Who's for Whom

Douglas Southall Freeman, biographer of Robert E. Lee and George Washington and military recorder of the Confederacy (Lee's Lieutenants), came out for Eisenhower this week in an article written for LIFE. "What makes Dwight Eisenhower so extraordinary a figure," wrote Freeman, "is the combination of his sense of duty, his humility of spirit, his incomparable training and his magnetic personality. Together these do much more than give the average man a respect for Eisenhower; they give a man respect for himself, because he sees and appreciates greatness. This unfailing ability of Eisenhower to lift the spirits of his companions is certainly one of the brightest attributes of leadership.

"The South is not a unit and is no longer 'solid' . . . Every Southern Democrat who has told me that he was supporting Eisenhower has said, in one way or another, that he was acting now precisely as he would in wartime, not for party, but for country. 'If it's a local election, sir,' one hard-headed man told me the other day, 'I'm a Dimocrat, just as my father was and my grandpa were . . . That goes for the state elections too. I'll never vote to put a Republican in the governor's mansion, no sir, not me! But when it comes to getting rid of that gang in Washington, I say, to hell with Dimocrats and

Republicans. What we need is a man smart enough and strong enough to drive out those fellows . . .'

"We who are going to vote for Eisenhower as Americans--and not as Southerners or as Democrats--are relying on the mainspring of the American clock, the mainspring of political conscience that swings the pendulum from one party to the other, as justice and honor demand, and always, thank heaven, within the arc of two parties.

"We of the South are relying, also, on the political idealism that stirs the hearts of many people in this part of America. We seldom have attained; we never have ceased to aspire. Few heroes have been ours to worship, but those we have enshrined . . . Every Southerner thought better of himself because he belonged to the society that produced Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and Wade Hampton. To that revered companionship, Eisenhower may be admitted."

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