Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (35 page)

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Authors: James T. Patterson

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BOOK: Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974
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E
ISENHOWER'S GLITTERING WAR
record and widespread popularity had made him attractive as a presidential possibility in 1948, but he had resisted entreaties from both parties and had stayed at Columbia. There and in Europe after 1951, however, he continued to be besieged by VIPs who wanted him to run in 1952. By the fall of 1951 non-partisan Ike clubs were springing up around the country. Truman himself in November of that year told Ike he would back him for the Democratic nomination.
18

As a military officer Eisenhower had never registered a party affiliation or (he said) voted. (Later he said he would have voted Republican in 1932, 1936, and 1940 and Democratic—in the midst of war—in 1944.) He had held his most important assignments under Democratic Presidents and strongly supported Truman's Cold War initiatives, including the Korean War. But he was very conservative on domestic matters, believing almost passionately in the necessity of balanced federal budgets and limited governmental intervention in the social and economic life of citizens. Not for a minute did he consider running as a Democrat.

Resisting Republican entreaties proved to be more difficult. Many GOP leaders, remembering the debacle of 1948, were almost desperately eager to run the popular Ike as their candidate. It helped even more that he had taken few clear stands on domestic issues and had therefore made few enemies. Thomas Dewey, still governor of New York, began badgering him to run as early as 1949. He told Ike that only he could "save the country from going to Hades in the handbasket of paternalism-socialism-dictatorship."
19
By late 1951 Dewey, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, and other leading Republicans—most of them in the eastern, internationalist wing of the party—were developing a well-financed network of support for Eisenhower's nomination as a Republican presidential candidate in 1952.

Eisenhower, far away in Europe, managed to keep some distance from Lodge and Dewey throughout 1951 and into early 1952. He refused even to say whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. But as primary season approached he relented, agreeing to have his name placed as a Republican contender in the New Hampshire primary in March of 1952. Without leaving Europe or taking a stand on any of the issues, he won the primary by taking 46,661 votes to 35,838 for Taft, his most formidable opponent.
20

Several considerations apparently prompted Ike to enter the political fray. One was his concern over Truman's budget message in January, which projected a sizeable deficit for the next fiscal year. Another was his distaste for Taft, who had opposed many Roosevelt-Truman era foreign policies and who had led conservative Republicans in the Senate in their support of both McCarthy and MacArthur. Taft, he told a friend, was "a very stupid man . . . he has no intellectual ability, nor any comprehension of the issues of the world."
21
Finally, Eisenhower may have been more interested in being President than he had let on. (As early as 1943 General George Patton guessed that "Ike wants to be President so badly you can taste it.")
22
Fearing the alternatives—a Democrat or Taft— Eisenhower convinced himself in early 1952 that it was his duty to run. With characteristic self-confidence he was certain that he could do the job better than anyone else on the political horizon.
23

His victory in New Hampshire testified strikingly to his popularity. Thereafter there was no turning back. By June he had resigned from his post at NATO and had returned to campaign against Taft and other lesser candidates, including Governor Earl Warren of California and former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen, a near-quadrennial contender. The battle against Taft became especially intense and hard-fought, pitting the eastern Dewey-Lodge wing of the GOP against the more "isolationist" and mostly conservative middle-western wing of the party. It was a jagged rift that had long divided the party and that imperiled Eisenhower's policies throughout his subsequent political career.

Ike proved a somewhat wooden candidate at first; the hustings were new to him and made him uncomfortable. Many party regulars, moreover, deeply admired Taft, "Mr. Republican," who had led the GOP in Congress since 1939. Ike, they complained furiously, was an outsider—not even a real Republican—who had no right to enter GOP primaries, let alone to claim the nomination. Still, Eisenhower had two big assets: he seemed better informed than Taft about foreign affairs, and he was America's most popular hero. Party leaders also worried that Taft, a colorless, uncharismatic campaigner, might lose to a Democrat in November. For these reasons Eisenhower rolled up delegates in the primaries and eked out a victory over Taft at one of the most bitterly contested party conventions of modern times. It was not until September, when Eisenhower promised a conservative course, that Taft and his angry supporters agreed to support the parvenu party nominee in November.

The delegates who chose Ike sharply repudiated Truman's foreign policies, which Eisenhower had played a major role in implementing. The GOP platform denounced containment as "negative, futile, and immoral" because it "abandons countless human beings to a despotism and godless terrorism." Mindful of ethnic and anti-Communist voters, the platform went on to deplore the plight of the "captive peoples of Eastern Europe" and to call for their liberation. Republicans further pledged to "repudiate all commitments contained in secret understandings such as those of Yalta which aid Communist enslavement."
24
That the delegates could nominate Eisenhower and approve such a platform testified to the near-schizophrenic divisions within the GOP and to the unembarrassed philosophical inconsistency of American political parties.

