Ironically, Eisenhower briefly thought—while watching a telecast of the Democratic convention the following summer—that had he known that the other party would nominate a man of Stevenson’s caliber, he would have stayed in Paris. Like millions of others, in America and around the world, Dwight Eisenhower had been touched by the magic of Adlai Stevenson. Physically the governor was unprepossessing: short, bald, broad of beam. Yet he came close to political genius. His integrity and devotion to public service were sensed at once; his intellect and wit deighted admirers in both parties. No twentieth-century politician, including Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, won so loyal a following among liberal intellectuals. When he spoke, he evoked a lyrical sense of America’s past and what she might be in the future. Stevenson dreamed Lincoln’s dream; vast audiences sat hushed as he swept them up in it; for the young and the idealists in his party he became a kind of religion that year. Like Wendell Willkie twelve years earlier, he made his countrymen better just for pausing to reflect upon what he represented, and eight years later the lamp he had held so high for so long would show the way upward to another, younger Democratic nominee.
Truman refused to accept his withdrawal. Shortly after the President had breakfasted with Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois the next morning, January 22, the news of Stevenson’s call at Blair House was on front pages across the country. The dismayed governor found himself accompanied by swarms of reporters. His name appeared in speculative accounts by all syndicated columnists, and he was featured in a Time cover story which said, “Whatever the truth behind the rumors, this much is evident: in a cold season for the Democrats, Adlai Stevenson is politically hot, and Harry Truman feels the need of a little warmth.” Asked by the press whether he would accept a draft, Stevenson grappled with his conscience. How, he asked those close to him, could anyone in good health and already in public life refuse the greatest honor and greatest responsibility in American politics? His reply to reporters was as negative as he could make it; “No one,” he said, could be “drafted by a modern convention against his oft-expressed wish.” In fact it had not happened in seventy-two years. In January Stevenson thought a repetition of that inconceivable.
Six weeks later he wasn’t so sure. On March 4 he and the President met again—at his request, according to Truman in his memoirs; at Truman’s, according to Stevenson’s papers. To avoid encouragement of the rising presidential boom, the governor flew to Washington under the name of an aide, William McCormick Blair Jr. During a refueling stop at Louisville, Barry Bingham, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and an old friend, urged him to let the people “judge for themselves on the basis of the public record.” Laughing, Stevenson said, “Well, you certainly haven’t been much help to me!” At Blair House he reaffirmed to Truman that reelection in Illinois was the full measure of his ambition. But the President wasn’t much help, either. “I felt,” he later wrote, “that in Stevenson I had found the man to whom I could safely turn over the responsibilities of party leadership…. I felt certain that he would see it as his duty to seek the nomination.”
On March 29, 1952, the governor was one of 5,300 Democrats gathered in Washington’s National Guard Armory for the party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. Other guests included the Achesons, and on the way there Alice Acheson asked her husband whether he thought the President might disclose his political plans during his after-dinner remarks. Out of the question, the Secretary of State said briskly; this was too early for him to announce that he would run again, and if he had decided not to, he wouldn’t reveal it before this audience, so many of whom would be disappointed. As it happened, Alice Acheson was the first person outside the Truman family to learn what was coming. She was seated beside the President, and as the time for speeches approached he showed her the last page of his. On it he had written in his own hand his decision not to seek another term. “You, Bess, and I,” he said, “are the only ones here who know that.” Distressed, she wanted to bring her husband over to argue with him, but he shook his head. “A little later,” Acheson wrote, “we were stunned by the announcement. The party was quite unprepared to find a new leader and the material from which to choose seemed thin.”
That was a Saturday evening. On Sunday Stevenson appeared on Meet the Press, now a television program, before a large number of studio spectators. The most heavily freighted question centered on his deposition in the Hiss case. The key testimony had been brief:
Q: Have you known other persons who have known Mr. Alger Hiss?
A: Yes.
Q: From the speech of those persons, can you state what the reputation of Alger Hiss is for integrity, loyalty, and veracity?
