American Experiment (330 page)

His 1950 crusade elevated McCarthy to the high priesthood of Republican right-wing extremism. McCarthyism, said the rising young conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., “is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.” The trick of McCarthy’s success was becoming clear too. He appeared to have an almost instinctive skill for manipulating the press during an age of fear. He dexterously handled the wire services, which supplied most of the country’s newspapers and radio stations with national news. He knew how to make headlines and catch deadlines; he knew that wild charges were played big while denials were buried among the want ads; he knew that the wilder the charge, the bigger the headline.

Covering McCarthy was a “shattering experience,” remembered George Reedy of the United Press. “We had to take what McCarthy said at face value. Joe couldn’t find a Communist in Red Square—he didn’t know Karl Marx from Groucho—but he was a United States Senator.” He was also both a reflector and an exploiter of the age of fear.

It was in this atmosphere of hostility and fear that Americans entered the election year of 1952. Already the sides were lining up but more so within the parties than between them. Senator Taft, cherishing his growing image of “Mr. Republican,” had already made clear his aim to win the nomination that twice had eluded him. Harry Truman, beset by the triple charges of “K1-C2” (Korea, corruption, and Communism), was not expected to run again—unless some Dixiecrat or populist Democrat threatened to make off with the nomination. McCarthy continued to play his own game. And to the consternation of Taft Republicans, the hated “Eastern Establishment,” after losing twice with Dewey, was preparing to foist another “New Deal Republican” onto the Grand Old Party.

That Establishment was busy recruiting its man. Dwight Eisenhower’s wartime reputation and popularity, projected through his soldierly bearing and infectious smile, made him the favorite of both Democrats and Republicans for their presidential candidate. A stint as president of Columbia University, glamorized by the New York press, followed by his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, had kept the general in the center of the public eye. By late 1951 Dewey, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, and a dozen other northeastern senators and governors were forming an Eisenhower organization and dispatching missionaries to NATO headquarters in Paris to draft their man.

Their man was proving curiously undraftable. Appealing to his ambition was useless. He had pretty well hit his peak in history, he liked to tell visitors, when he accepted the German surrender in 1945. “Now why should I want to get into a completely foreign field and try to top that?” The old soldier, now in his sixty-second year, also had the typical distaste of the American military man for the seamy side of politics. But he also had a sense of duty, even of indispensability, and it was on these vulnerabilities that the recruiters played while the “isolationist” Taft threatened to win the nomination, the Korean War festered, and China appeared more and more “lost.” Ike wanted the expression of duty to take tangible form, however—nomination and even election by acclamation. As Taft proceeded to line up delegates early in 1952, it became clear that the convention would not draft the general. Playing on his combative instincts, the missionaries won his grudging agreement to come home and fight for his nomination.

By late spring, when he returned home, Ike was ready for a fight, but not for the one that awaited him. Somewhat familiar with the ideological warfare between the old guard and young moderates within the GOP, he still had not realized the intensity of that conflict. It was not merely isolationists versus internationalists, or eastern and western “coastal” Republicans against midwestern Republicanism. The GOP was virtually two parties, each with its own ideology, traditions, and policies, its own leadership, electoral following, institutional foundations in federal and state governments. These two parties, one entrenched in Congress and state legislatures, the other in the federal and state executive branches, ordinarily kept their distance, but they could not escape collision in the campaign for delegates to the GOP national convention.

The Taft and Eisenhower forces came into sharpest conflict in Texas, where anti-Truman Democrats, anti-Taft Republicans, and just plain “I Like Ike” voters sought to wrest convention votes away from the old-guard regulars. Fierce battles erupted in precinct caucuses when the regulars, many of them accustomed to holding these meetings in their front parlors, found “one-day Republicans” crowding in to vote for Ike. Some precinct bosses ousted the intruders, who then held rump caucuses out on the lawn; other “hosts” were shoved out of their own homes and had to hold their own rump meetings outside. The upshot, after the Taft-controlled state convention met, was a ferocious fight over two competing delegate slates to the national convention.

