Fighting Bob

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On a grey, soggy Midwestern morning last week, a blue & white Jackrabbit bus pulled up in front of the high school in Canton, S. Dak. (pop. 2,500). It was 9:30 a.m., an early hour for a political rally even in this year of virulent campaign fever, but already 500 people were squeezed into the school auditorium. The candidate they were waiting for, a tall man who showed his 62 sedentary years but had a determined look, slipped off the bus with amazing agility. In the bus he left a bulging, battered, yellow leather briefcase with a gold-lettered name almost erased by the wear & tear of political travel. Everyone knew the name: Robert A. Taft.

Bob Taft, who has campaigned harder and longer than any man who ever sought a presidential nomination, was beginning his last primary battle of 1952. For five days after his arrival in Canton, he stormed across more than 1,000 miles of South Dakota's rolling plains, Dantesque bad lands and towering Black Hills. He made 24 speeches to 50,000 attentive South Dakotans; almost every hall he entered was jam-full. In a flat Ohio voice he said the kind of things most Midwestern Republicans hoped to hear. He said he was against universal military training, high taxes and expensive foreign aid; he was for farm-price supports, flood control and Douglas MacArthur. He made a big vow: "I promise you that if I am nominated and elected . . . I will reduce taxes by at least 15% within one year of the time I have been in office."

Meantime, in the enemy camp, the activity was almost as furious. Eisenhower clubs had been organized in all but half a dozen of South Dakota's 68 counties, and a first-string squad was coming in to speak for Ike. Among them were Senators Jim Duff of Pennsylvania and Fred Seaton of Nebraska, Governors Dan Thornton of Colorado, Val Peterson of Nebraska and Sherman Adams of New Hampshire, Representatives Walter Judd of Minnesota and Clifford Hope of Kansas. The Ike big guns would fire their heaviest volleys after Taft left the state this week.

With the two candidates for the Republican nomination only a hot breath apart, South Dakota's primary is indeed important--more important than the 14 delegates involved. The June 3 primary, in which more than 100,000 votes are expected, will be the last Eisenhower-Taft test before the Republicans gather in Chicago on July 7. The aftertaste of South Dakota might affect the first mouth-waterings in Chicago.

In this final primary, Candidate Taft is on a hotter spot than Candidate Eisenhower. For here, in Taft's Midwest heartland, Taft should win. A defeat in South Dakota would be a blow to Taft.

"The Most Fascinated." South Dakota was almost the last lap in the marathon Robert Alphonso Taft has been doggedly running for at least 14 and possibly for 43 years. In 1909, when President William Howard Taft was inaugurated, his eldest son Bob, then 19, rode down Pennsylvania Avenue in a chugging auto with his sister Helen and his little brother Charles, 11. Charles (now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio) had brought along a copy of Treasure Island to read, because he suspected that the ceremony would be "pretty dry." But Helen (now Mrs. Helen Taft Manning, a professor of history at Bryn Mawr College) remembers that Bob's attitude was quite different. Said she: "Bob was the most fascinated of all of us . . . To this day, Bob can relate step by step and almost word for word every detail of the ceremony. Perhaps, unconsciously, it was there that he acquired his first ambition to become President."*

Bob Taft's faint but conscious thoughts about being President came in 1936. That year, as a successful Cincinnati corporation lawyer who had served four terms in the state legislature, he was Ohio's favorite son. After he was elected to the U.S. Senate two years later, the thoughts became less faint. "A Senator has only one one-hundredth of the affirmative power of the President," he said, "and I suppose, like any Senator, I began to think about the presidency."

In 1939 he went after it. He set out across the country to campaign for the nomination. Before the Republicans gathered in Philadelphia, Taft had one of the smoothest Republican organizations ever formed. But it was not good enough. Although Taft was confident that he would win, the historic blitz carried Willkie in on the sixth ballot. Trudging out of the Philadelphia convention hall, the defeated Taft vowed: ''Never again."

He sat the next one out. In 1944 he was the chief architect of the Republican platform while his fellow Ohioan, John Bricker, took a run for President and wound up as the vice-presidential candidate. Not long after the election returns were in, Taft had forgotten his "never again." He traveled 30,000 miles and made 500 speeches before the 1948 convention, but then the high-powered Dewey machine ran him down.

