Eisenhower had been against going to Chicago. He thought it unseemly. Instead, he would spend the week with his wife’s family in Denver. On July 1 he and Mamie had celebrated their thirty-sixth wedding anniversary at the Dowds’ eight-room gray brick house at 750 Lafayette Street, the closest thing to a home he had known in a tumbleweed marriage that had been spent on military posts. In an evening discussion his supporters now persuaded him that he must move on to Chicago. The next morning he told reporters that he was ready “to roar clear across the country for clean decent operations.” He would fight “to keep our party clean and fit to lead the nation.” The battle being waged in the Credentials Committee was a “straight-out issue of right and wrong.” He deplored “smoke-filled rooms,” “star chamber methods,” and “chicanery,” and he was “shocked” at the National Committee’s decision temporarily seating pro-Taft delegations from the South. He demanded “fair play.”
Fair play: that became the rallying cry of his followers. Lodge said Taftite southerners must be banished as “stains on the integrity of our party.” There was a good deal of this sort of talk, some of it in the form of out-and-out charges that Taft was a thief, and the impact of it on the conservatives was galvanic. During two decades in the political Sahara they had learned much about bitterness, but their anger in the amphitheater transcended everything they had felt toward the Democrats. This convention wanted to nominate Taft. New Englanders excepted, if its members had felt free to follow their convictions they would have chosen him by acclamation and campaigned for him around the clock. Even the New York delegation eyed him longingly; only Dewey’s whip kept it in line. One by one the men whose telegrams the senator had held were drifting toward Eisenhower’s floor managers, doing it sneakily and hating themselves for it. Emotionally the high point of the week was reached Wednesday evening, at the climax of the debate over the Georgia slate, when Dirksen, his hair carefully mussed, mounted the podium in Taft’s behalf, pointed at the New York standard, and intoned, “Reexamine your hearts before you take this action. We followed you before and you took us down the path to defeat.” Crooking his finger at Dewey, he cried, “And don’t take us down that road again!”
They roared their approval—and then reached for Ike buttons. It was the polls that did it. Loving Taft as they did, they loved victory more, and they believed that the general, unlike the senator, would lead them to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. A majority were looking for an honorable way into the Eisenhower camp. Unwittingly the Taft forces gave them one. By banning cameras and reporters from the credentials hearings, they created the impression that they were trying to steamroller their men through. “Fair play” had acquired a convincing ring. The issue was joined when an Eisenhower leader, Governor Arthur B. Langlie of Washington, put a motion before the convention asking that the contested delegates from Georgia, Texas, and Louisiana remain unseated until their qualifications had been approved by a majority of all the delegates. At that the senator’s strategists skidded again. Ohio congressman Clarence J. Brown, a Taft manager, offered an amendment to the Langlie resolution which would have given Ike’s people just about everything they wanted while keeping control of the proceedings in Taftite hands. Brown seemed to be conceding that play in fact had been less than fair. It gave his amendment the semblance of a deal—which is precisely what the Eisenhower floor managers called it. The roll call which followed determined the outcome of the entire convention. Brown’s amendment was defeated, 658 to 548. By that margin control of the Republican party had passed into the hands of Dwight Eisenhower. His nomination followed, a few minutes before noon on Friday, the fifth day of the GOP marathon, when at the end of the first ballot the count stood: Eisenhower 595, Taft 500, Warren 81, Stassen 20, MacArthur 10. Senator Edward J. Thye waved the Minnesota standard and yelled above the roar, “Minnesota wishes to change its vote to Eisenhower!” Senators Bricker, for Taft, and Knowland, for Warren, then moved that the choice be made unanimous. Ike had it.