The convention also selected Richard Nixon as Ike's running mate. Eisenhower ultimately made the choice, mainly because many of his top advisers, including Dewey, were recommending it.
25
Nixon had worked quietly but effectively to swing California delegates to Ike during the convention, thereby infuriating Warren's California loyalists. More important to ticket managers, Nixon was young (only thirty-eight in 1952), a fiercely anti-Communist partisan, and a tireless campaigner. As a Californian he brought regional balance to the ticket and was expected to help deliver the state's important electoral votes. Then and later Eisenhower remarked that Nixon seemed to have no friends; he never warmed up to him. But he seemed yoked to him for at least the duration of the campaign.
26

Democrats and liberals professed to be shocked and appalled by the GOP ticket and platform. "T.R.B.," columnist for the
New Republic
, observed correctly that Ike actually stood to the right of Taft on some domestic issues. Eisenhower, he wrote, was "a counter-revolutionist entirely surrounded by men who know how to profit from it." The Eisenhower-Nixon team was a "Ulysses S. Grant-Dick Tracy ticket."
27
Another liberal described the convention as full of "treason screamers and poison-tongued character assassins." Most of these liberals enthusiastically backed the man whom the Democrats named to run against Ike: Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. Their enthusiasm was in some ways odd, for Stevenson was hardly much of a liberal. The grandson and namesake of Grover Cleveland's Vice-President, he had grown up in Bloomington, Illinois, in a very wealthy family. His grandmother had been a founder of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
28
He had been educated at Choate School in Connecticut and at Princeton and flunked out of Harvard Law School before finishing his legal degree at Northwestern and practicing law in Chicago. But for the Democratic heritage of his family, Stevenson might well have been a Republican, like many of his wealthy friends.

In 1952 Stevenson did not differ greatly from Eisenhower. He was an ardent Cold Warrior. He opposed public housing and was ambivalent about repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. He castigated "socialized medicine." While denouncing McCarthy, he approved of the dismissal of teachers who were Communists and supported the Truman administration's use of the Smith Act to prosecute Communist party leaders. He could sound snobbish, as when he denounced the GOP for "trying to replace the New Dealers with car dealers."
29
Like his running mate, Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, he considered civil rights to be mainly a question for the states to handle. Stevenson and Sparkman, determined not to provoke another Dixiecrat walkout, ran on a platform that was considerably more conservative concerning civil rights than the one on which Truman was elected in 1948.
30
The democratic socialist Irving Howe, casting a cool eye on liberal enthusiasm for Stevenson, later concluded that "Adlaism" was "Ikeism . . . with a touch of literacy and intelligence."
31

For all these reasons Stevenson did not appeal much to the working-class-black-ethnic-urban coalition that Roosevelt had amassed and that Democrats needed in order to win national elections. Many party regulars found him to be aloof, for he distanced himself not only from Democratic bosses but also from the Truman administration. This behavior so irritated Truman, who had been an early backer of Stevenson, that he wrote another of his unsent letters: "I'm telling you to take your crackpots, your high socialites with their noses in the air, run your campaign and win if you can. . . . Best of luck to you from a bystander who has become disillusioned."
32

Why then did Stevenson attract so many admirers in his time? Democrats who followed him liked his solid record as an internationalist in the 1930s and his State Department service during World War II, work that helped in the organization of the United Nations. He was a Democratic Establishmentarian with considerable experience in the realm of foreign affairs. When Illinois Democrats cast about for an honest Democrat to run as governor in 1948, they turned to Stevenson. Helped by running against weak opposition, he proved to be an effective vote-getter, winning the largest plurality in Illinois history and running far ahead of Truman. He was an efficient governor who attracted able and committed people to his administration. To politicians seeking a viable presidential candidate in 1952—Truman wisely declined to run again—Stevenson, governor of an electorally significant state, was an obvious man to draft. After much hesitation he agreed to run.
33

Liberal Democrats especially loved Stevenson—this is not too strong a verb—because he seemed to be everything that Eisenhower was not. They adored his speeches, which he spent hours practicing before delivering with a polish and vocabulary that many intellectuals considered wonderful. (Some did not: Howe noted that Stevenson was the sort of man who would call a spade an implement for the lifting of heavy objects.) There was intellectual snobbishness in this adoration; Republicans countered derisively that "eggheads" were the core of his support. But many of his speeches were indeed gusts of intelligent fresh air amid the staleness of political discourse that had often passed for campaign oratory in the 1940s and 1950s. So "eggheads" were happy to be involved. David Lilienthal pronounced that Stevenson's speeches were "simply gems of wisdom and wit and sense." The journalist Richard Rovere added, "His gifts are more imposing than those of any President or any major party aspirant for the office in this century."
34

Stevenson ran a dignified, issues-centered campaign in which he promised to "talk sense to the American people." This, too, appealed greatly to liberal supporters and intellectuals. But as the Democratic candidate he inevitably had to contend with partisan attacks on the Truman record. Republicans hammered away at creeping corruption—the "mess in Washington," they called it—in the Truman administration after 1950. The Truman years, they cried, involved "Plunder at home, Blunder abroad." The corruption in fact was minor, mainly involving influencepeddling on a small scale, but it existed, and Truman—ever loyal to friends—had been slow to stamp down on it. Eventually Truman's appointments secretary was convicted of accepting bribes, and nine federal employees in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and Bureau of Internal Revenue went to jail.
35

More damaging to Stevenson were loud and insistent charges that the Democrats had been "soft" on Communism. The Red Scare and Korea overwhelmed other issues, including civil rights and labor controversies that had been important in 1948. As in previous years the Republican Right led this assault, often irresponsibly. McCarthy branded the Roosevelt-Truman years as "twenty years of treason." Referring to "Alger—I mean Adlai," he said that he would like to get onto Stevenson's campaign train with a baseball bat and "teach patriotism to little Ad-lie." Nixon labeled Stevenson "Adlai the Appeaser," said he had a "PhD from Dean Acheson's cowardly college of Communist Containment," and reminded voters that the country would be better off with a "khaki-clad President than one clothed in State Department pinks."
36

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