A: Yes.
Q: Specify whether his reputation for integrity is good or bad?
A: Good.
Q: Specify whether his reputation for loyalty is good or bad?
A: Good.
Q: Specify whether his reputation for veracity is good or bad?
A: Good.
In the cross-interrogation in behalf of the government, the following testimony had been taken:
Q: Were you ever a guest in the home of defendant Alger Hiss at any time in 1935, to and including 1938?
A: No, I have never been a guest in Mr. Hiss’s home.
Q: Did you, prior to 1948, hear that the defendant Alger Hiss during the years 1937 and 1938 removed confidential and secret documents from the State Department and made such documents available to persons not authorized to see or receive them?
A: No.
Q: Did you, prior to 1948, hear reports that the defendant Alger Hiss was a Communist?
A: No.
After two years of McCarthyism, however, bland material like this was being transformed into political poison. Richard Nixon, California’s new senator, was saying that Stevenson had “testified as a character witness for Alger Hiss” and “in defense of Alger Hiss.”3 Everett Dirksen, the Republican senatorial candidate in Illinois, was taking the same line (“What would Dirksen have said?” asked Stevenson. “Would he have told a lie?”) and the Chicago Tribune had argued editorially that the governor should have avoided testifying because by giving evidence he had “arrayed himself willingly beside Alger Hiss.”
Now on Meet the Press Stevenson said: “I am a lawyer, and I think it is the duty of all citizens and particularly of lawyers—it is the most fundamental responsibility of lawyers—to give testimony in a court of law, honestly and willingly. And I think it will be a very unhappy day for Anglo-Saxon justice when a man in public life is too timid to state what he knows or has heard about a defendant in a criminal case for fear that a defendant would be ultimately convicted. That is the ultimate timidity.”
In response to other questions he said once more, “I must run for governor. I want to run for governor. I seek no other office. I have no other ambition.” Lawrence Spivak asked, “Governor, doesn’t this large studio audience give you any indication of how some people in the country feel about that?” Stevenson smiled. “It’s very flattering indeed,” he said, “and I suppose flattery hurts no one—that is, if he doesn’t inhale.”
What he had avoided saying was that among the members of the Carnegie Endowment’s board of trustees, which had voted in favor of making Alger Hiss president of the foundation and against accepting his resignation during his trials, was Dwight D. Eisenhower.
On March 11 Eisenhower had won the New Hampshire primary, 44,497 to Taft’s 35,820; eight days later Stassen won the Minnesota primary with 128,605 votes, but Ike was right behind him with 106,946 write-ins. From Paris came word that his showing in these two races had persuaded the general to “reexamine” his “political position.” In short, he was packing.
Kefauver was winning Democratic delegates, humiliating the President in state after state, but the Republican primaries, after that first burst of enthusiasm for Eisenhower, were not a runaway for anyone. Taft beat the general in Nebraska, beat Warren in Wisconsin, and trounced Stassen in Illinois by over 700,0
00 votes; write-ins for Eisenhower put him third. On April 15 the general took New Jersey away from Taft. He won in Pennsylvania, and Governor Dewey’s support guaranteed him the lion’s share of New York’s delegates. He picked up 20 delegates in Kansas, but only one in Kentucky, which gave the other 19 to Taft. Indiana went to Taft. On June 3, in the last two primaries, Warren won in California and Taft beat Ike in South Dakota. Nationally, Taft’s lieutenants counted 588 convention votes—with 604 needed for the nomination.
Early in April Eisenhower had announced that his “surprising development as a political figure” was interfering with his military duties; he asked to be relieved, and the White House granted the request at once, naming General Matthew Ridgway as his successor in Paris. Ike’s campaign opened on June 2 in his home town of Abilene, Kansas, where twenty thousand stood in a driving rain to hear him speak in the local ball park. As he saw it, the most pressing issue before the country was “liberty versus socialism.” He wanted the Senate to have a stronger role in determining foreign policy, and he called for lower taxes, an improved Taft-Hartley law, “a decent armistice” in Korea, abolition of needless federal agencies, continuing membership in NATO, and the “rooting out” of “subversive elements.” He was against controls to fight inflation and against “socialized medicine,” and he thought protection of civil rights should be left to the states.