He had watched it on television in his suite at the Blackstone Hotel, standing with his four brothers and nervously fingering two good luck charms, a Salvation Army coin and a Boy Scout souvenir. As Minnesota switched, Herbert Brownell rushed up and embraced him. The general’s eyes filled. Too moved to speak, he sought out Mamie for a private moment. Then he picked up a phone and asked to speak to Taft. It was precisely the right thing to do, and he, the presumed amateur in politics, was the one who had thought of it. He asked the senator if he could pay his respects. Fighting crowds all the way, he made his way to Taft’s lair in the Conrad Hilton. Both men were exhausted, stunned, and dazed. Photographers begged them to smile. They complied, though Taft was clearly in agony. He was going through this for the sake of the party, and his devotion to it had never made a greater demand. Though his eyes were bleak with pain, he managed to keep on grinning. He said huskily, “I want to congratulate General Eisenhower. I shall do everything possible in the campaign to secure his election and to cooperate with him in his administration.”
***
Eisenhower expressed surprise when Brownell told him that it was customary for presidential candidates to name their running mates. This would be the nominee’s first decision as Republican standard-bearer, and it was characteristic of him that he turned instinctively toward a procedure of the Army’s staff system. He wanted “a man who had a special talent and an ability to ferret out any kind of subversive influence,” but he would withhold his decision until Brownell could get “the collective wisdom of the leaders of the party.”
It was too soon to invite conservatives to the conference; those summoned were all Ike men. They gathered in a room, which quickly became smoke-filled, in the Conrad Hilton. According to Paul Hoffman, the first name discussed was Taft. It was knocked down; they wanted a younger man, preferably a westerner. Dewey waited until all but one of the other possibilities had been considered and rejected. “Then,” he said later, “I named Nixon as the logical nominee.” The senator met all qualifications. He was thirty-nine, popular with conservatives, a hard campaigner, and had never been accused of being a security risk. After a brief discussion everyone agreed to the recommendation. Brownell phoned Eisenhower and asked the operator to find Nixon. The senator had loaned his car to Earl Behrens of the San Francisco Chronicle and had then gone off, no one knew where, with Murray Chotiner. He was one of the last men at the convention to learn he had been picked. By the time he could call his sister-in-law in Whittier, she knew it; it had been on television, too.
In one sense the freshman senator was a natural choice for the second spot on a presidential ticket: he was everything his leader was not. An extrovert and a genius at compromise, Eisenhower was a natural master of social situations. Shy, taciturn, and introverted, Nixon was a perfectionist. He couldn’t stand cocktail parties. Humorless but earnest, a loner, proud of being the fastest dresser in the capital—eight minutes for formal clothes, two and a half for regular wear—he always carried in his inside pocket a list of things to do. Ike let others carry lists; that was what they were for. He was a backslapper; Nixon was a brooder. In economics and political ethics the general was a fundamentalist. The senator was a relativist, an opportunist, and a fatalist. The older man’s strength lay in his appeal for independent voters, while Gallup traced the popularity of the younger man to registered Republicans, most of them his senior.
Of course, there was more to Richard Nixon than that. Twenty years later, after everything in his life had been subjected to minute analysis, aspects of his life would intrigue his countrymen. Somewhere in his impoverished Yorba Linda childhood lay the secret of the immense drive which brought him fame in Chicago only five years after a Washington newspaper story had featured him as the “Greenest Congressman in Town.” Nixon’s eye for detail had been Alger Hiss’s nemesis, and in a way his own behavior was a pattern of odd little details. His sales executive manner, his indifference to what most men would call matters of principle, his extraordinary way of wolfing down
lunches of cottage cheese and ketchup, his loathing of psychiatrists, the need always to wear a vest—hundreds of such Nixonian traits, each insignificant in itself, formed a fascinating mosaic. At the time of his elevation to the GOP’s national ticket, however, he was still a one-dimensional politician, important only to the extent that he added or subtracted to Eisenhower’s appeal. It seemed reasonable to believe that he would add something. As the man who had brought Hiss to justice Nixon commanded respect. It was not enough to say, as Democrats did, that he was a clean-shaven McCarthy, and that he had won his Senate seat by crucifying his opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas. Mrs. Douglas had been crucified, all right, but the worst spikes had been driven into her by fellow Democrats. It was a conservative Democrat who had first called her the Communist candidate, making her primary triumph a pyrrhic victory and assuring her defeat before the Republicans had chosen their nominee.
