Man of Experience

(See Cover)

At Springfield, Mass, last week, Dwight Eisenhower told one of the few jokes of his campaign. It was the story about the colonel who asked for a promotion on the grounds of long experience in the service. The commanding officer refused and said: "Do you see that mule over there? He has been in that battery for 25 years, and he is still a mule." Ike used the story to illustrate the difference between real experience and mere endurance in office.

Eisenhower himself has picked up more real political experience than many politicians (of the mule variety) get in a lifetime. Not that he started from scratch. When Eisenhower, nearly 62, took off his uniform last June and started campaigning, he had a lifetime of experience in dealing with people, cliques, passions, ideologies and issues. The U.S. Army does not run without politics; the commander in chief of the largest military coalition in history cannot command (and win) without political maneuvering, and the officer charged with transforming an international paper army into reality cannot do that job, as Eisenhower did, without learning a great deal about the political passions of Capitol Hill (or Whitehall or the Quai d'Orsay).

As SHAPE commander, he dealt and held his own with such formidable and experienced personalities as Britain's Winston Churchill, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery and General Lord Ismay, France's Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, Marshal Alphonse Juin and the late General de Lattre de Tassigny, Belgium's Paul-Henri Spaak, Portugal's Premier Salazar, Italy's Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi and Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. From Oslo to Lisbon to Ankara, Eisenhower impressed himself on governments and peoples as the unifying leader in resistance to Communism.

Nevertheless, when Ike came home to seek the nomination, he had to enroll in a new course of political education. More was involved than the techniques of baby-kissing, backslapping and speechmaking. Eisenhower learned the things that he would need if he is elected--the political geography, physics and alchemy of the U.S. He learned what sort of a foreign policy the farmers would go for, and what sort of farm policy labor would not swallow. He learned what U.S. Steel --and the C.I.O.--would do about the Taft-Hartley law; how Negroes, housewives and soybean farmers feel about a dozen issues from FEPC to foreign trade. He learned what a great and many-voiced people--organized in its unions, corporations, Elks' clubs and political parties--wants, hopes and fears.

A Crammer. The first lesson was rough--and valuable. Student Eisenhower was immediately caught up in the dramatic fight between Taftmen and Ikemen for the nomination, the most intense fight in either party since the Democratic Donnybrook of 1924. The political backroom deals of Brazos County, Texas, became as familiar to Ike as the Battle of the Bulge. He was in the center of the storm when the leadership of the Republican Party was torn down--since then a new leadership has been constructed around him.

His next teachers were professional politicians, experts, technicians who sat with him for days in his Denver headquarters briefing him on farm problems, labor problems, foreign policy.

He had to cram hard, but while much of the subject matter was new to him, the cramming process and the rapid transition was an old story. In July of 1942, he had been a staff major general (permanent rank: lieutenant colonel). By the fall of 1942, he was commanding the highly complex and delicate invasion of North Africa, and a year later he was Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces. He needed and he got plenty of intensive briefing in that period. He had to learn in a hurry how to cope with supply problems beyond all previous military experience, how to integrate the vastly different U.S. and British fighting forces, how to read the totalitarian mind of the enemy.

In January 1951, he made his famous tour of the NATO nations, then came home at the height of the Great Debate on U.S. foreign policy to testify before Congress on whether or not Western Europe had the will and the power to defend itself, i.e., whether it was a sound investment for U.S. military help. Ike's answer was a firm yes. He swung popular and congressional opinion in a way Politician Harry Truman had been unable to do.-

Ike is a highly briefable man, absorbing, digesting, sorting out, modifying and making over information and opinions of others. That quality was the key to his two successes in Europe. It is the key to his experience of the last five months--perhaps the most intensive course any man ever had in U.S. politics.

His most "important teacher was the American people. Ike saw them at a thousand whistle stops from Oregon to Louisiana, crowding the depots, jamming a hundred auditoriums, town squares and courthouse steps. He listened where they cheered and where they were silent, where their faces were grim, and where they smiled. When he spoke about his three main campaign points--Korea, Communism and corruption--Student Eisenhower could gauge the echoes from the crowds. All of Eisenhower's education, military, diplomatic, political, came on top of the basic set of his character--the education of boyhood in a small Kansas town half a century ago. The lessons of a Kansas boyhood were about the land, wide enough for freedom, generous to those who worked (and defended) it; about the astounding program that grew out of individual initiative and unfenced teamwork. Do these lessons still have a meaning in an America that has grown complex and doubtful of itself? To Eisenhower, they do. In his informal homecoming talk at Abilene last June, across the field from the Eisenhower white frame house, he recalled some of the lessons: "I have found out in later years we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn't know it then. All that we knew was that our parents--of great courage--could say to us, 'Opportunity is all about you. Reach out for it and take it ... What are you afraid of?"