Third Try. Now Taft is making his third and hardest try. The core of his 1948 organization never really disbanded, and it went to work in earnest not long after he walloped the Ohio labor leaders to win re-election as Senator in 1950.

And Taft went to work in earnest himself. He traveled 46,000 miles by plane, bus, train and auto, made 524 speeches, campaigned in 41 of the 48 states,* crossed the country three times. Compared to his present team, 1940's was "amateur," says Taft. The chain of command runs down through a top staff to Republican national committeemen, state chairmen, county chairmen, precinct workers. There is a Taft organization in every state, a Taft man on the job in almost every county.

The machine functions smoothly, but it functions best when Bob Taft himself is on hand: then it whirs like a new Cadillac. Each day has its schedule--breakfast meeting, press conference, meetings with party leaders and prospective delegates, a big luncheon rally, more conferences and appearances in the afternoon, a major speech in the evening. This high-pressure efficiency leaves little time for Kefauver-style, hand-to-hand campaigning--and sometimes it leaves a chill.

The candidate himself is always absorbed in his schedule, and cannot be bothered with unscheduled trivia. In Baltimore last week, when a scheduled car broke down, Taft was finally transferred to a police cruiser. In the midst of these hot happenings, Taft sat quietly, saying nothing, paying no attention to what was going on, studying the contents of a thick Manila folder marked "Delegates--Count."

Five & Ten. Bob Taft's campaign has taken five pounds off his six-foot frame (present weight: 196), and has added about ten strokes to his golf game (most recent score: 95). But otherwise, the candidate shows no wear & tear. After having his tonsils out last Christmas, he has had fewer colds than usual. He sleeps for seven solid hours every night, wherever he happens to be, and wakes up as if he had a built-in alarm clock.

When he started this campaign, Taft thought he could make it a weekend affair. But the groundswell for Ike forced him to change his plans. Now he thinks he should have planned from the first to make it a full-time campaign, with a budget of $2,500,000 to $3,000,000. Though no figures are available, presumably his expenses will be considerably less.

Taft is his own chief strategist, but he has hard-working and able lieutenants. His key men:

P: David Sinton Ingalls, Taft's cousin, a likable, wealthy, aggressive Cleveland lawyer, campaign manager. His chief duties now: contacts, to see the right people at the right time, for the maximum influence on delegates. He is also responsible for lining up delegates in California and the territories.

P: Ben Tate, a ball-faced Cincinnati coal operator, campaign treasurer. He collects the money, a job which has been no great problem, and is responsible for delegate strength in four scattered states, including Ohio.

P: B. Carroll Reece, Tennessee Congressman and former Republican national chairman, since 1949 Taft's Southern expert, now in charge of "delegate relationships." Recce's four assistants are compiling a list with addresses, telephone numbers and personal information on each one of the 1,206 delegates to the national convention, so the Taft organization will be able to make the right approach at the right time.

P: John D. M. Hamilton, Republican national chairman the year Alf Landon carried Maine and Vermont, in charge of the East, by far Taft's most difficult territory. Hamilton was a top adviser on the New Hampshire and New Jersey primaries, in which the Taft machine stripped some gears.

P: Tom Coleman, Republican boss of Wisconsin, the Taft Midwestern specialist. He is the likeliest prospect for Taft's floor manager in Chicago.

P: Vernon Romney, former Republican chairman of Utah, overseer of the Northwest and most of the mountain states.

P: Ohio's Representative Clarence Brown, manager of the Taft '48 campaign, in charge of congressional relations.

P: Victor Johnston, tall, white-haired political career man, "director of operations." He set up the Taft headquarters in the Standard Oil Building at the foot of Capitol Hill, and now spends much time beating the bushes for delegates.

P: L. Richard Guylay, smooth, soft-voiced New York publicity man whose specialty is promoting political campaigns, now spending 90% of his time on Taft public relations.