This kind of fight over delegates’ credentials was nothing new; indeed, Taft could remember a similar battle between his father and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Whether a party should represent the old dependables
who stuck with it in good times and bad, for power or profit or principle, or the independents and volunteers and irregulars who “raided” the party either from opportunism or from idealism was one of the oldest political questions, in both theory and practice. What was new was the skill of the public relations men around Eisenhower in elevating the matter to a transcending moral issue. Soon his forces were embarked not on a messy old credentials dispute but on a crusade for moral purity,
THOU SHALT NOT STEAL,
proclaimed Dewey, Lodge & Co. Ike forces waved signs:
ROB WITH BOB
and
GRAFT WITH TAFT
. Eisenhower joined with his followers in denouncing the “Texas steal.” Taft offered to compromise, but how could the Ike crusaders compromise on a moral issue?

It was one of the more spurious “moral” issues in American history, but it was nonetheless effective. The Eisenhower forces won the credentials fight at the national convention in Chicago and then, with their strength augmented, held full command. There was hell to pay. Thrusting a limp, quivering finger toward the New York delegation, Taft stalwart Everett Dirksen, senator from Illinois, from the convention podium charged Dewey with taking “us down the path to defeat.” He cried, “Don’t take us down that road again!” Conservatives and moderates blasted one another on the convention floor. But Ike had the votes. Despite a prompt and friendly visit from the nominee, Taft left Chicago a deeply embittered man. His presidential road, like Dewey’s in 1948, had come to an end. But he could not understand why. He had taken the traditional path toward the White House. He was “Mr. Republican.” He asked a reporter, “Why do they hate me so?”

Could the two Republican parties remarry, at least for the campaign? It was a matter for negotiation. After demanding assurances from the nominee that he would exclude Dewey as Secretary of State from an Eisenhower cabinet and give the Taft forces equal representation, Taft was more conciliatory at a breakfast meeting on New York’s Morningside Heights. Eisenhower, after barely looking at it, approved a statement making “liberty against creeping socialization” the central campaign issue, promising to “battle communism throughout the world and in the United States,” and playing down the foreign policy differences between the two men.

Democrats would have viewed Ike’s “surrender at Morningside Heights” with pleasure, except that they were plagued by their own divisions. Truman still planned not to run, but only if he could bequeath the office to an acceptable—i.e., pro-Administration—nominee. This ruled out an engaging young senator from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver, whose chairmanship of a committee investigating crime in politics had supplied Republicans with ammunition against White House “cronies.” Southern
Democrats, still angry over the President’s civil rights program, were planning once again to break out of the party tent in one direction or another. Truman’s eye lingered on Adlai E. Stevenson, whose high-toned, good-humored governorship of Illinois was drawing national attention. But Stevenson was a curious political animal—he
liked
being governor and had little hankering for the White House. Offered the nomination by Truman, he declined. Pressed to run by hosts of Democrats ranging from Chicago bosses to Manhattan intellectuals, he repeatedly stated that he was not a candidate. To be sure, he did not issue a “Sherman,” and some expert decoders of the Delphic utterances of politicians made much of his having said, not that he “would not” accept the nomination, but that he “could not.” Others believed he had closed the door.

The vast majority of the delegates hardly knew Stevenson when this slight, balding, vibrant man welcomed them to Chicago in words of polished elegance and wit that many present would never forget. Here on the prairies of Illinois, he said, “we can see a long way in all directions.” Here were no barriers to ideas and aspirations, no shackles on the mind or spirit, no iron conformity. Here the only Democratic governors chosen in a century had been John Peter Altgeld, a Protestant, Edward F. Dunne, a Catholic, and Henry Horner, a Jew. And “that, my friends, is the American story, written by the Democratic Party, here on the prairies of Illinois.”

The delegates sat hushed, spellbound, as Stevenson turned to the Republicans. 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 in peace, victory in war, and bold leadership in this anxious hour were the misbegotten spawn of socialism, bungling, corruption,” and the rest. “They captured, tied and dragged that ragged idea in here and furiously beat it to death.…” After all the denunciations of Washington he was surprised that his mail was delivered on time. “But we Democrats were not the only victims here. First they slaughtered each other, and then they went after us.” This speech brought howls of laughter and wild applause, and helped produce Stevenson’s nomination a few days later—one of the few genuine presidential drafts in American history.

