Two-Platoon Politics

The presidential campaign had only three weeks left to run, but the Republicans still didn't hate Adlai Stevenson and the Democrats still didn't hate Ike. In 1952, the two-platoon system had come to politics too. Each party had not only picked a candidate but had provided its foes with a living, breathing, campaigning villain. Last week the G.O.P. was so sore at Truman and the Democrats so incensed at Bob Taft that both Ike and Adlai were still good guys to millions on both sides of the political fence.

The woods had never been so full of orators who seemed to be running for President too--or of voters willing to climb into the family automobile and drive out to hear them. Bob, Dick and Harry (it was a great campaign for first names) were out talking as loudly as the candidates. From coast to coast, crowds gathered at sidings, perched on freight cars, jammed courthouse steps and airports, to be bathed in political oratory.

Sound at the Sidings. While the old-fashioned whistle stop did not seem the right way to campaign in streamlined 1952, there was far more whistle-stopping and more public response to it than ever before. But television, the brooder which had grown the G.O.P.'s Dick Nixon from ugly duckling to swan in only 30 minutes, had also come into its own and had generated new, baffling problems. As a result, big advertising agencies had become more deeply involved in the mechanics of politics than ever before.

At first, on TV, Eisenhower looked shockingly old. His blond hair and eyebrows tended to disappear. Walter Tibbals, a veteran TV executive, had Ike's eyebrows touched up and tinted his face with make-up (not, initially, without a struggle), hung a grey curtain"behind him, and lighted him with magenta spots. But the general's big new dark-rimmed spectacles were his own idea--"If you have to wear glasses," Winston Churchill once told him, "make a prop out of them."

Television appearances have been less of a problem to Adlai Stevenson. He has concentrated on TV more heavily than Eisenhower and his tactical advisers keep the camera on his full face as much as possible so that his unfamiliar visage will become fixed in the public mind.

The Eager Amateurs. Clubs were mushrooming as never before. It was a big year for political amateurs. Both Ike and Adlai had inspired thousands of them to crowd, hot-eyed and eager, into the fray. Last week they were ringing doorbells, raising money, making speeches, ostentatiously smoking Eisenhower and Stevenson cigarettes and, in Texas, punching each other in the nose at cocktail parties. It was enough to make an old pol shudder. So was Dick Nixon's financial "striptease," which had set candidates about the doleful business of disclosing the catalogue of their worldly goods.

Though the campaign buttons of 1952 were bigger and flashier than ever before, almost nobody was wearing them but youngsters. There were Stevenson supporters among teen-agers--as one result last week the Eisenhower train rolled grandly from Sacramento to Oakland, Calif, plastered with Adlai stickers. But the noisiest single phenomenon of the campaign was the vociferous Ike worship which has gripped grade-school kids.

They not only jangle with Ike buttons and berate their parents for registering as Democrats, but troop noisily to political meetings--at some of the President's whistle stops last week they roosted in trees, chewing gum, dangling Yo-yos and shouting fiercely for Ike. Adlai Stevenson has had no heavier cross to bear than the sound of their shrill war chant: "We Like Ike!" At Ypsilanti, Mich., Stevenson drew a sympathetic laugh from the crowd by quoting Bernard Shaw: "Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children." He went on to say that he was glad to see the kids taking an interest in politics.

Their elders were mostly quiet about the campaign. Political experts, burned almost to a man in 1948, were hedging both their bets and their predictions. The U.S. electorate was still gripped by what seemed like unusual indecision. It was more likely thoughtfulness and a resolve to be right when Nov. 4 rolled around.

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