A Missing Campaigner. One important Taft campaigner from 1938 to 1950 is missing this year. Ready-witted, popular Martha Taft, who always added bounce and good humor to her husband's campaigns, is still confined to a wheelchair as a result of a stroke in 1950. In their 26-room Victorian home in Georgetown, Mrs. Taft clips newspapers for the candidate and criticizes his TV performances (her chief advice: "Don't talk so fast"). If she weren't ill, Martha Taft would be out on the hustings, twitting the opposition and getting plenty of laughs. This year one of her rare public appearances was at the Washington opening of Call Me Madam, May 5. Senator Taft wheeled her chair into the theater and carried her up ten steps to their seats.

The four Taft sons--William, 36, a Defense Department employee; Robert, 35, a Cincinnati lawyer; Lloyd, 29, a Cincinnati newspaperman; and Horace, 27, a graduate student in physics at the University of Chicago--have taken little part in the presidential campaigns. But the nine grandchildren have contributed their bit with a highly appropriate nickname for the candidate. They call him "The Gop."

The letters G.O.P. fit Bob Taft well. His deepest political instinct is party loyalty. From his start as a precinct worker and doorbell pusher in the wards of Cincinnati, to his third campaign for the presidential nomination, he has been unmistakably Republican.

Through the years, Taft has opposed in whole or in part almost every major proposal of the New and Fair Deals. He has been the unrelenting foe of bureaucracy, always on the warpath against the Federal Government's expenditures and its powers. On the campaign trail last week, he said with a sly grin: "Of course, there are some features [of the Democratic administration] which we agree with. But I don't think we should emphasize them."

In the Republican 80th Congress, Taft was the domestic-policy leader. He pushed through a program which included the controversial Taft-Hartley law. He startled some of his conservative Republican friends when he rewrote administration bills for federal aid in housing, health and education (Taft's versions gave more control to the states). In the role of framer of a constructive program, Taft is better than as a leader of the opposition. In the 80th Congress, Taft showed a brilliant grasp of practical legislative problems, a willingness to move with the changing patterns of American life. But opposition chafes him: then he seems captious, impatient, and gives many the impression that he is a reactionary.

His years of service and loyalty to the party line have won Senator Taft a title: "Mr. Republican." That title, and the record that won it, are two of his great assets in the nomination battle. One pro-Taft member of the Republican National Committee put it this way: "If Taft were elected, I would know everybody in his cabinet. But who in hell would I know if it were Eisenhower?"

The leaders of any political party are bound to. attach a very high value to party loyalty and service. No candidate for the Republican nomination has served his party as faithfully and as well as Bob Taft. This is widely recognized among Republican leaders. To oppose Taft is to undercut one of their own political assets. If an outsider can step in and take the nomination from Bob Taft, what state or county leader is safe from usurpation?

But the "Mr. Republican" label is also a Taft liability. Most of the opposition he now faces in his own party comes from the fear that that titleholder cannot defeat a Democratic candidate for President.

In the U.S. two-party system, centripetal and centrifugal forces are at war. The party leadership clings to those principles that differentiate theirs from the opposing party. The fringes of the party tend to merge with the opposing fringes. Often, the way to win votes is to appeal to this merging-fringe area and to the independents who lie in between.

Taft's friends scorn this practice as

"Me-Tooism," and say that it is responsible for the 1940, 1944 and 1948 Republican defeats. In fact, all parties, in all campaigns, practice a certain amount of "Me-Tooism." The British Tories were victorious by "Me-Tooing" the Laborites far more than any Republican ever "Me-Tooed" the New Deal.

This centrifugal "Me-Tooism" is an indispensable ingredient in politics--but it can destroy the whole party structure unless it is balanced by the gravitational attraction of the hard core.

Taft's enemies sneer that his strength comes largely from the "professional politicians." This may be largely true, but it is also true that in the campaign's early stages, the Taft camp generated more emotional fervor than the Eisenhower campaign. In the eyes of many "hard core" Republicans, Taft is the pre-eminent symbol of their party's opposition to 1) the socialist drift, 2) the appeasement of Communism, and 3) graft in government. While Taft and the professionals rallied around party principle, Ike's amateurs raised the white plume of expediency: our man can beat the Democrats.