Republicans were eager to give Nixon tangible evidence of their confidence in him. To those who asked how they could do it, Chotiner and Bernard Brennan replied that the best proof was cash. A vigorous campaigner needed a reservoir of it. The apparatus to receive it was already set up. Two years earlier Nixon and his staff had established a pipeline for contributions. Money was conveyed to what had become, in essence, an $18,000 contingency fund maintained for him by friends and admirers.
***
During the week between the departure of the Republicans and the arrival of the Democrats, Chicago was as serene as a hurricane’s eye. Conventions are the lifeblood of hotels, and the Loop’s hostelers had booked several small ones for the hiatus. The corridors where Ike had prevailed and Adlai would soon charm were momentarily swarming with safe driving instructors, life insurance salesmen, and the Ralston Purina sales force. It was a curious fact that memories of Taft seemed more viable than those of the general who had beaten him. For days after the Ohio senator had departed for his father’s old summer place in Murray Bay, Quebec, his ghost haunted the scenes of his last great struggle to follow the elder Taft into the White House.
In that midsummer of 1952 it was by no means certain that the vanquished Taft conservatives would remain loyal to the Grand Old Party. Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune was describing Eisenhower as the candidate of Wall Street, Europe, Harry Truman, and Tom Dewey. Asked by a Sun-Times reporter what he thought of Republican chances in November, Colonel McCormick said, “Zero.” A bitter Tribune editorial described the governor of New York as “the most unpopular figure in the Republican party today,” and a reader in Racine, Wisconsin, wrote in that although he had been voting Republican since 1916, “I will not vote for Eisenhewey. Phewey on Eisenhewey!” Clearly the GOP house was badly divided.
Obviously much hinged on the outcome of what was already being called the second Betty Furness Show. Democratic hopes had been broaching and yawing since April 16, when Governor Stevenson had to all intents and purposes taken himself out of the race. En route to a fund-raising dinner at the Waldorf—where his presence, he felt, might be misconstrued—he had issued a firm statement saying that in view of his decision to run for reelection in Illinois, “I could not accept the nomination for any other office this summer.” That, it appeared, had been that. Stevenson, the New York Times had observed, “seems effectively to have closed the door to his nomination.”
Had any other state been chosen for the convention, he might have kept it closed, but as governor he would have to welcome the delegates. Those who knew how well he spoke believed the convention would be smitten by him, and his admirers set up a national Stevenson for President Committee headquarters on the fifteenth floor of the Conrad Hilton. Unlike the outposts of other candidates, this one had no contact, direct or indirect, with its man. The governor continued to do everything in his power to shut it down. At his request, friends reluctantly promised not to put his name in nomination, and on Sunday, July 20, the day before proceedings opened, he made an extraordinary appeal to a closed caucus of the Illinois delegation begging it not to join in a draft. Reporters outside, lying on the floor and putting their ears to a crack beneath a sliding partition, heard him say of the Presidency that “I do not dream myself fit for the job—temperamentally, mentally, or physically. And I ask therefore that you all abide by my wishes not to nominate me, nor to vote for me if I should be nominated.”
No successful candidate in history had gone that far, but next day two events conspired against him. The first was a breakfast bid by Alben Barkley for the support of sixteen labor union leaders. Lacking a Stevenson commitment, the Vice President had a fair claim on Truman’s support, and had the leaders backed him, Truman wrote in his memoirs, Barkley would have become the party’s choice. They didn’t, thereby taking him out of the race. The second event was, as predicted, the governor’s stirring salute to the convention. He said: “Here, my friends, on the prairies of Illinois and of the Middle West we can see a long way in all directions…. Here there are no barriers… to ideas and to aspirations. We want none; we want no shackles on the mind or the spirit, no rigid patterns of thought, and no iron conformity. We want only the faith and the conviction that triumph in free and fair contest.”