There didn’t seem to be much there that Taft could quarrel with. On June 19, in an “Answer to Abilene,” he criticized the general for misunderstanding Taft-Hartley, lacking an agricultural policy, failure to name “the persons responsible for the loss of China,” and refusal to condemn the administration’s handling of the Korean War. That was quibbling, and everybody who could read a newspaper knew it. Someone pointed out that the only real issue upon which it was easy to differentiate between the two candidates was General MacArthur. Taft had promised to give MacArthur a government job. Eisenhower promised to listen to anything MacArthur had to say.
***
On July 7, when the Republican National Convention opened in Chicago’s International Amphitheater, hard by the stockyards, those present included Betty Furness, a thirty-six-year-old former actress who had contracted to appear on television commercials with the message, “You can be sure if it’s Westinghouse.” Before Betty had finished opening and closing refrigerator doors she would entrance seventy million viewers, including one GOP delegate who would try to put her name in nomination.
The three major networks had shipped thirty tons of equipment and over a thousand workers to the amphitheater, but the Taft forces who controlled the convention had made few concessions to the new medium. Apart from agreeing to the installation of a TelePrompTer, or “idiot board,” at the lectern, they had spurned requests from the TV networks. Later in the week, as word spread among those in the hall that they were on television, repeated motions would be made to “poll the delegation,” so that everybody could be sure he was seen by the folks back home. Viewers found it maddening. In the beginning, however, there was none of this, and when Delegate Cecil B. De Mille told reporters that this was the greatest show on earth, he meant the proceedings, not their transmission on television, which he as a movie mogul had sworn to stamp out.
Since conservatives had written the scenario, events bore an unmistakable rightist tinge. The keynote address was delivered by Douglas MacArthur. It was a great chance for a dark horse, but to the disappointment of his supporters he bungled it. Ike in mufti retained his appeal; MacArthur was merely another retired executive with a hairpiece. Whenever he mentioned God, which was often, his voice had a disconcerting way of rising a register and breaking, and he had developed a peculiar way of jumping up and down for emphasis. Toward the end of MacArthur’s speech the delegates were babbling so much among themselves that the general could scarcely be heard. This time he did fade away. After speaking he returned to the Waldorf in New York to await the decision of the convention. For three days the Bataan stood on the tarmac at La Guardia Field, its motor warm and its tanks full, ready to fly him back if the party should turn to him. On Friday the plane went back to its hangar.
The most popular speech was Joe McCarthy’s. Here Taft’s program committee had correctly judged the temper of the audience. When Chairman Walter Hallanan said he would give the delegates “Wisconsin’s fighting Marine,” a man who had suffered much for his dedication to “exposing the traitors in our government,” and the band struck up “The Marines’ Hymn,” a wild demonstration swept up half the men in the hall. Placards advertised his victims: “Hiss,” “Acheson,” “Lattimore.” Joe grinned satanically. After a tribute to MacArthur (“the greatest American that was ever born”) he launched into his text on a note of high drama: “We are at war tonight.” Solemnly he recited statistics of the conflict—the number of square miles which the “Commie-loving” Democrats had handed over to the beasts in the Kremlin, the millions of souls they had plunged into torment, the perfidy of the “slimy traitors” who slithered even now in “the Red Dean’s State Department.” He said he had documents to prove all this. Huge graphs and charts were wheeled to the lectern. The data were meaningless, the scales unreadable, but that didn’t matter; Joe explained it all while waving a pointer like a cattle prod.