Slow Start. At first the echoes were not strong. Ike was an undisputed national hero, but as a political candidate he did not quite "come across." A host of problems (irrelevant to the presidency, but highly relevant to a campaigner for the presidency) beset him: his voice was flat; he looked like an old man on TV because his light hair and eyebrows did not show up, giving an impression of blankness; his rimless glasses registered as two blobs of light on the TV screen. Reluctantly he submitted to make-up for TV performances. (An Eisenhower staffer found a make-up man who had been a paratrooper; this reassured Ike, whose tables of organization had never before included a male beautician.) He discarded his glasses and exchanged them for a dark-rimmed pair, which he began to use as a prop during his speeches (as Winston Churchill had once advised him to do).

Before last June's return to the U.S.,

Ike had built up a reputation as a speaker. However, his off-the-cuff efforts proved to be full of ballooning sentences, and his speeches from prepared texts tended to be wooden. At one point he threw out all prepared texts and--while his advisers watched him as nervously as if he were a time bomb--made some major speeches off the cuff. That way his sincerity came through, but Ike was not used to the split-minute timing necessary for television, sometimes rambled on, made some blunders. Ike finally settled on a prepared text in a looseleaf notebook from which he reads, with occasional ad libs. His delivery has improved astonishingly, but he still swallows the ends of his sentences and runs over his applause.

The Message. Gradually he began to get his message over to the people; first of all, that there ought to be a change. He hammered at the "mess in Washington," at corruption, inefficiency, high taxes and high prices. The U.S., he said, must have a government the nation and the world can respect. Another aspect of the mess was the inept handling of Communism, both at home and abroad. At home, charged Eisenhower, the Administration had coddled Communists, and sneered with phrases like "red herring" at those who warned against the danger. Abroad, the Administration's foreign policy had managed to take a magnificent victory and run it into the ground to the point where 1) the U.S. was fighting a war in Korea without a plan for winning it, 2) "godless Communism" had conquered vast areas of the world, including China, at the average rate of 100 million people a year, 3) the U.S. was spending billions on defense but had no real or consistent program for winning and keeping the peace.

But the message was not only protest. Ike spoke much of the future--the limitless future which the U.S., with its resources and its imagination, ought to enjoy. The Democratic slogan, "You Never Had It So Good," Eisenhower countered with, "Why Not Have It Better?"

At the start, few of his big, set speeches were ever as effective as his short whistle-stop talks. Here Ike was in his element: half the town gathered at the depot, high-school bands playing John Philip Sousa, the kids excused from school excitedly scrambling over freight cars and station buildings for a better look. These talks were far from polished; Ike's grammar could be hair-raising. The correspondents on his campaign train gleefully kept score of his cliches; but Eisenhower somehow can get away with cliches. When he says "I love this land," or "I am one of you," the words do not sound empty. (Although Ike could never approach Franklin Roosevelt's ability to make a cliche--e.g., "I hate war"--sound like a revelation.)

Taft & McCarthy. When Eisenhower began his swing into the Midwest, he had established himself as an effective campaigner. He now faced two immediate political problems: Taft and Joe McCarthy.

After the convention, Taft took a long, long vacation at Murray Bay and allowed his friends to say that he would not support Ike unless he got certain assurances. Later, this was used to give color to an inevitable Democratic charge that Ike had sold out to Taft. Ike's duty as leader of the party was to get Taft and his friends at work in the campaign--without sacrificing those principles which induced the party to pick Ike instead of Taft. In this situation, the wise leader tries to save the beaten rival's face by superficial concessions, while retaining the substance of the victory. That is what Ike did. In his speeches there is no evidence whatever that he has surrendered any principles to Taft. In the "unity statement," the two men acknowledged their "differences" on foreign policy, stated their joint belief that the main issue of the campaign was liberty v. the Fair Deal, and agreed that the Taft-Hartley law should not be repealed.

Yet Ike treated Taft with great respect and warm cordiality at their famous meeting at Morningside Heights. Taft, not Ike, read the statement of what they had agreed upon. In terms of sheer political expediency, it might have been better if Ike had given Taft more substance and less face. But in more serious terms, Ike had met the Taft problem successfully. Taft's followers went to work for Ike--which was what the Taft followers had wanted to do, anyway. And thousands of "liberals" backed away from Ike in horror --which was what the liberals had wanted to do, anyway.

