Ike's Third Week

Ever since Abilene, many of Ike's friends had been nagged by the feeling that his campaign lacked spirit and a sense of direction. Last week, however, things seemed to be picking up. Ike, throwing off his reluctance to deal in personalities and political maneuver, came out slugging at the Taft organization, displayed some of the hard-hitting self-assurance that Americans expect of a leader.

The first few days in Denver were billed as "leisurely" ones, but they were leisurely only by the standards of a political campaigner. Ike was up every morning at 7, by 8:30 was meeting with members of his 27-man staff in their second-floor offices at Denver's Brown Palace Hotel. Sitting behind a seven-foot mahogany desk, Ike spent his mornings dictating speeches to a male stenotypist, conferring with his staff or answering letters.

Brief Victory. Ike's chief task in the early days of the week was meeting convention delegates from Western states. First came the 15 pro-Eisenhower members of Colorado's 18-man delegation, then seven of Utah's 14 delegates, and six of the twelve from Wyoming. When the Utah delegates, who had previously been committed to Taft, emerged from Ike's office, State Chairman A. Pratt Kesler suggested that on the second ballot at Chicago, perhaps six of Utah's votes would shift from Taft to Ike. Once back home, however, the Utah delegation was re-corralled by Taftmen, who soon announced that all 14 members were committed to support Taft as long as the Senator had any chance for the nomination. Next day, talking with Oregon delegates, Ike lapsed into one of those circular pronouncements which may seem profound when first heard, and turn out on closer examination to be gibberish. The pronouncement: "You are never going to cut this budget markedly until you get a program of peace working in the world, which comes in two stages. The first you might call a real truce that convinces the other fellow that there is no use of this expensive fighting, and then finally, from that position of strength, begin to develop a little sense in a progressive system of disarmament, and that means complete examination of the problem."

In four days of meetings it was not certain that Ike had picked up any first-ballot votes, but to some extent he had realized the old soldiers' toast: "Confusion to the enemy."

A little before 7:30 the next morning, Eisenhower and a few of his aides clambered into an American Airlines DC-6. First stop in Texas was Denison (pop. 18,000), where Ike rode slowly down the main street in a green Chrysler convertible through crowds that pushed out to shake his hand. In the town's East Side, just across the Missouri-Kansas-Texas R.R. tracks, the motorcade stopped before a cheap, two-story, white clapboard house, whose front gate bears the sign "Eisenhower's Birthplace." At Forest Park, he made a brief, nostalgic talk about his homecoming.

Numbers & Morals. The Eisenhower party raced on to Dallas, led most of the way by state highway patrolmen, who occasionally got speedometers up to 90. That evening Ike got a standing ovation from the 500 Southwestern Republicans who had come to eat beef sirloin with him, and to hear him go all-out for the first time in his campaign. Bouncing slightly on his toes like a boxer, Eisenhower spoke of the necessity of a Republican victory in November. "I am convinced," said he, "that if the Republican Party does not win, we will seriously risk the existence of our American two-party system." Since the Republican Party is the minority party in the U.S., he continued, "what the party needs to win next November boils down to a matter of simple arithmetic. It needs more Americans who will vote Republican." His voice was steely with determination when he proc'aimed, "Certain it is that moral strength is the first essential to gaining numerical strength."

With visible anger, he snapped his opinion of the Taft organization which had stymied the election of Eisenhower delegates in Texas: "You have a small clique of Republicans who look upon our party as their fenced-in, personal preserve . . . On every post they have nailed up signs that read 'Keep Out.' " The enthusiasm of the audience mounted as Ike pounded ahead: "Thousands upon thousands of Republican voters--an overwhelming majority of them--were deliberately and ruthlessly disenfranchised. Majority rule, the very basis of our free government, was here flouted and overriden." Then Ike drew the moral: "No party can clean up the Government of the United States unless that party--from top to bottom--is clean itself."

Getting Through the Day. The Dallas speech drew angry cries from Taftmen, who repeated their defense that most Ike supporters in Texas were Democrats who had no business meddling in Republican affairs. Unruffled, Ike flew off next morning to Nevada for a visit to Hoover Dam. At the dam he told reporters gleefully, "On the road out here, a veteran shouted at me, 'You'd better get in, General, or we'll both be back in the Army." After a look at Lake Mead, Ike asked how soon it would fill up with silt if no precautionary measures were taken. When the guide told him 350 years, a nearby tourist cracked: "Hey, Ike, do you think you'll be President by then?" Said Ike: "Brother, all I'm trying to do is get through the day."

"False Prophets." Back in Denver, Ike abandoned purely internal Republican politics, spoke to the nation over a coast-to-coast television hookup on 1952's most important issue: foreign policy. "I occupy my present position in this political race," said he, "primarily because I believe that peace may well be at stake." He described the force of aggressive Communism, which with "America as its final and chief target" had steadily moved closer "to the sources of supply on which our existence depends." Earnestly he denounced "those who assert that America can live solely within its own borders . . . those who act as though we had no need for friends to share in the defense of freedom."

Then Ike got down to specifics. With obvious reference to air power advocate Taft, he decried "the false prophets of living alone who preach that we need do nothing except maintain a destructive retaliatory force in the event the Russian armies should march." Such a program, he suggested, was inadequate to cope with Communist political conquest like that in Czechoslovakia. He demanded unwavering support for the U.N. and NATO and, in another sideways swipe at Bob Taft, added that "even those who blindly opposed [NATO's] launching will admit that it has stopped the spread of Communism in Europe and the Mediterranean." He had equally forceful arguments against what he called "negative containment," i.e., the Truman-Acheson policy. "We cannot always be picking ourselves up off the floor. We must cease hand-to-mouth operations in foreign affairs."

Eisenhower defined the ultimate goal of his policy as creation of enough U.S. strength so that the Russians will accept peace and disarmament in their own self-interest. "We reject all talk of preventive war--there is no such thing. Live men and happy families--not synthetic doves--are the symbols of our purpose." Ike assured his listeners: "My fellow Americans, this can be done . . . Faced with momentous issues, confronting great danger, it is not in our American character to fail. We will not fail now."

Ike's speech had in spots the quality of a bugle blowing "Assembly." It offered no panaceas, but it rang with a kind of hope and strength that Americans have not lately heard from their leaders. The speech also served notice that he plans to pin on Robert Taft the "isolationist" label that the Ohioan heatedly rejects.

In Dallas, Dwight Eisenhower had stated the internal party issue on which he was prepared to stand in Chicago: the Eisenhower delegates from Texas must be seated at the convention. In Denver he had stated, no less clearly, the national-policy issue for which he was prepared to fight. Said one optimistic Eisenhower aide last week: "We expect to win the nomination and election on this issue."

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