With both nominees chosen, the election outcome turned on each candidate’s capacity to unite and mobilize his party. Eisenhower’s was the more formidable task. Placating Taft and the congressional Republicans was one thing; bringing around McCarthy and the McCarthyites was something else. Holding his nose, the general made the necessary concessions. In Indiana he shared a platform with Senator William Jenner, who had called Eisenhower’s revered boss George Marshall a “front man for traitors” and a “living lie.” In Wisconsin, under pressure from midwestern politicians
and from McCarthy himself, he deleted from his speech a tribute to Marshall’s “profoundest patriotism” in “the service of America.”

But the harshest test of Eisenhower’s effort to follow the high road while exploiting the low came with the revelation that running mate Richard Nixon, whom he had named in an effort to appease both Taft and the McCarthyites, possessed a “secret fund” fattened by businessmen. Although there was nothing illegal about the fund and the money had been used for legitimate campaign expenses, Nixon’s charges of Democratic corruption exposed him to fierce counterattack. First the general allowed him to twist in the wind while Republican politicians and editors—most of them from the Eastern Establishment—urged the vice-presidential candidate to quit the ticket. Then he waited until Nixon delivered a maudlin television talk about his wife and his daughters and his dog, Checkers. Only after several hundred thousand or more telegrams and letters deluged the Republican party with expressions of support did he embrace Nixon as “my boy.” The “boy” would never forgive Eisenhower for making him undergo this ordeal.

With biting humor Stevenson dug at these open sores in the GOP, quipping after the Eisenhower-Taft summit conference that Taft had lost the nomination but won the nominee, that the general was worried about Stevenson’s funny bone but he was worried about the general’s backbone. He liked poking fun at the war between the “two Republican” parties. But the Democratic candidate had his own two parties to deal with. With some Southerners ready to bolt again, the Democrats had adopted a platform exquisitely ambiguous on the key issue of federal fair employment legislation. They had chosen as Stevenson’s running mate Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, whose record on civil rights was such that fifty black delegates had walked out of the convention. Stevenson was caught in the middle of this issue, while Eisenhower, inheriting much of Taft’s symbolic and personal support in the South, took a conservative position on civil rights but a strong stand for ownership of the oil tidelands by the states. With the prestigious Senator Richard Russell applying steady pressure from the right, and black and white civil rights liberals from the left, Stevenson hoped that he could at least sweep the South in time-honored Democratic style.

But the South was no longer for the Democratic taking. Eisenhower proved to be the great unifier, just as his recruiters had hoped, and campaigned extensively in the South. Then, when he made the electrifying statement that he would “go to Korea”—after Stevenson had considered and rejected the idea as inappropriate for himself—election-watchers knew
that the fight was over. The general swept the northern industrial states and carried Virginia, Florida, Texas, and Tennessee—but not the states of the “solid South” that had bolted the Democracy in 1948. Election analysis demonstrated that his winning margin was far more a tribute to his personal popularity than a victory for the GOP. Almost half the poor did not vote, but among the poor who did turn out, most voted for Ike.

“Someone asked me, as I came in, down on the street, how I felt,” Stevenson told his weeping followers on election night. He was reminded of a story about Lincoln after an unsuccessful election. “He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.”

The Senate Caucus Room, April 22, 1954.
Bathed in brilliant television lights, senators, counsel, witnesses, bodyguards huddle around a small, coffin-shaped table, surrounded in turn by several score reporters. Men who are famous—and others who will be—are there: Joe McCarthy, smiling and frowning and giggling, his face heavier and stubblier than ever, the center of exploding flashbulbs; his aide, a smooth-faced young attorney named Roy Cohn; Joseph Welch, a little-known, old-fashioned-looking Boston attorney; Robert Kennedy, the twenty-nine-year-old minority counsel. Jammed into the room are four hundred spectators, including such Washington celebrities as Alice Roosevelt Longworth and “hostess with the mostest” Perle Mesta.