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Public Library
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KANSAS CITY, MO. PUBLIC LIBRARY
D DDD1 DED35fib 2
Republicans on the Potomac
Books by John Franklin Carter
Mystery:
Murder in the State Department
Murder in the Embassy
The Corpse on the White House Lawn
Scandal in the Chancery
Slow Death at Geneva
The Brain Trust Murders
Death in the Senate
Fiction:
The Rat Race
Champagne Charley
Hangover Hall (in preparation)
History and Politics:
Man Is War
Conquest: America's Painless Imperialism
The New Dealers (in collaboration)
American Messiahs (in collaboration)
Our Lords and Masters (in collaboration)
What This Country Needs
What We Are About to Receive
LaGuardia: A Biography
The Future Is Ours
1940
Remaking America
The Catoctin Conversation
Autobiography:
The Rectory Family
REPUBLICANS
ON THE
POTOMAC
The New Republicans in Action
BY JAY FRANKLIN,
THE McBRIDE COMPANY
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT 1953 BY
THE MCBRIDE COMPANY, INC.
First Edition
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED SIMULTANEOUSLY IN CANADA BY
MCCLELLAND & STEWART, LTD.
TORONTO
To S.S.C.
HE best political community is formed
by citizens of the middle class. Those states
are likely to be well administered in which
the middle class is large, and larger if pos
sible than both the other classes, or at any
rate than either singly; for the addition of
the middle class turns the scale and prevents
either of the extremes from being domi
nant."
Aristotle, Politics
CONTENTS
Foreword 1 1
L Local Boy Makes Good 15
II. Kingmakers 43
III. All The King's Men 78
IV. The Striped Pantagon 101
V. Know-How and High Brass 136
VL Deep in the Heart of Taxes 160
VII. We Can Do It Better! 1 8 3
VIII. New Brooms 211
IX. The Fight for the Water Hole 223
X. Rendezvous with History 267
FOREWORD
NTY years ago, in collaboration with Ernest K.
JL Lindley, I wrote The New Dealers, a sympathetic
but non-partisan appraisal of the personalities and poli
cies of the first administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Subsequently, for many years, I supported those policies
in my writings, in government service, and in politics.
It is never easy to break the political associations of a
lifetime, but I have found it possible to work with those
whom I helped to defeat in 1948 and still retain the
friendship of many of the honorable Democrats with
whom I fought shoulder to shoulder in the past for bit
terly contested reforms which are now taken for granted.
The more I saw of the progressive Republicans of the
East and the Far West, the more I believed that these
were the kind of Americans to whom the country must
turn for leadership if we were to avoid national disaster.
Many of the figures in the Eisenhower administration
are my personal friends, as are many of the Democrats
whom they have displaced. As I see it, our two-party
system is really a reciprocal undertaking in which both
sides agree on so many issues that their points of diif er-
11
12 FOREWORD
ence serve to create political progress without major dis
location of our public life. There is a vast area of good
will and common agreement in American government
which is the heritage of the party in power, be it Re
publican or Democrat. The chief purpose of the system
is, therefore, to provide a simple practical means to
change the directing personnel and the emphasis of public
policy without national upheaval.
So far as was possible under a rigid time schedule, I
have tried to make this appraisal of the New Republican
movement thorough and accurate. I wish to express my
thanks to the busy officials of the Eisenhower administra
tion for the time and trouble they have generously taken
to advise me in this work.
This is, of course, an expression of my own opinions
and judgment on public men and events. The responsi
bility is entirely my own and, while I have gone to pains
to assure historical and factual accuracy, the interpreta
tion is wholly personal to myself. If I have succeeded in
making it clear that the New Republicans are the true
heirs and honest executors of the reforms the progres
sives and liberals helped to pioneer a generation ago, then
I shall feel that I have kept faith with all those in both
parties who have worked through the years to make
America and the world a better place.
JAY FRANKLIN
Albany, N.Y.
April 2, 1953.
Republicans on the Potomac
I
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD
1 . THE REPUBLICAN RESURRECTION
D WIGHT D. EISENHOWER is not the leader of
the New Republican Party which has taken over
the Federal Government after twenty years of Demo
cratic control; he is not the agent of that group of able,
ambitious younger men and women who engineered the
nomination and election of the first professional soldier
to be chosen President in eighty years. Instead, he is the
expression of the deep historical process which has resur
rected the Republican Party and has made it a new politi
cal movement, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal
transformed the old Democratic Party into a new, semi-
revolutionary movement. Together, he and the New
Republicans have brought their new party to office un
der an overwhelming mandate to deal wisely and effec
tively with the greatest national crisis in American his
tory.
President Eisenhower would be the first to agree with
this estimate of his relation to political events. For the
15
16 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
New Republicans are both a product of and a reaction
to the same forces which sent a farm boy from Abilene,
Kansas, to walk with kings and lead nations in arms.
They are not "the rich, the wise, and the good" whom
Alexander Hamilton exalted as our destined leaders; nei
ther are they the Republican bankers and industrialists
and railway magnates who developed the continent and
alternately enriched and impoverished the nation for
three generations after the Civil War.
Their leaders are not men like Mark Hanna or Boies
Penrose or either of the Roosevelts. Few of them were
born to any recognizable degree of wealth or had the
initial advantages of assured social position or the privi
lege of an expensive education. Most of them come from
small towns, many of them from west of the Mississippi
River, and all of them have succeeded in their own ca
reers by the traditional process of free competition. They
are the kind of Americans who work their way through
college and make their own opportunities; incidentally,
the majority of them are of the old American stock with
roots far back in Colonial America.
They include Republican governors who taught the
old elephant new tricks during the long period of Demo
cratic centralization of the national government. They
include representatives of industrial and financial man
agements which survived and prospered in the face of
economic depression and labor unrest. They represent
the middle-class professional and business groups which
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD 17
resent the cycle of inflation and war into which liberal
Democratic leadership has plunged the nation in the last
fifty years. What is perhaps the most important fact
about the New Republicans is that they have survived
and come to power by learning to think and act as a
team. Eisenhower is not their master.
The Democratic Party, which they have displaced,
has always tended to follow the "star system," to rally its
forces around a powerful, dramatic personality: a
Thomas Jeff erson, an Andrew Jackson, a William Jen
nings Bryan, a Woodrow Wilson, or a Franklin Roose
velt; colorful, dramatic personalities, with great gifts of
political leadership, men whose principles and ideals have
made history and casualty lists. To tell the truth, the
Democratic Party is still beglamored by the Napoleonic
vision which established their party, the miracle of a
single man of genius reshaping nations and institutions
by the blend of personal ambition, political imagination,
and military force.
Where the Federalist ancestors of the Republican
Party were merchants and landowners in the tradition of
the eighteenth-century British Whigs, the Democrats
combined the monarchical instinct of the Tories with
the rise of the common man. Since the days of Julius
Caesar, this process has always led to political violence.
Where Theodore Roosevelt enrolled the cowboys and
the dudes in his famous Roughriders, his Democratic
cousin Franklin combined the professors and the labor
18 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
leaders in his New Deal political machine, while under
President Truman the alliance between the New Deal
millionaires and mobsters threatened to corrupt and de
stroy representative government in the United States.
The weakness of a party which depends on a power
ful and fascinating personality for its existence is that it
cannot be sure that a supply of such personalities will
always be available for the Presidency. The strength of
the contrasting team approach to political action which
is also essentially the military approach is that no mem
ber of the team is indispensable, that there are reserves to
draw on while the struggle continues, and that the mem
bers of the team look to each other rather than to any
single player for success.
That is why President Eisenhower fits the New Re
publican Party as a glove fits the hand. He is the Ameri
can Dream, walking. He is "Local Boy Makes Good."
He represents the slow, steady, selective processes of
personal ability, individual character, and outstanding
achievement in fair, open competition. His is not the
Horatio Alger story of "rags to riches." Neither is the
Eisenhower story like the legend of Ulysses S. Grant,
a drunken failure, rusting in quiet desperation until sum
moned to play a great part in history by the trumpet call
of great events.
This is a different kind of story. It is the tale of old
stock, solid Americans in every part of a large country,
working and living and trying to do their duty to their
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD 19
nation and their family and their God. It is the America
of Currier & Ives which has marched on Washington,
the small towns where girls in pigtails play hopscotch
and learn to cook and go to Sunday school, where small
boys whoop and scuffle in the piles of autumn leaves
around the Soldiers Monument, and neighbors need not
lock their doors at night. It is the America which for
generations has been educating its boys and girls and
sending them out into the world to make a living, the
America which pays its debts and goes to church and
volunteers in time of war. It is the salt of the American
earth, the essence of our society, the hope of our future,
the very best we have.
Whether our very best will be good enough to deal
with the tremendous crisis confronting our people re
mains to be seen. There are other dreams struggling for
expression in Eisenhower's America. There is the dream
of perpetual and increasingly workless material abun
dance, through science, socialism, taxes, and bureaucracy,
which has fascinated our people since the turn of the
century. There are vestiges of the old, ugly vision of a
society based on privilege of color, race, faith, or
wealth. There is the new nightmare of a Marxist world,
dedicated to the permanent revolution and the economic
thrust toward mass management of politics and police-
imposed social solutions. And there is the strong mission
ary faith that one hundred and sixty million Americans
are in some way destined to direct humanity and redeem
20 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
the world from evils and customs which have existed
since the dawn of human history.
Out of these conflicting dreams arose the New Deal of
1932, with its vision of social justice and its simple faith
that no American problem existed which could not be
set right by the simple applications of good will, human
reason, and abundant Federal appropriations. But the
final expression of these alluring concepts proved to be
painfully old. Called upon to devise better ways to dis
tribute the fantastic industrial and agricultural abun
dance of a fantastically wealthy continent, the only solu
tion offered was to redistribute insecurity, to ration
opportunity, to destroy or give away wealth, and to im
poverish everybody by monetary inflation. Called upon
to find employment for the ten million Americans
thrown out of work by depression and technology, the
only solution was to put them in uniform and send them
into armed combat in a great war which our own abun
dance financed and won. Called upon to protect and
promote the security of the American people and the
world-order in which they had grown to nationhood,
they threw away the military victory our soldiers had
won and exposed the nation to a far worse danger than
the one we had fought and conquered in the greatest war
in history.
So with Eisenhower and the New Republicans the
American people have gone back to first principles, to
character rather than personal charm, to wisdom rather
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD 21
than intellectual ingenuity, to the very sources of our na
tional strength.
This is not characteristic of our history. In previous
times we have been restless, optimistic, impatient of the
past, convinced that "history is bunk" and that all human
ills can be cured by swallowing some magic dose sew
ing machines, tractors, television sets, nationally adver
tised brands of cigarettes, coffee, or chewing gum. We
have believed that penicillin was better for us than sassa
fras tea, that forty miles an hour was better than twenty
miles an hour, and that three hundred and fifty miles an
hour was better yet. Now we find ourselves, against our
plans and desires, in a world which has always been dan
gerous for fools and which today punishes stupidity far
more promptly and severely than ever before.
Hence Eisenhower and the New Republicans in
Washington and hence the drama of the American peo
ple's decision to send their best team onto the field in
what may mean the very life or death of western civiliza
tion. The issues are so much vaster than those which
Roosevelt confronted cheerfully in 1933 that they out
strip imagination and almost numb public opinion. All of
the problems of the gallant New Deal enterprise twenty
years ago were subject to domestic legislation. But Presi
dent Eisenhower and his party cannot legislate for Rus
sia, for China, for Western Europe, or the British Com
monwealth. Mere human intelligence will not dispel the
danger. What we need now are patience, wisdom, forti-
22 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
tude, endurance, sacrifice. We have turned to the na
tional reservoir of these ancient virtues. It is on them that
our safety and survival now depend.
2. WHERE "!KE" FITS IN
If Eisenhower had not existed it would have been
necessary to invent him.
In one sense, America did invent him, since a nation's
capacity to solve its problems is measured by its un
planned ability to create the kind of men and women it
needs to serve it. The forces which developed Eisen
hower lay deep in the story of the whole American peo
ple. And those forces decreed that a man like "Ike"
should be born in the right part of the country, at the
right time, of the right kind of parents, and that he should
marry the proper wife and follow the right career to
bring his abilities to full maturity at the time when they
were most needed.
Back in the 1880's, when that erudite Scot, James
Bryce, whom Theodore Roosevelt once described as an
enormous brain entirely surrounded by whiskers, wrote
The American Commonwealth, he was not unduly dis
couraged by the greed, crudity, and corruption of Amer
ican society and politics. He announced that the regen
eration of America lay in the class of idealistic, college-
bred Americans of good family who resembled those
cultured Englishmen whose high ideals and integrity
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD 23
were willing to lose half the Empire and wreck half the
globe rather than yield to tyrannical world-conquest.
If another Bryce had been studying us in the first
decade of the twentieth century, he would have been
compelled as a true prophet to lift his eyes from Boston's
Back Bay, from Hyde Park and Oyster Bay, and from
Princeton (where a young Virginian named Tommy
Wilson was already in Bryce's time a promising student
of history and government) . To foretell the aftermath
of that deluge of nineteenth-century good intentions
and twentieth-century bad administration, he would
have had to look to places which no respectable English
or American scholar had ever heard of: to Peru, Ne
braska; to Cheboygan and Owosso, Michigan; to Mi
nerva, Ohio; to Yerba Linda, California; to Killeen,
Texas, and East Dover, Vermont; and above all to Abi
lene, Kansas.
For the New Republican Party was to find its leader
ship in the small country towns of America, particularly
in the Middle West and on the Prairies which have
served as the nation's granary for nearly a hundred years.
It was in this granary that Eisenhower was born. The
year was 1890, when Benjamin Harrison was President
and what were later called "the good old days" were
raging throughout a nation without a single automobile.
Raging is the word. The 1890's were a time of trouble
for the American people and the storm-center of those
troubles lay in Kansas, which was determined to "raise
24 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
less corn and more hell" in protest over low grain prices
and high living costs. That was the period of the Hay-
market murders in Chicago, the bloody Pullman strike,
the panic of 1893, the Populists, and Bryan's campaign
for "Free Silver" a period of angry upheaval against
the periodic miscalculations and mishaps of a haphazard
financial system, a period which witnessed the ominous
growth of socialist and syndicalist ideas among the for
eign-born masses still crowding into the eastern cities. No
small boy living in Kansas in this period could have es
caped the passions and enthusiasms of the age. The same
prairies which produced Bryan, the matchless voice of
social justice in his day and age, also produced William
Allen White, an equally sensitive social observer, whose
famous editorial "What's the Matter With Kansas?"
helped to calm the storm which swept the prairies in that
feverish decade before William McKinley's "Full Din
ner Pail," the discovery of Klondike gold, and the Span
ish-American War ushered the young western republic
into world affairs.
At the time, the war with Spain seemed very gay and
thrilling, except perhaps to those who died of yellow
fever or wounds, but it meant that, before the Abilene
youngster finished grade school, a fateful national de
cision had been taken, a decision which was ultimately to
bring him to the White House as President of the United
States. For Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill
and Admiral Dewey sinking the Spanish warships in
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD 25
Manila Bay were the first steps in a march which was to
lead to Chateau-Thierry and the Argonne, to Monte Cas-
sino and the Bulge, to Tokyo Bay and Yalta and Potsdam.
Young America had sat down at the poker table and
bought a small stack of chips in a game which has always
been played for table stakes, with stacked cards, brass
knuckles, and knockout drops.
While Eisenhower was still in high school, Great
Britain had sensed the need for allies in her coming strug
gle with the German Empire. The whole nature of war
and politics was changing. Barbed wire and the machine
gun, like the submarine and airplane, were part of the tre
mendous scientific forces which destroyed four empires
in four years and could destroy civilization and the hu
man race. As a consequence, this catastrophe insured that,
after half a century of peace, prosperity, and progress,
the American people would again need good military
leaders. It also meant that eventually, as with Washington
and Grant, a military career would become a prerequi
site, rather than a disqualification, for the Presidency of
the United States.
3. "!KE" AND MAMIE
Tell me how you spent the first ten years of your life
and I will tell you what kind of a man you are. Show me
the woman you married and I will tell you where you are
going. On both accounts, Eisenhower commands respect.
26 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
He was born in Denison, Texas, on October 14th,
1890, the son of parents of old Pennsylvania Dutch stock
whose ancestors had come to this country from Germany
two generations before the American Revolution. In
1878 his grandfather emigrated to Abilene, a Kansas
frontier town, with a group of the River Brethren, one
of the Pennsylvania Dutch sects, similar to the Amish
and Dunkards.
"Ike's" father, on coming of age, rejected the life of a
farmer, opened a general store in Abilene, and failed.
After this misfortune, he moved to Texas where David
Dwight Eisenhower (later changed to Dwight David
and then to "Ike," first a family and then a West Point
nickname) appeared as the third of seven sons, all but
one of whom are still living. Two years later the family
returned to Abilene, where the father of the future Presi
dent got a job as night watchman and mechanic in the
creamery operated by the Brethren and where his mother
struggled with the problem of raising seven boys on the
earnings of a husband who never made more than a hun
dred and fifty dollars a month in all his life.
What this meant to young Dwight David was a boy
hood spent in a hardworking, hard-up, happy, God
fearing home. He wore hand-me-down clothes to the
public school, worked on farms during vacation, and
finally landed a job as "second engineer" or fireman in
the local creamery, where he worked a seven-day, eighty-
four-hour week at low pay. That was when he was nine-
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD 27
teen years old; it is small wonder that his thoughts turned
to the army or the navy as a more stimulating career. His
mother encouraged him, although she was personally a
pacifist and later was to become a Jehovah's Witness.
With the help of the local editor, he made contact with
Kansas's progressive Republican Senator Bristow, and
went to Topeka to take the examinations for both West
Point and Annapolis in the spring of 1911. He passed
first for the navy and second for the army and, but for
being over the age for admission to Annapolis, might
well have become an admiral. The age hurdle swung him
over to West Point and he was enrolled as a cadet the fol
lowing autumn in the last hush before the onset of the
first World War.
His record at the Point was fairly good. He was espe
cially adept in English and history, played some football
until he received a knee injury which almost kept him
out of the army, and graduated 61st in a class of 168 on
June 12th, 1915. At that time a whole generation of gen
erals and statesmen were learning, at the expense of the
"poor bloody infantry," that barbed wire and the ma
chine gun had entirely changed the art of war. The Lusi-
tania had been sunk, but America was still neutral and
"Ike" went into the infantry as a matter of course. He
was assigned to Fort Sam Houston in Texas as a second
lieutenant.
There he met and promptly fell in love with a young
lady from Denver, Colorado who was spending the win-
28 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
ter in Houston. She was Mamie Geneva Doud, a pretty,
dark-haired nineteen-year-old Iowa girl whose father
had been a successful Chicago meat packer before mov
ing to Colorado in 1902. The couple were married in
Denver on July 1st, 1916 on the same day that Eisen
hower received his promotion as first lieutenant.
Slender, vivacious, and loyal, Mamie Eisenhower was
a preordained army wife, prepared for a life of sudden
moves, long absences, no settled home, and continuous
anxiety. The army became her life, her husband's career
became her masterpiece. They had two children. Their
first son, named for his father, was born in 1917, after we
had entered the first World War, and was to die of scar
let fever the year Warren Gamaliel Harding became
President. This was the greatest personal tragedy in
Eisenhower's life. The second son, now Major John
Sheldon Doud Eisenhower, was born in Denver in the
summer of 1922 and graduated from West Point the
very day his father launched the D-Day attack on for
tress Europe on June 6th, 1944.
The future first lady was not only a preordained army
wife; she was also a preordained Republican wife, who
believed and practiced the ancient principle that a wom
an's place is with her husband and family. She stayed in
the background and worked for her husband's interests,
accepting without complaint the abrupt shifts and
changes of an army career.
As a matter of fact, one of the questions now agitating
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD 29
"social" Washington is whether Mrs. Eisenhower shall
be allowed to maintain her political detachment. She is
certainly not an ardent partisan politician like Mrs.
Roosevelt, neither has she served as her husband's politi
cal secretary and adviser like Mrs. Truman. Not since
Grace Coolidge has there been anyone remotely resem
bling her in the White House. And she has already
proved that she is a great asset to her husband's political
career.
The man in the crowd in a small North Carolina town
who yelled, "Gee, Mamie! You even look good in a
dressing gown! " when she and "Ike" turned out of their
Pullman berths on a frosty morning, spoke for millions.
She has learned to dress extremely well, that is to say,
suitably to herself and in good taste, rather than expen
sively. Her "surrey with the fringe on top" hair-do has
not only affected feminine fashions; it suits her own per
sonality and facial contours.
At the age of fifty-six, with streaks of gray in her
brown hair, she is unaffectedly pretty, lively and, true
to her prairie tradition and her partly Swedish ancestry,
is an excellent cook, with special preferences for corn on
the cob, fried chicken, home-baked beans, and corn-
bread. And she fits perfectly into the general picture of
the old yeoman Americans taking over the government
of their country, in that her father's people emigrated
from England to Connecticut in 1639, while her moth
er's father, Carl Carlson, came from Sweden to Iowa in
30 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
1868. It scarcely seems probable that as first lady she will
be allowed to confine herself to her favorite hobby of
interior decorating that was done to the White House,
and how! by the Trumans or be satisfied with purely
family affairs. After all, Ike's career is still her life work
and here she can and does contribute much.
At the outset, "Ike's" career was not very promising.
He never saw overseas service in the first World War. In
fact, when he led the North African invasion, he had
had no combat experience and had never seen a battle.
However, he had already demonstrated his remarkable
ability as a trainer of soldiers, combining imagination,
discipline, and leadership to a degree that kept the army's
eye on him for future reference. In the 1920's he was
shifted from army post to army post, graduated first in his
class at the Command and General Staff School at Fort
Leavenworth, and was generally liked and trusted by his
fellow-officers. But the most important assignment he
drew in that period was eight months in France with the
United 'States Battle Monuments Commission. He was,
in short, a perfect specimen of the average regulaf army
major in peacetime, serving out his time with no particu
lar prospect of promotion before the age of retirement.
During that period an army career offered few chances
to the average line officer. But whatever assignment he
received he did thoroughly and well. Just as he had un
complainingly accepted training-camp duty in the first
World War, so he undertook to do some "ghost writing"
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD 31
in the War Department after his return from his battle
monuments assignment in France. He made himself use
ful in drafting speeches for Hoover's Assistant Secretary
of War Payne. When Douglas MacArthur became
Army Chief of Staff, that eminent connoisseur of a
resonant prose style latched onto "Ike" and later took
him along as his own chief of staff when he was trans
ferred to the Philippines in 1935. "Ike" remained with
MacArthur in Manila until January of 1940, when
World War II had already begun to pose a major mili
tary problem for the United States and we were about to
engage in the first peacetime conscription law in our his
tory.
His abilities, seasoned by work in organizing the Phil
ippines Constabulary, now found fuller scope. As chief
of staff for General Kreuger, he distinguished himself
by "defeating" Ben Lear's army in the great Louisiana
maneuvers of 1941. Army Chief of Staff George C. Mar
shall promptly collared "Ike" for work in the War
Plans (Pacific Theater) Division of the War Depart
ment. He did so well in this job that, somewhat irrele
vantly, he was slated for the North African command.
When the North African invasion was in the making, he
disagreed significantly with Marshall on where the land
ings should take place. From a purely military angle,
"Ike" argued that the landing should be well inside the
Straits of Gibraltar. Marshall was uncertain of Spain's
political attitude and decided that one landing should
32 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
also be made at Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of
French Morocco. Marshall's view naturally prevailed;
the incident is worth reporting because it showed that at
that time "Ike" had a blind spot for the political factor
in military operations.
This blind spot came to the fore again, with far more
serious effect, when he was in command of the European
invasion. Winston Churchill, political to the tip of his
cigar, was already concerned over the Soviet advance.
Churchill wanted to invade the Balkans and push on to
Berlin, and threatened to "lay down the mantle of my
high office' 7 Winstonian for "to resign" if "Ike" in
sisted on the invasion of Southern France in Operation
Anvil Churchill objected that this would strip the Medi
terranean theater of a mobile land force which could be
used in the Balkans as a counterpoise to the Red army.
"Ike" had his way in this and other political matters and
some of the present Berlin entanglement is undoubtedly
due to his decision to fight his part of the war on strictly
non-political lines.
Other examples of this political astigmatism are sug
gested by his apparent approval of the army's "point sys
tem" for repatriating our troops from Europe after V-E
Day and by his reported responsibility for abandoning
the elaborate military government program the army had
prepared for the occupation of Germany. The "point
system" automatically stripped our European forces of
experienced cadres and thus advertised to the Russians
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD 33
ur assumed intention to withdraw entirely from West-
rn Europe. The failure in military government led to
;raft, black marketing, and scandal in Occupied Ger-
nany. It was not until the appointment of former As-
istant Secretary of War John J. McCloy as United
States High Commissioner that the mess was finally
;leaned up.
Yet it is fair to say that Eisenhower's capacity to learn
from mistakes is a valuable part of his military outlook.
He was given the European command because Marshall
respected his brilliance as a strategist and also because he
had shown that he could get on with people. When he
returned to Europe in 1951 as supreme commander for
NATO, he was astutely conscious of, and skilled in deal
ing with, the political factors of his multi-national com
mand. Indeed, his wartime experience had already trained
him in the delicate arts of personal diplomacy in handling
such diverse personalities as George Patton, Charles de
Gaulle, Omar Bradley, and Field Marshal Montgomery.
Victory in Europe found Eisenhower at a pinnacle of
military reputation, a five-star general with lifetime rank
and pay. He returned to Washington as Chief of Staff
in 1945, setting Marshall free to go into Chinese poli
tics under Truman's fatal directive. During the three
years of his tour of duty, "Ike" traveled extensively in
Canada, Japan, China, Korea, Mexico, Panama, Brazil,
and Europe. He had already visited and toured Russia
after the V-E Day triumphs. He knows the world, or at
34 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
least he knows a world the world of armies and states
men better than any other American in history. Then,
when Omar Bradley was about to take over as Chief of
Staff in 1948, Ike was offered and accepted the presi
dency of Columbia University and retired from active
service.
At the time, the job looked like the American equiva
lent of the dukedom with which Britain rewarded the
famous Marlborough who had humbled the armies of
Louis XIV two hundred and fifty years ago. Nobody
had thought of Eisenhower as an educator, although his
army record showed that he was a first-class instructor,
and it is probably true that few people do so think of him.
He served less than two years in a position which would
tax the experience of a professional academic administra
tor, did a superb job for Columbia, and also found time to
advise the Joint Chiefs of Staff regularly through this
period.
Then, in December of 1950, President Truman re
called Eisenhower to active service to organize NATO's
defense of Western Europe. So, early in 195 1, the general
returned to France and, except for some quick trips home
in order to report on his assignment, there he remained
until June of 1952, when his name had been so promi
nently mentioned politically that he found it inconsistent
to remain on military assignment.
The man who had refused to forestall the Russians in
seizing Berlin and who had brushed aside Churchill's
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD 35
political advice was now acclaimed as the free world's
leader in the crisis provoked by the failure of British and
American politicians to foresee the political conse
quences of their own victory. European opinion cooled
so rapidly toward Eisenhower's candidacy after the
Democrats nominated Governor Stevenson that it is quite
probable that European commitments under NATO
were partly designed to prevent the nomination of a Re
publican isolationist for the Presidency. With the defeat
of the Taft forces at Chicago, the Europeans made no
secret of their preference for continuing a Democratic
administration at Washington. This apparent ungra
ciousness toward the man who had previously led them
to victory was chiefly due to the natural human instinct
to avoid any change. The Europeans were not sure that
they wanted a more positive national policy on the part
of the American government. They knew where they
stood with Truman and Acheson; with Eisenhower they
were far from sure.
For after twenty years of American presidents and
secretaries of state who had been highly co-operative,
they could not know whether the New Republicans
would continue the same policies and maintain the same
unquestioning compliance with London, Rome, and
Paris as in the past. By the time of Eisenhower's election
by an earthquake vote on November 4th, there was no
longer any doubt that his political victory was highly
unpalatable to the very governments which had previ-
36 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
ously hailed him as the tireless and tactful organizer of
the defense of western civilization against the Soviet em
pire and its Communist dogmas.
4. "IKE'S" POLITICAL EDUCATION
At the age of sixty-two, tall, well set-up, with sandy
hair receding from a capacious forehead and sharp blue
eyes, President Eisenhower can flatter himself on the
swiftest political education swmrna cum laude in the his
tory of the Republic.
It is the fact that he has learned so fast which has dis
turbed the chancelleries of Western Europe. Eisenhower
is the same general who in 1945 was so naively unprofes
sional as to hate the Nazi officers whom he fought. He is
the same general who, as recently as 1949, hesitated to
endorse the senatorial candidacy of his friend John Fos
ter Dulles lest he modify his own political standing. He
is the same general who in the winter of 1951-52 ap
proved a statement by the manager of his aff airs that if
the Republican Party wanted him they knew where to
find him, although no man has ever had the Presidency
thrust upon him.
However, his carefully prepared homecoming speech
at Abilene, Kansas was a political anti-climax and was
saved from flat failure only by "Ike's" obvious sincerity
of purpose. While his lieutenants were sweating and toil
ing down in the hot steamy plains, fighting to win him
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD 37
the nomination, he remained cool in the high altitudes of
Denver, fishing, painting water colors, and uttering what
would have sounded like schoolbook platitudes except
for the fact that he obviously meant them. Yet, even then
he was actively making political contacts and his train
trip to Chicago was a masterful piece of intensive cam
paigning.
Even after he had come to Chicago and accepted the
nomination as a call to duty, as the start of a crusade
an echo, perhaps, of his book Crusade in Europe his did
not begin until September. The conduct of his Denver
headquarters was lame and undistinguished. By the end
of August even his best friends were frankly dismayed
and Roy Howard, the friendly publisher of the New
York World-Telegram, said publicly that he was "run
ning like a dry creek." Then came the legendary "Battle
of Morningside Heights," in which it was made to appear
that "Ike" had capitulated to the conservative wing of
the Republican Party as personified by his beaten con
vention rival, Senator Taft. This led Senator Wayne
Morse to run screaming from the Republican Party in
the direction of the Democratic candidate, who used the
alleged surrender to Taft as an issue in his own campaign.
Next came the Nixon affair, when the Republican
nominee for the Vice-Presidency was represented as hav
ing been the recipient of improper financial favors in
California. Nixon managed to clear up his position to the
general satisfaction of the Republican part of the public
38 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
but it was a close call and it burned some of the dew off
the Republican rose.
Yet there was massive wisdom and masterful strategy
behind these disturbing appearances. The South was
wooed and partly won; most of the Taft Republicans
buried their disappointment and worked for "Ike's" vic
tory; and, most important of all, the Democrats fell into
a mood of overconfidence, as bland and as blind as that
which had cost the Republicans the election of 1948.
History had served them, then, to show that the party
in power at a time of general prosperity cannot fail to
win a national election. They did not believe it would
ever happen.
In the last ten days of the campaign, "Ike" suddenly
closed the gap between himself and the despondent pro
gressive Republicans of the East and the Far West in a
crushing pincers movement which transformed what
might have been only a narrow Republican victory into
a landslide. It was a tidal-wave election, which swept
Eisenhower into the Presidency with a huge plurality of
electoral and popular votes and which also insured Re
publican control of both branches of Congress. It was
also notable that, as the campaign came to its smashing
conclusion, "Ike" had finally mastered the art of speaking
to people, in huge crowds as well as in small intimate
groups.
This was Eisenhower's personal achievement, for he
ran far ahead of his party's other candidates, especially
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD 39
in the Middle West where the reverse had been feared.
This achievement stemmed from the fact that political
generalship, like military generalship, depends chiefly on
the imponderables.
To begin with, "Ike" is a man of steady habits; hard
working, energetic, an early riser, with the calm nerves
and good digestion which history finds most useful to a
military commander. He does not worry, he works regu
lar hours, he eats sensibly, takes a drink in the evening,
goes to bed and sleeps soundly, and is up early again
ready to work the following day.
