Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  Lodge assumed that Clay had cleared the announcement with Eisenhower.28 The fact is, Clay forced the issue—just as he had done many times while military governor of Germany.f Clay simply assumed responsibility and told Lodge to go ahead. If Eisenhower wished to repudiate Lodge he could do so.

  Clay telephoned Eisenhower to warn him of Lodge’s announcement. As Clay anticipated, Ike accepted the fait accompli. “Your telephone call saying that some personal comment on the matter would be necessary in order to cinch the sincerity of the statements was acceptable but not enjoyable to me,” he wrote Clay.29 Besieged by reporters at Rocquencourt, Eisenhower issued a formal statement on January 7 that Lodge’s announcement “gives an accurate account of the general tenor of my political convictions and of my voting record.” But Ike’s announcement was qualified. “Under no circumstances will I ask for relief from this assignment in order to seek nomination for political office, and I shall not participate in … preconvention activities.”30

  Asked at his next press conference about Eisenhower’s announcement, President Truman was full of praise. With Ike in the race, Truman was confident that Taft would be beaten and he could return to Missouri. “I’m just as fond of General Eisenhower as I can be,” said the president. “I think he is one of the great men produced by World War II [and] I don’t want to stand in his way at all. If he wants to get out and have all the mud and rotten eggs thrown at him, that’s his business.”31

  The battle lines were drawn. And foreign policy was the decisive issue. On February 7, 1952, former president Herbert Hoover released the names of sixteen prominent Republicans, including Senator Taft, who agreed with him that “American troops [should] be brought home.” In Hoover’s view, the continental United States should become the “Gibraltar of freedom.”32 Eisenhower was appalled. It was, he wrote Clay, “the false doctrine of isolationism.” In the nineteenth century Gibraltar was a truly great stronghold, said Ike. “Today, Gibraltar is one of the weakest military spots in the world. It could be reduced to nothing by a few modern guns posted in the hills and concentrating their fire on it.”33

  As for the campaign, Ike said he was trying to be straightforward and aboveboard. “Consequently, I do not intend to do anything that would, to my mind, be clearly ‘participation’ in a preconvention campaign.” Then he backpedaled. “I certainly hope that I am not stiffnecked and unreasonable in trying to carry interpretations to fantastic lengths,” he told Clay. Eisenhower said he “would never ignore the rank and file of any organization if the setting could be arranged so as to make it logical and natural. If you have any ideas along this line, you might let me know.”34

  For Clay, Ike’s message was another green light. Eisenhower’s question was answered the next day when Dewey’s team staged a midnight rally at Madison Square Garden. The Garden was packed with more than thirty thousand eager supporters chanting “We Like Ike” while waving “I Like Ike” banners. The rally lasted until dawn, and was filmed by financier Floyd Odlum and his wife, the famous aviator Jacqueline Cochran. Cochran immediately flew the film to Paris for Eisenhower to see. “I thought it was a lot of damn foolishness,” said Clay, “but it did have a real effect in persuading General Eisenhower to announce. When you are at this stage of the game, it doesn’t take much to tip the balance.”35

  Eisenhower and Mamie watched the film with increasing wonder. “As the film went on, Mamie and I were profoundly affected,” said Ike. “It was a moving experience to witness the obvious unanimity of such a huge crowd. The incident impressed me more than had all the arguments presented by the individuals who had been plaguing me with political questions for many months.”36

  When the film ended, Jackie Cochran told Eisenhower that he would have to declare his candidacy and return to the United States. “I’m as sure as I am sitting here and looking at you that Taft will get the nomination if you don’t declare yourself.”

  “Tell General Clay to come over for a talk,” Ike replied. “And tell Bill Robinson that I am going to run.”37

  The day after viewing Cochran’s film, Eisenhower wrote Clay that for the first time he understood “what it means to be the object of interest to a great section of packed humanity. I told her [Jackie Cochran] that you had said you expected to be over here before the end of the month, and I would not only depend largely on your reasoning, but that you were the real channel through which I learned the opinions of others in the States.”