He reviewed the years since Franklin Roosevelt’s first nomination to the Presidency in Chicago twenty years before, and spoke movingly of the proud achievements since. Then his eyes sparkled mischievously. “But our Republican friends,” he continued, “have said it was all a miserable failure. For almost a week pompous phrases marched over this landscape in search of an idea, and the only idea they found was that the two great decades of progress” were “the misbegotten spawn of bungling, of corruption, of socialism, of mismanagement, of waste and of worse. They captured, they tied and they dragged that ragged idea into this hall and they furiously beat it to death for a solid week.” Indeed: “After listening to this everlasting procession of epithets about our misdeeds I was even surprised the next morning when the mail was delivered on time…. But we Democrats were by no means the only victims here. First they slaughtered each other, and then they went after us. And the same vocabulary was good for both exercises, which was a great convenience. Perhaps the proximity of the stockyards accounts for the carnage.”
It was at that point that Eisenhower, watching in a Colorado fishing lodge, had misgivings. Simultaneously, the Democratic delegates took heart. “In one day,” Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote in next morning’s New York Times, “all the confused and unchanneled currents seemed to converge upon the shrinking figure of Governor Adlai Stevenson as the one and only, the almost automatic choice of the convention. Nothing but action by the President could alter the picture, and the general feeling here is that even that would now be too late.”
Late Thursday afternoon Governor Henry F. Schricker of Indiana took the lectern and said: “Ninety-two years ago, the nation called from the prairies of Illinois the greatest of Illinois citizens, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, too, was reluctant. But there are times when a man is not permitted to say no. I place before you the man we cannot permit to say no, Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois.”
Fifteen minutes earlier, as Schricker made his way to the podium, Stevenson had bowed to the inevitable. In a call to the White House he had asked whether the President would be embarrassed if Stevenson allowed his name to be put in nomination. Truman said, “I have been trying since January to get you to say that. Why should it embarrass me?”
The balloting proceeded while Stevenson, sitting in a second-floor bedroom at 1416 North Astor Street, the home of William McCormick Blair Jr.’s father, wrote out his acceptance speech in longhand on a yellow ruled tablet. Kefauver led on the first two ballots. After the third Stevenson was two and a half votes short of a majority. Utah then switched its twelve votes, and early in the morning of Saturday, July 26, the reluctant governor became the Democratic choice of 1952.
The first moments of his candidacy were inauspicious. Over and over the organ bleated out the campaign song “Don’t Let Them Take It Away,” a crude appeal to mass
cupidity, and the nominee was then introduced to the delegates by Harry Truman. Four years earlier, the President had ridden an underdog role to victory. Since then his political stock had depreciated, however, and Stevenson’s smile seemed wan when the President cried, “You have nominated a winner, and I am going to take off my coat and do everything I can to help him win.” To seventy million television watchers the scene was a reminder of Truman’s least attractive side, his fondness for Pendergast politics. The new man accordingly looked like a Pendergast protégé, and moments later the governor dealt his own chances a blow. In a rare lapse of taste, he told them: “I have asked the merciful Father, the Father of us all, to let this cup pass from me. But from such dread responsibility one does not shrink in fear, in self-interest or in false humility. So, ‘If this cup may not pass from me, except I drink it, Thy will be done.’”
To the devout, repeating Christ’s prayer at Gethsemane was sacrilege. Ike switched off his television set, saying to his fishing companions, “After hearing that, fellows, I think he’s a bigger faker than all the rest of them.”
He missed a remarkable speech. When memories of the conventions had faded, Stevenson said, there would remain: “the stark reality of responsibility in an hour of history haunted with those gaunt, grim specters of strife, dissension and materialism at home, and ruthless, inscrutable, and hostile power abroad. The ordeal of the twentieth century—the bloodiest, most turbulent era of the Christian age—is far from over. Sacrifice, patience, understanding, and implacable purpose may be our lot for years to come. Let’s face it—let’s talk sense to the American people. Let’s tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains, that we are now on the eve of great decisions—not easy decisions, like resistance when you’re attacked, but a long, patient, costly struggle which alone can assure triumph over the great enemies of man—war, poverty, and tyranny—and the assaults upon human dignity which are the most grievous consequences of each….
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 93