"Ike" is much more versatile than this steady routine
would suggest. He is a fair singer and has been known to
give a good parlor rendition of "Drink to Me Only with
Thine Eyes." Mrs. Perle Mesta, former American Minis
ter to Luxembourg, reports that Eisenhower, on a visit
to her legation, insisted -on being turned loose in the
kitchen, where he prepared and baked an excellent lemon
meringue pie, all with his own big hands. Like Winston
Churchill, he is an amateur painter, but where Church
ill's work is obviously that of a gifted amateur, "Ike's"
notably his portrait of the great golfer "Bobby" Jones
is of high professional quality and suggests the close
portrait technique of John Sargent rather than the im
pressionism of George Bellows. He obviously enjoys
fishing, but apparently more for the relaxation than for
the catch. He is also an enthusiastic golfer, playing a very
good game, and likes to win.
40 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
He is also a deeply and articulately religious man.
Brought up in the country of the camp meeting, the re
vivalists, the Holy Rollers, and the regular Thursday
evening prayer meeting, he feels no self -consciousness at
invoking the blessing of God when his cabinet assembles
or in opening his inaugural address with a public prayer.
A good many Americans feel a slight sense of personal
embarrassment at such public invocations of the Al
mighty, but in "Ike's" case there is no doubt that he sin
cerely believes in the power of prayer and is humble
enough in spirit to pray without Rooseveltian self -right
eousness.
Another important element in his character is his in
credible charm, His smile is gay and infectious, even
when the blue eyes above it remain cool and appraising.
His skill in handling Congressional committees was pro
verbial in the War Department and he has the general
reputation of being able to charm the birds off the bough.
It is on record that he talked the French out of Dakar in
1941, where the British had met with fierce resistance
a year earlier. Despite his numerous tiffs with General
Montgomery, he became firm friends with the peppery
little British military genius. He is actually able to appear
diffident and disarming even in matters on which he is
expert. He makes you want to help him accomplish
what he desires. Women in particular are attracted by his
personal magnetism and one of the phenomena of his
campaign was the repeated spectacle of teen-age girls
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD 41
and older women jumping up and down with excitement
at his public appearances.
Yet when all is said and done with charm, it remains a
fact that most of all Eisenhower commands respect, in
side and outside the army, inside and out of politics. He is
a strong, full-blooded, able man of his own age and gen
eration. He has tremendous self-control and rarely loses
his temper; when he does it is a field day. He has per
formed every task given him with skill, competence, and
a marked economy of time and effort. He knows the
world and has seen more of it, physically, than any
American chief executive. And he remains essentially
what he began as: one of a large, hard-up, hard-working,
God-fearing happy prairie family, who was expected to
make his own way in the world, honestly and respon
sibly, and to do his duty uncomplainingly at all times.
These are admirable qualities in any man: in a Presi
dent they represent a national dividend on the spirit and
institutions of the people who developed them and on
the part of the country from which he came.
Stating it another way, Eisenhower represents the best
we have in character, experience, and ability. His is the
thankless and difficult task of leading the nation and the
free world through the greatest crisis since the fall of
Constantinople to the Turks five hundred years ago this
very year. Whether our best will be good enough re
mains to be seen, but that question need not arise because,
42 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
if it fails, the whole of American history, western civiliza
tion, and Christianity itself become meaningless.
The final key to Eisenhower's administration is sup
plied by his choice of the word "crusade" to describe
his purpose. He has come f orward, quite simply, to re
mind us that duty, service, and sacrifice are the price of
human freedom, and he is prepared to ask of others what
he himself has given: a single-hearted devotion to the
public good. In this he is perhaps the first modern Ameri
can leader to envision a higher purpose in government
than the materialism which has shaken down empires
like ripe fruit in his own lifetime. Of him it could truth
fully be predicted, "If war is too important to be en
trusted to the generals, peace is too precious to be com
mitted to the politicians." As a professional soldier, he
has seen the waste and suffering of war. The world may
yet take comfort in the knowledge that none of the pro
fessional soldiers who have served as President of the
United States has ever involved this country in a war.
It is only the civilians who are bellicose. Soldiers prefer
peace and can bring to its service the same moral stand
ards of responsibility which they are expected to bring
to war.
II
KINGMAKERS
1. A PRESIDENT
EVTERY man and every woman who worked for
Eisenhower's nomination and election is a political
kingmaker. Even the comparatively small group of
American citizens who actively directed his victory in
1952 must include scores of names entitled to honorable
mention in the annals of the New Republican Party. A
few men can be selected arbitrarily as representatives of
the much larger group which constituted the high com
mand of the Eisenhower movement. Some who opposed
him helped him by their very opposition. High on the
list of those responsible for his presence in the White
House were two generals, two minister's sons, the son
of the publisher of a small Midwestern newspaper, and
a bankrupt haberdasher who had been brought up on a
hard luck farm in western Missouri.
These last two represented Franklin Roosevelt's two
great political mistakes. Roosevelt never forgave himself
for allowing Governor Lehman to name Thomas E.
43
44 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Dewey his special prosecutor of rackets in 1935 and thus
providing the young man from Owosso, Michigan with
a springboard which tossed him into the Governorship
of New York State and twice made him the Republican
Presidential candidate. And Roosevelt never realized the
miscalculation he had made in selecting Harry S. Truman
as his Vice-President in 1944, because apparently it did
not enter the wartime President's head that he might not
serve out his full term and that a man of far less experi
ence and much less breadth would handle the peace set
tlement after World War II.
Former President Truman must receive a large share
of the real credit for Eisenhower's election. The can
tankerous, courageous, erratic, and thoroughly human
little sexagenarian from Kansas City was the first public
man on record to favor Eisenhower as his successor.
Now is not the time or the place to judge Mr. Tru
man as a political leader. The power of the Presidency is
a prism which breaks up a man's character into its con
stituent elements, revealing the defects and limitations, as
well as the virtues, of the chief executive, all terribly mag
nified. Minor qualities which would be condoned or even
unnoticed in ordinary life thus become facts of tremen
dous significance in national and even world affairs. Very
few men in our history possibly only George Washing
ton and Abraham Lincoln still shine as steadily after
their political leadership as they did before power beat
upon them. Before he was through with General Eisen-
KINGMAKERS 45
hower, Truman had boxed the compass of political con
duct and had contributed powerfully both to his election
and to the success of his administration.
The first point to be noted in this strange association is
Mr. Truman's attitude toward military men. An able
artillery captain in the first World War, he positively
adored successful generals. One of his close associates in
the 1948 campaign said: "If Harry Truman had been a
woman, he would have been a camp follower." Truman
regarded General George Marshall as the greatest living
American and, when he met Eisenhower at the Potsdam
Conference in July of 1945, he told the leader of the
crusade in Europe that he Truman would help "Ike"
get anything he wanted, including the Presidency.
Mr. Truman soon regretted this unsolicited off er when
the Americans for Democratic Action and other promi
nent Democratic Party leaders made no secret of their de
sire that General Eisenhower rather than Truman should
be their Presidential candidate in 1948. However, Eisen
hower set his mind at rest by withdrawing his name from
consideration and Truman went ahead and received the
nomination, winning the election in a photo finish against
Governor Dewey.
Two years later, however, President Truman returned
to the idea that Eisenhower would be "available" for the
Democratic nomination and recalled him to military duty
as commander of the NATO forces for the defense of
western Europe. This post constituted a world-wide
46 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
showcase and it does not seem to have occurred to Tru
man to discover whether the general was a Republican
or a Democrat. Even if he had any doubt on this point,
he seems to have believed that the off er of the Presidency
was one which would induce Eisenhower to change his
affiliation on terms which would allow him to win by ac
clamation. It was only late in 195 1, as reported by Arthur
Krock of the New York Times, that Truman took the
trouble to check up and received the dismaying news
that, if Eisenhower ran for the Presidency, it would be as
a Republican.
It was then that Mr. Truman made his final contribu
tion to the general's political triumph. He informed for
mer Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana that "Ike V
place in history was so assured and respected that he
would never consent to have his name and reputation
dragged into the mud of politics. Then, when this esti
mate of the general proved to be a profound miscalcula
tion, Mr. Truman proceeded to supply the vituperation
needed to confirm an Eisenhower landslide. He implied
that "Ike" was a racial bigot, he accused him of "dema-
goguery" in promising to go to Korea, he "declassified"
secret documents in an attempt to prove that "Ike" was
responsible for the Korean entanglement, he went around
the country denouncing the idea of electing a military
man to a position which had become one of tremendous
military responsibility. The crowds chuckled and
cheered and whooped, "Pour it on, Harry!" and the
KINGMAKERS 47
Democratic President believed he was winning the elec
tion for his own party.
He only succeeded in diverting public attention from
the real Democratic Presidential candidate, Governor
Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois, and thus converted a fairly
close campaign into a Republican landslide. When the
votes were counted, not one man in the White House had
anticipated the outcome. It was, perhaps, the greatest mis
calculation in the life of any American politician in our
times.
It was then that President Truman made his most val
uable contribution to American public life. This testy,
arrogant little bantam of a machine politician was at times
capable of a queer humility. He had been awed and hum
bled when Roosevelt's death pitchforked him into the
White House. He had been modest and unassuming
when, much to his own surprise, he won the election of
1948, though his entourage soon got him over that pass
ing mood. In the moment of final humiliation and defeat,
after one last snarl, the outgoing President offered the full
co-operation of his discredited Democratic administra
tion in turning the Federal Government over to the vic
torious Republicans, smoothly, in good temper, and with
a strong sense of public responsibility. Whatever place
history may assign to Harry S. Truman, it can truth
fully be said that naught became his administration like
his leaving of it. Despite occasional outbursts of verbal
backsliding, he thus did honorable service to the nation.
48 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
History records that Franklin D. Roosevelt refused the
proffered co-operation of the Hoover administration in
1932. Twenty years later, both Eisenhower and Truman
made political history by setting a precedent for real co
operation in the interregnum period between the defeat
of one party and the accession to power of its opponent.
In his case, this was not so difficult as it seemed twenty
years earlier. Both Truman and Eisenhower came from
the same neck of the woods. Both had been born of poor,
hard-working families. Both had a simple, strong, un
questioning American patriotism. Both were religious-
minded men, Truman a Baptist and "Ike" a Presbyterian.
Both had been in battle and both represented that middle-
income American group which made up the bone and
sinew of the Republican Party.
The differences between them were those of tempera
ment, experience, and formal political affiliation. Tru
man was a professional, lifelong machine politician;
Eisenhower a professional, lifelong soldier. Truman was
excitable, Eisenhower calm. Truman was as unreliable
as a slippery plank, Eisenhower was as steady as a rock.
Truman's intimates played him like an accordion, Eisen
hower led his associates like the captain of a ball team.
Truman was a Democrat who happened to be the leader
of a Democratic Party which had been in power for
twenty years. Eisenhower had only recently and reluc
tantly entered political life as a Republican, from a sense
of duty to his country in the crisis provoked by the poli-
KINGMAKERS 49
cies of those twenty Democratic years. But they were
more united by those qualities which they shared than
they were divided by their differences of character and
outlook; together they set an example of forbearance and
good feeling which can be listed among the enduring
assets of the first Republican to be elected President of
the United States in a generation.
2. A GOVERNOR
Of all the Republicans who planned and worked for
Eisenhower's victory, New York's Governor Thomas E.
Dewey made the outstanding contribution. Paradoxi
cally and characteristically, he made it by subordinating
his own personality to the creation of a winning Eisen
hower team.
Other governors worked with Dewey during the
months which preceded the Republican 1952 Conven
tion. John Lodge of Connecticut, Sherman Adams of
New Hampshire, Albert Driscoll of New Jersey, Payne
of Maine, and Inglis of Washington were prominent
among them. But the three-times-elected Governor of
the state which contains a tenth of our population and
pays a fifth of our taxes, the man who was twice nomi
nated for the Presidency and had overcome the crushing
political disappointment of defeat without complaint or
bitterness, had more to offer than any other of "Ike's"
political supporters,
50 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Alert, neat, scrappy, Dewey at the age of fifty had
learned how to elect and keep in power a Republican ad
ministration in a state which had been strongly Demo
cratic for twenty years. He had shown that he could be
a good loser as well as a graceful winner. His was, pos
sibly, the finest political brain in American politics and
his interests and acquaintances were world-wide. A chess
player rather than a poker player, he repeatedly infuri
ated the experts by his quiet habit of making successful
combinations in Republican politics. Yet the Eisenhower
movement was built, politically, on Dewey's character
quite as much as on Dewey's skill in party management
and public appeal.
That character had been systematically misrepresented
by his opponents both inside and outside the Republican
Party. Resolute, he was called ruthless; warm hearted,
considerate, and even diffident by nature, they said he
was cold-blooded and arrogant. Deeply loyal to his
friends and associates and sincerely religious he is a ves
tryman of St. Paul's Episcopal Church at Albany the
smear artists of both parties portrayed him as cruelly am
bitious, a machine boss with complete and arbitrary con
trol of party organization. Even his zeal as a public prose
cutor in convicting murderous racketeers was twisted to
suggest that he took a sadistic pleasure in sending men to
prison.
In addition to all this, some Republicans went so far as
to hold him personally responsible for not being elected
KINGMAKERS 51
President in 1948 and his various moves in the long, diffi
cult battle to win Eisenhower the Republican nomina
tion were greeted with bitter anger by the advocates of
other candidates.
Through all this period, Dewey kept his head and his
temper. He played clean, hard politics. He had already
shown his moral stature by not brooding over the failure
of his Presidential candidacies, where men as big as Al
Smith and Jim Farley had visibly sulked for years, while
even Herbert Hoover nursed a long grievance over his
defeat in 1932, as his published memoirs make clear.
In 1950, Dewey had thought to retire from public life
in order to practice law, educate his two sons, and live on
his dairy farm in Pawling, New York. He was not per
mitted to do so and, after a strong and, as usual, highly
successful campaign, was re-elected Governor of New
York for the third time. The following summer, at the
suggestion of John Foster Dulles, he took a journey to the
lands of the Far Pacific and returned in time to place his
experience and knowledge at the service of the Eisen
hower movement. It is the best tribute to his character
that he found far more pleasure in working for "Ike's"
nomination and election than he ever had in any of his
own political campaigns.
Dewey, like Eisenhower, came from the great Mid
western region of America; his parents, like "Ike's," were
of old Colonial stock. His original American ancestor,
Thomas Dewey, came to Boston in 1630. Tom Dewey
52 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
was born on March 24th, 1902 over a general store in
Owosso, Michigan, a town of about eight thousand
people, where his father, a former West Point cadet,
edited the local Owosso Times. He grew up in the pleas
ant ways of the Booth Tarkington type of midland small
town selling The Saturday Evening Post, handling the
local distribution of the Detroit News, working on farms
or in the local drugstore during school vacations, playing
football, debating, playing in minstrel shows at high
school, and doing all the pleasant things young Ameri
cans did in those easy days before the first World War.
He also worked as a printer's devil in his father's printing
shop and during the summer vacation of his junior year
at college he actually ran the shop and edited the paper.
His family was far from wealthy and he put himself
through his first year at the University of Michigan on
money he had earned for this purpose. He studied singing
and, in his last year before his graduation in 1923, won
first prize in a state singing contest. He then won a schol
arship with a New York voice teacher at the Chicago
Musical College where he met a young mezzo-soprano
from Oklahoma named Frances Eileen Hutt, whose
father was a brakeman on the Union Pacific. After she
had returned to New York, he came east, continued his
singing lessons, and also enrolled in Columbia Law
School. He still has a fine baritone voice but he gave up
a singing career after a minor throat operation reminded
him of the risks of a professional vocalist. That was in
KINGMAKERS 53
1925 mid-stream in the era of wonderful nonsense
but Tom Dewey had his law degree and settled down in
September to practice law as a junior clerk at eighteen
hundred dollars a year. Three years later, when his salary
had climbed to three thousand dollars, he decided it was
enough to marry on and he did. His bride was the same
Frances Hutt he had met in Chicago.
This tale has been told before, but it is a good story and
it is worth telling again, if only because it provides the
key to the much larger political pattern of his and Eisen
hower's career. It is a story of decency, ability, fidelity,
tenacity the story of a couple of ambitious young
people coming to the metropolis to make a living and to
found a family rather than to pursue a career.
While a middle-aged army major named Eisenhower*
was still working with the Battle Monuments Commis
sion in France, a young lawyer named Dewey was en
rolled in the New York Tenth Assembly District Repub
lican organization and was doing the humdrum political
chores of ringing door bells and watching the polls in a
Tammany stronghold, unaware that in 1931 he would
suddenly find his foot on the bottom rung of the great
political ladder and start climbing.
Dewey has never stopped except for brief rests since
that day when the newly appointed Republican United
States Attorney for the Southern Judicial District of
New York, George S. Medalie, asked him to serve as his
54 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
chief assistant; at twenty-nine, he was the youngest man
ever to hold that post.
The rest of the Dewey story is a matter of public rec
ord. He ran Medalie's staff of sixty lawyers successfully,
prosecuting every kind of case, including the famous case
against racketeer "Waxey" Gordon. After Medalie's res
ignation, the nine Federal judges appointed Dewey as
United States Attorney until F.D.R. replaced him with
a regular Democrat. Eighteen months later, by mid-193 5,
a disgusted New York County Grand Jury was demand
ing a special prosecutor to investigate New York City's
rackets. Lehman resisted for two months, then finally
gave in and named four eminent members of the bar un
der instructions to agree on which of them should take
the assignment. At the end of their conferences, they an
nounced that thirty -three-year-old Dewey was the man,
and Lehman grudgingly appointed him. He ran the
rackets investigation for two and a half years and then in
1937 ran for and was elected as district attorney in New
York, winning by over a hundred thousand in the worst
defeat Tammany ever suffered. In May of 1938, Dewey
indicted, and later convicted, Tammany leader "Jimmy"
Hines in a body blow at the Democratic combination of
crime and politics in New York. That same year, he was
nominated for governor by the Republicans and most
politicians believe he was actually elected, being
"counted out" by sixty-four thousand votes in his race
against the incumbent Herbert Lehman who was sup-
KINGMAKERS 55
ported by all the other parties, including the Commu
nists.
Dewey was a candidate for the Republican Presiden
tial nomination in 1 940, but was edged out quite easily by
the Wendell Willkie steamroller. At the end of his term
as district attorney in 1941, he declined renomination
and returned to private practice. A year later he was
elected governor with a whopping majority and was re-
elected in 1946 and in 1950, each time with heavy plu
ralities.
In 1944, he accepted the thankless but necessary job
of running for the Presidency against F.D.R., then at the
height of his war popularity. Four years later, after a
sharp tussle with Senator Taft of Ohio, he was again
nominated for the Presidency and would have been
elected but for an overconfidence among Dewey's sup
porters which enabled Truman, who had the benefit of
the ablest political advice in America, to drift in as the
winner of the closest national election in this century.
Two years later, faced with an incipient cabal in New
York State Republican politics, the governor reluctantly
put aside his personal preference for private life and al
lowed himself to be drafted for the governorship, and by
definition for a major role in the 1952 campaign. For this
third victory left him in an unassailable position to con
tribute to the success of his party, by virtue of the fact
that it was at last clear to everyone that he was not moti-
56 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
vated by personal ambition and was ready to give "Ike"
the best he had.
What Dewey had was tremendous.
He produced the team-play principle, as opposed to
the Democratic Party's preference for prima donnas,
whether it was F.D.R. trying to play every instrument in
the band or Truman rendering "The Missouri Waltz."
He had long since shown that he was one of the few men
in public life who would not take "Yes" for an answer.
He was still rarer in his refusal to take "No" for an an
swer either, until he had heard the reasons. This kind of
leadership wins football games, political campaigns, and
wars. It provided "Ike" with the bridge from SHAPE
to GOP.
Dewey also contributed the Dewey program, a "We
can do it better!" record in Albany which showed how
an honest Republican administration which believed in
social progress could deliver the goods, simply, economi
cally, and without bureaucracy or regimentation. The
Dewey program had also proved that it could win ma
jority support, year after year, in a normally Demo
cratic state. Even if "Ike," in the broad simplicities of
prairie Republicanism, didn't appreciate its importance,
here Dewey gave him the political key to 1956 and 1960.
Possibly that was what "Ike" had in mind when, shortly
before his inauguration, he referred to Dewey as a man
whose political future still lay before him. The governor
would disagree emphatically, but the Washington com-
KINGMAKERS 57
mentators, those professional exporters of educated
guesses, decided that this meant Dewey as President some
time soon.
He contributed the technique of television campaign
ing which he had invented in 1950, a method so effective
it could not be omitted and so expensive that it delighted
advertising agencies and gave gray hairs to campaign-
fund raisers.
Finally, Dewey supplied Eisenhower with the most
practical kind of help. The Dewey team was sent into
action. Herbert Brownell, Dewey's long-time political
partner and campaign manager, was brought into action
to manage "Ike's" pre-convention campaign. Republican
State Chairman Pf eiff er, a hard-headed Buffalo lawyer,
was set to work helping round up Eisenhower dele
gates. Sardonic Irish-born Tom Stephens, Republican
State Secretary, was turned loose in the primaries, first in
New Hampshire, then in crucial New Jersey. Jim Hag-
erty, the governor's press secretary, was assigned to
work with Brownell three weeks before and at the Chi
cago Convention and subsequently became "Ike's" cam
paign press representative; Gabriel Hauge, the young
Minnesota economist who has since been installed in the
White House, was recruited from Business Week to help
"Ike" on economics. Dr. Stanley High was ripped from
The Reader's Digest to help "Ike" on speeches. Batten,
Barton, Dursrine & Osborn the famous New York ad
vertising firm which had been Dewey's ally for a dec-
58 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
ade rolled over to the general's support on September
15th, after "Ike's" radio and television had been misman
aged. A special research unit, headed by Dewey's Com
missioner of Commerce, Harold Keller, and including
Dewey's Mediation Chairman, Mervyn Pitzele, and
Hickman Powell of the State Power Authority, also was
sent into action.
His help included himself, and week by week, despite
the pangs of literary parturition involved in the produc
tion of his first book, Journey to the Far Pacific, and the
legislative session at Albany, the governor sat in on the
conferences, advised, planned, and directed, until the
moment came for the most eloquent speech he delivered
in the entire 1952 campaign. That speech was delivered
at the Chicago National Convention of the Republican
Party. It was brief; it was unanswerable. Amid a chorus
of howls and boos from galleries allegedly packed by the
Chicago Tribune., Dewey made this oration: "New York
casts ninety-one votes for General Eisenhower, four
votes for Senator Taft." This was a mild preview of the
848,000 majority Dewey's state was to give the general
in November.
In summary, it can safely be said that, although Eisen
hower finally won the election almost by national ac
clamation, he would not have been nominated at all with
out the self-effacing, astute, and disinterested support of
Governor Thomas E. Dewey.
KINGMAKERS 59
3. A SENATOR
Senator James Henderson Duff of Pennsylvania was
second only to Governor Dewey in achieving the nomi
nation and election of President Eisenhower.
Like so many in the New Republican movement, Duff
is a Presbyterian. In fact, he is the son of a Presbyterian
minister, of that pugnacious Scotch-Irish blood which
gave Pittsburgh politics so much dash and color. It is typi
cal of the political atmosphere of that smoky town that
former Democratic Senator Joe Guffey, who used to be
a business friend of Duff's, remarked in 1950: "Jim Duff
has been a good Governor of Pennsylvania and he will
be a good United States Senator. Of course, we haven't
spoken for years since he called me a Communist."
Seventy years old, six feet tall, weighing about two
hundred pounds, with blue eyes and crew-cut red-gray
hair, the junior Senator from Pennsylvania made his way
up from the rectory at Mansfield (now Carnegie) in Al
legheny County, through the rough-and-tumble of oil
and gas leases into the bare-knuckle free-for-all that dis
tinguishes the politics of that region. He was a successful
"wildcatter" in the oil and gas business as later in pub
lic life which he entered by the somewhat obscure
route of graduating from Princeton in 1904 and studying
law at the University of Pennsylvania and later at Pitts
burgh University. He was a promising athlete at Prince
ton, although never Varsity material, and his younger
60 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
brother Joe, who was killed in World War I, was an all-
American football star.
Jim Duff first tried his hand at politics with Teddy
Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign in 1912 and after that
fiasco returned to the regular Republican fold with a
hearty suspicion of the Old Guard. However, his plans
for making a fresh political career were postponed in
1929 when he, along with a good many other Americans,
went broke. He was still paying off his debts, with an oc
casional free-swinging romp in the Republican state or
ganization, when Governor Martin drafted him for state
attorney general in 1943, when Duff was already sixty
years of age. Four years later Duff ran for the governor
ship, was elected, and then broke sulphurously with Joe
Grundy's Old Guard Republican machine in eastern
Pennsylvania. From that day to this, Duff's simple test of
political affiliation is whether a man is for or against Joe
Grundy and the Old Guard Republicans in the Keystone
State.
By that test, he opposed Dewey at the 1948 Repub
lican Convention. By that test, he smashed the Old Guard
in the 1950 primary which resulted in sending Duff to the
Senate and Judge John S. Fine to the governor's mansion
at Harrisburg. By that test, he lined up against Taft and
Grundy in 1952, helped "Ike" win the Pennsylvania
Presidential primary with over eight hundred thousand
votes, and completed his task, after a bitter feud with
Governor Fine, by swinging forty-four of Pennsyl-
KINGMAKERS 61
vania's seventy convention votes to Eisenhower and
helping bring Pennsylvania into the Republican column
on election day with a majority of over a quarter of a
million votes.
He was a good progressive Governor of Pennsylvania
during his four-year term, putting a stop to stream-pollu
tion and compelling strip mines to replace the top soil on
their cuttings. He managed the state's finances prudently,
despite a great hospital- and road-building program, and
he became nationally famous when he ordered highway
commission bulldozers to spill the parked trucks over the
side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike after the truckers
staged a sit-down strike on the roadway in protest against
paying suitable tolls. When he entered the Senate in
1951, everyone expected more fireworks from "Big
Red."
They were disappointed. The new senator devoted his
first two years in Washington to promoting the can
didacy of General Eisenhower. One of the first moves in
this game was a general treaty of amity and commerce
with Governor Dewey. The two men had so much in
common that their quarrel of '48 was forgotten and,
starting late in 195 1, Duff and Dewey conferred in New
York on the average of once a week, planning "Ike's"
pre-convention strategy. These New York meetings
were secret affairs at the Commodore Hotel and usually
included Herbert Brownell, Tom Stephens, New York
National Committeeman Russel Sprague, and later
62 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and Senator Frank
Carlson of Kansas.
Two incidents indicate how delicately balanced were
the personalities which decided the success of their cam
paign. For some weeks, Herbert Brownell hesitated to
give full time to the Eisenhower campaign on the sound
ground that he had committed himself to his firm not to
become involved in another political campaign. This
aroused unfounded suspicion in the Duff camp that
Dewey might secretly consider himself the eventual can
didate, and in the spring Dewey finally persuaded Brow
nell to devote his full time. Again, when Duff went down
to Texas, had a brisk quarrel with Henry Zweifel, the
Taft leader, and struck up a warm friendship with Jack
Porter, later leader of the Eisenhower forces in the Lone
Star State, the Dewey group were alarmed and took Duff
to task for preferring a fight to victory. Later Brownell
went to Texas and moved in to capitalize dramatically on
the failure of the Taft forces to deal fairly with the
elected Eisenhower delegates at the Mineral Springs
Convention. Paradoxically, the Taf tite grab of the thirty-
six Texas delegates, which was denounced as "theft" by
the "Ike-likers," ended with the latter getting all the
Texas delegates, including eight who fairly belonged to
Senator Taft.
Duff's style of campaigning is simple and neolithic.
Dewey stayed close to New York City and did his major
campaigning via television. By election day, the governor
KINGMAKERS 63
had actually appeared on television more than any other
political leader except Governor Stevenson. But Duff
went everywhere and spoke everywhere. Before the
votes were counted he had traveled over one hundred
thousand miles and had delivered hundreds of speeches in
support of the general.
But the victory was won before the campaign began,
in the course of those quiet, regular New York meetings
in which Dewey and Duff forged that mutual trust and
understanding of their aims and methods which created
the moral atmosphere for the Republican triumph. It is
no easy thing for strong, able men to agree in politics,
particularly when one of them is Duff and the other
Dewey, each of whom has vigorous personal convictions
and a willingness to go to bat for them at any time and
in any place.
With Brownell as the competent political chief of
staff, the man who got things done, and with Cabot
Lodge neglecting his own political fortunes to act as trav
eling salesman for Eisenhower, the Dewey-Duff com
bination proved irresistible. It paid off in enough dele
gates to nominate the general on the first ballot and in
enough votes on election day to make Eisenhower the
first Republican President with a broad popular mandate
in twenty-four years.
As a matter of record, Duff was almost the first na
tional Republican to come out for Eisenhower. That was
in 1948, when it was believed that Duff's support of
64 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
"Ike" was intended chiefly as a move to stop Dewey.
The latter was actually the first national Republican
leader to come out for Eisenhower: he spoke for "Ike's"
nomination as early as October of 1950 and stuck to his
position, whereas Duff, despite his detestation of the Old
Guard, voted for Taft in 1948.
The Old Guard angle is vitally important, for a large
part of the significance of the Eisenhower movement de
rives from the fact that its original leaders were chiefly
eastern Progressive Republicans. They were men who
had fought Old Guard Republican machines, and spon
sored and administered liberal social programs as gov
ernors of such industrial states as New York, Pennsyl
vania, and New Jersey. They were also men who had
broken with their party's traditional isolationism in order
to advocate aid to Europe and such other controversial
measures as universal military training, which had been
forced on the American people by the challenge of the
"cold war" with Soviet Russia.
Men like Duff and Dewey and Driscoll were branded
as "Me-too-ers" by their Old Guard opponents, but they
had pointed the Republican way back to national power
by refusing to allow the reactionaries to dominate public
policy. Such men had also discovered, what President
Eisenhower will swiftly learn, that in a pinch an honest
Republican executive can always count on decent Demo
cratic votes, in the legislature or at the polls, to carry the
KINGMAKERS 65
day for progressive government against the reactionaries
in the ranks of both parties.
Still happily married after nearly forty-five years to
the bride of his youth, Senator Duff stands high among
the kingmakers of the Eisenhower administration. He is
also a living reminder that the New Republicans are con
siderably older than the Republic. His own ancestors
came to New England in the early 1630's and his later
forebears settled in western Pennsylvania six years before
the American Revolution. The old Scotch-Irish breed is
tough and Jim Duff is tough. He represents an America
which, he believes from the soles of his firmly planted
feet to the tips of his bristling reddish hair, is morally and
physically tough, decent, and self-respecting.
4. A PUBLISHER
Many able editors and many powerful publications, in
cluding such giants of journalism as the New York Times
and the New York Her aid-Tribune y as well as men like
Roy Howard and the Cowles brothers, campaigned vig
orously for General Eisenhower.
But none of them made as effective a contribution to
"Ike's" crusade as did Henry Robinson Luce, co-founder
and directing genius of the most successful publishing
venture of the twentieth century, the Time-Life-For-
time magazine empire.
That is because Luce contributed to "Ike V cause not
66 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
only favorable editorial treatment but also personnel.
Luce lent two of his editorial aces, C. D. Jackson and
Emmet Hughes, as campaign speech-writers after "Ike V
opening utterances had showed the need of fewer plati
tudes and more punch lines in the oratorical contest
against the adroit and witty Adlai Stevenson. Luce also
encouraged his wife, the talented Clare Boothe Luce, to
campaign tirelessly for the general and made the signifi
cant negative contribution of not supporting Robert A.
Taft. This he might well have done since Luce and Taft
were fellow-members of Yale's legendary Skull-and-
Bones Society and were also linked by close ties of friend
ship with Taft's personal campaign manager, Dave In-
galls of Cleveland.
Harry Luce is a remarkable man.
