natural resources not fully developed ...” As Gunther noted, McCormick’s power went far beyond the sheer numbers of his paper’s circulation. The paper profoundly affected many who had never read it, particularly in the smaller cities within its greater circulation area, where it functioned as something of a bible for those members of the Rotary and Kiwanis clubs whose members made up the core of the Republican party. “Even if you don’t actually read it, you feel its permeating influence,” Gunther wrote. “Its potency is subcutaneous.”

The
Trib
filtered the news carefully, passing on those items that confirmed its prejudices and omitting many of those that might have caused doubt among the faithful. During World War One, when television did not exist and radio was just beginning to become an alternative source of information, the
Trib
’s voice was a dominating one. For a time its publisher expressed the region’s prejudices and fears with singular accuracy. Later, as World War Two approached, and even more when it was over, a new dimension of internationalism began to surface among younger people in the region, particularly those who had returned from fighting in World War Two. The
Trib
still remained influential, but its influence was on the decline, and its editors were gradually losing touch with a changing region. The colonel’s bitter break with Roosevelt, his hatred of the New Deal, and his unyielding postwar isolationism cost him severely with younger readers, particularly as they had radio and television to turn
to. His xenophobia seemed on occasion like a caricature. He did not like Europe, which he regarded as a lesser continent, populated with people significantly greedier and more materialistic than Americans. It was a place, he noted, where everyone always seemed to want to go to war. But as much as he disliked Europe, he disliked England even more, not just merely because he thought it a snobbish and foppish place, but because he was sure that the entire American foreign service was filled with Anglophiles eager to serve England’s purpose rather than that of their own citizens. The British were not only perfidious (with the Americans their favorite dupes), they worked hand in hand with the Soviets. A typical
Trib
cartoon of the postwar era showed Clement Atlee, the British prime minister, with an exhausted and somewhat witless Uncle Sam and Atlee saying, “Let’s bribe Stalin with your two billion atomic bomb so Russia will let England rule Europe with the five billions you’re going to lend us without interest.” The colonel thought of himself as the prototype of a more patriotic America, uncontaminated by foreign influence as so many others back East were. Near the end of his life, the colonel was interviewed by a British journalist: “Isolationist? Anglophobe?” he said, “No, I’m just a patriot.” His, wrote John Gunther, was “a furious Americanism and patriotism.” Anglophobe he might be, but he fancied English clothes made by English tailors, English hatters, and English shoemakers; he affected a slight British accent; he drove a Rolls-Royce and lived in a British country house outside Chicago. His father had been a diplomat, serving for a time in London, and the young McCormick had not only attended British schools, but when he returned to America he had gone to the schools of the Eastern elite: Groton, which he found provincial, and Yale. At Groton, McCormick noted with disgust, with the exception of Washington and Lincoln, “all the rest of their heroes were New Englanders. Their sectional patriotism,” he noted, “was also evidenced by the reading of mediocre New England poets.”

He had disliked Hoover (on the occasion of Hoover’s inaugural in 1929, the colonel had listened to his speech and immediately cabled his Washington bureau “
THIS MAN WON’T DO
”), but it was nothing like the feeling he soon came to have for Franklin Roosevelt. That feeling was hatred, pure and simple. He despised Roosevelt personally, the New Deal politically (all New Deal institutions were to be referred to as “so-called”; thus the NRA was, in the
Trib
columns, “the so-called NRA”). He had been somewhat neutral during Franklin Roosevelt’s first run for the presidency; they had been, after all, at Groton at the same time, and for a time there were
even Dear Frank/Dear Bertie letters. But he quickly turned on Roosevelt as the direction of the New Deal became constantly more clear. It was anathema to him. In time his hatred of Roosevelt and the New Deal became like a virus. He seemed to differentiate little between Roosevelt’s administration and those of Hitler and Stalin. His vendetta was finally far more poisonous to the colonel himself, given the essential popularity of most of Roosevelt’s reforms. Their feud became ever more bitter, ever more personal, and ever more obsessive on his part. (Roosevelt seemed almost amused by it, and when a
Trib
reporter would ask a question at a Roosevelt press conference, the President would tell him to tell Bertie to stop seeing things under the bed.) Late in his life, a decade after Roosevelt’s death, as McCormick himself lay dying, all he could do was talk about was Roosevelt.