As the campaign warmed up, however, certain principles always present on Ike's side became more prominent, and his followers developed fervor of their own. Real rank-&-file revolts against the Old Guard swept through half a dozen states, notably Washington and Texas. Ike gets the benefit of a strong popular drive in favor of an active and responsible U.S. policy in foreign affairs. He also benefits from a widespread disgust with professional politicians. It is unfair, but it is a fact that Taft has been hurt by the anti-politician feeling aroused by the Truman scandals.

Taft's long fight for the nomination has won votes--but it has also lost votes. An aggressive and "tireless campaigner is not necessarily an effective one. On TV panel programs, "Fighting Bob" sometimes gives the unfortunate impression that he wants to fight everybody about everything. In private, personal fact, Taft is not overaggressive or arrogant. He comes over that way as a result of breaking down his natural reserve to build up the "Fighting Bob" picture.

When Taft's Republican opponents get down to cases on why they think he can't beat a Democrat, they point to 1) labor opposition, and 2) foreign policy. The first is less important: 75% of the votes that labor leaders can swing against Taft can probably also be swung against Ike--or against any other Republican. The foreign-policy issue is more damaging. Taft is by no means an isolationist. His record indicates that, if he were President, he would try, in his own way, to build up the free world's cooperative strength against Communism. His views on the necessity of a stronger Air Force and the Navy emphasize this position. But his political opposition to Truman has led him into some extreme and sometimes puzzling statements. One day he called for a stronger front in Asia; on the next for a cut in military expenditures. The two positions are not necessarily inconsistent, but they sound inconsistent--and Fighting Bob does not pause to reconcile them in the minds of voters.

Toward the independent voters--who, after all, make up 28% of the U.S. electorate--Taft takes a rather high & mighty line. Says Taft: "We cannot afford to modify our principles to secure the support of a limited number of mugwumps, who never have and never will believe in Republican principles . . . We can only win by the earnest support of a carefully worked-out organization, to interest and bring to the polls millions of voters who have thought little about the vital nature of this political campaign . . . I promise you an all-out fighting campaign . . ." Independent voters do not like to be typed as second-class citizens, even once in four years.

Just Two Senators. When Ike lands in the U.S., only five weeks will be left to fight it out. The campaign will increase in intensity and bitterness. Taft men will raise louder cries against Ike, demanding to know where he stands on specific issues, questioning whether he is really a Republican, asking if he will conduct a fighting campaign against the Democrats, echoing Taft man MacArthur's sacrificial statement that no soldier should be President. (The Ike men have developed a quick answer: look at the last two Senators who have become Presidents: Warren G. Harding and Harry S. Truman.)

After South Dakota, Candidate Taft has scheduled only four one-day stands outside Washington, including one in Pennsylvania (where most of the delegates are still uncommitted). There are two good reasons for this light schedule: 1) Taft expects to make five or six major political pronouncements on the floor of the U.S. Senate, the second-best sounding board in the nation (best: the White House); 2) he wants to be mobile, ready to rush in wherever a finger is needed in the delegate dike. The last month is the time for deals--and the Taft men have more experience in this kind of politicking than the Ike supporters. A crucial dealing ground will be the convention credentials committee, which will control the seating of contested delegations. Taft men are now hard at work to get their partisans on that committee.

About two weeks before the convention, Taft may move to a spot near Chicago, to establish his own variety of the meet-the-delegates headquarters Ike will have in Denver's Brown Palace Hotel. Said Taft, doing his own me-tooing: "If Ike has a villa, maybe I'll have one too."

As the race pulls into the homestretch, it is probably the closest in U.S. political history. Taft's strategy was to start early, nail down solid organization support, run hard, never slip behind. The Eisenhower forces' strategy was to base the campaign on Ike's popularity, convince the delegates that they have a winner, overtake Taft, and sweep past him at the finish. So far, the plans of both sides have worked remarkably well. Taft has the lead, but Ike is running faster. A falter now, on either side, might be the margin of defeat.

If defeat comes to Robert Taft at Chicago in July, or at the polls in November, he will not run for the presidency again. But, being Bob Taft, he is not thinking much about that prospect. He is thinking more about whether he will seek re-election as President in 1956.

* Robert Taft would be the second President's son to succeed his father. The first: John Quincy Adams (1825-29), son of President John Adams.

* Exceptions: Utah, Montana, Nevada, South Carolina, Kansas, New Jersey, Maine.

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