He is the son of a missionary in China. Harry was born
in Tengchow, China in 1898, on the eve of the Boxer
Rebellion, and spent his boyhood in the Far East. Pres
byterian missionaries don't usually have much money to
finance a college education for their children, but Harry
was sent to Hotchkiss School, to prepare for Yale, under
the patronage of Standard Oil's Mrs. Edward Harkness.
That was in 1912, the year of Republican division and
downfall. Harry entered Yale in 1916 and graduated
with the class of 1920, having taken time out to serve as
second lieutenant of field artillery in the first World
War.
KINGMAKERS 67
As an undergraduate, Luce was fiercely eager to suc
ceed. A friend of Thornton Wilder and Steve Benet, he
wrote poetry. He also wrote for the Yale Daily News,
where he and another Hotchkiss boy, Briton Hadden,
made plans for a weekly news magazine. On graduation,
he staked himself to a year at Oxford and then returned
to get direct newspaper experience on the Baltimore
News, where Hadden was already working as a reporter.
In the winter and spring of 1922, he and Hadden made
detailed plans for the publication which eventually ap
peared in the spring of 1923 as Time, the Weekly News-
magazine.
The first seven years were the hardest and the publica
tion did not show a profit until 1928, but it taught Luce
the secret of success. He paid high salaries and gave stock
to his associates. Since he picked able editors and trusted
them, this method worked magnificently. In 1930, he
started Fortune, a de luxe job of business reporting edited
by the left-wing poet, Archibald Macleish. And in 1936
he launched the fantastically successful Life picture mag
azine, which nearly bankrupted his outfit because its cir
culation so rapidly outstripped its advertising rates that
it lost five million dollars before the journalistic gusher
could be brought under control. Other publications, film,
radio, and television enterprises have been included in the
Luce empire but the big money-makers are Time, with
a "readership" (original circulation plus pass-on readers)
of over three million a week and about one hundred mil-
68 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
lion dollars of gross revenue a year, and Life, with "read
ership" of twenty-six million and another hundred mil
lion dollars of gross annual earnings. The monthly total
net circulation of all the Luce magazines is over thirty
million and that means power as well as money. This
impressive journalistic success was made in its essentials
before Harry Luce was forty years old.
More impressive is the fact that the greatest growth
came after the death of Harry's friend, partner, and co-
genius, Briton Hadden, in 1929. It was to be six years be
fore Harry found another publishing partner of equal
brilliance, when he married Clare Boothe Brokaw, her
self a skilled magazine editor and successful playwright.
In fact, the marriage of this meteoric woman and this
monolithic publisher gave rise to the comment that, as
usual, when an irresistible force meets an immovable
object, they marry. At any rate, Luce divorced the wife
of his youth and the mother of his two sons, the lovely
Lila Holtz of St. Louis, whom he had met in Rome in
192 1 when he was still a student at Oxford.
Tall, well set-up, with thinning sandy hair, gray eyes
and a slight stammer, at the age of 55 Harry Luce is, as
many really shy men are, rather blunt and even aggressive
in manner. He is often regarded as a ruthless self-made
so-and-so but he is no penny-pincher and the proverbial
munificence of his salary scale has driven many of his
editors into premature stomach ulcers.
KINGMAKERS 69
His outlook on world affairs has been deeply colored
by his Chinese background. He was the first important
publisher to speak out for a bolder and more expert pol
icy toward China. While he has never been an "Asia-
first" man, he has agreed heartily with Lenin and Stalin
that the fate of the world will be decided in Asia. He has
strong opinions on practically every part of the globe and
his magazines frequently express themselves so vigor
ously that foreign governments bar their circulation. His
general attitude is one of simple American nationalism,
coupled with a semi-mystical sense of manifest destiny, a
belief that America can save and manage the world in
what he called "The American Century" this one. He
is not a political imperialist but he is, very definitely, a
moral imperialist who sincerely holds that the spiritual
values of American life are positive goods which can re
generate mankind.
He belongs in the New Republican Party as surely as
do Eisenhower, Duff, and Dewey. Like them, he is an
old-stock American with deep Colonial roots. Like them,
he was brought up in modest circumstances, made his
way by his own native ability, and achieved outstanding
success in free competition. Like them, he believes in the
basic virtues and in human character as the key to na
tional salvation. Like them, he has a strong missionary im
pulse. He has seen and known much of the world and be
lieves that America can yet save the human race from sin
and death. Next to Dewey himself, he has contributed
70 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
more in brains and manpower to this administration than
any other member of the Eisenhower team.
More important still, he has learned his own limita
tions and confines his political energies to the channel of
his publications. In 1950, there was talk of having him
run for the United States Senate in Connecticut and he
seriously considered a political career. But his publish
ing associates objected: "Harry," they told him, "you're
a damn good publisher but you may be a lousy Senator.
You don't know whether you could be elected. Why
jeopardize your magazines by getting into a game you
don't understand?" He blinked, swallowed and accepted
their advice one of the few American publishers on
record who has passed by the catnip of political office
and has stuck to his own line.
5. Two GENERALS
Two regular army generals, one willingly and the
other against his will, made a decisive contribution to
Eisenhower's campaign. Both had exchanged their khaki
uniforms for the striped pants of Big Business, both were
notably successful commanders and organizers, and both
were originally engineer officers, members of the aris
tocracy of brains in the West Point-army hierarchy. The
first was a trim, incisive Georgian named Lucius D. Clay.
The second was a spare, baldish, and dramatic native of
Arkansas by the name of Douglas MacArthur.
Lucius Clay was seven years younger than "Ike" and
KINGMAKERS 71
had graduated from West Point two years after him, in
1918. He promptly married his "one and only," Mar-
jorie McKeown, who is still his wife and the mother of
two grown sons. Clay was born of an old southern family
in the little town of Marietta, Georgia, the state which
supplied the famous Confederate General "Dutch"
Longstreet. He is an exemplar of the old southern tradi
tion of military service to the nation.
His career at first was that of a competent young engi
neer officer. It took him thirty years of service all over the
world to rise to the rank of general. For sixteen of those
years he lived and raised two sons on the pay of a first
lieutenant. He was always regarded as brilliant and at one
time taught engineering at West Point. Then he was as
signed to the vital training school of military logistics,
the rivers and harbors work of the army engineers. In
1937, he was called out to Manila to serve with Eisen
hower on MacArthur's Philippine staff. A year later he
was recalled to build the great Red River Dam in Texas.
After a brief tour of duty in organizing the defense air
port program for the Civil Aeronautics Authority, he
was brought into the War Department, where he became
deputy chief of staff in charge of the army's two hundred
billion dollar materials procurement program. In 1945
he was made deputy to Eisenhower and a year later be
came Deputy Military Governor of Occupied Germany;
he was promoted to command of all United States troops
in Germany in 1947.
72 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Scarcely had he received this last post when the Rus
sians, in retaliation against the Marshall Plan's threat to
finance the economic recovery of Europe without So
viet permission, blockaded West Berlin. Amid a welter
of confusing instructions from a chaotic administration
at Washington, Clay made and announced his dramatic
decision that America would never be driven from her
rightful place in Berlin. For his startling countermove,
the famous Berlin airlift, he was solely and personally re
sponsible. During the six months of the Russian blockade,
from April 1st to September 30th, Clay astounded the
military world by transporting more than two million
tons of food and fuel in British and American planes to
the relief of the beleaguered city. This feat made both
military and political history and marked Clay as one of
the finest organizers in the annals of the American Army.
Then, late in 1949, he returned to New York City and
accepted the position of chairman and general manager
of the great Continental Can Company, in which capac
ity by the way he raised that concern's sales to a rec
ord figure of four hundred and seventy-five million dol
lars in 1952. Dewey had admired Clay in the course of a
trip to Occupied Germany and West Berlin in 1949, and
asked him to take another job, that of unsalaried Chair
man of the New York State Civil Defense Commission.
Clay accepted, as a matter of course, and went to work so
unobtrusively that the governor did not see him again for
a number of months until it was time for the backstage
KINGMAKERS 73
planning for "Ike's" nomination. Clay became the tact
ful contact man and military intermediary between the
clandestine "Draft Ike" headquarters in the Hotel Com
modore and Eisenhower's SHAPE command near Paris.
He also did discreet missionary work for "Ike" among
the Big Business executives who were inclined at first to
favor Senator Taft.
The association between the two men was close and
friendly and contributed to the smooth handling of the
difficult problem involved in nominating a big man who
wasn't there and who had long refrained from giving any
public or private assurance that he would run if nomi
nated or serve if elected.
Not long after his inauguration, Eisenhower told a
luncheon guest that he had not really wanted to be Presi
dent but that his friends had taken charge until the draft
got out of hand and could no longer be controlled. Lu
cius Clay was in fact the chief of "Ike's" army friends
involved in this operation. Whereas the Big Brass "who
knew Ike when " were visibly disturbed at the prospect
of having a President who really knew the inner work
ings of Pentagon procurement, this efficient Georgian
selflessly placed himself at the service of his old com
mander and worked for his political success.
In this he provided a curious contrast with "Ike's" old
commander, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur.
MacArthur was born and bred in the old army of the
Indian fighting and the Spanish- American War. As the
74 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
son of General Arthur MacArthur, he first saw the light
in 1880 on an army post in Arkansas. Too young to fight
in the war with Spain, he graduated from West Point in
1903, at the head of his class, and entered the prize corps
of engineers as a second lieutenant.
Of his military and political promise there could be no
doubt from the very start. His career fully justified his
early brilliance: service in the Philippines, military aide
to "Teddy" Roosevelt, a part in Wilson's famous Vera
Cruz expedition, assignment to the General Staff at
Washington, infantry service in France in the first
World War, during which he was twice wounded in
action, duty with the Army of Occupation in Germany,
appointment as Commandant of Cadets at West Point,
elevation to the post of Army Chief of Staff from 1930 to
1935, retirement to the Philippines in 1935, and a con
tinuous record of historic military and political actions
in the Far Pacific from that time until his abrupt recall
from Tokyo by President Truman on April llth, 1951
for dissenting from the administration's policy on the
Korean War.
There is no need to appraise, despise, or exalt that great
record; it speaks for itself and his achievement as supreme
commander of the allied occupation forces in Japan was
so outstanding that he must be credited with having made
great contributions to Japan's reconciliation with the
West in the Japanese peace treaty which Dulles nego-
KINGMAKERS 75
tiated six months after MacArthur's enforced removal
from his high command.
For some eight years MacArthur was regarded as po
tential Presidential material. In 1944, Senator Vanden-
berg of Michigan took a trip to MacArthur's Australian
headquarters at Brisbane to canvass his "availability" for
the campaign against Roosevelt.
At that time he was unavailable and also suffered from
an inter-service feud of long standing with the navy. So
persistent was this feud that in 1942, during the doomed
defense of Bataan Peninsula, President Roosevelt was
compelled to send tactful orders to remind MacArthur
on Corregidor that at least some navy men were entitled
to citations and decorations for gallantry.
In 1948, MacArthur's name was entered in the Repub
lican primary in Wisconsin, his adopted state, but the
showing was a disappointment. However, the drama of
the Korean War, the desperate fighting around Pusan,
the daring Inchon landings, and the back-and-f orth surge
of the armies to the Yalu and back again and then north
once more to the 38th Parallel, placed the general in the
most favorable limelight. Quite naturally in one of his
age he was 72 he also tended to regard Eisenhower
as a man who had been his subordinate and "ghost
writer," as not his equal for the Presidency of the United
States.
Riding a wave of public distaste for the ungracious
manner of his recall, MacArthur soon became part of the
76 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
"Stop Eisenhower" movement; the skilled politicians
promoting Taft gave assurances that "Mac" was their
reserve candidate if "Mr. Republican" failed to win the
nomination. The opening days of the Republican Con
vention at Chicago witnessed a strange transplanting of
the old Hitlerian military mystique from Nuremberg to
the Stockyards: drum-taps and bugle calls, and repeated
mass pledges of allegiance to the flag, culminating in the
arrival of MacArthur himself, slender in civilian clothes,
modest, quiet, and unassuming, to deliver the keynote
speech. This was expected to be as dramatic and electri
fying as Bryan's famous "Cross of Gold" speech in 1896
and to produce a political stampede for Douglas Mac-
Arthur. It was a good speech, as all of his speeches are,
but it was a political anti-climax. When it was over, he
was over, too. He had lived too long outside the country
and was too old to speak to or for the present generation
of Americans. He was warmly applauded and swiftly
forgotten. The Eisenhower forces rode through to a
first-ballot victory for "Ike" and General MacArthur be
came a Big Business executive as Chairman of Reming
ton-Rand.
He had, however, made an important if unintentional
contribution to Eisenhower's victory. His prolonged
Presidential "availability" had helped prepare public
opinion for the election of a professional soldier as chief
executive for the first time in eighty years. And the
drama of his recall from Japan had given the Republican
KINGMAKERS 77
Party a major campaign issue in the form of general dis
satisfaction with the administration's self-defeating stale
mate policy in Korea. MacArthur did not offer Eisen
hower any assistance in the campaign nor was he asked to,
but "Ike" harbored no hard feelings and, after the elec
tion, promptly consulted him on the course to follow in
the Far East, where,MacArthur had served so long and so
brilliantly in war and in peace. For MacArthur, the
somewhat effulgent orator and the old soldier who could
not die and would not fade away, provided a perfect foil
for the younger general, whose brilliance was less marked
but whose sense of comradeship was strong enough to
overlook past differences for the sake of political solidar
ity and national unity.
Ill
ALL THE KING'S MEN
1. SHERMAN ADAMS
EVERY President is more than a single individual. In
his political and executive actions, he is a composite
of himself and his immediate staff. Thus Franklin Roose
velt was a tincture of Louis Howe, Marvin Mclntyre,
Eleanor Roosevelt, Steve Early, Sam Rosenman, and
Harry Hopkins. So was Mr. Truman a mixture of him
self, Matt Connelly, Clark Clifford, Harry Vaughan, and
John Snyder.
The White House staff of Presidential intimates can
develop along one of two lines. They can serve, as they
served Roosevelt until his illness in 1944, as avenues to
channel information into the President, or as a Palace
Guard, such as surrounded Truman, determined to fend
off outsiders and to "air-condition" the chief executive
with only such information and contacts as they wish
him to have.
In the case of Eisenhower, the White House staff so
78
ALL THE KING'S MEN 79
far has fallen into neither of these categories. It is, in fact,
a kind of composite political brain including three mem
bers of the "Dewey Team," and other aides trained and
tested by the actual political campaign which elected
"Ike" President.
Chief of staff for this operating unit is former Gover
nor Sherman Adams of New Hampshire. Fifty-four years
old, slight and taciturn, Governor Adams, like many suc
cessful New Englanders, does not look his part at all. He
might be a moderately well-to-do owner of a couple of
Gloucester fishing schooners instead of possessing a
rather remarkable record for achievement in both busi
ness and politics. He is the man who conducts the regu
lar 8:30 o'clock morning White House staff meetings
and directs the traffic of reports in and out of the Presi
dent's oval study. A sensible, even-tempered man, a cross
between David Harum and Henry Thoreau, he began
as "Ike's" 1952 political lucky piece and ended as the
pivot man in the Eisenhower group.
His first direct connection with the Eisenhower move
ment began with the famous New Hampshire Presiden
tial primary of March llth, 1952 the first and hence
the crucial test of "Ike's" standing with Republican
voters. New Hampshire's twelve delegates to the nomi
nating convention were at stake and the Taf t forces were
pouring in money and energy in an attempt to upset
"Ike's" bandwagon before it started rolling. Dewey sent
Tom Stephens up to Concord to work with Adams and
80 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
the whole nation watched while the "Ike-likers" had an
attack of underconfidence and the Taft-addicts became
correspondingly optimistic. But when the votes were
counted, all twelve Eisenhower delegates had been
elected, by a vote of forty-six to thirty-four thousand, in
an intensively conservative Republican constituency. At
this point, Governor Adams unobtrusively strolled into
the center of the Eisenhower group and has stayed there
ever since. He acted as "Ike's" floor manager at the Chi
cago convention and then as manager of the staff at Den
ver headquarters and on the campaign train, and was in
charge of the Eisenhower offices at the Hotel Commo
dore after the election. Unless he decides to try for a seat
in the United States Senate, now that he is no longer gov
ernor, there is every prospect that this shrewd, dry-
humored man of great affairs will stay on in the White
House as long as "Ike" is President.
Sherman Adams' whole career is, in itself, an almost
perfect illustration of the basic character of the Repub
lican resurrection. A descendant of the primeval Henry
Adams who founded the famous Massachusetts family
which has so far included two American Presidents, Sher
man Adams was born in East Dover, Vermont, early in
1899. Soon afterward, his parents moved to Providence,
Rhode Island, where he attended the public schools be
fore entering Dartmouth College in 1916. Two years
later he enlisted in the Marine Corps in World War I,
ALL THE KING'S MEN 81
but returned to college after the armistice and graduated
in 1920.
The following fall he went into the lumber business.
Fond of outdoor life, he rose from the ranks as sealer,
lumber surveyor, foreman, plant manager, and finally
manager of timberland operations for the Black River
Lumber Company in Vermont. In 1923, he married a
Vermont girl, Rachel White, and is the father of four
children three girls and a boy.
Up to 1940, his life might almost have been invented
by the Thornton Wilder of Our Town. An Episcopa
lian, at one time he sang for a year in the choir of Wash
ington's National Cathedral. He is director of several
trade associations, a director of the Pemigewasset Na
tional Bank of Plymouth, New Hampshire, and of the
Pemigewasset Railroad. He is also a member of the ex
ecutive committee of the Society for the Protection of
New Hampshire Forests, an honorary member of the
Amjnonoosuc Fire Wardens, a member of the New Eng
land Council and of the American Legion. He also be
longs to the Masons, Mystic Shrine, Elks, Moose, the
Grange and the Grafton County Farm Bureau. He has
raised funds for the U.S.CX, Russian Relief, and Navy
Relief. He is a friendly, persistent joiner of good causes
and fraternal organizations.
Adams was over forty when he first got mixed up in
politics. Running as a Republican in the town of Lincoln,
which was Democratic by nearly three to one, he was
82 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
elected to the New Hampshire state legislature by a large
majority. When he ran for re-election in 1942, he re
ceived the undivided vote of Lincoln and was chosen
unanimously as speaker of the house in 1 943 . The follow
ing 1 year he was elected to Congress from New Hamp
shire's second district and specialized on flood control
and labor legislation.
His first political setback came in 1946 when he was
defeated in the Republican primary for the governorship
of New Hampshire. So he took a couple of years out in
the pulp and paper industry and won the governorship
in 1948. New Hampshire is a stubborn political com
munity, but Adams made substantial progress in mod
ernizing the state's administration. However, the Yan
kees in the legislature refused to vote the new taxes
needed to finance his program, so Adams calmly turned
around and instituted a general retrenchment in the cost
of state government which was calculated to make the
opponents of taxation realize that economy also has few
charms for the practical politician. Then along came the
Eisenhower movement and Sherman Adams swung him
self aboard with the casual ease of a New Englander hop
ping aboard a train on his polysyllabic railroad.
Adams' contribution to "Ike's" White House opera
tion is both moral and practical, if such a distinction can
be made in politics. He is a good executive who is careful
not to stand between the President and his subordinates
whenever the latter need to see "Ike." With an orderly
ALL THE KING'S MEN 83
mind and a sense of business management, he keeps the
papers moving across the executive desk and the staff
busy on their assignments. He is also a center of unhur
ried common sense in the midst of great events. That is
perhaps his greatest value, a permanent patch of sunny
calm in the center of the storm.
2. THOMAS E. STEPHENS
It would be almost impossible to find anyone more
different in background and temperament from Sher
man Adams than his old partner in the New Hampshire
primary fight, the present White House Special Counsel
and Acting Appointment Secretary, Thomas E. Ste
phens.
But just as Governor Adams' job is one of the most
burdensome in the new Republican Administration,
Tom Stephens' role involves a continuous and nerve-
wracking responsibility for organizing the details of
the President's working day. He serves as the valve which
regulates the flow of official and unofficial visitors to the
impressive oval-shaped office which is the nerve center
of the government. Upon Stephens' judgment, to a great
extent, depends the orderly handling of the most im
portant schedule in the world and the good relations of
the President with leaders of Congress and business and
many powerful national organizations.
84 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Stephens, a slim, dark lawyer in his late forties, was
born and raised in Ireland. He has an unpredictable Irish
wit and a fund of humorous anecdotes which has en
abled him to relieve tension at the White House, much
as it did in his previous political associations. Stephens'
father brought him to this country at the time of the
Easter Rebellion and the execution of Sir Roger Case
ment when young Tom was thirteen.
As so often happens with the Irish when they emigrate,
he almost automatically became a politician. What was
extraordinary in Tom's case was that he became a Re
publican politician in Democratic Brooklyn. Perhaps it
was only a refinement of the Irish tradition to be "agin
the government." In any case, Stephens happened to be
come a precocious and successful operator in politics.
He was twenty-eight years old when he received his
law degree from Brooklyn Law School That was in
1932; in the same year he was appointed as Assistant
Corporation Counsel of the City of New York and as
signed to Albany, where he represented the city's in
terest in matters before the state legislature.
Then he served for a number of years as assistant to
the president of New York City's Council during the
Republican reform administration of the mid-thirties.
He took time out from politics during World War II to
put in nearly three years of overseas service as major in
the Air Force in the European theater, most of this time
in Italy.
ALL THE KING'S MEN 85
He returned to become an aide to Herbert Brownell,
now Attorney General, in the conduct of the 1948 Presi
dential campaign of Thomas E. Dewey. Brownell used
him with great success as a troubleshooter and as advance
man for the pre-convention primary contests around the
country. Stephens had resumed the private practice of
law, but politics made continual intrusions into his pro
fession. When John Foster Dulles was appointed by
Dewey to fill the Senate seat vacated by Robert F. Wag
ner, Sr., Tom came along as political secretary. Mr. Dul
les was defeated for election to the post in 1949, but he
liked Stephens so well that, when chosen for Secretary
of State, he vied with the President for the competent
young lawyer's services, offering him one of the top
spots in the State Department.
Stephens is a natural-born idea man and something of
a worrier. According to what can best be called internal
evidence, he probably would have been an advertising
genius. While he missed going into that field, he fell vic
tim to the advertising man's occupational ailment ul
cers. After many years of intense suffering, he submitted
to an operation which amputated a large part of his
stomach. Now the ulcers are gone, but his lean and
hungry look and the necessity for taking six meals in
stead of the normal three testify to the resultant impair
ment of his digestive equipment.
Although he is a stimulating and cheerful member of
any group he chances to be with, business or social, he
86 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
betrays at times an extreme pessimism. This is particu
larly true in things political, and may be merely the prod
uct of the many years of Republican reverses in the pre-
Eisenhower era in New York.
For example, at the January 20th, 1953 inaugural of
the general, Governor Dewey bumped into Stephens.
Tom was sedate, proper, and extremely restrained in ac
knowledging the warm greetings of his many friends
among the celebrating party big-wigs. To Dewey he
cautiously commented as the new President reviewed
his inaugural parade: "You know, Governor, I am now
about willing to agree this fellow Eisenhower is going to
get the nomination."
His theory of politics is simple and practical: take care
of the details. As a test of his theory, in early 1946 when
he was director of the campaign division of the Repub
lican National Committee, he once scored an impressive
upset and elected a Republican Congressman in a "sure"
Democratic Pennsylvania District. His first job on reach
ing New Hampshire for the primary was to take charge
of having an Eisenhower banner stretched across the
main street in the state capital. At the Chicago conven
tion he was credited with the ingenious trick, which in
furiated the Taftites, of having a loud-speaker truck
circle the Conrad Hilton Hotel, blaring piously: "Help
us keep Chicago clean! Please do not litter the sidewalks
with your used Taft buttons!" This, however, he em
phatically denies. His work with Governor Driscoll at
ALL THE KING'S MEN 87
Trenton, New Jersey paid off in another major Eisen
hower victory, when "Ike" beat Taft by over one hun
dred and fifty thousand votes. When Eisenhower re
turned to the United States in June, Tom was promptly
assigned as the general's appointment secretary and
served as such during the entire campaign.
With Stephens screening "Ike's" visitors and Jim
Hagerty handling his press relations, there might have
been some feeling among the Taftites that Dewey had
too firm a grip on White House mechanics or Tom him
self may have found the steady grind of the appointment
job too much for his truncated digestive equipment. At
any rate, "Ike" named him as White House Special
Counsel, the job previously held by Clark Clifford and
Charlie Murphy under Truman, and put Arthur Van-
denberg, Jr. in charge of the appointments. However,
the son of the late Michigan statesman became ill and
did not assume his White House assignment. Tom never
was relieved of the responsibility for the Eisenhower
calling list, despite the fact that the Commission signed
by the President indicated that he was to be the White
House lawyer.
Tom Stephens contributes an unconventional ap
proach to politics and an original mind. He is not only a
competent lawyer who for many years was a member of
successful law firms in New York and Washington; he
is also fascinated by all kinds of inventions.
88 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Stephens always has one or two hobbies going at full
speed and a couple more in the planning stage. On im
pulse, he once bought a farm in Virginia in partnership
with another lawyer with an equally meager agricul
tural background. They sold it just before Tom entered
the White House after a fling at absentee raising of
watermelons, pine trees, pigs, sheep, and ducks. The live
stock for the farm was obtained by tossing a neighboring
farmer "double or nothing" for them. Subsequently, he
took to growing mushrooms in a closet of his Washing
ton apartment. People said it could not be done. A small
circle of friends say that so far his crops have been good
no toadstools.
Tom Stephens may be an amateur at raising farm
products but he is an old pro at bringing in a harvest at
the polls. He learned how elections are won and lost in
Manhattan Island, one of the toughest political battle
grounds in the nation. The midtown district where Ste
phens and Brownell and Dewey received their political
baptism and much of their training was one of the few
Republican islands in the New Deal seas during the 'thir
ties and 'forties. He has rung doorbells, watched polling
places, observed and advised state legislatures, managed
city and state campaigns. His political "savvy" and keen
understanding of people are valuable assets, indeed, to the
President, who is the first to admit his own lack of ex
perience in the rough-and-tumble political game.
ALL THE KING'S MEN 89
3 . GABRIEL HAUGE
Next in order to join the Eisenhower group was Dr.
Gabriel Hauge, a Minnesota-born economist in his early
forties. A serious, heavy-built man, fair-haired and blue-
eyed, Hauge is a man of Norwegian ancestry, the son of
a Lutheran clergyman in the little prairie town of Haw-
ley, Minnesota, where "Gabe" was born.
Hauge possesses a clear, thorough kind of honest mind
which has carried him far and high in a competitive so
ciety. He graduated from co-educational Concord Col
lege in Minnesota in 1935. The following year he served
as its assistant dean of men, moving on to Harvard Busi
ness School, which gave him a master's degree in econom
ics in 193 8. Nine years later, Harvard gave him his Ph.D.
After graduating from the Business School he was ap
pointed budget examiner in the Minnesota state budget
bureau. The same fall he returned to Harvard, where he
taught economics for two years and then moved on to
Princeton for another two years, also as an instructor in
economics. He put in a summer vacation as senior statisti
cian in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York the year
which witnessed the outbreak of World War II.
After Pearl Harbor he promptly enlisted in the navy
and put in a four-year stretch as a lieutenant-commander
on the U.S.S. California in the Pacific theater. On being
demobilized in 1946, he returned to New York, where
Dewey's banking commissioner, Elliott Bell, promptly
90 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
grabbed him and made him chief of the State Banking
Department's Division of Research and Statistics. When
Bell left the state government to enter the great Mc
Graw-Hill publishing house in 1950, he brought Hauge
along to write the editorials on Business Week.
In the meantime, Hauge had married attractive Helen
Resor of Greenwich, Connecticut, a member of the great
J. Walter Thompson advertising family. The young
couple have four children including one set of twin
sons as well as two daughters. On the birth of the twins,
he stubbornly resisted the argument of his friends that
he should pass out two cigars instead of one. He is a de
voted, solid family man as well as a rock-like, level
headed man of affairs-
While recognizing Elliott Bell's prior claim on
Hauge's services, Governor Dewey kept his eye on this
extremely competent and loyal lieutenant. Dewey re
peatedly made use of Hauge's services in the prepara
tion of state papers and economic research. Both as a re
search man and as a speech writer, Hauge had the im
portant duty of supplying ballast and balance. He would
never hesitate to weigh the facts carefully before agree
ing to any line of political argument.
This kind of intellectual integrity is hard on the aver
age politician, but Dewey and others who worked with
Gabe found it invaluable. Honesty in thought, as well as
scrupulous care in expressing it accurately, are rare in
politics and that was what Hauge had to offer. In addi-
ALL THE KING'S MEN 91
tion, his own economic philosophy was entirely in tune
with that of the New Republicans. As became his Scan
dinavian blood, he believed in the "middle way" which
"Ike" was later to proclaim, avoiding both the Scylla of
unbridled individualism and the Charybdis of Marxist
mass management.
Early in 1952, Dewey pre-empted Hauge's spare time
and energies and set him to work in the temporary Eisen
hower headquarters at New York's Hotel Commodore,
in charge of research. Hampered by lack of funds and
of his own time, the young Minnesotan went steadily to
work and had much of the basic material needed for an
orderly Eisenhower campaign. Then, when "Ike" re
turned from Europe, Hauge automatically moved into
"Ike's" campaign staff at Denver, at Chicago, in New
York, and on the train as economic consultant.
Directly after his inauguration, Eisenhower appointed
Hauge as his administrative assistant, with the special
task of passing on all economic matters. Since, at least
in the opinion of professional economists, practically
everything in modern government has an economic
angle, this is a pretty large assignment. Hauge soon dis
covered that his office in the east wing of the White
House was too crowded and noisy. He had the calm
foresight to collar a large, air-cooled sub-cathedral on
the second floor of the old State-War-Navy Building,
right next to the Budget Bureau; this location has the
added advantage of being nearer to the President's of-
92 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
fice than was his old room over by the Treasury on East
Executive Avenue.
He has taken a house up near the National Cathedral,
moved wife and children down from New York, and is
prepared to work on national and world affairs just as
methodically as he used to work on his classroom lectures
at Princeton or on his editorials for Business Week. His
position and responsibility are, roughly, those of the for
mer chairman of the Board of Economic Advisers, the
highly vocal Dr. Leon Keyserling, but without the title
and, above all, without the publicity. Economic compe
tence and intellectual honesty may not save the world or
the nation but they can help and, so long as he can be
helpful, Gabe Hauge will stay and do his job, without
fanfare, complaint, or public recognition.
4. JAMES C. HAGERTY
The remaining member of the Dewey trio to leave
Albany in order to help "Ike" get to the White House is
a freckled and bespectacled ex-newspaperman who was
born in Plattsburg, New York shortly after William
Howard Taft became President of the United States.
James C. Hagerty has undertaken the man-killing job
of White House press secretary at the age of forty-four,
and is giving "Ike" the same dogged service and journal
istic common sense he previously gave Tom Dewey at
Albany for over ten years.
ALL THE KING'S MEN 93
Plattsburg is famous for three things: it was the scene
of Commodore Macdonough's naval victory over a Brit
ish flotilla in the War of 1812; it witnessed the volunteer
officers training school organized by General Leonard
Wood in 1915 to help prepare for World War I; and it
was the journalistic cradle of "Old Jim" James A.
Hagerty, since 1922 the political expert of the New York
Times.
Both "Old Jim" and "Young Jim" retain the Irish flair
for political quick-wittedness which guarantees a free
ringside seat at any political show.
Young Jim Hagerty never expected to enter politics.
He intended to be a newspaperman, like his father. After
preparing at New Jersey's Blair Academy, he went on to
Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1934.
As an undergraduate, he had acted as campus corre
spondent for the Times and on graduating with no
nonsense about attending that trade school for publicity
men known as the Columbia School of Journalism he
went straight into the city room of New York's most
distinguished morning newspaper. The Times city room
is a post-graduate course in applied journalism and, after
a four-year grind on police reporting, general reporting,
and rewrite, young Hagerty was sent to Albany as his
paper's legislative correspondent.