  Eisenhower told Clay he was leaving shortly for the funeral of King George VI in London (the King had died on February 6, 1952) and that he planned to spend the weekend at Brigadier Gault’s country home, just outside the city. “If you really feel there is any great rush about this business, I can see you over there.”38

  On February 16, Eisenhower met Clay at the home of Brigadier Gault. Both agreed that an unannounced meeting in the English countryside would attract less media attention than a meeting at Ike’s headquarters. Clay explained the status of the campaign and emphasized how important it was for Ike to make a public commitment to run and return to the United States as soon as possible. Clay told Eisenhower that winning the nomination would be harder than winning the election, that Taft now had 450 of the 604 votes required, and that another 70 were leaning in his direction.

  “I pressed General Eisenhower all I could for a definite answer and he still did not want to give one. In fact, he got quite angry with me for insisting.”

  “Well,” Clay finally told Ike, “there is nothing more I can do.” And he rose to leave the room and retrieve his coat.

  “Wait,” said Eisenhower, and he followed Clay to the cloakroom. “Let’s not leave things on this note.”

  In the privacy of the cloakroom at Sir James Gault’s country residence, Eisenhower told Clay that he would run. He agreed to come back to the United States before the Republican convention and to resign his commission at that time. No date was set, but Clay suggested June 1, 1952.39

  When New Hampshire voters went to the polls on March 11, Eisenhower swept the state with 50.4 percent of the vote to Taft’s 38.7 percent. Stassen ran a poor third with 7.1 percent. Ike won all fourteen of the Granite State’s convention delegates. The following week in Minnesota, Eisenhower received 108,692 write-in votes while Stassen, running in his home state with his name on the ballot, received 129,706.40 The bandwagon was rolling, but Eisenhower still declined to set a date for his return.

  “When I was a boy, I would go out to the corral in the morning and watch one of the men trying to get a loop over the neck of a horse that he was going to ride for the day,” Eisenhower wrote Clay on March 28. “I was always pulling for the horse but he was always caught—no matter how vigorously he ducked and dodged and snorted and stomped. Little did I think, then, that I would ever be in the position of the horse.”41

  “I am delighted you retain your sense of humor,” Clay replied. “All I can say is that our country needs you. There is no one else.”42

  The day after Ike wrote to Clay, President Truman announced his decision not to stand for reelection. Speaking to an overflow gathering of Democrats at the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in Washington, Truman departed from the text of his prepared speech to state, “I shall not be a candidate for re-election. I have served my country long, and I think efficiently and honestly. I shall not accept a re-nomination.”43

  With Eisenhower still procrastinating about the date of his return, Clay and Dewey devised a stratagem to force his hand. Douglas MacArthur had been selected to give the keynote address to the convention. MacArthur was crisscrossing America, whipping up a rhetorical frenzy over his dismissal by President Truman, and it was possible that in the heat of a deadlocked convention his oratorical skills might propel him forward as a compromise between Eisenhower and Taft. Certainly it was a plausible scenario.

  Having served with Ike in Manila, Clay knew the one thing Eisenhower could not tolerate would be for MacArthur to wrest the Republican nomination away from him. Dewey needed no c
oaxing. On March 30 he wrote to Eisenhower in longhand that unless Ike set a definite date to return, a deadlocked convention was a distinct possibility, and in that case MacArthur might win the day. Clay forwarded Dewey’s letter to Eisenhower on the next TWA flight to Paris. It was hand-carried by the pilot, Captain Robert Nixon, and delivered to Eisenhower’s aide Colonel Robert Schulz, when the plane landed at Orly.44

  On April 1, Republican voters went to the polls in Illinois, Nebraska, and Wisconsin. It was a landslide for Taft. In Illinois, Taft won 74 percent of the vote and took all 60 delegates. Eisenhower was not on the ballot. In Nebraska, Taft trumped Eisenhower with 79,357 votes to Ike’s 66,078, and took 13 of the Cornhusker State’s 18 delegates. In Wisconsin, where Eisenhower was also not on the ballot, the Taft forces elected 24 of the state’s 30 delegates.