During the Roosevelt years, he liked to say—and he most definitely was not joking—that he had kept the Republican party alive. By the Republican party he did not mean the party of Dewey and Willkie and Cabot Lodge, he meant the old Republican party—one rooted in small Midwestern towns, one that was antilabor, conservative on all fiscal matters, wary of government intervention in any public matter, and one that did not see the world as becoming more dangerous. His opposition was expressed not only on the editorial page but in every aspect of the paper. The colonel was in his own way a rather pure man; he was simply a propagandist, not a journalist. His views were as likely to appear in the news columns as on the editorial page. He was famous for having his editors take the copy of the Associated Press (which was never supposed to be rewritten) and rewrite it to suit his prejudices, inserting whatever they wanted; thereupon, the
Trib
would print the report, still under the AP logo. For this and other sins, there were periodic attempts to have him kicked out of the AP. That meant that the backing of the
Trib,
given all its prejudices, was something of a two-edged sword. It stirred passions deeply on both sides. It was often said of the
Trib
’s political power that you could not afford to have it for you in a political campaign (because so many people hated it), but you also could not afford to have it against you.

Others who disliked the New Deal gradually became a part of a larger coalition that understood that the events in Europe now had a great impact on America and that America, like it or not, was tied to the fate of England and France. McCormick did not accept that premise, the anger burned too deeply in him. His answers about what he would do to stop the mounting German aggression were, for so
dogmatic and forthright a man, curiously soft. When he had testified before a Senate committee, Claude Pepper had pushed him about what he would do, and McCormick had answered, “Those Germans are not so tough. I have been up against them and there is no use in being scared of them.” He seemed more and more, with the approach of the war—and even more after it—a man out of touch with reality. “One of the finest minds of the fourteenth century,” a former
Trib
foreign correspondent called Jay Cooke Allen called him. The America that had entered the war was different from the America that emerged from it. His isolationism during so critical and patriotic a time had hurt him. His ego had become more and more of a joke. Colonel McCosmic, the rival
Chicago Daily News
called him and had made fun of all of his boasts about how much he had done to modernize the American military, bringing ROTC to college campuses and making available machine guns for the Army. A
Daily News
cartoon showed him on a horse being pulled by a van and saying, “I was the first to mechanize the cavalry.” Another cartoon showed him kicking Uncle Sam in the pants and saying, “A powerful man like you can be of considerable assistance to me in winning the war.”

Landlocked the region might be, and conservative it might be, but there were generational changes taking place; the younger men who had fought in the war believed in their cause and did not accept McCormick’s isolationism. He was, in the years after the war, a man overtaken by events. His last great political moment came when Everett Dirksen, one of his protégés, savaged Tom Dewey at the 1952 Republican convention for him. It was a last sweet moment in one more lost campaign, one more defeat within his own party. Taft’s defeat by Eisenhower in 1952 was the final straw: “I can see no benefit in changing ‘Me Too’ Dewey for ‘I, Too’ Ike, who was nominated and is entirely surrounded by men who know exactly what they want—which is not the good of this country,” he wrote. He called for a third party, but it was all too late.

The Democrats were nothing less than desperate. They had been in power for too long—twenty years—and while the record of the sitting President, Harry Truman, might one day provide fertile territory for revisionist historians to take a second look at a courageous man operating in an extremely difficult time, there was no escaping the fact that at the time he was an unpopular President in an unpopular party burdened by an unpopular war. That year the Democrats
turned to a short, slightly overweight, rather aristocratic figure named Adlai Stevenson, just completing his first term as the reform-minded governor of Illinois.