That was in 1938, the year of Dewey's first and all but
successful bid for the governorship. Jim stayed on as the
Times man in Albany until 1943, covering Dewey's vie-
94 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
torious campaign in 1942. He was completely taken by
surprise when the first Republican to be chosen governor
of New York in twenty years turned around and offered
him the job of handling his press relations at Albany.
After some hesitation, Jim accepted and remained a mem
ber of Dewey's staff until Eisenhower's victory com
pelled him to pull up stakes in Albany and move on to
Washington.
Life in Albany suited Jim right down to the ground.
Essentially a small-town upstate boy, he loves to play
golf, shooting in the middle eighties, and he enjoys the
feel of New York state politics.
Politics was in his Irish blood but he caught golf the
way some people catch epilepsy. It happened at Colorado
Springs in the summer of 1943, when he was covering
Dewey's pre-convention activities. Dewey was laid up
for a few days; to kill time Jim decided to try golf for
the first time. He immediately became a passionate, in
veterate, and devoted golfer, a man who swings a club
not always well but extremely hard, and even succeeded
in communicating this dread disease to his wife. When
he moved to Washington one of his first thoughts was
to locate a house not far from the Chevy Chase Country
Club. In 1950, when Dewey planned to retire as gov
ernor and practice law, he began to disband his "team."
Elliott Bell left the Banking Department for McGraw-
Hill, John Burton left the Budget Bureau to become
chairman of the State Power Authority, and Dewey's
ALL THE KING'S MEN 95
Secretary, Paul Lockwood, was moved onto the Public
Service Commission. For the remainder of his term,
Dewey promoted Jim to fill Lockwood's place, but kept
him still on his old press-relations assignment. Then pub
lic pressure compelled Dewey to seek a third four-year
term as governor and Hagerty stayed on as his secretary
until June of 1952, when he was lent to Eisenhower.
By then, Jim was an experienced hand in national
politics. He had served as Dewey's press secretary in both
the 1944 and 1948 Presidential campaigns. He had also
worked intimately with the dynamic governor on na
tional speeches and public policies. Liked and trusted by
Albany and Washington correspondents, Hagerty was
the inevitable choice to handle press matters for "Ike,"
before and at the convention and during the campaign.
His move to Washington meant more than a revolu
tion in residence. His whole pattern of living was al
tered, and for the better, by the general's old-fashioned
preference for early rising and early retiring. Dewey
is a late worker who thinks nothing of keeping himself
and his staff on the job until two or three in the morning.
Then he gets a respectable amount of sleep and shows up
in the office somewhere around eleven o'clock. Now
that Hagerty has to show at the White House by 8 A.M.,
it is almost as much of a strain on his habits as if he had
joined the staff on an afternoon paper.
A deceptively solemn man, his poker face often breaks
into a mischievous grin; he is a hard kidder, "dead-pan,"
96 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
but his tongue carries no sting. His contribution to Eisen
hower, apart from his personal familiarity with the me
chanics of the job and his wide friendship with news
papermen, is his ability to insist on that part of our
traditional "decent respect for the opinion of mankind"
which is represented by the pressure of a free press. Par
ticularly in dealing with the army, where commanders
frequently put their trust in censorship, it is valuable for
"Ike" to have a man around who knows the other side of
newsgathering and can judge fairly what should be told
and what can safely be withheld in matters of public in
formation.
While still on the Times, Jim married Marjorie Lucas.
They are in the tradition of the New Republicans, still
married and have two sons, the oldest of whom is at
Hamilton College preparing for a commission in the Ma
rine Corps while the younger will go to college in a
couple of years.
To help him in his White House press job, Jim reached
out and grabbed Murray Snyder, former Albany cor
respondent for the New York Herald-Tribune. This
selection gives a measure of Hagerty's sound political
judgment. Snyder is young, able, and highly-respected
in the newspaper world, which is fine. Equally fortunate
is the fact that Snyder has served a rock-ribbed Republi
can paper, whereas Jim's newspaper connections were
with an independent Democratic daily. So the political
books are neatly balanced in terms of New York journal-
ALL THE KING'S MEN 97
ism and Jim got the services of a first-rate assistant into
the bargain.
5. EMMET JOHN HUGHES
There are other significant White House appoint
ments in addition to Sherman Adams and the Dewey trio
men like young Vandenberg of Michigan; General
Wilton B. Persons of Alabama, the Georgia Tech gradu
ate who joined the Coast Artillery in the first World
War and rose to become the army's ace public-relations
officer and Congressional contact man; and Governor
Val Peterson of Nebraska, who spent a few days as
"Ike's" administrative assistant after both Nebraska sena
tors had vindictively blackballed him as ambassador to
India.
But perhaps as important an appointment as any was
"Ike V selection of Emmet J. Hughes, text editor of Life,
as principal Presidential speech writer.
The art of political ghost-writing is a delicate, diffi
cult and thankless one. If things go badly you are blamed;
if they go well, you become the target for intrigue and
jealousy. The job calls for two entirely contradictory
qualifications: an intimate and masterful awareness of the
whole political situation and a selfless subordination of
the writer to the character, personality, and convictions
of the man whose speeches he drafts. This combination
of statesmanship and humility is not easily found. For
example, Roosevelt used and discarded a whole stable of
98 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
ghost-writers: Ray Moley, Stanley High, Tom Cor
coran, Bob Sherwood, and always Sam Rosenman. Tru
man set up an oratorical assembly line, feeding the raw
material in a steady flow to his immediate operators, Clif
ford or Connelly, before standing up and delivering the
finished product. Dewey works hard and often exhaust
ing hours on every speech he delivers, usually in close
consultation with as many as seven or eight specialists,
writers, and advisers.
But Dewey actually dictates and edits every speech he
delivers, usually through three or more drafts, and in the
case of his book, Journey to the Far Pacific, he wrote an
average of four drafts of every chapter and worked on
it personally far into the night in addition to doing his
exacting job as governor.
When General Eisenhower returned shortly before
the Republican Convention, the ghost-writing situation
was naturally nebulous. "Ike's" own public-relations of
ficers were army-minded and out of their element in
dealing with American politics. At first, Dr. Stanley
High of The Reader's Digest was assigned to work with
the general, but as the campaign got tough someone was
needed who shared High's ideals and also understood
brass knuckles. There was only one place to go for that:
to Harry Luce. Luce promptly produced C D. Jackson
of Fortune to handle speech-assembly operations at
"Ike's" Hotel Commodore headquarters, and Emmet J.
Hughes of Life to accompany the candidate and fit the
ALL THE KING'S MEN 99
prefabricated New York output into the political pic
ture of the moment.
Only thirty-one years old and the son of a district
court judge in Summit, New Jersey, Hughes has an ex
tensive grounding in both propaganda and intelligence
work. He graduated from Princeton, Phi Beta Kappa,
summa cum laude, and with honors in modern European
history, in June of 1941 . That same fall he went on to do
graduate work at Columbia but, after Pearl Harbor,
abandoned his studies to join the Elmer Davis Office of
War Information. A devout Catholic, he was appropri
ately shipped to Madrid in August of 1942 and remained
there until May of 1946. In an effort to escape into active
military service, he enlisted in the army in Algiers as a
private, but was promptly sent back to Madrid, where he
continued to work for OWI, the State Department, and
military intelligence, winning a special intelligence cita
tion for "exceptional loyalty and devotion to duty."
After his discharge, he joined the staff of Time, which
sent him as bureau chief, first to Rome and then to Ber
lin during the period of the Russian blockade. Back in
New York again in 1949, he was appointed text editor of
Life. There he remained until early September of 1952,
when he was granted leave of absence to join Eisenhower
as a speech writer.
Emmet Hughes is a scholarly man with an incisive
mind and a preference for simple, direct vivid writing.
He collects Goya etchings, reads detective stories, and
100 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
plays a moderately good game of golf. He is the author of
two fairly good books, The Church and the Liberal So
ciety, which was a Catholic Book Club selection, and
Report from Spain, published in 1947, which earned him
the following "rave" from The Saturday Review of
Literature:
"Hughes has a logical, penetrating mind, a pre
cise workmanlike respect for accuracy, a mature
political judgment solidly based on a thorough aca
demic foundation, and an objectivity limited only
by a fervent respect for the dignity and freedom of
man."
His was a Life marriage since, in the course of his edi
torial researches, he made the acquaintance of a pretty
Life researcher named Eileen Lanouette. After exchang
ing notes, they decided to continue their research to
gether and were married. Their daughter, Mary Larkin
Hughes, was born a week before Eisenhower's election.
Benjamin Disraeli once said, "With words we govern
man." Hughes is "Ike's" word expert, but words of them
selves can mean no more than the man who writes them
intends them to mean. Sincerity, in the last analysis, is
the great bond which holds Eisenhower and his team to
gether. Hughes could not write a word for Eisenhower
which "Ike" does not believe or that Hughes does not also
believe. That is one secret of successful ghost-writing.
The other is that Hughes knows what to say. He rounds
out a smooth-running, first-class White House staff.
IV
THE STRIPED PAJVTAGOJV
1. A RECEIVERSHIP IN FOREIGN POLICY
THE New Republicans are the receivers in bank
ruptcy of the foreign policies they have inherited.
At the turn of the century, as a nation we more or less
unconsciously married ourselves to the British fleet and
nation. This was a period when the British fleet held the
peace of the world, but our timing was bad. It was on
the very eve of another period when the submarine and
airplane were about to challenge the basis of British sea
power. It was also on the very eve of an era when the
rising tide of Asian and Arab nationalism threatened the
foundations of the whole world-order,
As a result, the Republican receivers in bankruptcy
for fifty years of American foreign policy must try to
balance some startling and contradictory entries in our
diplomatic ledger:
China: We started the century with a determination to
maintain Chinese territorial and political integrity; we
101
102 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
insisted at Yalta in 1945 that China should break the
Nine-Power Treaty of 1922, which had affirmed our
traditional Far Eastern policy, in favor of the Soviet
Union.
Japan: We backed Japan against Russia in 1904-5; we
almost went to war with Japan over China in 1921; we
befriended her for a decade and then drifted into a Japa
nese war which ended in our again befriending, defend
ing, and financing this beaten Asian nation.
Germany: Theodore Roosevelt used our traditional
friendship for Germany to counterbalance British claims
on our diplomatic support. Woodrow Wilson brought
us into war against Germany in 1917. We supported the
German Weimar Republic and financed German repara
tions in the 1920's; we boycotted and eventually fought
Hitler's Germany; today we are befriending, defending,
and financing the West German Bonn Republic.
Russia: For most of the nineteenth century, we were
firm friends with Czarist Russia. Czar Alexander medi
ated with the British to gain us a favorable peace after the
War of 1812. During the Civil War, a Russian fleet pro
tected the Pacific Coast against Confederate raiders and
another Russian fleet visited New York as a reminder to
France and Britain that it could be risky to intervene on
behalf of the Confederacy. Then we gradually drifted
into hostility to Russia. We resented Russian en
croachments in the Far East, backed Japan diplomatically
THE STRIPED PANT AGON 103
in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, and broke our
commercial treaty with Russia out of resentment at
Czarist persecution of the Jews. For a short time in 1917
we hailed the Kerensky revolution with enthusiasm but
swiftly settled into dislike for, and opposition to, the
Communist regime. This opposition lasted until 1933,
when Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Government and
instituted a policy of friendship which led to outright al
liance and support in World War II. Yet by the end of
1945 we resumed our previous opposition to the Soviet
Government and gradually appointed ourselves as the
protector and protagonist of the free world against Soviet
enslavement.
Europe: We ended World War I insisting, under
the Wilsonian doctrine of national self-determination,
that Europe be divided into small national governments.
At the time it was not too inaccurately described as mean
ing that "every little language got a country all its own."
Twenty-five years later, we were insisting with equal
sincerity that Western Europe should unite in recom
pense for our thirty billion dollars of post-war assistance
and our treaty obligations under NATO to maintain
American troops for the defense of Western Europe
against the Soviet threat.
Disarmament: During the 1920's we vigorously urged
Europe to disarm; in the 1950's we earnestly pleaded
with the European nations to rearm in order to avert
catastrophe.
104 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
World Government: After the first World War, we
proposed and then rejected the League of Nations. Be
fore the second World War had ended, we proposed and
joined the United Nations and engaged in war in Korea
in the name of this organization.
Latin America: During all these decades of indecision
and sharp shifts in national attitude, we have alternately
blown hot and cold on Latin America. Theodore Roose
velt and William Howard Taft relied on "dollar diplo
macy" and the American navy in the Western Hemi
sphere. Woodrow Wilson intervened by force in Mexico
and in various Caribbean countries, to "shoot men into
self-government" and to protect American lives and
property. Franklin Roosevelt adopted Elihu Root's
"Good Neighbor" policy and poured Federal funds into
a program to keep the American Republics quiet dur
ing the war against the Axis. President Truman virtually
ignored this hemisphere and ignored, also, the ominous
spread of native Communist movements in Central and
South America.
Party Responsibility: So much for the record, now for
the accounting. The Republicans showed great skill and
interest in dealing with the Far East and in creating
peaceful political and commercial ties with other coun
tries, while every Democratic President in this century
involved us in a major war. Yet the responsibility for
these wars must be shared by both parties. Theodore
Roosevelt started our anti- Japanese policy by sending
THE STRIPED PANTAGON 105
the American fleet around the world in 1908. Herbert
Hoover's Secretary of State announced the so-called
"Stimson Doctrine" which by-passed the Nine-Power
Treaty and committed us to oppose Japanese territorial
gains brought about by force. Both parties cheered when
President Truman announced the even more spacious
"Truman Doctrine/ 7 which asserts our duty to defend
every nation against internal as well as external Commu
nist aggression. Intervention in Korea was also cheered
by both political parties and has not been disavowed by
either.
The task which faces the Republican receivers of an
American foreign policy which has collapsed in Eastern
Asia, is tottering in Western Europe and the Near East,
and is threatened in the Americas, is to substitute a politi
cal defense for the costs and risks of purely military pos
tures. The Republican theory has always preferred to
create a common material interest between the nations
so as to disarm in advance the political antagonisms which
precede militaiy hostility. This was the traditional meth
od of British foreign policy during the long, prosperous
century between the battle of Waterloo and the first
World War. By trade, investment, and the development
of backward regions, it was possible to dispel enmity in
advance by making our friendship mutually advanta
geous to all concerned.
Yet it is no longer certain that methods of international
conduct which sufficed in the day of the steamship and
106 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
the electric telegraph will serve as well in the day of the
atom and hydrogen bombs, the schnorkel submarine, and
the Third International. The force of nationalism has
become violently explosive in Asia, all the way from
Mukden to New Delhi, and is shaking the Arab world
from Teheran to Cairo and from Cairo to Capetown.
The evil legacy of American prejudice against the col
ored races was reinforced by Democratic control of our
government and has led to a situation in which the Com
munists can capitalize to our disadvantage on the rising
tide of color throughout three-fourths of the world.
Where fifty years ago we faced as proud republicans
a world of monarchy, today we are uneasy, conserva
tive capitalists facing a world of socialism, Communism,
flaming nationalism, and profound suspicion of economic
and political colonialism. The British Empire itself has
lost Asia and is no longer the great world-wide political
fact with which we lived in reasonable amity, punctu
ated by family squabbles, for over a hundred and
twenty-five years. The only empire which has expanded
during this century is the Russian, which now stretches
from the Elbe and the Upper Danube to Shanghai and
Canton. France, Austria, Germany, Turkey, Britain,
Italy: all other empires shrank or were dismembered. We
ourselves were placed in an imperial position but without
imperial control, and found ourselves committed to pay
annual tribute in men and materials not only to our allies
but to our beaten foes.
THE STRIPED PANTAGON 107
For the final item in the audit which the Republican
receivership must consider is this: after tremendous sacri
fices and brilliant military victories in Europe and in
Asia, we find ourselves faced with a far greater peril than
those dangers which we went to war to overcome. We
forgot that good fences make good neighbors. By crush
ing Germany and Japan, we confronted ourselves with
a Soviet Empire which was no longer restrained in Eu
rope or in Asia by powerful neighbors.
2. JOHN FOSTER DULLES
After a lifetime spent in preparing himself for the
position, John Foster Dulles became Eisenhower's Secre
tary of State at the age of sixty-five.
He is the first professional diplomat to head our for
eign office since Wilson dismissed Dulles' uncle, Robert
Lansing, over thirty years ago. He has entered upon his
duties with a grim determination that the State Depart
ment shall represent and speak for the American people.
Under his predecessors, thanks to lend-lease and Mar
shall Plan aid, the State Department often appeared to
act as agent for foreign governments, to a degree which
undermined its influence both with Congress and the
country. A large part of the initial bluntness of Secre
tary Dulles' approach to the West European govern
ments derived from the need to restore American confi
dence in the administration's diplomacy.
108 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
There are many conflicting views concerning John
Foster Dulles. Some regard him as a stiff shirt, others as
a reactionary, still others as a man who will "get us into
trouble," as though we were not already in trouble. The
British complain of his "duplicity" in negotiating the
Japanese peace treaty; the Soviets call him a spy and
saboteur and accuse him of having started the Korean
war!
The truth is that Secretary of State Dulles is part and
parcel of the entire Eisenhower Republican movement.
He is the son of a Presbyterian minister and was brought
up in Watertown, New York. His family was far from
wealthy, but his mother's father was John W. Foster,
Secretary of State under President Benjamin Harrison,
and his uncle was that Robert Lansing who replaced
Bryan as Wilson's Secretary of State after the sinking of
the Lusitmia, He came of age and began his successful
professional career, after studies at Princeton, the Sor-
bonne, and George Washington University, before there
was any Federal income tax and before the completion
of the Panama Canal made us a world power. This was
in 1911, when success was measured more by money,
and by skill at defending money, than by social position
or intellectual attainment.
His attainments were notable. He started practice with
the famous international Wall Street law firm of Sulli
van & Cromwell President Wilson used him for negotia
tions with Panama and other Central American coun-
THE STRIPED PANTAGON 109
tries, in the effort to hold Latin America in line during
our participation in the first World War. He enlisted in
the army in 1917 and served as a major on the general
staff and later on the War Trade Board. He was one of
Wilson's advisers at the Paris peace conference in 1919
and worked with Hoover on European relief.
During the 1920's and 1930's, Dulles became famous
for his successful international law practice, and learned
the method of personal diplomatic negotiation in twenty
years of dealing with foreign agencies and governments.
He also traveled in the Far East and interested himself
deeply in the work of the Federal Council of Churches,
regarding the Christian forces of this country as a vital
influence in shaping a just foreign policy.
Toward the close of the second World War, Dulles
was a member of the American delegation to the San
Francisco Conference, where he helped frame the U.N.
Charter. He also served as American delegate at the U.N.
Assembly sessions in 1946, '47, '48, and '50.
In 1944, when Dewey initiated the bipartisan foreign
policy, he sent Dulles to confer with Secretary of State
Hull in order to keep foreign policy out of politics in
the campaign. During the 1948 contest, Dulles was
Dewey's adviser on foreign affairs and slated to be his
Secretary of State. The following year, Dewey ap
pointed him to the Senate to replace the late Robert
Wagner, who had resigned.
The campaign which followed was an acid test of bi-
110 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
partisanship which called Truman's bluff. The Demo
cratic President threw the full force of administration in
fluence into an attempt to defeat Dulles and succeeded in
electing Lehman as Senator from New York after a strug
gle marked by characteristic Democratic resort to re
ligious and racial bigotry. For a while Dulles considered
waiting in order to run against Lehman again in 1950;
then he swallowed his resentment and returned to the
State Department as special adviser with special reference
to the Far East.
He visited Korea and inspected the Korean defenses
on the 38th Parallel a few hours before the Communist
sneak attack. Following Truman's decision to intervene
in defense of the Korean Republic, Dulles took astute
advantage of the changed world situation to negotiate
the Japanese peace treaty on terms of mutual reconcilia
tion and respect. London was not enthusiastic, due to
British fears of Japanese trade and shipping competition,
but Dulles was persistent. He got the treaty and appeased
the uneasiness of Australia and New Zealand by negotiat
ing treaties of common defense with those exposed Pa
cific British dominions. This further exasperated the
London government which, like Canada, was already a
member of NATO, and argued that Britain should also
sit in on the American-Australian-New Zealand alliance.
Dulles' visit to London, after Eisenhower's inauguration,
was a frosty affair but the moribund European defense
treaty took on an appearance of life as a result of his
THE STRIPED PANTAGON 111
negotiations after he had made it abundantly clear that
future American aid was contingent on European co
operation with the public purposes for which the Ameri
can people taxed themselves to provide that aid.
On the record, John Foster Dulles is, therefore, a
man of very considerable attainments, both as a lawyer
and as a diplomat.
His career, in turn, reflects his character and back
ground. He is an elder of the Presbyterian Church and
a deeply religious man. In 1912 he married the former
Janet Avery of Auburn, New York, and has three chil
dren and seven grandchildren. His son Avery is training
to be a Jesuit priest and nothing in Dulles' long public
life angered him so much as Senator Lehman's dishonest
charge during the 1949 New York Senatorial campaign
that Dulles was a religious bigot.
Dulles used to play golf and tennis when younger;
even now, whenever possible, he flies with his wife to
camp out in a simple log cabin at his favorite retreat,
Duck Island in Lake Ontario. He owns this small island
as well as nearby Yorkshire Island, and he and* Mrs.
Dulles do all their own work on these trips. Although
there -is no record of his having equalled "Ike's" ability
to bake a lemon meringue pie, the Secretary of State is
an excellent cook and takes particular pride in his ability
to deal rightly with venison. He is also a connoisseur of
wine. He is a good bass fisherman and a good shot and an
expert sailor. Incidentally, Duck Island may have taught
112 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
him a useful lesson in caution. At one time there was a
sizable herd of buffaloes on his domain, but they have
died out, due to their attempts to cross to the mainland in
winter before the ice on Lake Ontario was thick enough
to hold their weight.
Apart from camping, hunting, sailing, fishing and
cooking, his chief diversion is bridge. He plays a sound
but rather too deliberate game. He also used to play chess
with his brother Allen, but they gave it up by mutual
consent when they found that the average game con
sumed five hours of their crowded time.
Dulles went along with Dewey in supporting Eisen
hower but, after consulting with "Ike" and Dewey, re
frained from endorsing "Ike" in the pre-convention
period in order to work amicably with the Taft sup
porters on the foreign-policy plank in the 1952 Republi
can platform. As a former Senate colleague of Taft's,
Dulles was careful to keep on friendly terms with "Ike's"
rival and he also paid high tribute to General MacArthur,
another rival, for his share in the Japanese treaty.
Whatever he may appear in Soviet eyes, Dulles is no
warmonger and behind his soft shirt lurks a very astute
gentleman. In fact, it is a fair guess that some foreign
criticism of his appointment represents annoyance at our
having a Secretary of State who really knows interna
tional affairs, after the almost unanswerable series of Ed
Stettinius, Jimmy Byrnes, George Marshall, and Dean
Acheson,
THE STRIPED PANTAGON 113
Before his appointment, the chief Republican criticism
of Dulles stemmed from the fact that he suggested Alger
Hiss, among others, to head the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, of which Dulles at the time was a
trustee. However, Dulles declined to appear as character
witness for Hiss after the latter's exposure and was one
of the witnesses for the prosecution. On being nominated
by Eisenhower, Dulles insisted that the FJB.L investigate
his own loyalty before he sought Senate confirmation.
In his necessarily cautious dealings with Senator Mc
Carthy, he began by taking the position that he would
not challenge or interfere with the right of Congres
sional investigation and that he had no time to waste in
defending a set of suspect circumstances created by his
predecessors. However, he did not hesitate to fight Mc
Carthy's attempt to block the nomination of Charles
Bohlen as ambassador to Moscow.
He is a strong, experienced American of Scotch an
cestry reaching far back before the Revolution and with
a family tradition of distinguished public service. His
selection as Secretary of State was almost automatic,
once Dewey declined the post. If brains and character
can rescue American foreign policy, John Foster Dulles
is the man best equipped for the job since President Mon
roe picked John Quincy Adams to head the State Depart
ment after the Napoleonic wars one hundred and thirty-
five years ago,
114 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
3. THE STATE DEPARTMENT
The reorganization of a huge bureaucratic machine
with forty-two thousand employees, packed with the
seedy relics of such wartime agencies as O.W.L, B.E.W.,
and O.S.S. and riddled with scandal, is too big a job for
one man. With the Foreign Service, officials can be
shifted from post to post, rewarded with ambassadorial
responsibility or shipped to Bulawayo, but the depart
ment itself is buttressed by civil service and battlemented
by loyalty and security requirements which make any
change slow and difficult.
Secretary Dulles has made a cautious beginning. With
General Walter Bedell Smith as undersecretary and the
former head of Quaker Oats, fifty-nine-year-old Donald
Lourie of Chicago, to handle administration, the secre
tary's hands should be free to conduct foreign policy, al
though it is estimated that in the first three months he had
scarcely five minutes of time for that purpose. He per
sonally picked Herman Phleger, the eminent California
international lawyer with extensive practice in the Pa
cific and the Far East, to serve as legal adviser. Former
Congressman Thruston Ballard Morton of Kentucky,
one of the casualties of the Taf t-Eisenhower pre-conven-
tion struggle, was selected to handle relations with Con
gress. Robert Johnson, president of Philadelphia's Tem
ple University, was chosen to take charge of the Voice
of America, which had started to crack painfully in the
THE STRIPED PANT AGON 115
process of changing from an elfin treble to the desired
deep bass.
For his own "kitchen cabinet," Dulles picked two
young men whom he had known for years and who were
deeply loyal to him personally: Carl McCardle and Rod-
eric O'Connor. They are so representative of Dulles'
judgment of men that they can be taken as a general re
port on the spirit of his whole departmental reorganiza
tion.
Roderic L. O'Connor comes of a well-to-do Irish
Catholic family which has lived in Manhattan for three
generations. A slender, fair haired young man of thirty-
one, with a large head though a level one, he attended St.
Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire and Yale
University, which gave him a law degree in 1947. Dur
ing the war itself, Rod was a navigator in the Army Air
Corps and served in the Mediterranean theater from
March of 1943 to October of 1945.
After completing his studies, he was associated with
the New York law firm of Kelley, Drye, Newhall, and
Maginnes and also made himself active in the New York
Young Republican organization. When Dewey ap
pointed Dulles to the Senate, the Young Republicans de
manded "recognition" in the form of a job for one of
their number as Dulles 7 assistant in Washington. Since
Rod met the specifications, he got the job. He worked in
Washington and during the 1949 campaign with Tom
Stephens on the political end of Dulles' senatorial career.
116 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
After Lehman and Truman had combined to defeat
Dulles, Rod went to Germany to do legal work for the
Department of Defense in connection with our occupa
tion policies. He returned just in time to follow the Eisen
hower campaign, but as a government employee was
barred by the Hatch Act from taking an active part.
Asked by Dulles to come to work for him again, O'Con
nor acted as Dulles' detail man in organizing the approach
to his State Department duties during the interregnum
between election and inauguration day. He accompanied
Dulles and Stassen on their quick tour of the West Euro
pean capitals early in February of 1953. In his State De
partment 'job as special assistant, he has as colleague John
W. Hanes, Jr. of North Carolina, son of the John Hanes
who was once Roosevelt's Undersecretary of the Treas
ury. Young Hanes is also a Yale graduate, class of '49,
and also served a three-year stretch in Occupied Ger
many in the Office of the High Commissioner.
By contrast with this Ivy League duo, Carl Wesley
McCardle comes into the State Department by a much
longer route. A native of West Virginia, under fifty,
McCardle was Washington correspondent of the Phila
delphia Bulletin at the time when Dulles picked him as
Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs.
McCardle is tall, dark, large, and excitable, a profes
sional newspaperman whom Dulles met and liked in the
course of the various international conferences which
McCardle had been assigned to cover for the Bulletin.
THE STRIPED PANT AGON 117
Like Dulles, McCardle is of Scotch descent with a
small-town rural background. His father worked for the
telephone company in Morgantown, West Virginia.
From the very start, Carl had printer's ink in his blood.
After graduating from the local high school, he ran a
county weekly paper in Cameron, West Virginia. Then
for a year he taught school at Windy Gap where he also
served as correspondent for the Moundville Daily Echo.
He next went to Washington and Jefferson College in
Pennsylvania, and also worked at night as reporter for
the Washington Observer. After that he went on to
study law at Temple University in Philadelphia, accom
panying his studies by working as copy boy on the
Bulletin. He received his law degree in 1931 but has
never been admitted to practice.
The Bulletin promoted him rapidly, to feature writer,
to diplomatic correspondent, to Washington corre
spondent, to European correspondent, finally making
him head of its Washington bureau in 1949. In the course
of this career, McCardle covered Hitler's seizure of Aus
tria and Czechoslovakia. From 1943 on, he covered most
of the major diplomatic conferences: Hot Springs, At
lantic City, San Francisco, the meetings of the Council of
Foreign Ministers in Moscow, Paris, London, and New
York, and the sessions of the United Nations.
Dulles soon found it useful to take McCardle along on
his own special trips and the two were together in Korea
just before the Communist attack in June of 1950 and
118 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
conferred with Mac Arthur in Tokyo before it was known
whether Truman would intervene. They were actually
airborne back to America when they received the fateful
word that American troops had been ordered into action
in Korea. They also traveled together on the various
trips required to negotiate the Japanese treaty.
His State Department job brings in a man who has a
sense of journalistic statesmanship which is rare in Wash
ington. No Press Club Bar "kingmaker," McCardle is a
responsible reporter with a talent for personal friend
ships. He is no administrator and has the reputation of
never being on time for any appointment, but in his
present position he is mercifully not required to perform
any administrative duties, but rather to hold himself free
to work with Dulles on large affairs. He is highly emo
tional and frequently attacked with political jitters, and
has made enemies as well as friends, both in the Wash
ington press corps and in politics.
As with so many of the New Republican leaders, Carl
McCardle is essentially a small-town old-stock American.
He married at the age of thirty and he and his wife, the
former Dorothy Bartlett of Philadelphia, have one child,
a daughter.
However, McCardle is much more than a camouflaged
super-State Department press officer. Secretary Dulles
values his advice on matters of policy quite as much as
on the proper wording of a press statement or the draft
ing of a speech.
THE STRIPED PANTAGON 119
4. ENVOYS EXTRAORDINARY
With our European alliance in jeopardy, London,
Paris, Rome, and Bonn automatically became the chief
political posts for our diplomacy. Career diplomats could
be and were assigned to such important centers as Tokyo,
Madrid, and Moscow, but the Eisenhower administra
tion decided that in the chief capitals of Western Europe
our envoys should represent the moral, material, and in
tellectual leadership of the New Republican Party.
In point of fact, London had always been the chief po
litical post in American diplomacy. With important eco
nomic and currency issues arising between Washington
and London, Eisenhower picked as ambassador the great
est institutional banker in the United States, sixty-seven-
year-old Winthrop W. Aldrich of the Chase National
Bank. The age of the great personal bankers, such as J. P.
Morgan and George Baker, had passed with the Banking
Act of 193 5, much of it the work of Aldrich himself. As
chairman of the board of directors of New York's gi
gantic Chase Bank, he not only possessed a mastery of the
financial and monetary elements in Anglo-American re
lations; he had also backed "Ike's" Presidential candidacy
with all his very great influence and experience.
Aldrich was, in fact, almost the last of the "Old Re
publicans" in that he was born to moderate wealth in
Providence, Rhode Island, in 1885. His father, Nelson
Aldrich, was a United States Senator for thirty years,
120 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
the co-author of the famous Payne-Aldrich tariff which
wrecked the Taft administration, and the chairman of
the National Monetary Commission which foreshad
owed the creation of the Federal Reserve system. Yet
when Aldrich testified to a Senate committee that his per
sonal fortune was only three hundred thousand dollars,
one Democratic Senator refused to believe him and then,
convinced of the facts, opposed his nomination to Lon
don on the ground that the great banker was too poor to
maintain the post.