  The following day, April 2, 1952, Eisenhower wrote President Truman asking to be relieved as supreme commander, allied powers Europe on June 1. “My request contemplates transfer to inactive status on the date that I can make a final report to the proper officials in Washington. In the event that I should be nominated for high political office, my resignation as an officer of the Army will be instantly submitted to you for your approval.”45 Truman replied with a handsome handwritten letter on April 6. “Your resignation makes me rather sad,” said the president. “I hope you will be happy in your new role.”46

  Eisenhower was sixty-one years old and in excellent health. He continued to put in twelve- to fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, and according to most observers had never looked better. The foundation for NATO had been laid, the foreign ministers of France, Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries had just signed the treaty creating the European Defense Community (EDC) paving the way for German rearmament, and Field Marshal Alan Brooke, now Viscount Alanbrooke, put wartime disagreements aside to congratulate Ike upon becoming a candidate. “The future security of the world depends on your now assuming this great office during the critical years to come.”47

  In Washington on June 1, Eisenhower paid a farewell call on the president. After summarizing the condition of NATO, Ike complained to Truman about the nasty campaign the Taft forces were waging. It was not only his romance with Kay Summersby and Mamie’s dependence on alcohol that were being bantered about. Gossips now said that Eisenhower was Jewish—“Ike the Kike”; that he had been recently baptized by the pope in Rome and was anti-Semitic; or that he enjoyed carousing with Marshal Zhukov, his “Communist drinking buddy.” Truman contemplated Eisenhower’s distress with amused detachment. “If that’s all it is, Ike, then you can just figure you’re lucky.”48

  Eisenhower launched his campaign for the Republican nomination in Abilene on June 4. The homecoming was scheduled to allow Ike to attend the dedication of his boyhood home and lay the cornerstone for the Eisenhower museum. Publicity was massive, national television provided live coverage, and the event was to conclude with a dramatic address by Eisenhower to an overflow crowd of thirty thousand supporters jammed into the high school football stadium.

  Nothing went as planned. Torrential rains whipped Abilene all afternoon, the stadium was less than half full when Eisenhower spoke, television cameras panned the empty seats relentlessly, and Ike fumbled his lines and lost his place as he read dyspeptically from a prepared text. Buttoned up in a see-through plastic slicker, with a rain hat on his head, Eisenhower looked every inch like a tired old man doing what he did not want to do. When he took his rain hat off, his few strands of hair blew in the wind, making him seem even more lost and forlorn.49 The speech was even worse—an amalgam of warmed-over clichés and familiar platitudes about the evils of big government, excessive taxation, and the need for national solvency. It had been cobbled together by Kevin McCann and Ike’s personal staff, and wreaked of the amateurism of political outsiders looking in. “It looks like Ike is pretty much for mother, home, and heaven,” chortled B. Carroll Reece, longtime Republican member of the House of Representatives from eastern Tennessee.50

  In New York, Dewey, Clay, and Brownell, who were watching the event on television, were appalled. It was evident that Eisenhower was not ready for political prime time. Invited back to New York, Ike spent the week at 60 Morningside Drive refitting and boning up for the fight ahead. For the first time he began to understand that he might lose the nomination to Senator Taft. The Republican convention was little more than five weeks away, Taft was well ahead in the delegate count, and Ike’s Abilene performance had scarcely started a prairie fire, in the words of The New York Times.51

  From New York, Eisenhower moved to Denver and set up headquarters in the Brown Palace Hotel. The problem, it was agreed, was reading from a formal text, which obscured Ike’s folksy charisma. Henceforth, he would speak off the cuff. Ten days after his dismal performance in Abilene, Eisenhower roused a Denver audience with a high-voltage display of extemporaneous speechmaking. “The speech was magnificent,” Dewey cabled that evening. “I hope you never use a text again.”52

  When the Republican National Convention convened in Chicago on July 6, Taft claimed 525 committed delegates; Eisenhower had roughly 500; California, with 70 delegates, was backing its favorite son, Earl Warren; Minnesota’s 28 votes were behind Stassen; a scattering of delegates were uncommitted, and three states—Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—sent rival delegations to Chicago, another 70 votes. The credentials committee, which was controlled by the Taft forces, voted to seat the Taft delegations from the contested states, and a floor fight loomed. If the Taft delegates were seated, the senator would be perilously close to the 604 votes required for the nomination.