Related to the Taft issue is Eisenhower's endorsement of Senator Joe McCarthy. Eisenhower and his advisers decided early in the campaign that Ike would ask for the election of the whole Republican ticket in each state. Ike did not endorse McCarthy until the voters of Wisconsin made him the Republican nominee. Considering McCarthy's smashing primary victory, Eisenhower gave him, by any political standard, cool, correct treatment. In Green Bay, Wis. Ike stressed the difference between McCarthy and himself, but added that they differed on "method," not "objectives," i.e., uprooting of Communism in Government. In his big Milwaukee speech, in which he endorsed the entire Republican ticket in Wisconsin, Eisenhower did not mention McCarthy's name. He said: "We would have nothing left to defend if we allowed ourselves to be swept into any spirit of violent vigilantism. [But] at the same time we have the right to call a spade a spade. That means, in every proved case, the right to call a Red a Red."

Eisenhower feels that he must act as a spokesman for the whole Republican Party, which, he says, he did not "invent." He feels it is not his function as presidential candidate to tell the people of Wisconsin whom they ought to send to the Senate. Says he: "The idea of forcing uniformity within a party is precisely the thing that most European countries have been doing to their own injury . . . This splinter party system of Europe ... is what the Democratic spokesman recommends for us Americans."

The Issues. As the Eisenhower train rolled through the Midwest and on toward the West Coast, the land--green and golden in the fall sunshine--gave a measure of Eisenhower's task. For it was prosperous land; the' barns were trim, the houses were freshly painted and had that indefinable look a house wears when its people are not in want. It was Eisenhower's job to show what was beneath this prosperity, and beyond it. He had to show that the larder was not so full as it seemed, and that distant places like Korea or Indo-China were threatening the safety of the safest, newest farmhouse roof. He kept hammering away at high taxes, inflation, high prices, the explosive uncertainties and frustrating deadlock of the Korean war.

Foreign Policy. The key to his idea on foreign policy is in these sentences: "The containing of Communism is largely physical, and by itself an inadequate approach to our task . . . Dollars and guns are no substitutes for brains and will power." When Adlai Stevenson remarked, "A wise man does not try to hurry history," Eisenhower replied: "Every American knows the answer to that one. Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him."

In Europe he favors the system of alliances and U.S. aid, but he feels that the U.S. has not done nearly well enough providing moral leadership for Europe: "Europe has not achieved the ability to become independent of our purse strings."

In Asia he attacks the Democrats for their most disastrous foreign policy failure: "The Administration passes on to the people this cheerful, if astonishing, news: 'We have blocked the road to Communist domination of the Far East.' In honest stupefaction the people must ask: Can this man [Adlai Stevenson, who made the remark on Sept. 27 in Louisville] be serious? Can an Administration frankly confessing that it could not prevent the loss of China--the whole heart of Asia--have the audacity to boast nonetheless of having 'blocked' the Communists in Asia?" Eisenhower favors an effective Pacific defense pact. He advocates top priority in U.S. aid to the "newborn and reborn nations" of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Korea. Eisenhower has said repeatedly that we "must make certain that those southern Koreans . . . can be prepared to defend their own front lines" with only relatively small U.S. forces remaining. He has not said that such a changeover can take place in the near future. He has not advocated U.S. withdrawal. He has said several times that he has no panacea to offer for the ending of the Korean war. But in his Detroit speech last week, in which he pledged to go to Korea himself, if elected, to survey the situation (see above), Eisenhower denounced defeatism which "dares to tell us that we, the strongest nation in the history of freedom, can only wait, and wait, and wait."

Communism at Home. He pledges to cleanse the Government from top to bottom of subversives, without using the methods that wound "the innocent as well as the guilty . . . Freedom can defend itself without destroying itself."

One of the Democratic charges against Eisenhower is that he is vague on issues. Actually, while Ike's prose is vague in style, his speeches are highly specific in content. He has never made a speech so specific as Stevenson's Labor Day speech on the Taft-Hartley Act--but Stevenson has never made another one like that, either.

It is evidence of Ike's amazing education about U.S. affairs that he has discussed in detail an extraordinarily large number of issues, and has been a good deal more specific than most political candidates. Some of the issues:

FEPC. Against a federal compulsory FEPC on the grounds that it has no chance of passing the Senate, would therefore be of no real help in the fight against discrimination. He favors state FEPCs, and has promised that as President he would do everything in his power for state legislation against discrimination, including presidential influence on governors. He also promised strict anti-discrimination policies in federal employment.