Up to a certain point, Winthrop Aldrich's career
might have been composed by John Marquand. He
graduated from Harvard in 1907 and from Harvard
Law School in 1910. He entered a private law firm in
New York in 191 1 and, after a stretch of service on con
voy duty with the navy in the first World War, he
joined the law firm which served as counsel for the
Equitable Trust. With the onset of the panic of 1929, he
became president of the Equitable. A year later he
merged it with the Chase bank, and became its president,
being elected as chairman of its board in 1934, a post he
held until "Ike" sent him to London. A former Chase
attorney, John McCloy, who had been United States
High Commissioner in Germany, chairman of the World
Bank and Assistant Secretary of War, then replaced Al
drich at the Chase. The bank is in good hands.
A recital of Aldrich's directorships and public activi
ties, including his many charities, would be tedious. Suf-
THE STRIPED PANTAGON 121
fice it to say that Winthrop Aldrich is a personally un
assuming man who has led a quiet and rewarding life.
Since 1916, he has been married to the former Harriet
Alexander, is the brother-in-law of John D. Rockefeller,
Jr., and is the father of six children, all but one of whom
are living.
The Aldrich family is of old Colonial stock, originally
emigrating from Derbyshire, England and settling in
Massachusetts in 1631. His clear-headed sponsorship of
banking reform after the 1929 panic marked him as a a
traitor to his class" in the sense that it purged high finance
of high-level racketeering, but it also entitles him to
respect as an economic statesman. So obviously was he
"Ike's" choice for London that his nomination leaked to
the press before the State Department could ask the usual
Foreign Office clearance; Anthony Eden and Winston
Churchill were rather miffed to read the news in the
papers before their official sanction had been requested.
To Germany, by contrast, Eisenhower has sent, not a
banker but a chemist, former President James Bryant
Conant of Harvard, to serve as our High Commissioner
and, on ratification of the overdue Germany peace con
tract, as our ambassador to Bonn. Conant comes of an old
blue-blooded Bay State codfish-and-bean family and re
cently distinguished himself by his work on the atom
bomb. Following liberal educators such as Eliot and
Lowell, Conant faced a difficult job when he became
president of Harvard in 193 3, when only forty years old
122 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
and a chemist into the bargain. Before that time he had
served as a major in the Chemical Warfare Section of the
army in World War I and had returned to teach at Har
vard and to study in Germany. His work on hemoglobin
and the chemical structure of chlorophyll which holds
the secret of plant growth as well as of sweet breath
gave him world recognition.
Bonn is not his first diplomatic assignment. He negoti
ated the wartime agreement for exchange of scientific
defense information with Great Britain, and he went to
Moscow with "Jimmy" Byrnes in 1945 in the vain at
tempt to persuade the Soviet Government to agree to
U.N. control of atomic weapons. At the time, Conant
did not know that, partly as a result of his British agree
ment, Dr. Emil Fuchs had been able to steal all the neces
sary atomic information for Soviet benefit and so en
abled Stalin to roll his own uranium nightmare. There
was also a little difficulty before the Senate confirmed
Conant in his diplomatic post, because the former presi
dent of Harvard had uttered the heresy that Communist
beliefs do not necessarily disqualify a college professor
for teaching his subject. This lapse from academic grace
was mercifully overlooked and Conant is now at Bonn,
barely 60, interested, intelligent, and prepared to do his
part in knitting Germany to the West, where she be
longs. It is scarcely necessary to add that Conant, like
other New Republicans has stayed married to the same
wife, Grace Thayer Richards, also of old Boston ances-
THE STRIPED PANTAGON 123
try, since their wedding thirty-two years ago. They have
two sons and, when in Boston, inevitably reside on Cam
bridge's famous Quincy Street.
Another great European post, Rome, is to be the scene
of a noble diplomatic experiment: the appointment of
Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce as the first American woman
ambassador in a city which for over two thousand years
has considered woman's place as being well, certainly
not behind a desk in the American chancellery.
The wife of Harry Luce has an almost unique capacity
for causing controversy. This is partly because she has,
unlike most people, a hard, clear mind, and a clever, tart
tongue in addition to beauty, money, and fame in her
own name as a successful playwright. All that is pretty
hard for most men and all women to take. Actually, ex
cept for a couple of divorces, her own and her present
husband's, she comes closer to following the New Re
publican pattern than does any one of the other three
political envoys extraordinary to Western Europe. Her
grandfather was a Baptist minister in New England. Her
father was a violinist in New York City, where she was
born. After his death, she was brought up by a stepfather
in Greenwich, Connecticut, and had to make her own
way by wit, brains, and charm in a highly competitive
social and business world.
She made that way with irritating ease and exasperat
ing success: married and divorced wealthy George T.
Brokaw; worked for Vogue and Vmity Fair, becoming
124 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
the latter 's managing editor in 1933, and an extremely
good one, too; wrote three books, not bad ones, and three
successful plays, including "The Women." In 1935, she
married Harry Luce. She also distinguished herself as a
war correspondent, was elected to Congress as one of
Connecticut's representatives, and was going places po
litically.
Then God reminded her of His existence. Her only
child, Ann Clare Brokaw, was killed in an automobile ac
cident in 1944. Clare Luce turned, as many hurt souls do
turn, to the Catholic Church for consolation and was
widely hailed as one of Bishop Fulton Sheen's prize con
verts. Most people, including Clare, would think that
God had something to do with it. In the 1952 campaign
she went all out for Eisenhower and was believed to want
the job of ambassador to Mexico. But "Ike" decided
otherwise and the Eternal City was somewhat startled
to learn that a woman a woman would be the next
American ambassador. Rome has dealt with Cleopatra,
Messalina, and Lucrezia Borgia, but it is doubtful that
anyone like Clare Luce has challenged its social attitude
in all the intervening centuries.
It will provide a severe test of all Clare's skill and wis
dom to counteract the Latin attitude towards members
of her sex, to still the searing Roman gossip, and to escape
the mocking malice of Italian society. Perhaps it will
work out, perhaps it won't, but if it doesn't it will be the
first time in Clare's career that she has failed to master any
THE STRIPED PANTAGON 125
situation in which she found herself. Still slender, blonde,
blue-eyed, and beautiful at 50, she has an ambitious man's
mind in a small feminine body. If anybody can pull off
her assignment in the Rome of Pius XIII and Alcide de
Gasperi, Clare Luce can do it.
5. OPERATIONS
Republican Party politics also raised its lovely head
in the selection of two of Secretary Dulles' chief col
leagues in operating our foreign policy: Harold E. Stas-
sen and Henry Cabot Lodge.
Stassen was born on a farm in Minnesota's Dakota
County in 1907, the son of parents recently emigrated
from Central Europe.
He graduated from the University of Minnesota,
which also gave him his law degree in 1929. In law school
he roomed with Wayne Morse, the future Senator from
Oregon. After graduation, Stassen practiced law in his
own firm in the Twin Cities, served for a while as a
county attorney, and then was elected as Republican
reform governor in 1938. There had been a rebellion
against the corruption of the Farmer-Labor Party state
administration, which had imprudently proposed to raise
the tax on iron ore mined in the Mesabi Range, and Stas
sen won.
He made a good record as governor, being elected for
three consecutive two-year terms; he delivered the key-
126 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
note speech at the Republican National Convention of
1940 in Philadelphia, where he was Wendell Willkie's
floor manager. He resigned as governor to join the navy
in 1943 and served as flag secretary to Admiral "Bull"
Halsey for two years in the Pacific, earning citations for
gallantry in battle. After serving on the United States
delegation at the San Francisco conference in 1945, Stas-
sen traveled widely in Europe and Russia, wrote the in
evitable book, and turned up as a Presidential candidate
in the Republican Convention of 1948. In the compli
cated shuffle which followed Dewey's nomination by
that gathering, Stassen received the post of president of
the University of Pennsylvania as a sort of academic con
solation prize.
A professed liberal in politics, he was again a candi
date in 1952, winning delegates in Minnesota and Wis
consin, but almost missed the trolley at Chicago, when
Senator Thye swung the Minnesota delegates to Eisen
hower before Stassen could make up his mind to release
them. However, Stassen immediately came to Eisen
hower's support in the campaign and was rewarded after
the election by being placed in charge of our foreign-aid
operations as Mutual Security Administrator. As such,
he accompanied Dulles on their quick "look-see" tours
of Western Europe and the Near East.
Happily married and the father of two young chil
dren, a boy and a girl, at forty-six Stassen has yet to
satisfy the general public that he is more than the intelli-
THE STRIPED PANTAGON 127
gent opportunist he often appears. Wayne Morse used
to like him but no longer approves of him; however,
Morse approves of scarcely any member of the human
race these days. Certainly there's more to Stassen than
opportunism. He is able, energetic, and has attracted a
large personal following in the schools and colleges. He
has pitched in and is doing a wholehearted job for "Ike."
His, too, is an American story, up from a prairie farm to
the presidency of a great university and to high official
position, with only his own brains to back him.
Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, our ambassador
to the United Nations council, represents another kind
of political debt, a debt of honor.
Lodge lost his Senate seat to young John Kennedy of
Boston's emerging "Venetian-blind Irish" after concen
trating on "Ike's" pre-convention fight and on "Ike's"
Presidential campaign. He had faced sure defeat before
"Ike's" nomination and his sponsorship of the victorious
general did not save him, although it helped.
He is now in his fifty-first year, the grandson of the
famous Senator Henry Cabot Lodge who smashed
Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations after
World War I, and is the brother of John Lodge, lawyer
and former movie actor who is now the Republican gov
ernor of Connecticut. Although the Lodge family goes
far back into Massachusetts history, they are relatively
new in Boston, where they have been prominent for
only a hundred years or so. Cabot, as Lodge is called,
128 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
graduated from Harvard in 1924, married Emily Sears
of the famous Boston Sears family in 1926, worked as
correspondent and editorial writer for the Boston Tran
script and the New York Herald-Tribune, and then went
into Massachusetts politics.
He is tall, youthful, energetic, pleasant, and equipped
with a powerful bass voice. He also has courage and luck.
He was elected to the Senate in 1936 but took leave be
fore the end of his term to serve with the first American
tank detachment in Libya before the North African
landings. He was re-elected to the Senate in 1942 but
then resigned and served in the army throughout the
North African and European campaigns, being separated
from the service in December of 1945. The following
year he was again elected to the Senate, where he served
until his defeat by Kennedy in 1952.
The selection of Lodge as our representative on the
United Nations council signalized Eisenhower's deter
mination to conduct a more vigorous American foreign
policy. Lodge is a good political floor-fighter and a good
rough-and-tumble political speaker, as one must be in
Boston politics. While there was some legitimate criti
cism of his refusal to shake hands with Soviet delegate
Vishinsky, there was none of Lodge's powerful arraign
ment of Soviet military support of the Communists in
the Korean War. For once, it seemed possible that the
Russians would no longer have things their own way in
hurling vituperative propaganda charges at the U.N.
THE STRIPED PANTAGON 129
sessions. It is an assignment made to order for Henry
Cabot Lodge and should provide the world with evi
dence that American diplomats no longer intend to take
insolence or insult lying down.
6. INTELLIGENCE, INCORPORATED
Neither envoys, however extraordinary, nor policy
operations, however ably conducted, will succeed unless
the State Department has accurate knowledge of the real
trend of foreign nations and the political intentions and
necessities of foreign governments in short, a reliable
intelligence service.
Until now there has been no really good foreign politi
cal intelligence service available for the guidance of the
American government. It has been a hit-or-miss, feast-
or-f amine, catch-as-catch-can operation, now bloated by
crisis, now deluded by foreign infiltration, and again
cramped or throttled by Congressional indifference.
Since the war, however, a start has been made on a fairly
permanent and dependable basis to remedy this horrify
ing gap in the organization of our foreign policy.
This organization, the Central Intelligence Agency,
grew out of the trials and errors of our wartime intelli
gence and its recent chief, General Walter Bedell Smith,
has been transferred to the position of Undersecretary of
State, leaving Foster Dulles' younger brother, Allen, in
charge of the C.I.A., while the Luce publications have
130 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
regurgitated C. D. Jackson to direct the associated
psychological strategy work of American foreign policy.
Bedell Smith is an expert dry-fly fisherman and a pro
fessional soldier who got into intelligence the hard way:
according to the late James Forrestal, Smith, when Am
bassador to Russia, assured him that the Soviets could not
develop the atom bomb within five years. That was in
1948; a year later Stalin let the uranium pop and Smith
returned to America to work out a system to prevent that
kind of miscalculation from ever again being committed
by any responsible American official.
Fifty-eight years old next October, Bedell Smith was
born in Indianapolis and began his long military career
as a private in the Indiana National Guard. In World
War I, he rose from the ranks to the grade of first lieu
tenant, serving with the 39th Infantry in France.
He liked the army and the army liked him, so after the
armistice of 1918 he stuck with the infantry and slowly
worked his way up through various commands until the
outbreak of World War II brought him to Washington
on the general staff. He served as "Ike's" chief of staff in
North Africa and at SHAEF and served in the same posi
tion through the invasion of Europe and the conquest of
Germany. In February of 1946, President Truman, as
ever besotted with the notion of military omnipotence,
decided to name him as our ambassador to Russia, where
he stayed until March of 1949. On his return to America
he served as conunander of the 1st Corps Area on Gover-
THE STRIPED PANT AGON 131
nor's Island until the Korean mess convinced even the
Truman administration that it needed better political
intelligence. So in October of 1950 Bedell Smith took the
oath as director of Central Intelligence, where he re
mained until his former commander sent him over to
State to work with Secretary Dulles.
Smith has a sharp mind which is intolerant of "yes"
men and a harsh manner which encourages the average
man to want to say "yes." He also has the reputation of
being a better second in command than commander in
any major operation. With stomach ulcers and the ex
tremely pleasant Nory Cline Smith, of Springfield, Mis
souri "The Queen City of the Ozarks" as his wife, he
has seen much of the world and has done very well in it.
He turned over to his successor, Allen Dulles, the first
really professional secret intelligence service in the his
tory of this country since Lincoln employed the Pinker-
tons to tell him what went on in the Southern Confed
eracy.
His successor is, of course, "the other Dulles" Fos
ter's younger brother Allen a gay and intelligent man
of sixty, with graying hair and moustache and a long ex
perience in diplomacy and intelligence.
Like his brother, Allen W. Dulles was brought up in
Watertown, New York, went to Princeton, and even
tually entered the famous Sullivan & Cromwell law firm.
Before taking to law, that training ground of politicians,
he spent ten years in the diplomatic service, which he en-
132 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
tered in 1916, serving in Vienna, Switzerland, Berlin,
Constantinople, and in the State Department until his
resignation in 1926.
As a younger man, he was a fair golfer and an excel
lent tennis player, winning quite a few respectable tennis
tournaments, while he used to break ninety regularly on
the links. Today he is subject to exasperating attacks of
gout, a hereditary ailment in which he cannot even con
sole himself with the thought that he owes it to high liv
ing, since it hits him chiefly as the result of intensive high
thinking.
Allen Dulles first burst upon the public eye at the age
of eight when it was 1901 he published a book called
The Boer War, which ran to four editions. Having lis
tened to arguments between his pro-Boer uncle Lansing
and his pro-British grandfather Foster, Allen was vio
lently in favor of the Boers. Among other points, his first
published work stressed the poor British marksmanship,
alleging that in a target test of lyddite on twenty tethered
goats, after half an hour's bombardment there were
twenty-one goats, since one had given birth to a kid un
der fire.
During the Second World War, he naturally joined
the CXS.S. and handled our wartime intelligence in Swit
zerland, isolated in a neutral country surrounded by ene
mies. Early in 1 945 , he negotiated with General Wolff for
the surrender of the German army in Italy. This caused
acute umbrage in Moscow, where Stalin feared, in the
THE STRIPED PANTAGON 133
teeth of all the evidence, that Roosevelt might follow the
policy we should have followed, to hold Central Europe
for the West, and almost precipitated a major crisis in al
lied relations. However, Roosevelt stood firm and it was
Truman who was responsible for deferring the German
surrender in Italy in an attempt to appease Stalin.
After the war, Allen Dulles returned to his law prac
tice in New York. But politics is like other social dis
eases hard to cure and he helped manage his brother's
1949 campaign for the Senate and was otherwise active
in New York Republican circles. However, Korea put
a term on both his private law practice and his attempt to
return to New York life. He moved down to Washing
ton as Bedell Smith's second in command at Central In
telligence; now that Smith has become Undersecretary
of State, Allen Dulles has taken charge of C J.A. Today,
with full backing from Eisenhower and with a free hand
including unvouched funds to conduct his opera
tions, he is prepared to pit his growing organization
against the experts of the Old World: France's perennial
Deuxieme Bureau, the legendary British Secret Intelli
gence, and the astonishingly successful Russian blend of
Soviet espionage and Communist party organization.
The final element in this mobilization of brain power
in the service of our foreign policy is provided by C. D.
Jackson, the fifty-year old New York City boy who
grew up to be publisher of Harry Luce's Fortune.
Like both the Dulleses, Jackson is a Princeton gradu-
134 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
ate; he worked with Allen Dulles and Lucius Clay in the
postwar period in organizing Radio Free Europe, a pro
gram designed to lay the foundations for eventual libera
tion movements on the shady side of the Iron Curtain.
After a traditional Ivy League education and six years
with the family business of importing marble for build
ings and tombstones, "C. D." the initials stand for
Charles Douglas became a career Luce executive, rising
to the post of Life general manager in 1937. On the out
break of World War II, he left the Luce outfit and joined
the State Department, serving first in Turkey. In 1943,
he joined "Ike's" command as deputy chief of psycho
logical warfare in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and
later in SHAEF. He did not hesitate to tell veteran
American diplomat "Bob" Murphy, who had forgotten
more about Europe than "C. D." ever knew, where to
head in, and otherwise endeared himself to all concerned.
After helping in the liberation of France and Belgium,
Jackson worked with D.P.'s and liberated war prisoners.
Bedell Smith insists that the only time "C. D.'s" psycho
logical warfare really worked was when a bale of his
pamphlets, dropped from a bomber, failed to open and
plummeted to hit and sink a German barge in the Rhine.
France, as usual, gave him the ribbon of the Legion of
Honor. Few escape it. Then he returned to New York
after V-E Day and resumed his place in the Luce works,
finally being appointed publisher of Fortune in 1949.
When "Ike's" campaign needed more combat psy-
THE STRIPED PANTAGON 135
chology and less lovely prose, he called for "C. D." and
Jackson came, breathing fire. He ran "Ike's" speech-
writing research bureau at the Commodore and did a
good job, if you compare the November election returns
with "Ike's" political barometer readings in early Sep
tember.
Now Jackson has been called into action again. Opin
ions differ widely as to his personality and ability. His su
periors speak of him glowingly, as agreeable, supple,
obliging, and highly efficient. His competitors and sub
ordinates express themselves in terms which not only
glow but smoke: they dislike him intensely and say so in
rather unprintable terms. All agree that he is dynamic,
resourceful, hard-driving, and full of ideas, a born Amer
ican business go-getter who is now, fortunately for us all,
in the business of getting after the Russians.
Psychological warfare has been defined as the art of
getting the other fellow so mad that he can't think
straight. C. D. Jackson should be wonderfully success
ful at this particular game.
V
KNOW-HOW AM) HIGH BRASS
1. THE DEFENSE CRISIS
THE cost of our unwise foreign policy of past dec
ades is measured by a defense crisis of extremely se
rious dimensions. When statesmen fail, soldiers must
stand to arms and the people must sacrifice and suffer.
An eighty billion dollar budget; a standing army in
cluding air and navy of nearly three and a half million
men; the expenditure of billions for military assistance to
allied nations all over the globe; an ulcer of a Korean War
which has cost nearly one hundred and fifty thousand
casualties and ties down nearly one-third of our army;
the continuation of military conscription in time of
peace, not to mention the development of an internal
police organization for security against foreign agents or
the unpredictable demands of civil defense: all these rep
resent only the first installment of the price the Ameri
can people must pay for three generations of idealistic
ignorance in foreign affairs.
136
KNOW-HOW AND HIGH BRASS 137
The mere list of our formal defensive commitments
reveals that the messianic impulses of this country since
the time of the Boxer Rebellion have made war almost
anywhere in the world a war against the United States.
With only seven per cent of the world's population we
have undertaken the following:
Since 1823, by the Monroe Doctrine, we are com
mitted to defend the countries of Latin America against
transoceanic attack. Franklin Roosevelt, in his 1940
speech at Kingston, Ontario, extended this principle to
oblige us also to defend Canada.
Since 1922, we have been bound in a treaty of mutual
guarantee with the principal Pacific powers.
Since 1931, under the Stimson Doctrine, we stand
pledged to refuse to recognize territorial or political
changes brought about by force or by the threat of force.
The events of 1917-18 and 1941-45 show that we feel
bound in fact to defend Great Britain and Western Eu
rope against conquest without any formal written treaty
of alliance.
The United Nations charter of 1945 embodies an ob
ligation to defend all U.N. members against foreign ag
gression; our intervention in Korea was undertaken in
the name of this pledge.
The Rio de Janeiro Treaty of 1947 for hemisphere
defense calls for assistance to any American state sub
jected to an armed attack.
The Truman Doctrine of 1947 commits us to defend
138 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
all friendly nations, starting with Greece and Turkey,
against either external or internal Communist aggression.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization of 1949
obliges us to defend the countries of Western Europe
against attack.
The Japanese- American treaty of 1951 provides for
the use of American troops to defend Japan from foreign
attack and to maintain internal order.
The Philippine- American treaty of 1951 commits us
to defend the Philippines Republic.
Similar treaties with Australia and New Zealand in
1951 commit us to the common defense of our respec
tive territories in the Pacific.
Since 1951, under NATO, we have undertaken to
promote a common army for the defense of Western Eu
rope, including the West German Republic.
We have also proposed, in one form or another, un
dertakings to protect Iran, to link the Arab countries in
defense of the Near East, and a Far Eastern "PATO"
Pacific Area Treaty Organization which will group
the "free nations" of Asia in a common defense with our
military support.
We have supported the French in Indo-China and the
British in Malaya in their guerrilla war with Communist
bandits.
These are rather spacious commitments by a single na
tion, however productive its industries and however
competent its military leadership. Yet the first challenge
KNOW-HOW AND HIGH BRASS 139
to them following Acheson's political blunder in an
nouncing that we would not defend Korea the North
Korean attack across the 38th Parallel in June of 1950
came close to producing a major military disaster and
eventuated in a costly political and military stalemate
which has undermined our prestige throughout Asia.
Only a nation with the illusion of omnipotence could
have undertaken such vast responsibilities. The probable
cause in our case was the belief that the atom bomb was an
American military monopoly, which it never was. A
similar contributing cause was the theory that the atom
bomb was a sovereign military weapon, which it could
never be so long as its only appropriate targets were large
industrial cities or closely massed troops.
What makes the defense crisis at Washington even
more appalling is the fact that the atom and the hydrogen
bombs, which could be terribly effective against our own
industrial communities, are only part of the new armory
of modern warfare. We must now consider the possibil
ity that our enemy may attack us with biological war
fare attacks on human, plant, and animal life by plague,
viruses, and other microorganisms; chemical warfare
with its range of elaborately indiscriminate weapons; and
propaganda warfare, with its ability to infiltrate our poli
tics and sensitive areas with dissension, sabotage, and
treason.
The New Republican team which has come to Wash
ington in an attempt to deal with the resulting defense
140 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
crisis is composed of unusually competent men. They
represent the best brains of our industrial management,
one field in which we really lead the world.
So far as procurement, production, and conventional
strategy are concerned, the Pentagon is now staffed with
the best brains in the country. The associated task of
propaganda, intelligence, and political planning lies out
side their field and is still the weakest link in our armor.
Yet unless the propagandists and the statesmen succeed,
the task before the production men and the generals may
prove nearly insuperable.
There is not much time left. Our plans for a European
defense community under SHAPE have faltered and
may prove unrealistic.
Asia itself is either Communist or neutral, except in
Malaya and Indo-China where the British and French
continue at heavy cost to defend Southeast Asia against
Communist revolutionaries.
Africa is beginning to shake under the double earth
quake of Arab nationalism in the north and bitter racial
conflict in the south, both spurred by Moscow.
South America, which has been taken for granted, has
begun to install anti- American governments: some Fas-
cistic, as in the Argentine, others, near the Panama
Canal, Communistic.
Our quest for political allies who will share the burden
of free-world defense is hindered by widespread resent
ment against our power, envy of our wealth, and distrust
KNOW-HOW AND HIGH BRASS 141
of our motives and of the steadfastness of our policy.
If the know-how boys and the Big Brass in the Penta
gon are not careful they may wake up some morning and
discover that America has allowed itself to be depleted
economically and discredited politically to the point of
isolation, and that "Fortress America" that concept of
a continental Gibraltar astride the world's great oceans
has become a desperate necessity rather than a dangerous
and defeatist dream.
2. GENERAL MOTORS
Defense is the biggest business in the United States.
With appropriations running at the rate of fifty billion
dollars a year, with three and a half million men and
women in the armed forces and nearly a million and a
half civilian employees, the Department of Defense is the
costly symbol of our attempt to remedy the cumulative
mistakes of years of foreign policy by mobilizing our
power in a determination to win back the peace our po
litical statesmen lost or, if the worst comes, to defend
our very lives.
The method we have adopted is the one which won
us military victory in the two world wars of this century:
what a defeated Nazi called our "ruthless war industry."
Thanks to the so-called "managerial revolution" and to
the Roosevelt-Truman inflation which transferred con
trol of industrial policy from the investors to the man-
142 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
ager, the postwar struggle finds our ability to turn out
everything from atom bombs to chromatic service rib
bons at a gargantuan level of efficiency. However, it is an
open question whether the resultant defense mechanism
is not too intricate and vulnerable in an age of strategic
bombing and sabotage. But our industrial system is what
we have to fight with and it was natural that Eisenhower
should turn to the largest single defense contractor, the
gigantic General Motors Corporation, for the man to be
his Secretary of Defense.
Arthur Summerfield, then the Republican national
chairman, also gave strong support to the idea that
Charles Erwin Wilson of Detroit was the man to handle
the big job. Both politically and administratively it made
sense to let the best of the "know-how" boys take over
the tremendous task of defense procurement.
Unfortunately for this attempt to wed Big Business to
Big Brass, the bride slipped on a banana peel coming out
the church door and the political honeymoon ended with
her hip in a plaster cast when it was learned that Mr. Wil
son was reluctant to sell his G.M. stock and pay nearly
a third of his personal fortune to the government in capi
tal-gains tax in order to take the position. Liberals who
hesitate to give a pint of blood to the Red Cross were
scornful of such niggardliness. Both Wilson and some of
his chosen assistants felt that such a sacrifice of their pri
vate wealth, in addition to loss of income, was unreason
able and, despite the standing law against "conflict of in-
KNOW-HOW AND HIGH BRASS 143
terest," there was much justice in their attitude. Even
tually all but one of them Mr. Robert Sprague of North
Adams, Massachusetts, who was unable to sell his stock
took the investor's portfolio purging and are entitled to
public respect for their willingness to pay a great price
for the right to serve their country.
Wilson is a stocky, heavy-built man of sixty-two,
clean shaven, with bristling white hair and a ruddy com
plexion, who is just about as far removed as possible from
the old stereotyped, silk-hatted Wall Street capitalist of
Communist legend. He is perhaps the most perfect speci
men in captivity of the social process which has trans
ferred control of big business from the bankers to the
engineers.
He was born in 1890 in the little country town of
Minerva, Ohio of Scotch and German ancestry. His fa
ther was the principal of the local public school, where
his mother had also taught. When young Charlie was
four years old, his father transferred to teaching in Min
eral City, where the boy attended the public schools. In
1904, they moved again, this time to Pittsburgh, and,
after graduating from high school, the future Secretary
of Defense went on to Carnegie Tech., which gave him
his electrical engineering degree in 1909.
Wilson then got a job as student apprentice with
Westinghouse, working with that important electric
company's chief engineer, E. C. Lamme, for ten years. It
at Westinghouse in 1912 that Wilson worked on the
144 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
first self-starter for automobiles. During the first World
War, the company worked on army and navy contracts;
in 1919 Wilson joined General Motors. He worked for
the G.M. subsidiary, Remy Electric Company at Ander
son, Indiana, rising from plant manager to general man
ager in 1925. Then he headed the merged Delco-Remy
Company, developing shock absorbers, electric refrig
eration, and similar peaceful products, and managing the
company's four plants.
The year when Hoover was elected President, Wilson
was made a General Motors vice-president and moved to
Detroit, where he remained until "Ike" called him to
Washington. He not only assisted the company's ex
panding operations in the United States and Canada, but,
more significantly, undertook to handle G.M.'s labor re
lations after the bitter sit-down strikes of 1937. On the
eve of the second World War he was made executive
vice-president and in 1940 became acting president when
William Knudsen went to Washington to help Roosevelt
organize defense production. The following year, Wil
son became president of the whole shebang and as such
managed General Motors' impressive share in war pro
duction. During the war, his company was responsible
for twelve billion dollars' worth of munitions output, in
cluding a fourth of all tanks and airplane engines, a half
of all machine guns and carbines, two-thirds of all heavy
trucks, and three-fourths of all the navy diesel horse
power produced in the entire country.
KNOW-HOW AND HIGH BRASS 145
Wilson also made social history in 1950 when he
signed a five-year contract with the C.I.O. United Auto
motive Workers providing for automatic wage changes
to reflect changing costs of living. Incidentally, Wilson,
like other New Republicans, has stayed married to the
girl who was his bride in 1912, Miss Jessie Ann Curtis of
Williamsburg, Pennsylvania, and is the father of six
children.
When he hit Washington in the opening days of the
new administration, he rubbed Congress and newspaper
men the wrong way. He treated the Senate committee
which passed on his nomination exactly as he would treat
the directors of a smaller corporation with which G.M.
had decided to deal. He dodged newspaper interviews.
In fact, he has issued orders to his defense subordinates
to avoid public speeches, interviews and magazine arti
cles, since he believes that he and they will rise or fall on
their record for efficient defense production and that
publicity is no substitute for achievement.
There is no doubt that Wilson and his team represent
the best brains in American industrial management. They
are business managers who have weathered both depres
sion and inflation, have learned to get on with organized
labor, have mastered industrial technology and, with
chiefly their own brains as capital, have raised the nation's
economic output to the highest level in history. The de
fense job they have undertaken is tremendous. Just one
minor part of it: military assistance to our allies by the
146 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
end of 1952 had already shipped to friendly foreign na
tions over six million tons of "hardware," including
twenty thousand tanks and combat vehicles, twenty
thousand pieces of artillery, one and a half million small
arms and machine guns, over four hundred naval vessels,
and more than three thousand airplanes.
If the mobilization of our industrial skill can save the
peace, Wilson and his group are the men to do it. Wash
ington has already begun to whisper that "Wilson won't
last," that he'll give up after a couple of years and go back
to Detroit. But the question of his political popularity is
secondary to the test of his ability. Lincoln's Secretary of
War, Edwin Stanton, was one of the most disagreeable
men in our public life, but he supplied and managed the
Federal armies which won the Civil War and has gone
down in history as one of the greatest political adminis
trators this country has ever produced. It is a fair guess
that Wilson won't leave Washington unless Wilson fails
to do his job and so far Charley Wilson has never failed
in any production job he has undertaken.
3. & COMPANY
The members of Wilson's Defense Department team
were selected by him personally to help him do his job.
They will be judged by their chief's record in office and
so cannot be regarded as key political appointments in the
Eisenhower administration. But they are all representa-
KNOW-HOW AND HIGH BRASS 147
tive of the New Republican movement in terms of in
dustrial management. None of them was originally born
to wealth, all of them have succeeded in the intense com
petition of corporate management. In terms of industry,
they are the personal and moral equivalent of such po
litical leaders as Dewey and Duff.
Take Wilson's trouble-shooter, Deputy Secretary of
Defense Roger M. Kyes. Kyes is still in his middle forties,
a slender, smiling, keen-eyed man. He was born in East
Palestine, Ohio, went to Culver Military Academy and
then to Harvard Business School, from which he gradu
ated in 1928. He stepped out with his diploma just in time
to step into the depression. For the next twenty years,
Kyes worked with a variety of concerns, manufacturing
aircraft and plows among other products. He joined the
General Motors staff in 1948 and two years later became
general manager. He married a girl from Harding's home
town, Marion, Ohio, and is the father of four daughters.