  Under the rules of the Republican party that had been in effect since the convention of 1912—the convention that nominated Taft’s father after ejecting Theodore Roosevelt’s supporters—the delegates from contested states approved by the credentials committee were permitted to vote on the question of the seating of other contested delegations. If this rule were adopted again, the Taft forces would prevail and Ike would be counted out. Herbert Brownell, who was Eisenhower’s chief strategist at the convention, focused his efforts on preventing the contested delegations from voting. Working with Dewey’s team of lawyers, Brownell devised what was called the “Fair Play Amendment” to the rules: No contested delegate could vote on the seating of other delegates until his own credentials had been approved by the convention.

  A bitter battle ensued. Eisenhower delegates draped the hall with banners reading thou shalt not steal, while Taft forces poured invective from the rostrum. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, a leading Taft spokesman, peered down from the platform at the New York delegation and shook his finger at Governor Dewey. “We followed you before and you took us down the path to defeat.”53 Pandemonium broke out on the floor as the Republican Old Guard vented its hatred for the New York governor. Dewey sat through it unperturbed, which annoyed Taft’s supporters even more.

  When the vote was finally taken—the question before the convention was a Taft motion to exempt members of the Louisiana delegation from the Fair Play Amendment—the Taft forces lost 548–658. California and Minnesota voted against the motion, and the Fair Play Amendment was then adopted by voice vote. The Eisenhower delegation from Louisiana was seated. Another roll call followed on seating the Georgia delegation, and the Eisenhower slate won 607–531. The Eisenhower delegation from Texas was then seated by voice vote without a roll call. Taft had lost all three votes, and the momentum of the convention shifted in Eisenhower’s favor.

  The Taft team counted on MacArthur’s keynote to help them regain control of the convention. But MacArthur’s speech fell flat: an overly long jeremiad of accumulated bitterness that put all but the most committed delegates to sleep. MacArthur was followed by Senator Joe McCarthy, who woke the delegates up with his anti-Communist rant. “One Communist in a defense plant is one Communist too many. One Communist among the American advisers at Yalta was one Communist too many. And even if there were only one Communist in the State Department,
that would still be one Communist too many.”54 McCarthy’s rabble-rousing roused the rabble, but the momentum of the convention did not change.

  Ike watched the proceedings on television from his suite at the Blackstone Hotel, joined by Brownell, Clay, and his brother Milton. Governor Sherman Adams managed the Eisenhower forces on the convention floor, and Governor Dewey had his hands full with the New York delegation, eighteen of whom were leaning toward Taft. As the credentials fight climaxed, Eisenhower suffered what Brownell thought was an ileitis attack. “General Clay and I were the only ones outside of Mrs. Eisenhower and Milton who knew about it. The delegates did not know. General Eisenhower was in extreme pain. But he got up and dressed and went out and had a news conference, and then went back to bed. It was one of the greatest performances I ever saw in my life.”55 g

  The balloting for president began at 11 a.m. on Friday, July 11. Five candidates had been nominated—Taft, Eisenhower, Warren, Stassen, and MacArthur. As the roll of the states was called, Brownell and Clay huddled in front of the TV in Eisenhower’s suite while Ike watched from a distance. “Eisenhower was certainly the calmest person in the room,” said Brownell. “I could never understand how he didn’t have some feelings inside of him, but he was either an awfully good actor or else he was awfully calm. Of course, when you’re managing a presidential campaign you can’t let the candidate know how close it may be. It would be very distracting for him to know all the headaches that you are having dealing with the various state delegations.”56