Social Security. Wants to improve and extend it, particularly in regard to old-age pensions. "I believe the social gains we made are overwhelmingly supported by everybody and they are no longer a political issue."

Socialized Medicine. Against it, but for use of federal aid to local hospitals and public health programs, etc., where states are doing an inadequate job.

Education. Against federal aid to schools, except where states are doing an obviously inadequate job.

Farm Policy. For price supports at 90% of parity.

Labor. For retaining and amending the Taft-Hartley Act, against repealing it.

President's Powers. Against any interpretation of the President's "inherent powers" that go as far as Truman's steel seizure, which the Supreme Court declared illegal.

Resources. For schemes like TVA ("a great experiment"), but favors more voice by the people of the regions affected on how they should be organized and run.

Tidelands. For state as against federal ownership.

U.M.T. Against it while draft continues.

Inflation. Against the present Administration's policy of using the Federal Reserve System to weaken the dollar.

Government. Promises to "reorganize and streamline" the Government by "principles of competent, imaginative management . . . We will take out of the files the unfulfilled reports of the Hoover Commission; we will dust them off; where necessary, we will ask Congress to enact them."

Eisenhower's education about the "issues ' was particularly significant because the Democrats have fostered an attitude about Eisenhower which a Manhattan taxi driver recently summed up in the phrase (quite seriously intended): "But after all, he is just a hero." The idea (not uncommon about heroes) is that Ike's past achievements spring from some mysterious and possibly noble qualities which, however, are not connected with the job he would have to do as President, and have nothing to do with such practical matters as organizing ability, power to make decisions, skill in analyzing situations, etc. Ike had to be specific to prove that a hero doesn't necessarily have a head of clay.

The Homestretch. As Ike's education progressed, he gradually became his own top adviser. At the beginning, Eisenhower's hastily assembled staff was disorganized. But the organization improved fast. Republican National Chairman Arthur Summerfield does not try to manage Ike's train; he concentrates chiefly on that large part of the campaign which does not revolve directly around the candidate.

Ike's personal campaign adviser is New Hampshire's Governor Sherman ("The Rock") Adams, a self-effacing, efficient liberal Republican who was Ike's floor manager at Chicago. He has been somewhat hampered by his lack of clearly defined authority. Also among the top advisers: Senator Fred Seaton of Nebraska, Herbert Brownell, Tom Dewey's Nebraska-born lieutenant, Congressman Walter Judd and Harold Stassen.

In the homestretch of the campaign, Ike is in top form, with a new self-assurance and gusto. The 200-odd speeches, the 40,000 miles by train, plane and car, the motorcades in the chill wind, the 2 a.m. platform appearances seem to have left no mark on him. His voice is only slightly hoarse (he yelled lustily at the Army-Columbia football game). His enthusiasm for talking to people and exchanging views with them seems to grow. He has coined no great phrases, although some Ike sentences pack a weighty punch. Samples:

P:"The only way ... to win World War III is to prevent it."

P:"The worst indictment against the present Administration is not that corruption exists, but that it has been consistently condoned."

P:"We cannot . . . win the peace with a foreign policy of drift, makeshift and make-believe."

P:"We cannot act as freedom's leader by wearing the shoddy clothing of national scandal."

As his campaign drew toward its end,

Eisenhower reminisced: "Coast to coast ... I saw the faces of tens of thousands of eager, earnest, friendly Americans. The thought kept recurring . . . what tremendous deeds can be done for America through the unity, through the united will, of all these people . . ."

Student Eisenhower won't get his grades until the night of November 4. But meanwhile, nobody can say that a man of unique experience did not cram another piece of priceless education into the last five months.

TIME (Feb. 12, 1951) reported: "What made [Eisenhower's] assignment so overwhelming was the fact that his answers would be believed. The word of no other man would be taken so unquestioningly, so much on faith. His was a position almost unique in U.S. history ... In Europe, the reaction [to his report] was dramatic. Britain . . . breathed an almost audible sigh of relief. Italians remembered their past glories. The non-Communists of France were lifted up. The whole of Western Europe, living under the shadow of the great peril, was more heartened than at any time in four years of daily threats, unending scares . . ." After this statement appeared, TIME heard no dissent or criticism of its appraisal of Eisenhower's achievement.

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