Or take Harold E. Talbott, "Ike's" Secretary of the
Air Force. Talbott is a tall, handsome, determined busi
ness executive who was born of well-to-do parents in
Dayton, Ohio, sixty-five years ago, and who graduated
from Yale in 1 9 1 1, when the Elis were still winning foot
ball games and so had no doubts about anything under
the sun. For the next few years he worked with the fam
ily business in Dayton on hydroelectric development and
construction. As early as 1916, he became interested in
aviation when his father and Charles Kettering organized
148 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
the Dayton Wright Company, one of the few United
States airplane concerns which really made planes, both
trainers and DeHaviland fighters, during World War I.
Talbott served in that war as a major in the Army Air
Force. He got his G.M. baptism in 1919 when Dayton
Wright was merged into General Motors, and he stayed
on until 1925, when he joined Chrysler and moved on to
New York. He later was chairman of North American
Aviation, and director of Electric-Autolite and of other
companies. The same year he moved to New York, he
married Miss Margaret Thayer of Philadelphia, and they
have four children. Unlike Wilson, Talbott had money
behind him from the start of his career but, like his chief,
he has gone ahead under his own steam to become a con
spicuously successful industrial manager.
Cast in somewhat the same mold as Talbott is Wilson's
Secretary of the Army, Robert T. Stevens. He was born
in Fanwood, New Jersey, just before the turn of the cen
tury, graduated from Yale in 1921, married two years
later and is the father of five children. In the first World
War, like many other Yale men, Stevens served in the
Field Artillery; in the second World War, he was with
the Quartermaster Corps, serving in Washington and in
Europe and ending up with the rank of colonel. Between
the wars he had worked under the N.R.A. Blue Eagle of
old Hugh Johnson in and on various business-govern
ment advisory groups. He was also chairman of the fam
ily textile business and on the directorates of General
KNOW-HOW AND HIGH BRASS 149
Electric, General Foods, Pan American Airways and
other business and charitable enterprises. He is a Presby
terian and a member of the Yale Corporation.
Consider, by contrast, Robert B. Anderson of Texas,
Secretary of the Navy. He was the only member of the
team who did not have to amputate his financial hump in
order to pass through the needle's eye of the Senate com
mittee. Anderson was born in Burleson, Texas, forty-
two years ago. He went to Weatherford College in
Texas, studied law at Texas University, practiced law in
Houston, Texas, married a Texas girl, and has two Texas
sons. He is a Methodist, a lawyer, and a successful oil op
erator. He has also served in the Texas state legislature,
has been the Lone Star state's assistant attorney general
and has held posts on other state agencies, including the
post of tax commissioner, boxing commissioner, execu
tive director of the Texas Unemployment Commission,
as well as on the Texas Federal Reserve Bank. In recent
years he has also managed the famous Waggner Ranch
near Vernon, Texas.
The same pattern is repeated in the "Little Cabinet"
levels of Defense. Assistant Secretary of Defense John
Hannah is just turned fifty, is an expert on poultry, for
mer President of Michigan State College and a native of
Grand Rapids, where the furniture comes from. J. F.
Floberg, the Assistant Navy Secretary for Air, is a thirty-
eight-year-old native of Chicago, a practicing lawyer
with four years of active naval service in World War II,
150 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
including the Tunisian and Sicilian campaigns and at the
Salerno landing. Blond, alert, Comptroller Wilfred
James McNeil, with the title of Assistant Secretary of
Defense, is a native of Boone, Iowa. Now fifty-two years
old, McNeil was brought into the Defense Department
by the late James Forrestal, after business experience in
banking, selling automobiles, and newspaper circulation.
Another Forrestal holdover is a dark-haired, serious, be
spectacled young lawyer from Saranac, New York, As
sistant Defense Secretary Frank C. Nash.
Whatever else such men may be, no one can accuse
them of being bloated capitalists or of owing their posi
tion to corporate favors or to political favoritism. They
are surprisingly young for their achievements and they
all achieved their standing by intelligence and by their
ability to adjust themselves and the enterprises with
which they have been connected to the changing condi
tions of American business and the shifting pressures of
American society. On their ability to help America as a
whole to adjust itself to the changing character of de
fense in a world which itself is in process of violent social
and economic upheaval may depend far more than the
profits of private business.
Our very hides are at stake, and so Eisenhower has
turned instinctively to men much like himself in charac
ter and background to undertake the huge task of supply
ing the munitions needed to defend the Free World.
KNOW-HOW AND HIGH BRASS 151
4. THE BIG BRASS
The armed forces of the United States are unusual
among those of the great powers in that we have never
possessed a privileged or hereditary officer class. The
British navy alone employs the same principle as ours in
the selection and training of its commanders, but even
in Britain, as in France and Germany, the traditions of
feudal nobility have tended to limit high rank to the
younger sons of old titled or landowning families. In
Russia and other totalitarian countries, there is powerful
political party control over the selection and training
and, above all, in the promotion or liquidation of military
commanders.
The regular armed forces of the United States, almost
from the birth of the Republic, have been officered and
led by men who were picked on a deliberately representa
tive basis. There have been promotions from the ranks
and transfers from National Guard or R.O.T.C. units,
especially in time of war; graduates of such military
schools as the Virginia Military Institute have held high
command, notably George C. Marshall, who rose to be
Chief of Staff and a five-star general in World War IL
But on the whole, the army, the navy and the air force of
the United States are officered by graduates of the United
States Military Academy at West Point and the Naval
Academy at Annapolis.
West Point has been training the leaders of our army
152 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
since 1802; Annapolis has been training our naval officers
since 1845. So far, no amount of political pressure or so
cial privilege has enabled a man to enter or graduate from
either of these institutions unless he can meet rigorous
physical and intellectual requirements. With a few ex
ceptions, appointment to either academy is on the rec
ommendation of a Senator or Congressman. Each mem
ber of Congress has the right, subject to examination of
the applicant, to appoint an average of one West Point
cadet a year. Additional cadets are appointed by the
President and the Vice-President, and about forty-five a
year can be transferred from the ranks of the enlisted men
in the regular army, on the recommendation of the Sec
retary of the Army. A similar system applies to the ap
pointment of midshipmen to Annapolis.
This method of recruiting our professional army and
navy officers insures that there shall be the widest pos
sible geographical representation among the commanders
and that no one dominant, social, political, or regional
group shall have a monopoly of selecting the officers for
our defense forces. High standards of professional train
ing and personal conduct at both academies automatically
weed out any unqualified individual who might manage
to slip in through political connivance. From the moment
of their appointment, they are clothed, fed and paid
miserably paid by the government, and do not need to
possess private incomes to support their rank, as with
such British army regiments as the Coldstream Guards.
KNOW-HOW AND HIGH BRASS 153
As a result of this unique representative method of pro
viding the necessary military and naval leadership, the
armed forces of the United States today are staffed from
top to bottom by men who are the counterpart of the
New Republicans who elected Eisenhower and the lead
ers of the "managerial revolution" whom "Ike" has called
in to organize our defense production. Scratch a Sherman
Adams or an Omar Bradley, a Charley Wilson or an Ad
miral Radf ord, and they are all the same breed of Ameri
cans: wholesome, small-town, ambitious types who have
climbed to the top of their particular tree, against stiff
competition, by their own ability to manage men and deal
with critical situations.
The acid test of war, superimposed on this selective
process, has brought an exceptionally strong group of
leaders to high military command. In fact, the chief criti
cism which can be made of them is that they are too
strong for a weak President or Defense Secretary to man
age. Former Defense Secretary Lovett significantly
wrote President Truman in December of 1952 of the
growing need to make it legally clear under the National
Defense Act that the Joint Chiefs of Staff are subordinate
to the civil authority of the Secretary of Defense. There
have been muttered complaints that the former Joint
Chiefs, especially their chairman, General Omar Brad
ley, decided national policy in foreign relations; there
was also reason to believe that the "High Brass" in the
Pentagon opposed "Ike's" election because it would place
154 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
in the White House a President who knew a great deal
more about defense than they did.
The truth of the matter is that, under Truman, the
Joint Chiefs of Staff ran away with the Defense Depart
ment. After V~J Day, the three services faced the grim
prospect of a return to lower rank and much lower ap
propriations. The result was a very human and indeco
rous scramble for Congressional preference: the air force
with its strategic bombers and the atom bomb, the navy
with its super-carriers and submarines, the army with
its massive organization, personnel, and overseas bases.
Forrestal struggled for unification but it was unifica
tion upward, much as Truman's price stabilization stabi
lized prices upward. What the services did, in effect,
was to add all their demands together and send the com
bined bill to Congress. The situation became so alarming
that in 1949, the unification law was amended in order
to appoint Omar Bradley as chairman, or moderator, of
the three competing services. For a while Defense Secre
tary Louis Johnson made a determined effort to cut back
the service demands, with their competitive stockpiling
of material and manpower, but this effort ended tragi
cally when Dean Acheson's State Department booby-
trapped the defense establishment into the Korean War.
This unpremeditated commitment had the effect of
reopening the Pentagon's Via Triumphalis into the
United States Treasury and was utilized to resolve serv
ice rivalries on the costly but convenient plane of giving
KNOW-HOW AND HIGH BRASS 155
the army, navy and air forces whatever they wanted.
Service opposition to Eisenhower's election reflected the
fear that he would either favor the army against air and
navy or, worse still, that he would compel them all to
work together as a team and allocate funds to them on
the basis of real knowledge of their' needs and impor
tance. With Truman they had always been sure of a
respectful hearing; with "Ike" things might not be so
easy, since he knew more about defense than they did
themselves. In fact, the 1952 election almost proved the
paradox that the only way to maintain civilian authority
over the military is to choose a military man as President.
The former Joint Chiefs were, of course, subject to
replacement by the normal processes of their respective
services after nomination by the President and Senate
confirmation, and all of the Truman group were
changed for cause after Eisenhower's first hundred days.
The men whom "Ike" found waiting his orders on Janu
ary 20th, 1953 are, therefore, only indicative of the kind
of commanders we have developed in our armed forces.
During the period when they controlled our defense
establishment, its costs increased and its quality declined.
Men like Ozarks-born, five-star General Omar N. Brad
ley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; General J.
Lawton Collins, Army Chief of Staff; Admiral William
Morrow Fechteler, Chief of Naval Operations; and Gen
eral Hoyt S. Vandenberg, Chief of Staff of the Air
Force, are competent and experienced combat com-
156 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
manders. When they dealt with an adoring little civilian
who always signed on the dotted lines, they administered
chaos and called it defense.
They were not responsible for the original Korean
blunder, but they were responsible for the failure to
have a good military fire brigade, so to speak, on hand in
Japan to deal with that or any other blaze. Their struggles
to obtain control of such political functions of defense
as central intelligence first by the air force and then
by the navy on a sort of rotation system reduced the
C.I.A. to such a level that all our agents in Eastern Eu
rope were arrested by the Russians. It took Bedell Smith
nearly four years to straighten out our intelligence serv
ices after they had been the football of the inter-service
rivalry of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
This disastrous record was partly due to the novelty
of realistic peacetime intelligence work, but mostly to
the traditional political illiteracy of the military mind.
This recurring blindspot toward the political factor
in defense is the greatest single weakness in the Ameri
can military establishment. During the postwar jockey
ing for advantage between the three services, control of
intelligence was sought, not so much to improve the
quality and timeliness of the information on which policy
decisions are made as to keep it out of the hands of the
other services and, above all, to filter the flow of facts to
the President of the United States. In much the same way,
the Voice of America program directed by the State De-
KNOW-HOW AND HIGH BRASS 157
partment appeared better calculated to impress Con
gress with its value, for departmental appropriations,
than to conduct an effective American foreign propa
ganda.
Political illiteracy in the army, in particular, was so
strongly entrenched that not even repeated organized
riots in Communist prison camps in Korea produced a
clear and scientific approach to the well-organized Com
munist political offensive in the camps. And when our
truce negotiators met with the Communist representa
tives to discuss the "cease-fire," they were sitting ducks
for the highly trained Communist propagandists, from
the moment our representatives appeared under a flag of
truce and were photographed as if in the act of sur
render to the Reds. Our military men have been schooled
to keep out of domestic politics; as a result they are seri
ously handicapped in dealing with enemies who use
politics and propaganda as part of modern armaments.
The best that can be said is that, through politico-mili
tary bungling in Europe as well as Asia, some of our
commanders are getting an intensive postgraduate educa
tion in this important branch of international conflict.
Among the rising group of American commanders, as
a result, are now some men who have learned that it is
as important to know why nations go to war as it is to
know what weapons they possess. They include such
officers as General Alfred M. Gruenther, the alert,
scholarly fifty-four-year-old newly appointed successor
158 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
to Ridgway at SHAPE, regarded as the ablest strategist
in the army; our present 8th Army commander in Korea,
Lieutenant-General Maxwell D. Taylor, who would
bear the brunt of any future outbreak of hostilities in
that tragic peninsula; his opposite number in Germany,
General Thomas Troy Handy, in command of our
troops between the Red army and the Rhine; and the
tall, dark, saturnine commander of our Pacific Fleet,
Admiral Arthur William Radf ord, promoted to the posi
tion of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after under
taking the thankless task of protecting Red China against
attack from Formosa*
These men who guard our ramparts from the Great
Wall of Korea to the Watch on the Elbe are only repre
sentative of hundreds and thousands of army, navy and
air force officers on whose skill, courage, and judgment
the nation may at any time depend for its survival. Des
pite the baffling combination of massive intelligence and
startling stupidity which seems to characterize the mili
tary mind in every country, these are also the best we
have. They are not a class set apart from the rest of the
country, except by their record of service: they are bone
and sinew of the same deep-lying social forces repre
sented by small-town, middle-income, taxpaying neigh
borly churchgoing families which have built our na
tion, created its industries, and now have rallied to the
support of Eisenhower and the New Republican Party.
If they can only learn in time that, as the deadliness and
KNOW-HOW AND HIGH BRASS 159
range of weapons increase, military policy becomes in
creasingly political, then their ordeals in the cold-war
period will prove to be an invaluable investment in na
tional security. In the meantime, it is significant that
"Ike" sacked the whole lot of high commanders who re
sented a cut in defense appropriations and opposed the
reorganization of the Defense Department, and replaced
them with more dependable servants of the civilian gov
ernment which has trained and paid them to serve the
nation as a whole: Ridgway, Carney, and Twining
under Radford.
VI
DEEP /JV THE HEART OF TAXES
1. "THE SILLY OLD DOLLAR SIGN"
BEFORE 1913, this country lacked the means to fi
nance a major war. This defect in twentieth-century
statesmanship was remedied in the nick of time by the
creation of the Federal Reserve System and the passage
of the income-tax amendment on the eve of World War
I. Thanks to these two monumental archways leading to
the savings and earnings of the American people, in that
conflict we were able to put five million men in uniform,
suffer three hundred and fifty thousand casualties, and
raise the national debt from a bare one billion dollars in
1915 to more than twenty-five billion dollars in 1919.
Before 1935, this country again lacked the means to
finance a total war. This defect in the age of Hitler and
Stalin was also remedied just in time by the devaluation of
the dollar and by the system of social security payroll
deductions which paved the way for the payroll with
holding tax of World War II. Thanks to inflation and to
160
DEEP IN THE HEART OF TAXES 161
the check-off on salaries and wages, in this second con
flict we were able to put over fifteen million citizens in
uniform, suffered over one million casualties, and raised
the national debt from forty-nine billion dollars in 1941
to almost two hundred and seventy billion in 1946.
This latter achievement was due to the fiscal policies
of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With much
the same patrician impatience which had led a British
prime minister to refer to decimal points as "those
damned dots/' President Roosevelt, in launching Lend-
Lease in 1941, proclaimed his intention to get rid of
"the silly old dollar sign" in our aid to the nations which
were fighting the Rome-Berlin Axis. Over that once
sacred dollar sign he had exercised his fiscal droit de
seigneur for the eight years of the New Deal, using the
devaluation of the dollar and other inflationary measures
to increase the national debt from seventeen billions
under Hoover to nearly three times as much by the time
of Pearl Harbor.
For the price of poor statesmanship is debt and taxes,
Yet in spite of orthodox sneers at the New Deal's infla
tionary and spending policies, it is fair to assert that they
helped the United States avoid industrial fascism after
the banking crisis of the early 193 O's. Historically,
fascism has attacked industrial nations whose capital has
been destroyed by inflation or war. This loss of funds
compels industries to create their own capital under
forced draft, out of high prices and low wages, a com-
162 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
bination which requires special police and political au
thority. The Milan industrialists were behind Musso
lini, just as the Ruhr magnates were behind Hitler.
Roosevelt's seizure of the banks, and his programs for
public works, relief, and refinancing private indebted
ness made enough capital available in time to head off the
ugly drift toward a violent reaction in the steel, coal, and
automotive industries.
The cost of this deliverance was the creation of an in
flationary mechanism which, as Roosevelt warned, in the
hands of weak or corrupt officials could destroy the peo
ple's liberties. Roosevelt's warning was aimed at Wall
Street, but he would have been wiser to watch Kansas
City. After his death, the successors to his administration
turned to inflation and deficit spending as the drunkard
returns to his bottle and made a permanent policy out of
a perilous expedient.
The result was a spiraling price inflation, largely post
war, which cut the value of the dollar by nearly fifty per
cent and raised all costs, including the cost of rearma
ment, depleted all savings, cut all salaries and fell with
crushing force on the very middle-income business and
professional homes which were the concrete expression
of the old American dream. The Federal Reserve Board
had been browbeaten by the Treasury Department into
an abdication of its duty to regulate the volume of credit
and was compelled, instead, to prostitute itself in order
to maintain the value of government bonds, as though
DEEP IN THE HEART OF TAXES 163
you could bring on warm weather by holding a lighted
match under the bulb of a thermometer. By the time this
imitative magic was discontinued in 1951, the damage
had been done; by then the Korean War provided fresh
inflation of wages, prices, savings, and security.
When "Ike" stepped into the White House, here was
the booby trap he found waiting for him as the gift of
his predecessor. *
The national debt stood at nearly two hundred and
seventy billion; Mr. Truman had budgeted for a ten bil
lion deficit in 1953; the Republicans stood pledged to
debt reduction and a balanced budget.
Congress had authorized an additional eighty billion
for expenditures by the Federal departments, chiefly on
defense.
Nearly eighty billion of the national debt was due or
callable before the end of 1956, and interest rates were
due to jump by about forty per cent, from 2.35 per cent
to an indicated 3.25 per cent, raising the annual cost of
debt service by perhaps as much as a billion a year.
The tax rates were the highest in America's peacetime
history, ranging from twenty to ninety-two per cent, on
personal incomes. Nearly one-third of the national in
come of three hundred billion depreciated dollars went
to pay the cost of government, with the Treasury taking
twenty five billion from pay envelopes, thirty six billion
frojn income and profits taxes, ten billion from other
excise and luxury taxes f or a total of seventy billion. In
164 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
addition to all this was the cost of state and local govern
ment.
The Republicans had promised to economize on this
terrifying Federal budget but barely a sixth of the whole
eighty billion went for the normal costs of the national
government: fifty five billion was for defense and foreign
aid, eleven billion for interest and the veterans. It was
clearly impossible to keep the party's premise to balance
the budget and reduce the taxes unless there was to be a
major default on the basic commitments the American
Government had already made at home and abroad. The
silly old dollar sign had come home to roost and it looked
like a hungry vulture.
It was under these unpromising conditions that Eisen
hower's new Secretary of the Treasury, George M.
Humphrey of Cleveland, Ohio, announced the following
program for fiscal management:
". . . first, that we will have a sound and stable dol
lar, not one of declining value; second, that we do
not spend more than we earn; third, that we pay a
little down on our debts from time to time instead of
rapidly borrowing more; fourth, that we keep our
credit good by properly managing the debts we al
ready have; fifth, that slowly but surely and defi
nitely we reduce the too heavy burden of taxes
which, buried in the cost of everything we buy, are
stifling initiative and increasing the cost of living;
sixth, that we maintain free markets in which the
great American consumer can buy what he needs
DEEP IN THE HEART OF TAXES 165
when he wants it and choose for himself what he
will buy at prices he is willing to pay; seventh, that
producers are free to strive to produce more, better
and cheaper goods to compete for the consumer's
favor in buying their particular products in compe
tition with everything else; eighth, that we protect
the savings of the old, their insurance and their pen
sions; ninth, and above all, that we preserve for the
young the great symbol of America, the oppor
tunity to advance and improve themselves to the
limit of their own abilities and their own hard work
and endeavors."
2. GOLIATH OF THE GOITER BELT
In the telecast in which Secretary Humphrey de
livered this admirable description of what it would be
like to live in a really free economy, Columbia Broad
casting's political impresario, Mr. Eric Severeid, de
scribed George Humphrey as "a first-class example of
the managerial revolution which has produced a fresh
new type of restless, imaginative business managers who
see property as fluid, changing, expanding, in an in
separable working relationship with the government and
the whole expanding society."
Humphrey himself had never expected to enter the
cabinet and his selection, as a known Taf t supporter, was
made by Eisenhower without the knowledge of Senator
Taft. A flexible-minded, highly successful banking and
industrial statesman, Humphrey is generally regarded
166 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
as not only the greatest business leader in Cleveland,
Ohio but also as the ablest man in the Eisenhower cabinet.
When the unsought treasury post was offered him, he
promptly disposed of all investments which could con
stitute a "conflict of interest" with his official duties and
accepted the gargantuan task of cleaning up the scandal-
ridden and demoralized Treasury Department he had in
herited from Mr. Truman's crony, John Snyder. In this
course, Humphrey was true, not only to his own charac
ter and career, but to the high civic tradition of Cleve
land, where he had made his home for more than thirty-
five years. Whether because of the almost constant over
cast of clouds from Lake Erie or because of the absence of
iodine in the drinking water which places that city in the
heart of the famous "goiter belt," Clevelanders are
acutely interested in politics and are vigorous partisans
from the cradle. Since the days of Tom Johnson and
Newton Baker, Cleveland has shared with Houston,
Texas the distinction of being the most political-minded
city in the United States. It is also, of course, one of the
most vital industrial communities in North America.
Humphrey is a Clevelander only by adoption. He was
born in the small Michigan town of Cheboygan sixty-
three years ago. His parents were only moderately well-
to-do and he had to make his own way. He was brought
up in the bustling little city of Saginaw, Michigan, where
he attended the public schools and played on the Saginaw
High School football team, helping it win the state cham-
DEEP IN THE HEART OF TAXES 167
pionship in 1907. After this he went on to the State Uni
versity at Ann Arbor, where he joined Psi U and gradu
ated with a law degree in 1912. As soon as he had passed
his state bar exams, he returned to Saginaw, joined his
father's law firm, and married a Saginaw girl named
Pamela Stark.
Five years later, as a result of his legal attainments, he
was offered the position of general counsel of old Mark
Hanna's famous M. A. Hanna & Co. in Cleveland, where
he remained until 1953, rising gradually to the rank of
partner, vice-president, executive vice-president and
finally, in 1929, president of the whole concern, becom
ing at last its chairman of the board of directors in 1952.
George Humphrey possesses much more than a clear
legal brain. He has an easy, adaptable personality and is
a thinker. It is a tribute to his wisdom that, although the
Hanna Company deals primarily with such controversial
products as coal and steel, not once during all the labor
turmoil of the last twenty years and more of this cor
porate leadership has his company been involved in con
flict or unfavorable public prominence. Mark Hanna
was long regarded as a symbol of silk-hatted conserva
tism; it is often forgotten that he pioneered in decent
labor relations and that the concern he founded has kept
its name and its nose clean, labor-wise, tax-wise and gov
ernment-wise.
At a time when other coal and iron masters were losing
money or hiring finks and thugs to police their workers,
168 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
under Humphrey even during the depression the
Hanna business not only earned a profit but expanded.
In association with the National City Bank of Cleveland,
of which he is a director, the company proceeded to com
bine Weirton Steel, Great Lakes Steel and the Hanna
interests in iron mines, lake shipping, and blast furnaces
to form the remarkably successful National Steel Cor
poration in the very year of the 1929 panic.
The year which saw the end of World War II also
witnessed Humphrey's comparable achievement in or
ganizing Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Company, a
merger of the Pittsburgh and the Consolidation Coal
Companies, to form the largest bituminous coal-produc
ing corporation in the world.
And the year which witnessed the Communist attack
in Korea saw Humphrey organize the Iron Ore Com
pany of Canada to develop the huge newly mapped iron
deposits in Labrador and Quebec. With the fabulous
Mesabi range depleted of its ore by two world wars,
these new reserves guarantee the future of the Great
Lakes steel industry in North America. In this connec
tion, where twenty years ago they damned it as "a social
istic ditch," there is no doubt that the Hanna Company
and its banking associates now applaud the decision of the
Canadian government to develop the St. Lawrence Sea
way and thus permit the Labrador ore to move to the
blast furnaces of National Steel on the, lower lakes.
It is in achievements like these that Secretary Hum-
DEEP IN THE HEART OF TAXES 169
phrey takes legitimate pride. They were managed with
out fanfare or scandal and typify business foresight and
industrial imagination at their best. The same foresight
also brought him into the Committee for Economic De
velopment and he is one of the trustees of that remarkable
mobilization of America's managerial brains for public
service. He has also been active in other industries, in
cluding rayon, copper, and sugar. At one time he was
chairman of the Department of Commerce's Business
Advisory Council and also served on the E.G. A. advisory
committee which reconsidered Roosevelt's hasty plan to
dismantle the German factories and turn their machinery
over to Russia. A list of the other business, educational,
and charitable organizations with which Humphrey is
connected reads like an institutional Who's Who: Acade
my of Political Science, Tax Foundation, Iron and Steel
Institute, United States Council of the International
Chamber of Commerce, Harvard Graduate Business
School, Ford Foundation, and Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, as well as hospitals and medical schools.
Thus George Humphrey brings into the Eisenhower
administration a broad, fresh, and practical conception
of wealth, not as measured in terms of dollar profits, but
in terms of production, employment, and utilization. He
is a leader of the new business philosophy which realizes
that the purpose of industry is not to produce wages for
workers, profits for investors or tax revenues for Wash
ington, but that all these necessary things can come only
170 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
if industry's chief function is to produce needed goods
and services at a price people can afford to pay.
This view cuts squarely across the old-fashioned eco
nomic sentimentalities of the past. It challenges the creed
of organized labor that business exists primarily to pro
vide jobs for union members; it abandons the traditional
banking view that industry should concentrate on net
profits and dividends; and, judging by his published state
ments, it is in conflict with the bureaucratic concept of
industry as a convenient mechanism for collecting taxes
from the community and turning them over to the gov
ernment.
So George M. Humphrey is the man who, if anyone
can, will take us back to the original nature of American
economics: a free market, private initiative, incentive for
risk, and rewards proportionate to effort, judgment, and
success. This was the prevailing economic climate of the
1 890's when he was a small boy in Michigan and William
McKinley was in the White House. Tempered by the
strains and responsibilities of the past fifty years, these
ideals still hold the secret of our tremendous industrial
growth, a growth of productivity so fantastic that not
even the fiscal aberrations of twenty years of lethal tax
ation have yet demoralized our industrial system or de
based our currency beyond repair. Humphrey and men
like him have, in fact, been giving the dollar its real value,
in terms of coal, steel, processing, and transportation,
without reference to whether gold sells for thirty-five
DEEP IN THE HEART OF TAXES 171
dollars an ounce or whether we have twenty-three billion
dollars buried in Fort Knox. Such trifles are only the
symbols for the real values represented by the things
people eat, use, and wear. That is the basic philosophy of
the man whom "Ike" has selected in the effort to help us
all return to a freer way of life.
3. "As FINE As You COULD POSSIBLY IMAGINE"
To help him do his job, Humphrey has picked what
he publicly called "as fine a group of men as you could
possibly imagine." One of them is a woman. All of them
have come up, much as Humphrey did, from simple
homes and with few initial advantages. They include a
former Harvard professor, the daughter of a western
miner, a statistician from Virginia, a Georgia lawyer who
was born in California, a Cleveland lawyer, and a New
York camera manufacturer who was born in Georgia.
Together, they are a cross section of middle-class Ameri
can business achievement at its best and most diverse. In
dividually, each is a story of outstanding personal suc
cess, based on ability, hard work, and little or no luck.
There have been rumors that, under Roosevelt, Com
munists filtered into the Treasury Department. Henry
Morgenthau's assistant, the late Harry Dexter White,
denied under oath that he was a Communist: a few hours
later God struck him dead of heart failure, so he is no
longer subject to investigation. He is believed to have
172 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
originated the fantastic "Morgenthau Plan" to strip Ger
many of machinery for the benefit of Soviet industry and
to leave Europe's workshop a potato patch and cow pas
ture. He may also have authored the vicious excess profits
tax, which in effect decrees that there shall be no new
major business enterprises in the United States. Certainly,
under Roosevelt's and Truman's administrations, to in
herit, give, or earn money was punished as severely as,
and more surely than, the average mayhem or manslaugh
ter. Income taxes range up to ninety-two per cent, and
start after the first six hundred dollars of personal in
come; inheritance taxes climb from seven per cent, on a
five thousand dollar estate to seventy-seven per cent, on
ten million dollars, regardless of the number of heks.
Gift taxes start at 2 1 A per cent, on five thousand dollars
and soar to fifty-seven per cent, on four hundred thou
sand dollars. Property may not be theft but the New Deal
Treasury punished its transfer as a serious civil offense.
This may not be orthodox Conxmunism but it strikes at
the root of our basic institutions: individual initiative,
private charity, and the family.
Certainly no one could say that Humphrey's deputy,
W. Randolph Burgess, is a Communist or even a radical,
since he was born sixty-four years ago in Newport at a
time when it was the center of America's most unre-
generate wealth. He was born with a silver spoon, if not
in his mouth, at least in his porringer, and enjoyed an
extensive education at Brown, McGill, and Columbia
DEEP IN THE HEART OF TAXES 173
universities. A large, bald, excessively shy man, Burgess
is today the greatest living expert on United States gov
ernment bonds and was chairman of the board of the
merged City Bank Farmers Trust Company of New
York at the time "Ike" called him to help refinance the
public debt.
For nearly ten years, Burgess was in charge of the
"open-market" operations of the New York Federal Re
serve Bank, buying and selling government securities as
needed to regulate the supply of bank credit. In 1938, he
joined the National City Bank of New York and stayed
with them until coming to Washington. The first re
financing he undertook after "Ike's" inaugural nine bil
lions in February of 195 3 clearly indicated that interest
rates were rising and that the era of cheap inflationary
credit was coming to an end.
The Treasury, of course, is more than a broker for
government securities. It is the oldest, best, and most in
telligent operating agency of the Federal Government.
In tax collection alone, the Internal Revenue Service
raked in eighty-three billions in the fiscal year ending
June 30th, 1952. That meant that ninety million indi
vidual tax returns were handled by about fifty-five thou
sand officials, some of whom were not entirely honest.
The new Commissioner of Internal Revenue is a protege
of Virginia's economy-minded Senator Byrd, a certified
public accountant from Richmond, Virginia, who was
born about the time Byrd's predecessor, Carter Glass,
174 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
was getting ready to revise the state constitution so as to
disenfranchise the poor. T. Colejnan Andrews was born
in 1899, when the whole nation had been frightened by
Populism and Bryanism. He is surely no radical, but is
a practicing accountant who has served both the State of
Virginia, the Navy Department, and the General Ac
counting Office and is recognized as one of the nation's
leading statistical authorities. He can be relied upon to
root out dishonesty among the collectors of this torrent
of taxes.
