The Personal Touch

One day, when the President was riding with General Bradley and me, he fell to discussing the future of some of our war leaders. I told him that I had no ambition except to retire to a quiet home and from there do what little I could to help our people understand some of the great changes the war had brought to the world and the inescapable responsibilities that would devolve upon us all as a result of those changes. I shall never forget the President's answer. Up to that time, I had met him casually on only two or three occasions. Now, in the car, he suddenly turned toward me and said: "General, there is nothing that you may want that I won't try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1048."

I doubt that any soldier of our country was ever so suddenly struck in his emotional vitals by a President with such an apparently sincere and certainly astounding proposition as this. Now & then, in conversations with friends, jocular suggestions had previously been made to me about a possible political career. My reaction was always instant repudiation, but to have the President suddenly throw this broadside into me left me no recourse except to treat it as a very splendid joke, which I hoped it was. I laughed heartily and said: "Mr. President, I don't know who will be your opponent for the presidency, but it will not be I." There was no doubt about my seriousness. --Dwight Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe

Rolling into New York state last week, Harry Truman wound up two weeks of whistle-stopping during which he had done his demagogic best to insure that Dwight Eisenhower should not get the presidency in 1952. A sampler of Tru-manisms:

P:"The special interest fellows who run the Republican Party are so anxious to get control of the Government . . . that they won't stop at anything . . . [Eisenhower] is doing and saying exactly what they tell him ... He has become a front man for the lobbies." P:"By attacking our efforts in Korea and calling them a blunder, [Eisenhower] has raised questions that strike a blow at the morale of the free nations fighting there. I never thought I would see a general, least of all this one, doing anything that could weaken the morale and faith of our country ... at the very time when our troops are locked in battle with the enemy." P:"He doesn't know anything about most of the issues." P:"He has betrayed his principles, and he has deserted his friends."

At a press conference, six months before Ike's nomination by the G.O.P., Harry Truman warned that Ike would have to expect to have mud thrown at him if he got into politics. At the time the President made this statement, nobody realized that it was a personal threat.

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