That was the real keynote, and subsequent performances adjusted to Joe’s level. Apart from the Westinghouse commercials and the attractive wives and daughters of candidates—most memorably “Honeybear” Warren and her sisters—the fare was grim. Young Senator Richard Nixon cried that “the American people have had enough of the whining, whimpering, groveling attitude of our diplomatic representatives, who talk of America’s weaknesses and of America’s fears, rather than of America’s strengths and of America’s courage.” The platform was hewn from the same lumber. In writing the foreign policy plank, John Foster Dulles excoriated every aspect of the Democratic record abroad, from Roosevelt’s failure to defend the Baltic republics in 1939 to Korea. A reporter reminded him that at the time of the Baltic seizure Dulles himself, an America Firster, was urging FDR to stay out of the “senseless, cyclical struggle” to maintain national sovereignties, and that as recently as last May 19 Dulles had written in Life that Truman’s decision to defend South Korea had been “courageous, righteous, and in the national interest.” How could he say otherwise now? He replied that if he were speaking as an individual, he couldn’t. As a platform writer, however, he was merely setting forth the Republican case against the Democrats. It was, he agreed, a nice point.
Combative as the words at the podium were, the struggle for the nomination was fiercer. Its ferocity is suggested by an appeal from David S. Ingalls, Taft’s cousin and campaign manager. Circulated among delegates that week, it began:
SINK DEWEY!!
TOM DEWEY IS THE MOST COLD-BLOODED, RUTHLESS, SELFISH POLITICAL BOSS IN THE UNITED STATES TODAY. He stops at nothing to enforce his will. His promises are worthless. He is the greatest menace that the Republican Party has. Twice he has led us down the road to defeat, and now he is trying the same trick again hidden behind the front of another man.
But how could Dewey do it? Taft seemed to have the nomination sewed up before the first gavel had fallen. On Sunday, July 6, when party functionaries were still arriving, the senator had walked briskly into a press meeting in the basement of Chicago’s Conrad Hilton Hotel carrying a large, neat bundle of telegrams—530 of them—from delegates who had banded together in their determination to stick with him to the end. By Monday morning Taft had 607 such assurances—three more than needed. Both the temporary and the permanent chairman were pledged to him. He had a majority in the Platform Committee, the Credentials Committee, and the National Committee. His aides had even picked the music to be played and the singers who would sing it. There was, it seemed, no way he could be turned back.
The Eisenhower forces’ only hope lay in challenging accredited delegates. Ever since the Civil War the Republican faith had been defended in southern states by skeletal organiza
tions of loyal party workers. They had but two tasks: to serve as postmasters when a Republican President was in the White House, and to vote in the quadrennial conventions. As regulars, they were now backing Taft to a man.
Eisenhower men questioned their right to sit on the convention floor. The first contest arose in Texas, and it was typical. Only five voters had attended the Republican party’s 1950 Fort Worth caucus, so Henry Zweifel, the national committeeman for Texas, had decided to hold the May 3, 1952, caucus in his own home. To his dismay his garden had been trampled by a hundred strangers wearing Ike buttons. On the ground that Democrats without standing in the Republican party had no right to choose the Republican nominee, Zweifel had ordered them out of the yard. Three weeks later, at the state convention in Mineral Wells, regular Republicans had chosen the delegates they would send to Chicago: 30 Taft men, 4 for Eisenhower, and 4 for MacArthur. The Eisenhower people had convened in a separate hall, picking 33 Ike delegates and 5 for Taft. Thus there were two slates of Texans at the national convention.
The party officials who would choose between them were, of course, Taft men. But Eisenhower spokesmen were denouncing what they called “the Texas Steal” and demanding that Taft himself denounce such tactics. The senator replied with some heat that he had never stolen anything in his life. GOP slates in the South had been chosen according to procedures which had been followed for eighty-four years, he said, and only those with larceny in their own hearts were saying otherwise. He was right. The issue was bogus. The Eisenhower delegations from the South were no more representative than the Taft southerners, and the Taftites were at least lifelong Republicans. Unfortunately for the senator, he was not the idol of a grateful nation. Shielded by Ike’s five-star mantle, his floor managers had expanded operations; they were now challenging the slates from Georgia and Louisiana, too. Even more important, they had coaxed their leader into the ring.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 92