Another Treasury position which used to be more
important than the internal revenue post is that of the
Assistant Secretary in charge of Customs, the Coast
Guard, and the Lighthouse Service. Before 1913, tariff
duties provided the bulk of the Federal revenues. Today
they account for a measly half billion dollars, less than
one per cent, of the total. The job itself is one which calls
for real administrative ability to combat smuggling,
maintain air-sea rescue services and ice patrol, inspect
merchant vessels, guard against sabotage in ports, tend to
thousands of lighthouses and lightships and, in wartime,
to integrate the coast guard with the navy. This assistant
also supervises the three mints at Philadelphia, San Fran
cisco, and Denver and checks on the purity of the coin
age. This post is now held by a forty-six-year-old Cleve
land lawyer named Horace Chapman Rose, who studied
at Princeton and at Harvard Law School In 1932 Rose
served as one of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell
DEEP IN THE HEART OF TAXES 175
Holmes' famous series of secretaries Tom Corcoran
was another before joining a Cleveland law firm. Dur
ing the war he worked with Bernard Baruch on prob
lems of industrial mobilization and reconversion. After
his demobilization he resumed his law practice, with
some time out as an economic consultant for Paul Hoff
man's E.G. A. operations.
Possibly the most romantic appointment to the least
romantic Treasury post is that of Ivy Priest to be Treas
urer of the United States. Her job includes processing
about three hundred million Government checks a year,
keeping track of the twenty-eight billions of dollars of
currency in circulation, replacing worn-out bills, and
forwarding fresh supplies of coin and paper money to
the banks. Her name now goes on all new bills issued by
the government and the signature Ivy B. Priest will soon
become as well-known as the engraving of Benjamin
Franklin.
Mrs. Priest was born in the little mining town of Kim-
berley, Utah in 1905, the oldest child of a Mormon miner
who rejoiced in the name of Orange Decatur Baker. She
had graduated from the local public schools and was in
her freshman year at the University of Utah when her
father fell ill. She immediately abandoned her education
and returned home to help take care of the family, in
cluding six brothers and sisters. She worked as a tele
phone operator, she worked as a salesgirl, she studied at
night and took correspondence courses. In 1934 she also
176 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
went into politics as president of the Utah Young Re
publicans. A year later she married Roy Fletcher Priest
and is the mother of three children; her home is in the
little town of Bountiful, Utah. Her flair for politics was
phenomenal, and by 1944 she became Republican Na
tional Committeewoman for Utah, holding the post until
this year. During "Ike's" campaign she headed the wom
en's division of the Republican National Committee; her
appointment is of course partly a political reward for
having done a good political job. But Ivy Priest is more
than patronage: she is vigorous, practical, dynamic, in
terested in civic progress and social welfare. Among
other things she is responsible for the first minimum-
wage law for working women in Utah.
Like Secretary Humphrey, all of these officials severed
all business and professional connections before seeking
Senate confirmation. Not one of them has been divorced.
All are married, family men, and responsible citizens,
who fit perfectly into the middle-income, middle-way
pattern which created and supports the Eisenhower ad
ministration.
4. BUDGET-MAKING AND BUDGET-BREAKING
The same is true of George Humphrey's opposite
number, across West Executive Avenue from the White
House: Budget Director Joseph M. Dodge.
The task which Dodge inherited from hair-trigger
DEEP IN THE HEART OF TAXES 177
Harry is a dismal one. The Democratic administration,
convinced that nothing in the world could not be settled
by a big appropriation, countered the uxorious Repub
lican plans to balance the budget by planning for a
whopping deficit this year and piling up authorized ex
penditures, over and above the budget, equal to a single
year's Treasury receipts. The first action the new team
took was to order a complete freeze on the government
departments. No new appointments, no jobs to be filled,
except when absolutely indispensable and certified as
such. In addition, Dodge issued orders that the employees
of the Budget Bureau should promptly report any ob
struction or lack of co-operation on the part of other
Federal officials. This represents the first honest attempt
in twenty years to tighten the purse strings and to use the
power of the purse, as originally intended when the
Budget Bureau was established, to assert the authority of
the White House over the executive departments.
Under Roosevelt, inspired by some Presidential rub
bish uttered to justify his taking it under his wing, the
Budget Bureau got above itself. During the war years,
with the President's unvouchered funds and general
grants of authority at its disposal, this purely administra
tive agency tried from time to time to make public policy
rather than see that funds were spent for the purposes
already determined. President Truman was no fiscal
purist but he called in an old-timer, Frederick J. Lawton,
and put him in charge of the Bureau of the Budget. By
178 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
then, the military establishment was calling the turn and
naming the appropriations, and the Bureau merely served
as a sort of M.P. directing financial traffic. Lawton, a
remarkably "warm-hearted, intelligent man to be in such
a thankless post, has been kept on in Washington assist
ing "Ike's" chosen Budget Director and to serve the
White House as a pipeline to the past.
If any one official can control self-willed and self-
perpetuating bureaucratic machinery, Joseph Morrell
Dodge is the man to do it. He was born in Detroit sixty-
two years ago, had only a public-school education, and
began his business career at the age of sixteen as a bank
messenger. By sheer personal ability, he slowly rose in
the banking business until, at the time of his appointment
by Eisenhower, he had become the president of the
oldest financial institution in Michigan, the Detroit Bank.
In addition to being a director of Chrysler and several
insurance companies, he has also been president of the
Michigan Bankers Association, the American Bankers
Association, and the Association of Reserve Bankers. He
might be described as a banker's ideal of a banker.
Although he has the general facial expression of the
man who turns down your loan application at your local
bank, he has a record of numerous civic and charitable
activities, including the Michigan Cancer Foundation,
the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the American Cancer
Society, the Greater Detroit Hospital Fund, and the local
Detroit chapter of the Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.
DEEP IN THE HEART OF TAXES 179
Dodge met "Ike" during the war after he came to
Washington for the Army Services Forces and the War
Contracts Board in 1941. Following V-E Day, the War
Department sent him over to Frankfurt, Germany to
serve as financial adviser to Eisenhower's military gov
ernment. "Ike" made him director of finance for all the
American forces in the European theater and formed a
high opinion of his ability and judgment- Truman gave
him a Medal of Merit for his work in Germany and in
1950 Dodge also received the Medal for Exceptional
Civilian Service for his work on the economic stabiliza
tion of Japan.
As a matter of fact, since 1941 Dodge has been more of
a government official than a private citizen. After the
war he was an American delegate on the Austrian Treaty
Commission at Vienna. Later in the same year this was
in 1947 h e attended the London meeting of the Coun
cil of Foreign Ministers as poor George Marshall's deputy
for Austrian affairs. For a four-year period, Dodge was a
member of the E.G. A.'s advisory committee on the fiscal
and monetary problems involved in foreign aid. For
three years, from 1949 to 1952, he also served as Ameri
can Minister and financial adviser to the Supreme Com
mander of the Allied Powers in Japan, making four trips
to that country, and in 1952 he worked with Acheson
and Dulles as a consultant on economic and financial
matters affecting Japan. In his spare time, if any, he also
180 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
acted as financial consultant to the Department of the
Army.
When Truman creditably broke partisan precedent
and offered his full co-operation to the incoming Eisen
hower administration in advance of the inaugural, "Ike"
promptly named Dodge and sent him to the White
House to consult on budgetary and fiscal matters. Dodge
established the first Republican beachhead in the White
House, while his colleague, ex-Senator Henry Cabot
Lodge, did the same at the State Department.
His associates report that this able and experienced
financier in charge of the Budget Bureau is easy to work
with, reasonable in his plans, and remarkably ready to
listen to reason. Upon his firmness and judgment, no less
than on the skill and imagination of George Humphrey
and his Treasury associates, depend the solvency and
financial integrity of the Eisenhower administration.
The challenge they face is simple and preposterous.
The demand for tax reduction, as promised by the 1952
Republican platform, is politically appealing. Canada and
England have reduced taxes and Republican Congress
men who face re-election in 1954 are eager to follow suit.
If it were only a matter of urging Eisenhower to veto a
bill to reduce taxes, there would be little problem. But the
task is to persuade Congress to renew onerous taxes which
would otherwise automatically expire.
The discriminatory excess-profits tax, which favors
large-scale, long-established businesses at the expense of
DEEP IN THE HEART OF TAXES 181
new and smaller enterprises, is due to expire on June 30th,
1953. A special eleven per cent, addition the Truman
addition to the personal income tax, ordained after the
outbreak of the Korean War, is due to expire on Decem
ber 31st, 1953. If Congress does nothing, the lapse of
these two revenue measures will cost the Treasury nearly
six billion dollars in revenue. Startling as it seems, the best
bet is for a compromise, under which the eleven per cent.
Truman annex to the income tax and the excess-profits
tax will both expire together on September 30th, 1953.
These tax cuts would thus take effect in time for the 1 954
elections.
But if they do take effect, what becomes of the bal
anced budget and what of the national debt limit of two
hundred and seventy five billion dollars? With increased
interest rates due to add materially to the cost of debt
service, and with Mr. Truman's last budget aiming at an
eight to ten billion dollar deficit, the Eisenhower adminis
tration might easily turn up with a deficit of between ten
and fifteen billion dollars in 1954, although the Republi
cans solemnly promised and vowed to balance the budget
and to end deficit financing.
For this is the end of the trail for the Roosevelt-Tru
man easy-money, "silly old dollar sign" policy. And this
is the end of a fiscal insouciance which led F.D.R. to ap
point one Secretary of the Treasury because the latter
had composed a special inauguration march for him in
1933, and another because he lived near Hyde Park in
182 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Dutchess County, New York and knew something, but
not much, about farm credit. It is the end of Kansas City
politics in the Treasury, politics which turned over col-
lectorships of internal revenue to deserving and grasping
Democrats, and which led Mr. Truman to appoint one
Secretary of the Treasury because he needed to be "fat
tened up" for a Supreme Court appointment and another
because he came from the Ozarks. The Republican fiscal
team comes from the grass roots of America. Perhaps
they, too, need to be shown but for the present they are
most likely to be seeing stars, as they try to throttle down
the runaway Democratic inflation to a safe and steady
pace.
VII
WE CAN DO IT BETTER !
1. THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE
TWENTY years ago, when Roosevelt became Presi
dent, the overwhelming majority of Americans
were willing to accept, if not wholly approve, his spirited
attempt to deal with the scandal of misery in the midst of
plenty: fourteen million unemployed, idle factories,
closed mines, foreclosed farms, insecurity, hunger, bank
ruptcy, suicide, and despair in the presence of an abun
dance of fuel, food, energy, capital, skill, and strength.
The New Deal took its moral imperative from the
President's avowal that the mission of his administration
was, in New Testament terminology, to establish the
more abundant life, especially for that one-third of the
nation which was "ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished."
A whole generation of young, ardent idealists came for
ward to help remake America with a semi-revolutionary
fervor which was impatient of all financial or legal ob
stacles.
183
184 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Less than ten years later, when Roosevelt formally
abandoned "Dr. New Deal" in favor of "Dr. Win-the-
War," it was beginning to appear that his basic solution
for the problem of misery in the midst of plenty was to
get rid of the plenty.
A growing scarcity of foods and fibers was deliber
ately created by buying up "surplus" farm produce and
destroying it, impounding it, giving it away to foreign
nations; millions of pigs were slaughtered and their meat
deliberately destroyed in 1933; the same was done with
the cattle in the drought of 1934; later on, thousands of
tons of potatoes and oranges and millions of eggs were
ruined for human consumption. The inflation, both of
labor costs and living costs, which we thus legislated was
supposed to be temporary; it soon became a permanent
national policy.
Only the onset of the second World War rescued the
New Deal from its economic auto da fe, providing jobs
for additional millions of workers in uniform or in muni
tions plants and shipyards, and setting up an inexhaustible
demand for the production of expensive industrial prod
ucts which could be shot away or blown up or sunk in
the sea with no corresponding economic benefit to our
society.
A scarcity of labor was created by the manpower de
mands of a war which kept fifteen million Americans in
the armed forces and swiftly liquidated the construction
which the New Deal had started with the Civilian Con-
WE CAN DO IT BETTER! 185
servation Corps, public works, and the work-relief pro
gram. It was much more exciting to fight the Nazis than
to plant trees, terrace hillsides, or build houses.
Even the most brilliant and controversial of the New
Deal projects the Tennessee Valley Authority and the
great dams on the Columbia River no longer were
valued primarily for their social and economic benefit to
the people of the regions they served. They were valued
chiefly as sources of industrial power for our war plants,
especially for the development of the atom bomb at Oak
Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington. For the
most audacious of all Roosevelt's successful programs,
the development of atomic energy, blossomed only in a
frightful weapon of indiscriminate slaughter. Had he
succeeded in persuading Congress to authorize the St.
Lawrence Seaway and the Florida Ship Canal or tidal
power at Passamaquoddy, these in turn would have
found their justification in helping us stoke the fantastic
destruction of global warfare.
As a result of the growing danger of World War El,
today destruction threatens even the vestiges of these
imaginative programs for the benefit of union labor,
commercial farming, a restricted variety of social se
curity, and hydroelectric development. The good fruit
of the New Deal's domestic program is today corrupted
by the evil fruit of the New Deal's foreign policy.
What use to have your pay docked, year after year, for
compulsory old-age savings and unemployment insur-
186 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
ance when inflation steals half the value of your pension
and when you may not live to enjoy it?
Of what avail will be social security and old-age pen
sions, farm-benefit payments and price supports, collec
tive bargaining and higher wages, if the American peo
ple old and young, farmer and factory hand are ex
posed to sudden death from the skies?
What good will be the great dams of the Far West ex
cept to provide conspicuous targets for atomic bombers?
What use is a good industrial pension plan if your factory
is blown up? Of what value a guaranteed price for wheat,
if your sons are in the army? What price your social
security card against a Communist tank in Korea or on
the Elbe?
What good will it do a man to refinance his mortgage
or live in a low-rent public housing project if the cities
must be evacuated in the name of civil defense?
For the Roosevelt administration followed a foreign
policy which has placed all of its domestic reforms in
jeopardy. Today, as the Republicans take over the estab
lished programs for social welfare and economic justice
which an entire generation of Americans labored to
create, the growing threat of a third world war hints
that, like the rubble of Berlin and Hiroshima, they too
may be laid waste.
Twenty years ago, Roosevelt off ered to the American
people the promise of a more abundant life. Today, the
WE CAN DO IT BETTER! 187
children of the Forgotten Man of 1933 live under the
shadow of the more abundant death.
2. THE "INCREDIBLE" DURKIN
The most ironic captive of the Democratic munitions
economy is that minority of our working people which
calls itself "labor." Of the sixty million Americans who
work for a living, about fifteen million, or one quarter,
are members of labor unions. Their votes kept the Demo
crats in office for years and the war and post-war defense
crisis conferred upon them phenomenal power.
In time of national emergency, the right to strike be
came the power to sabotage national security; elaborate
governmental and legal precautions have been needed to
hold this dangerous power within bounds. It was obvi
ously flattering to union leaders to have their mundane
demands for more money for less work exalted to the
level of world politics and the survival of human free
dom. They groaned but they loved it. Yet, if peace
should break out* their power and prestige would be
swiftly deflated. Strikes would be settled on their eco
nomic merits rather than on the basis of public safety.
There would also be heavy unemployment. Between a
quarter and a third of current economic activity is now
related to defense. With peace and the demobilization
of the three and a half million Americans now in our
188 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
armed forces, a cutback in defense spending could pro
duce a major crisis in employment.
An example of this process of union deflation is already
visible in the case of the Transport Workers Union in
New York City. By their votes they have controlled the
city government which owns the subways. By their
wage demands they have forced the city transportation
system to lose money. Finally, they came to the point of
demanding that either the city tax all the other working
people in order to raise the wages of a small group of
workers or that the fare be raised, costing the average city
family well over fifty dollars extra each year.
This self-defeating conclusion to the cycle of wage
demands and voting strength is also duplicated in the
national defense program, where the Federal Govern
ment taxes all the working people to underwrite high
wage scales for the minority of workers employed in the
coal, steel, automotive, chemical, electric, and related
munitions industries. If this forced market should be
blitzed by peace, defense contracts would be cut back
or cancelled, and with them the means to pay high wages
and maintain full employment at the expense of the tax
payers would dwindle.
This, rather than the barren bickering over repeal or
modification of the Taft-Hartley Labor-Management
Law, is the basic issue which confronts Eisenhower's
Secretary of Labor, the "incredible" Martin P. Durkin
of Chicago. Mr. Durkin is a quiet, ascetic plumber, who
WE CAN DO IT BETTER! 189
neither smokes, drinks, nor swears, and one of whose
three sons is preparing to enter the Catholic priesthood.
Durkin is a Democrat who supported Stevenson and is
an opponent of the Taft-Hartley Law; when "Ike" an
nounced the appointment, Senator Taft exclaimed, "In
credible!" It was politically believable when you ex
amined the facts of the case.
Durkin owes his job to the fact that he is not a Protes
tant. As "Ike" was completing his cabinet it was sud
denly realized that he didn't have a single Catholic in any
major administration job. Something had to be done, fast.
Herbert Brownell got in touch with the National Catho
lic Welfare Conference at Washington, and came back
with the name of Durkin. So that was that.
Secretary Durkin is nearly sixty and started his work
ing career as a steamfitter's apprentice in Chicago in
1911. He served with the field artillery and the cavalry
in France during the first World War, and when he re
turned from overseas he became Chicago business man
ager of the Plumbers Union or as they prefer to be
called, the United Association of Journeymen and Ap
prentices in the Plumbing and Pipe-fitting Industry of
United States and Canada, A. F. of L. He held that job
for twenty years, with no nonsense about union democ
racy, until he was promoted to be secretary-treasurer of
the whole international union in 1941, and moved to
Washington. Two years later he became the plumbers'
president, a post which he held until he entered the cabi-
190 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
net, and conducted their business so efficiently that he
drew an anti-trust prosecution from the government. Of
course, the charge was not pressed, but it was a sort of
economic accolade.
Shortly after taking residence in wartime Washington,
Durkin became associated with the National Catholic
Welfare Conference and was made vice-president of the
Catholic Conference on Industrial Problems. This means
that he is an adherent of the Vatican-sponsored program
for a corporative organization of industry along the lines
pioneered by Dr. Salazar in Portugal a notably non-
industrial but completely Catholic country and a devo
tee of the papal encyclicals on social justice. This ecclesi
astical program involves the self -regulation of industry
by labor-management councils; it is opposed to state
socialism and labor syndicalism, as well as to Commu
nism; it involves such concepts as the family wage and
the annual wage and so offers a middle way between con
ventional Anglo-Saxon trade-unionism and the Com
munist-Nazi type of labor-front organization.
When Durkin was appointed, the current Washing
ton jibe ran that "Ike's" Cabinet consisted of eight mil
lionaires and one plumber. Apart from the fact that at
least two of the other cabinet officers could not qualify
as millionaires, the gloss on this quip pointed out that the
plumbers were the wealthiest group of American prop
erty owners, because by the time a plumber had done a
WE CAN DO IT BETTER! 191
job on you, he not only owned his own home, but owned
your house as well.
Durkin's approach to the job was characteristically
conciliatory. He began by reassuring the staff of the
Labor Department that they need not fear dismissal be
cause of having been originally appointed by Democrats.
He fell flat on his face when he tried to take up the Taf t-
Hartley law, and his political future is cloudy. But in
his dealings with Senator Taft he showed good humor
and courtesy, and it could fairly be said that his appoint
ment by "Ike" was justified if only because it reassured
the jittery union leaders that they would not be subject
to reprisals by the incoming Republicans.
3. SINCLAIR WEEKS
As individuals, the businessmen of the country remem
bered how they had been pushed around for twenty
years, derided and chided at the same time they were told
to go out and earn more profits to be taxed for support of
a government which they were accused of having mis
managed.
After being the target of such political propaganda for
a generation and being forced by such statutes as section
' 7 A of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 193 3 and
the Wagner Act of 1935 to grant what they regarded as
unjustified and unwise power to labor unions, they had
become almost pathological in their dislike for govern-
192 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
ment regulations and organized labor. They clung bit
terly to the small relief they had been granted by the
Taft-Hartley Law of 1947, and they nursed a sense of
grievance against the big labor leaders, especially John
L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers and President
Philip Murray of the Congress of Industrial Organiza
tions. The deaths of both Murray and President William
Green of the A. F. of L. shortly after "Ike's" election
seemed to symbolize the idea that it was "time for a
change," and they were eager to make the change swiftly.
In addition, they far more than labor were un
easily aware that their profits and production depended
largely on government defense spending. They realized,
as labor did not, that in 1940, after eight years of the New
Deal, there had still been ten million Americans unem
ployed, and that it was only the war which provided full
employment at high wages. They, too, were the prisoners
of the Fair Deal barracks society, and knew that cessa
tion of foreign aid or a cutback in defense appropriations
could send many prosperous concerns to the wall. They
did not propose to be trapped by rigid wages and con
trolled prices in the recession which all business econo
mists warned might follow a basic change in defense
policy. Yet here again the mood of many businessmen
was complicated by their traditional isolationism and
their dislike of a foreign policy which had involved their
fortunes so deeply in world events. This whole set of
psychological factors in the business community called
WE CAN DO IT BETTER/ 193
for the services of a first-rate family doctor with a good
bedside manner and a little black bag.
That need was fittingly supplied by Eisenhower's
choice of Sinclair Weeks of Massachusetts as his Secre
tary of Commerce. This appointment was a big political
surprise. Before "Ike's" nomination, Weeks had been
strongly supported by the Dewey Republicans for the
post of national chairman. In the maneuvering at the
Chicago convention it became necessary to sidetrack his
candidacy in order to win the support of Michigan's
Republican state chairman, Arthur Summerfield. How
ever, when "Ike" gave Summerfield the traditional party
management job of Postmaster-General, Weeks was of
fered his choice between the Commerce Department and
the vacated position of Republican national chairman.
Most insiders assumed he would take the chairmanship.
Instead, he plumped for the cabinet and thus cleared the
way for Wes Roberts at the national committee*
Weeks is a member of an old-established conservative
Boston banking family. His father served as Secretary of
War in Harding's cabinet and the family firm of Horn-
blower & Weeks was one of the financial giants of the
1920's. Sinclair Weeks himself was born in West New
ton, Massachusetts, sixty years ago, graduated from Har
vard in 1914, and married a year later. He is the father
of sk children and, like most proper Bostonians, a thor
oughly dependable family man. During the first World
War, he served with the field artillery, fighting in France
194 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
all through 1918, from the German March offensive to
the armistice.
Except for that martial interlude, he remained with the
family financial business for ten years until he branched
out into manufacturing in 192 3 . In addition to a connec
tion with the Reed & Barton silver business at Taunton,
Massachusetts, he has been especially active in the United
Carr Fastener Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts,
an eminently successful "holding company" which
makes every kind of fastener except zippers.
About the same time that he went into manufacturing,
Weeks also entered politics, starting as alderman of New
ton and later serving as its mayor for three terms. In
1944, Leverett Saltonstall, who was then the Bay State's
governor, appointed him to serve in the Senate for a few
months after Cabot Lodge resigned. For many years,
Weeks was also active on the Massachusetts Republican
state committee and on the Republican national com
mittee. He was G.O.P. committeeman from Massachu
setts for twelve years, served as the national committee's
treasurer for three years, and was chairman of the party's
finance committee from 1949 until he entered "Ike's"
Cabinet.
.Weeks was a tower of strength in the Eisenhower
movement before and at Chicago, and went on to give
"Ike" full financial and political support in the 1952
campaign. He is one of the tough breed of Yankee busi-
WE CAN DO IT BETTER/ 195
nessmen who have shown that they can survive Demo
crats and depressions without whining. One of his first
statements after entering the cabinet was to suggest that,
after so many years of special Federal devotion to cotton
and rayon, maybe it was time to do something for wool.
New England's famous old woolen industry has, in fact,
been neglected for forty years and the old sheep farms
have been abandoned, but the woolen mills and the skill
are still there. Why not revive it?
In spite of southern shudders at the thought, Weeks'
proposal contains a good deal of economic sense. At the
very least, it is an indication of his New England tenacity
and his political acumen that he should counter the
southward drift of the cotton mills from New England
by a return to Yankee first principles.
The Department of Commerce, which he now heads,
has of course fallen from its high estate under Herbert
Hoover. After being administered by Dan Roper and
Charles Sawyer, there wasn't much left of the original
Republican dream of a "normalcy" in which American
businessmen, by seeking to enrich themselves, would re
make the world. But American businessmen are again
coming back into repute and power and Sinclair Weeks
is one of the best of them: a man who understands both
business and politics and can make the two of them trot
together in double harness even as in the sunny decades
before the first World War.
196 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
4. "CousiN EZRA"
Before anything like that can happen, something must
be done about the farmers. When Roosevelt took the
dollar off the gold standard, he tried to put our money
on a commodity basis through his so-called "parity price
formula." Under this policy, a bushel of wheat or corn,
or a bale of cotton, was supposed to have a constant pur
chasing power in terms of the cost of the manufactured
goods the farmers must buy.
The initial attempt to bring this to pass meant, in fact,
a sharp reduction in the supply of farm products. Acre
age allotments and marketing quotas; commodity-loan
programs; Agricultural Conservation Program pay
ments; slaughter of pigs and cattle; and the diversion of
excess food into domestic relief and foreign channels
under the commodity purchase programs all was part
of a costly combination resulting at times in depriving
the American people and the world of the benefits of
our own agricultural abundance in attempting to in
crease farm income by creating an artificial scarcity.
With the war, high inflexible price supports, ninety
per cent, of parity, were relied upon to stimulate the very
production which had previously been curtailed. With
half the world to feed, this made sense. When the war
ended, however, the price supports, high and inflexible,
were continued long after they were needed, since the
wartime demand for agricultural commodities had sub-
WE CAN DO IT BETTER! 197
sided. As the years passed, the rest of the world resumed
its production of food and our foreign markets con
tracted, except as we were willing to give away our prod
uce. There was a slow decline in farm prices because of
artificially stimulated high production due to the guar
antee of high price supports, and the government was
compelled to buy up more and more, not only crops such
as cotton and grain, which could be safely stored, but
products which deteriorated rapidly, such as potatoes
and butter. By the time Eisenhower took over, the De
partment of Agriculture, operating under a system of
high inflexible price supports, had invested over a billion
dollars of public money to hold up the price of vital food
and related products to our people, buying and storing
on a compulsory basis the following sizable inventory:
70 million pounds of butter
265 million bushels of corn
125 million bushels of wheat
97 million pounds of peanuts
23 million pounds of cheddar cheese
525 million gallons of turpentine
96 million pounds of dried milk
2 million bales of cotton
186 million pounds of linseed oil
165 million pounds of rosin
421 million pounds of cottonseed oil
130,000 pounds of wool
198 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
4 million pounds of tobacco
150 million pounds of beans
In addition to all this, the department in a single year
spent additional millions of dollars to hold up the price of
eggs, pork, pears, apples, cherries, orange juice, turkeys,
almonds, prunes, raisins, and honey.
Here was the guarantee of legislated price inflation. As
industrial prices rose, due to defense contracts and Fed
eral taxes, the price-support program required higher
farm prices. Higher food prices meant demands for
higher wages. Higher wages meant higher industrial costs
and prices, and so on. More important still was the fact
that farmers hold the political balance of power in the
Senate and in most of the states and, despite a sharp de
cline in the number of farm families, could block any
legislative change in this system.
Yet if peace should come and we, should curtail our
system of foreign subsidies, the export market would de
cline still further, domestic purchasing power would be
reduced, and still larger and less manageable food sur
pluses would accumulate.
To deal with this splitting economic headache, "Ike"
turned to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church, and
appointed one of its twelve apostles, fifty-four-year-old
Ezra Taf t Benson of Idaho, as his Secretary of Agricul
ture. This selection paid long overdue tribute to the agri-
WE CAN DO IT BETTER! 199
cultural genius of the Latter-Day Saints, who after thriv
ing in Illinois and Iowa, were driven west into the Utah
Desert by savage persecution. By a combination of co
operation, church discipline, and the inspired leadership
of Brigham Young, the Mormons over the years literally
have made the desert blossom like the rose. Their probity,
ability, and self-reliance have contributed increasingly
to the whole nation.
Benson, by his own admission to "Ike," had been a pre-
convention Taft supporter, although he had previously
supported Dewey in '44 and '48. When the Taftites
sought to console themselves for the large Dewey influ
ence in "Ike's" Cabinet, they joked, Well, we still have
Cousin Ezra! " Ezra Taft Benson, however, is no close re
lation to the Ohio Senator, being a sixth cousin. He was
born in the little Idaho town of Whitney, a great-grand
son of the original Mormon Apostle, Ezra Taft Benson,
who pioneered with Brigham Young and entered the Salt
Lake Valley with that remarkable man in 1 847. The new
secretary's parents were pioneer settlers in southern
Idaho, where he grew up on a farm and ran it for several
years. He graduated from the Utah State Agricultural
College in 1921 and, like many young Mormons, spent
two years in church missionary service in the British
Isles.
Ezra Benson continued his studies on his return, grad
uating with honors from Brigham Young University at
Provo, Utah, taking a master's degree in agricultural eco-
200 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
nomics at Iowa State University, and doing graduate
work at the University of California as late as 193 8. In be
tween times he served as an extension-service county
agent in Idaho and as a specialist on farm marketing at the
University of Idaho, where he became head of the de
partment of agricultural economics and marketing. This
position led him into the farm co-operative movement, so
congenial to the Mormon tradition of co-operation, and
he achieved national distinction in this field, rising to be
chairman of the American Institute of Co-operation,
which includes some fifteen hundred co-operative and re
lated farm organizations. Benson also is active in the Mor
mon Church, having become in 1943 a member of the
Council of the (12) Apostles, the governing body of that
church. After the second World War, the church sent
him to Europe in charge of its European mission; he spent
nearly a year traveling some sixty thousand miles on
Mormon relief work in the war-torn countries.
There is no doubt that Ezra Benson has accepted his
cabinet post with a sense of religious dedication. He feels
that his appointment is a distinct tribute to his church and
his friends feel that he, as a Mormon, has much to offer
the American farmers of all faiths. Mormons believe in
work the beehive is the symbol of their home state,
Utah and in co-operation and mutual help rather than
in charity, subsidy, or handouts. If Secretary Benson can
lift our agriculture out of the bureaucratic and financial
swamp created by his predecessors of late years and the
WE CAN DO IT BETTER! 201
philosophy under which they have operated, with their
seventy thousand officials and their collectivist plans to
pay the farmer to take orders from Washington and vote
for the party in power, it is a sure bet that he will need the
help of Almighty God. It is part of Benson's strength that
he believes he will receive divine assistance.
5. OVETA GULP HOBBY
That something must be done to break the rising spiral
of food prices has long been recognized by sociologists
and welfare workers. The entire Federal social security
system, which collects over three billion dollars a year
in payroll taxes to finance old-age pensions and unem
ployment pay, has been subverted by the inflated cost of
living. To put it plainly, in the 1930's people were taxed
in dollars which were worth considerably more than the
dollars they get back in the 1950's, and so cannot provide
for their needs. The social security system itself became
a useful Democratic device to enforce the payroll with
holding tax, while the social security fund, which was to
have been a trust for the benefit of the aged and the un
employed, has in practice become just a small part of the
general receipts of the United States Treasury. After it
had experienced the services of two eminent Democratic
politicians, Paul McNutt of Indiana and Oscar Ewing of
New York, "Ike" thought it was time for a good house-
cleaning in the Federal Security Administration and ap-
202 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
pointed a woman as its chief, Colonel Oveta Gulp Hobby
of Houston, Texas. From the start, Colonel Hobby had
a seat at cabinet meetings and her agency was promptly
made a full Department of Health, Education, and Wel
fare, with general responsibility for the government's
program for education and social welfare.
Although the colonel is nationally famous as wartime
commander of the Woman's Army Corps, in Texas she
is famous as a newspaper editor and publisher and as a
politician. Oveta Gulp was born at Killeen, Texas, 48
years ago, and first made her mark as parliamentarian of
the Texas House of Legislature in 1926-3 1. At the end
of that period she made an unanswerable point of order
by marrying the former Governor of Texas, William
Pettis Hobby. She has two children and is herself a strik
ingly handsome brunette with a first-class brain. Her
brain was soon put to work on her husband's paper, the
Houston Post, where she gradually rose from the job of
research editor in 1931 to that of editor and publisher
in 1952.
During the war, Mrs. Hobby came to Washington,
first with Army Public Relations, and then as com
mandant of the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps, later
the WACs, with the rank of colonel. At the end of this
service, she was duly given the Distinguished Service
Medal, and returned to her editorial desk at Houston. She
learned all one needs to know about the Washington run-
around in her days at the Pentagon.
WE CAN DO IT BETTER! 203
Her presence in the cabinet is due, not only to her
beauty, influence, or experience as an administrator; it is
also a Republican debt of political gratitude to the Lone
Star State for having voted for "Ike." Texas still retains
the old frontier attitude toward initiative and self-reli
ance, and Colonel Hobby's career reflects that Texas
tradition. She is smart, she is tactful, and she knows her
stuff.
If full-scale war or peace should complicate the social
problems of the millions of Americans under the eye of
her department, one can be sure that she will handle them
chiefly by calling on private initiative and local agencies
to co-operate, rather than slap down a dramatic new pro
gram, demand a big new Congressional appropriation,
and hire thousands of additional government employees
to put it across. The model of social welfare established
by Governor Dewey in New York and reinforced by Ei
senhower's determination to put it on a pay-as-you-go ba
sis, rather than Oscar Ewing's sweeping proposals for
nationalized medicine and Federal control of education,
will be her preference. Hers is the chance to show what
the Republicans meant when they said "We can do it
better! " New York, for example, has a far more advanced
program for health, welfare, and security than any state
in the Union, and far in advance of anything yet done in
Washington. Other Republican states have made similar
progress and have done so without bureaucracy or regi
mentation, also with great economy and flexibility. This
204 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
is where the Eisenhower administration can make real
social history in the nation; it looks as though they in
tended to do so.
6. THE MOST REPRESENTATIVE MAN
The Interior Department is another branch of the Fed
eral Government where the New Republicans intend to
show that they can do it better. Here the chief issue cen
ters around land use and public power projects, mainly in
the Far West; big, costly multi-purpose dams which will
help meet the expected ten years of continued power
shortage in the enormous region between the Rocky
Mountains and the Pacific.
"Ike" has put just about the most representative Re
publican in his administration in charge of this contro
versial program, a westerner whose first decision was to
disappoint the small but vocal group which hailed "Ike's"
victory as a mandate to stop all the talk about putting the
Federal Government into the power business.
The former Governor of Oregon, Douglas McKay,
may have received his job in recognition for the man-
sized job done for "Ike" by Oregon state chairman Ralph
Cake in the 1952 campaign, but he is entitled to recogni
tion in his own right. So typical is McKay of the kind
of New Republican Eisenhower has brought to Wash
ington or who brought Eisenhower to Washington
that it is worth taking an extended look at his career, ,
WE CAN DO IT BETTER! 205
He was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1893, the son of
a carpenter of Scottish descent with a touch of Dutch
blood, and of a Scottish mother with a dash of French
ancestry. All of his four grandparents arrived in Oregon
by 1852, seven years before the territory became a state.
By heritage, he is part of the old West of the Oregon
Trail and the covered wagons.
As soon as he was thirteen, young McKay started
working after school to help support the family; each
summer he worked on a farm near the little Oregon
country town of Scappoose. He had a strong liking for
farming and at the age of eighteen dropped out of high
school in order to enter the agricultural course at the
Oregon State College at CorvalUs, where he first showed
his knack at politics by getting himself elected as presi
dent of the freshman class.
He worked his way through college, paying his own
tuition and contributing to family income as well, and
graduated in 1917, qualified as a county agricultural
agent. He never got the job. By then we had entered
World War I and he left Corvallis to go to officer's train
ing school at the Presidio in San Francisco shortly after
his marriage to Miss Mabel C. Hill, a stenographer whom
he had met in a Portland law office. After some basic
training he was sent to France as a second lieutenant with
the 3 6 1st Infantry and, during the battle for Sedan in the
Meuse-Argonne offensive, suffered a serious shell wound
which changed his whole career.
206 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Hit in six places in the right shoulder, McKay almost
lost his arm, but a series of operations enabled him to re
gain use of his shoulder muscles, and he was discharged
as cured- However, the injury forced him to give up
farming, for which he had trained, and to seek a less ardu
ous occupation. After a try at selling insurance and auto
mobiles, he became sales manager of a Portland motor
company and was assigned to his firm's Chevrolet agency
in Salem, the state capital.
That was in 1927, the first year that Chevrolet outdis
tanced Ford, and he soon set up in business for himself,
forming the Douglas McKay Chevrolet Company. His
business prospered and eventually, in 1946, he was able
to move into a large new building of his own and handle
both Chevrolets and Cadillacs. For this success as a safes-
man he has been charged with being a puppet of General
Motors!
He is nobody's puppet. His political career shows that
he can succeed independently without regard to Detroit.
For example, in 1932 he was elected mayor of Salem and
kept the city on a hand-to-mouth basis during the two
worst years of the depression. Because his own business
barely kept out of the red during this same period, Mc
Kay came to a sound Scottish conclusion: that it is the
duty of government, as well as business, to preserve and
guard its financial foundation. So he went into state poli
tics and was elected state senator in 1934, being re-elected
WE CAN DO IT BETTER! 207
four times in succession, each time leading the rest of the
Republican county ticket.
As a state legislator, McKay specialized on highway
planning, as was natural in an automobile dealer, particu
larly after World War II, a period when all states faced
crucial decisions involving the rebuilding and rehabilita
tion of all public works, including their highway systems.
He took his political life in his hands at this time, risked
bitter conflict with powerful selfish interests, and floated
bonds and rebuilt the roads. He also was interested in
conservation, backed the Willamette Valley project and
championed the Willamette River Basin Commission.
He entered national politics in 1940 when he campaigned
for Wendell Willkie. He helped Dewey win the Repub
lican Presidential nomination in 1948, and in 1952 played
a useful part of lining up West Coast delegates for Eisen
hower at Chicago.
Where was he in 1944? On the day the Japanese at
tacked Pearl Harbor, December 7th, 1941, McKay hap
pened to be in Honolulu with the Willamette University
football team, and he and the squad helped dig trenches
on that "day of infamy." He immediately volunteered
for active military service but his World War I wound
confined him to limited duty. He was commissioned cap
tain in October of 1942, being later promoted to major,
and served as public-relations officer at Camp Murray
and Camp Adair.
At the end of the war he went back to Oregon politics
208 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
and was elected the forty-ninth governor of Oregon in
the 1948 election.
Of course he's a joiner; that is part of the western tra
dition in business and politics. By the latest count, he be
longs to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Disabled
American Veterans, the American Legion, the Masons,
the Shriners, the Knight Templars, Kiwanis, Elks, and
Eagles. He is also an active and devout Presbyterian. He
and his wife have two daughters; a son was killed in an
automobile accident while a student at Oregon State Uni
versity. One of his daughters, incidentally, is taking up
her father's lost career in agriculture and is studying to
become a farm expert. His favorite hobby, which is also
in the western tradition, is horseback riding.
In short, Douglas McKay is just about the most aver
age kind of small-town business man in politics who ever
came down the Potomac. Slender, dark and alert at sixty,
he could serve as a stand-in for almost any cabinet officer
in "Ike's" administration and would do a pretty com
petent job. He rounds out the Eisenhower group which
has accepted the receivership of the windy, contradic
tory, costly, and controversial legacy of Democratic so
cial and economic reform.
It speaks much for Roosevelt's political skill, although
not for his national statesmanship, that he gave the coun
try the impression that he and the Democratic Party had
invented and patented all the social progress in the United
States. Actually, the New Deal derived most of its social-
WE CAN DO IT BETTER! 209
welfare program from New York State, where a long
series of progressive governors, Republican and Demo
cratic (including Teddy Roosevelt, Charles Evans
Hughes, Charles Whitman, and the great Al Smith) , had
been dealing for decades with the emerging problem of
an industrial and urban society in a country which was
originally composed of farmers and traders. The vice of
the Roosevelt trick was that it persuaded many Repub
licans that their party must oppose necessary measures of
adjustment and reform and even led them to attack mem
bers of their own party who dared to continue the Re
publican tradition of social progress and economic fair
play.
The Eisenhower group can do it better if they simply
pick up where Roosevelt left off and go to New York
and other progressive commonwealths to study and adapt
the steady, undramatic, sensible pleasures which such
Republican governors as Dewey, Duff, Driscoll, and Mc
Kay have enacted and administered. The truth is that
there is no single broad national solution for any of our
social problems. Living conditions, climate, custom, pop
ulation, and economic circumstances vary tremendously
from state to state and from region to region. The Re
publican solution is to find ways to adjust flexible na
tional programs to local and regional differences. This
method distrusts hordes of officials and doubts the effi
cacy of enormous Federal appropriations, preferring to
rely on private and local agencies and to confine Federal
210 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
action to helping local authorities to solve their local
problems. That is where the New Deal reforms went
astray and that is where the New Republicans can bring
the country up to date with its own remarkable progress
if they are not interrupted by war.
Their greatest weakness is that, with certain excep
tions, the New Republicans seem to lack human kind
ness. Where such Democrats as "Al" Smith in New
York and "Ed" Kelly in Chicago were deeply concerned
with the problems and frailties of their constituents, the
Republicans often fail to consider the happiness or sor
rows of their neighbors. This lack is what St. Paul meant
when he said that if you have not charity, all else f aileth,
and is responsible for the charges of arrogance and in
difference to human needs which have accompanied past
Republican defeats. The New Republicans have suc
ceeded and are legitimately proud of their success, but
it is only as they have individually suffered or failed that
they show an understanding of the fact that, in Ameri
can politics, it is not enough to serve your fellow-men:
you must also like them.
VIII
MEW BROOMS
1 . ORPHAN OF THE ADMINISTRATION
NOT the least of the ironies of the Eisenhower ad
ministration is the part played by the Department of
Justice.
During the 1952 campaign, "the mess in Washington"
seemed to guarantee that the Attorney General of the
United States would occupy the best political showcase
in the country. The nation had been startled by a rash of
resounding scandals, involving graft and corruption
throughout the Truman administration: five-percenters,
mink coats, R.F.C. favoritism in granting loans, black
mail and thieving in the Bureau of Internal Revenue,
stealing in the Commodity Credit Corporation, and a
blind eye to all these doings on the part of the Depart
ment of Justice, "Turn the rascals out!" is always effec
tive politics and a large amount of the moral fervor mo
bilized in support of "Ike's" crusade stemmed from pub
lic disgust with the Democratic clique which had grown
old, fat, contented, and corrupt in national office.
211
212 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Eisenhower's decision to appoint the man whom Gov
ernor Dewey regarded as one of the most brilliant po
litical brains in the United States, Mr. Herbert Brow-
nell, as his Attorney General implied that the Department
of Justice would set the pace for the whole new admin
istration. A record for vigorous, intelligent, and success
ful housecleaning and prosecution at Washington could
place Brownell before the country in the finest possible
light. His ability and honesty were acknowledged and
widely respected by lawyers and politicians alike. He had
been Dewey's partner in politics for a quarter of a cen
tury and held the unequaled record of having success
fully managed the nomination of three successive Repub
lican Presidential candidates. He was "Ike's" key man in
clearing applicants for policymaking jobs in the incom
ing Republican administration. He had selected young,
able, decent men as his assistants and was expected to
make political, as well as legal, history on the Potomac.
Unfortunately for these great and justified expecta
tions, "the mess in Washington" proved to be a great
deal more serious than any number of mink coats on the
wrong backs or wads of money in the wrong pockets.
Top billing in the new Republican show reflected the
basic problems before the country: foreign policy, de
fense and taxation. The limelight was focused on John
Foster Dulles, Charles E. Wilson, George M. Hum
phrey, and their assistants in the departments of State,
Defense, and Treasury, for the duration of the world
NEW BROOMS 213
crisis with which the Eisenhower administration found
itself desperately engaged.
In fact, instead of dealing with the problem of corrup
tion in government, the new Attorney General's fast
assignment was to devise acceptable methods for han
dling the unfamiliar problems involved in dealing with
matters of security, loyalty, and subversion.
During the long Hoover depression a good many gen
erous, idealistic young Americans became disillusioned
by the scandalous breakdown of our economic system
and were attracted by the communistic urge of the Marx
ist doctrine. They were also favorably impressed by Rus
sia's tremendous drive and direction under Stalinist state-
planning and saw no harm in embracing theoretical Com
munism as a tenable political faith. Added to them, of
course, was the sizable group of low-caliber citizens who
in any country and in any age will always sell their
mother's back teeth for the price of a drink; the two sets
became the basis for an extremely efficient Soviet spy
service in the United States. Before and during the war,
that situation did not seem to matter. We had recognized
Russia in 193 3, as part of Roosevelt's diplomatic reaction
to the rise of Hitler, and in our conduct of the war the
Red army necessarily became a vital element in our mili
tary strategy and planning. It was only after V-J Day
that we became uneasily aware of the fact that the Krem
lin had planted its agents and sympathizers throughout
the Federal Government. The country had belatedly
214 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
taken panicky alarm and was in a mood to approve far-
reaching investigations of public officials, public enter
tainers, schoolteachers, scientists, and professors. Yet
there was no clear precedent for appropriate action in
this legal no-man's land. The entire problem was foreign
to the spirit of our laws and institutions.
Granted that it is the responsibility of the Chief Execu
tive to ascertain the loyalty and reliability of government
employees, could an official charged with being a poor
security risk have resort to the courts or invoke the prin
ciples of the Bill of Rights? If so, what became of our
basic governmental principle of the "division of pow
ers"? If not, what guarantee was there that a man un
justly accused could establish his innocence? Two con
victed Soviet spies involved in the theft of American
atomic secrets for the benefit of the Kremlin faced death
by electrocution. Their action was punishable by death
under the Espionage Act of 1917. Should the Depart
ment of Justice recommend clemency and thus cater to
the world-wide organized Communist agitation for the
pardon of the two spies? Or should the Attorney Gen
eral advise the President to let the law take its course and
countenance the creation of two more Communist
"martyrs"?
Granted that the Department of Justice could devise
some satisfactory plan for dealing with the loyalty of
Federal employees, what protection could it offer to ap
plicants for Federal employment? If an individual official
NEW BROOMS 215
was entitled to a hearing on charges of disloyalty, could
a man or woman unjustly accused of disloyalty be black
listed for appointment without an equal opportunity to
establish the falsity of malicious accusations?
Such issues, rather than the classic performance of a
new broom making a clean sweep of dust and cobwebs,
became part of the administrative maze in which the new
Attorney General and his assistants found themselves
the moment they had taken their oaths of office. For these
were parts of the police problem imposed on the nation
by its foreign situation and, although they had no coun
terpart in the normal traditions of American jurispru
dence, were closely related to the brute question of
American survival in the face of the clear and present
danger from abroad.
2. HERBERT BROWNELL, JR.
Ever since the 1952 elections, the Democrats have said
that Governor Dewey of New York is the ablest politi
cal leader in the United States. Dewey would deny the
accuracy of this tribute to his skill and judgment in pub
lic affairs on the ground that Brownell has the better
claim. Of course, the fact of the matter is that Dewey is
the administrator of public office and Brownell the po
litical manager. As a matter of record, the two men have
worked together as a team so long that it is almost im
possible to say where one begins and the other leaves off
in their combined operations.
216 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Certainly, any list of "Ike's" kingmakers could not
omit Brownell, who handled the grinding detail work of
Eisenhower's pre-convention campaign and managed
the in-fighting at the nominating convention itself. And
when "Ike" picked Brownell as his Attorney General,
most people assumed that it was a political reward for
these services.
They overlooked the fact that Brownell is an able law
yer in his own right and that his political activities have
almost literally been conducted in^his spare time. Like
"Ike," he is a prairie product. His father was a professor
at the University of Nebraska and the future Attorney
General was born in the little town of Peru, Nebraska,
attended the public schools, and graduated from the state
university with a Phi Beta Kappa key in 1924. Like
Dewey, he then came east to study law and received his
law degree, with honors, from Yale in 1927. That same
year he passed the New York bar examinations and
joined the conservative Wall Street law firm of Root,
Clark, Buckner, Rowland, and Ballentine. The year of
the panic he changed to the long-established firm of Lord,
Day, and Lord, remaining with them until he came to
Washington with "Ike" twenty-four years later. His
specialty is hotel law and he is expert in keeping his clients
out of court and protecting their good name without un
necessary litigation.
The same year that he became a partner of Lord, Day,
and Lord he married Miss Doris McCarter of Texas. The
NEW BROOMS 217
Brownells have four children, are Methodists and in
every way conform to the New Republican model of
family life and undramatic, solid achievement.
Brownell's political career began in 1931, as did that
of so many younger Republicans. The depression had
shaken the complacency out of the G.O.P. and the same
ferment which created the New Deal was also distilling
its political antidote. Brownell was Republican district
captain in New York's old 10th Manhattan Assembly
District, a closely divided district then held by Tammany
Hall. Another captain in the same district was named
Tom Dewey and when Brownell decided to run for the
assembly in 1931, Dewey was his campaign manager.
That year he lost to a Roosevelt Democrat, Langdon
Post, but in 193 2 Brownell ran again and was elected, be
cause Tammany decided to knife Post for having sup
ported the Seabury investigation. However, the political
climate of New York City was changing. In 1933, Fio-
rello LaGuardia, a progressive Republican, was elected
Mayor and Brownell remained in the state assembly for
five consecutive terms.
This record effectively disposes of the quip that
Brownell's political experience has been confined to
rounding up delegates to Republican national conven
tions who do not wish to vote for Robert A. Taft. By
1942, Dewey and Brownell had reversed their roles and
it was Herb Brownell who acted as Dewey's campaign
manager when Dewey was elected as the first Republi-
218 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
can governor of the Empire State in twenty years. His
brilliance is attested to by the impressive fact that his
candidates won the Republican Presidential nomination
against powerful opposition in 1944, 1948, and 1952.
After Dewey's foredoomed defeat by Roosevelt in
1944, Brownell served as Republican national chairman
for a couple of years. After Dewey's unexpected defeat
by Truman in the "surprise election" of 1948, many Re
publicans blamed Brownell for the policy of "dignity
and unity" which bred a disastrous political compla
cency. Brownell particularly irritated many Midwest
Republicans and his name, like Dewey's, was a red flag
to the Taft supporters in 1952. An expert behind-the-
scenes political operator, Brownell ran rings around some
of the more mentally muscle-bound opponents of Gen
eral Eisenhower. His role before and at the convention
was that of chief of staff and his strategy paid off in
"Ike's" first-ballot nomination.
During the contest with Adlai Stevenson, Brownell
worked inconspicuously at "Ike's" Hotel Commodore
headquarters in New York. This was the period when
Eisenhower soft-pedaled his Dewey connections in order
to cultivate the good will of the bruised and embittered
Taf tites. Brownell showed that he could learn by experi
ence and, whereas in 1948 the Republicans had been de
stroyed by overconfidence, he used the clamor over the
Taft-Ike axis to induce a corresponding mood of "It's
in the bag" among the doomed Democrats. The payoff
NEW BROOMS 219
came on election day when "Ike" received the greatest
popular majority of any Republican President and New
York State itself gave him an unprecedented plurality of
over eight hundred and forty thousand votes.
Brownell's political future, like Dewey's, is a legiti
mate subject for speculation. If a peaceful accommoda
tion of interests should end the "cold-war" crisis, his task
of clean-up man in the Augean stables of Fair Deal poli
tics in the Justice Department would confer upon him
the same kind of national prominence achieved by
Dewey as "racket-buster" in New York City twenty
years ago.
However, if the East-West conflict persists, Brown-
ell's role may easily parallel tfcat of his Democratic prede
cessors, such as Robert Jackson or Francis Biddle.
In any case, it is far and high for a boy from the Ne
braska prairies to have traveled before his fiftieth year.
His career is concrete evidence that ours is still a society
of opportunity and that the practice of law is still the key
which opens most of the doors to success in public life.
3. THE F.B.I. TAIL OR DOG?
On Brownell and his assistants depends the not unim
portant question of whether we shall develop along
police-state lines, whether the F.B.I. shall wag the dog in
a government supposedly of laws, not men.
Will the symbol of American justice be the blind-
220 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
folded goddess with the scales and sword, or will it be the
omnipotent G-man, with his files, his fingerprints and
his shoulder holster?
So far as "Ike's" Attorney General is concerned, the
answer is clear. It is provided by the group of lawyers he
has brought in to help him make a clean sweep of the fixes
and other ward-politics practices which crept into the
Department of Justice after Truman made Tom Clark
of Texas his Attorney General. Brownell's Deputy At
torney General is forty-year-old William P. Rogers,
born in the little town of Norfolk, New York, and a
graduate of Colgate who received his law degree from
Cornell. Bill Rogers got his start in New York City as
assistant District Attorney in 1938 under Tom Dewey.
A member of a big Wall Street law firm, he also served
as chief counsel for the Senate War Investigating Com
mittee at Washington after a good war record in the
navy. During the 1952 campaign, Rogers rode the Nixon
train and is credited with extricating the Republican
Vice-Presidential candidate from the famous "Nixon
Fund" Democratic smear. Rogers is no innocent in poli
tics and promptly appointed a Taf t Republican as his as
sistant, thirty-four-year-old Robert Minor of Columbus,
Ohio, who had been Senator John Bricker's administra
tive assistant.
The same pattern of political prudence and careful se
lection of qualified young lawyers was followed in the
other Department of Justice key jobs. They all follow
NEW BROOMS 221
the New Republican pattern: all family men, all young
for politics.
There remains the shadowy "Fourth Branch of Amer
ican Government," the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Under the long, honest, and efficient direction of J. Ed
gar Hoover, the F.B.L has achieved much of the prestige
with Congress and the public enjoyed by the Marine
Corps. It has kept out of politics and has avoided scandal.
It rendered outstanding counterespionage and intelli
gence services before and during the second World War,
and has been reasonably successful in dealing with Com
munist and Soviet agents during the present conflict be
tween Russia and the United States.
As a result, the director of the F.B.I, has become an
official who is much more powerful, politically, than the
Attorney General, while his organization has become the
darling of Congress in dealing with "subversive activi
ties." Matters have now reached the stage where, in
addition to being nominated by the President and con
firmed by the Senate, government officials must also be
"cleared" by the F.B.I.
In every other country where a national police or
ganization has achieved comparable powers, it has even
tually abused .them. The present director is fifty-eight
years old and had a distinguished record of service in the
Department of Justice before becoming head of the
F.B.I, in 1924 as part of the Republican clean-up after
the Teapot Dome scandals and the disgrace of Harding's
222 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Attorney General Harry Daugherty of Ohio. Hoover
is a fully qualified lawyer and has been careful to insist
that his G-men have a thorough knowledge of law as
well as judo, gunplay, and modern police technique. Yet
Edgar Hoover will not forever rejnain as the director
of the F.B.I.; other less able and less scrupulous men may
rise to control this powerful and respected agency, with
its thousands of operatives, its vast mysterious files and
its growing power to decide who may or may not be con
sidered "loyal" to his own country.
If the cold war should be intensified, that power might
become inconsistent with traditional freedom in the
United States. The police state has suppressed freedom in
other lands and in other eras of history, and we are not
immune from history or human nature.
Even if we assume, as most of us do, that our tradition
of liberty is too robust to be destroyed by such a process,
it remains a fact that, for the duration of the cold war, the
F.B.I, is a vital part of our national defense system and,
like the armed services, will need wise and firm control
by "Ike's" Attorney General.
IX
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE
1. POLITICS, POLITICS
A POLITICAL administration can be no stronger
-TIL than the political party which supports it. If that
party loses control of Congress, power to act departs
from the executive. That is the basis of our two-party
system.
Equally basic is the fact that it is almost as bad for a
party to be too long out of power as it is for a party to
stay in office too long. The last breeds self-satisfaction
and corruption, the first breeds self -distrust and factional
bitterness.
No sooner had the votes been counted in "Ike's" land
slide victory of November, 1952 than a little cloud no
bigger than a politician's mouth appeared on the Repub
lican horizon. Whereas Eisenhower had received over
fifty-five per cent, of the popular vote and 442 of the 531
electoral votes, his seven million plurality did not cany
over into the Republican Party as a whole. The Senate
had been 49-to-47 Democratic; after the election it was
223
224 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
49-to-47 Republican, if you count Wayne Morse of Ore
gon as a Republican, something to which he loudly ob
jected. In the House of Representatives the Republicans
picked up a small working majority of nine votes 221
to 212 but a check of the election returns showed that
the Republicans had actually received less than half of all
the votes cast for congressmen. While this apparent mi
nority position is due to overwhelming Democratic ma
jorities for congressmen from the southern states, it did
not furnish a comfortable or reassuring picture for the
Republican Party managers to see that "Ike's" plurality
was twice as large as the Republican majorities in con
tested districts. Put one way, "Ike" led his ticket; stated
another way, the Republican Party trailed "Ike" rather
badly.
The congressional elections of 1954 could determine
whether the Eisenhower administration, like that of Her
bert Hoover, would abruptly be shorn of its power to
direct national affairs. A Democratic resurgence could
deprive the Republicans of control over both branches
of Congress and impose frustration on the new Repub
lican President.
Many signs supported the belief that, under normal
political trends, this might easily happen. Failure to re
duce taxes, a continued drop in farm prices, a serious busi
ness recession, a continued stalemate in Korea any or
all of these could disappoint the hopes of the thirty-three
million Americans who had trooped to the polls with the
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 225
cry, "I like Ike!", and lead to a general disillusionment in
favor of the Democratic opposition.
So the story of the eighty-third Congress resolves itself
into the familiar fight for the water hole or, if more mod
ern imagery is now in order, into a struggle to determine
whether the Republicans shall expend their beachhead
or be driven back into the sea.
The management of the Republican Party, at this
juncture, was a house subdivided against itself. The for
mer national chairman, Arthur E. Summerfield of Michi
gan, had been named by Eisenhower as Postmaster-Gen
eral, with control of the most effective political patron
age in the country. Truman had rendered Summerfield's
task somewhat difficult by "covering into Civil Service"
the thousands of Democratic postmasters who had re
ceived patronage appointments during the twenty years
of Democratic Party control at Washington. So the Re
publican organization was unable to act promptly and
effectively with this important instrument of political
power.
Summerfield according to the Democrats was a
member of the mythical "General Motors dynasty" that
was supposed again according to the Democrats to
have captured the Republican Party. Actually, he was
head of the largest Chevrolet sales agency in the world
and an independent political power in Michigan. He was
born in the little Michigan community of Pinconning
fifty-four years ago and, after getting as far as the eighth
226 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
grade in the public schools of Bay City and Flint, Michi
gan, had to go to work at the age of thirteen for Weston-
Mott, axle manufacturers, later absorbed by General
Motors. From there he graduated into the Buick Motor
Company and during the first World War worked with
the Chevrolet ammunition department. Shortly after the
armistice, he decided to go into the real-estate business.
In 1924 he became a Michigan oil distributor, and just
one month before the Wall Street crash of 1929 started
his own Chevrolet agency in Flint and has stayed with
it ever since.
Summerfield didn't get into politics until 1943, when
he became finance director of the Michigan Republican
central committee. He was a successful fund raiser and
the following year he was chosen Republican national
committeeman from Michigan, a position which he held
until he joined "Ike's" Cabinet. This brought him onto
the national level of politics and he served as acting chair
man of the Republican strategy committee which was
organized in 1949, after the '48 disappointment.
He is a joiner in moderation Masons, Elks, Kiwanis
and a solid citizen who married young, when only nine
teen, and has two children. He has also been active in the
boys' clubs movement in Michigan, in the National Au
tomobile Dealers Association, and on the Council of For
eign Relations. In short, he is a self-made man who
worked his way up to the top of the tree without any
favors and few educational advantages.
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 227
Summerfield went into the Eisenhower camp at Chi
cago, after some slick political footwork which drove
the "Ike" managers frantic. The Michigan Republicans,
with their powerful backing from the automotive indus
try, held the balance of power between Taft and Eisen
hower. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin were
strongly for Taft. If Summerfield had brought Michigan
into the Senator's camp, as he might have done, it would
have faced the "Ike-likers" with a solid Midwestern
line-up. Summerfield went with the Eisenhower side
when he became convinced, as a result of a statewide
canvas, district by district, that the voters of Michigan
wanted Eisenhower. He had previously had all the can
didates speak in Michigan. Taft, in fact, had been there
four times. Summerfield joined the Eisenhower side and
was made chairman of the Republican National Com
mittee. This was a prudent decision, as it went far to re
assure the Taft group in the party that the Deweyites
were not in complete control. Summerfield ran the
Washington end of the national campaign under consid
erable difficulties, but with the discovery of the wide
gap between "Ike's" political popularity and that of the
conservative Republican candidates, a new approach was
indicated.
This approach was supplied by Charles Wesley Rob
erts of Kansas, who was executive director of the na
tional Eisenhower headquarters in Washington during
the pre-convention campaign. Summerfield made Wes
228 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Roberts the director of organization for the Republican
National Committee.
Unfortunately, it was only an approach, because Rob
erts felt obliged to resign barely two months after he had
undertaken the job. He suffered from two serious dis
advantages: not being rich, he had accepted a salary as
national chairman, which tended to reduce him to the
status of an employee of the committee, and he got
caught and smeared in an intra-Republican Party squab
ble in Kansas. When a committee of the state legislature
at Topeka attacked him as a lobbyist on the ground that
he had accepted a sizable public-relations fee for helping
arrange the sale of a private hospital to the state, he de
cided to step out of the chairmanship. This incident de
prived the Eisenhower administration of a man who was
almost uniquely qualified to maintain the volunteer en
thusiasm which had won the election for the New Re
publicans.
He was promptly replaced as national chairman by
Leonard Wood Hall, who was born in Teddy Roose
velt's home town of Oyster Bay, Long Island, in 1900,
and named after Teddy's famous superior officer in the
Roughriders, Colonel Leonard Wood. Hall's career has
been publicly undramatic and politically significant: a
law degree from Georgetown University and a practic
ing lawyer since he was 21 years old; three terms in the
New York state legislature; a three-year term as sheriff of
Nassau County, New York; election to Congress in
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 229
1938; fourteen years in the House of Representatives,
ending in his appointment to the delectable office of Sur
rogate of Nassau County.
So much for the bare facts; now for the truth behind
them. Len Hall bald, clean-shaven, with horn-rimmed
spectacles and a firm jaw is one of the ablest political
technicians in Republican national politics. He handled
the Congressional end of the 1952 campaign for Eisen
hower and turned in an energetic performance which
resulted in a slim but sufficient Republican majority in
the House of Representatives along with the Eisenhower
landslide. Hall had wished to be named Republican na
tional committeeman from New York, but the post was
already very competently filled by J. Russel Sprague,
also of Nassau County; Hall was therefore made Surro
gate, pending future developments. His name was ad
vanced for the national chairmanship by Speaker of the
House Joe Martin of Massachusetts, and was backed by
other national Republicans before the Dewey organiza
tion also came to Hall's support.
He lacks Wes Roberts' flair for enlisting the enthusi
astic support of liberals and independents, but he is
widely known and liked by Republican politicians
throughout the country. He is also a first-class political
practitioner in a job which could be bungled by inexpert
management. He will have the good will of the regular
Republican organizations throughout the country and
the full approval of the Republicans in Congress. His
230 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
chief danger is that he may be, as are many professional
politicians, disposed to discount the importance and
good will of the six million independent voters without
regular political affiliations whose support can elect Presi
dents and whose indifference can destroy national ad
ministrations.
2. "POOR RICHARD"
The spearhead of the Republican political drive on
Capitol Hill is the man who is separated by a single heart
beat from the Presidency of the United States: Vice-
President Richard Nixon.
Dick Nixon is one of the youngest men to occupy this
post, being barely forty years old, and his Vice-Presi
dential candidacy occasioned more controversy and mis
givings than any in our history. He is dark-haired, se
rious, energetic, and self-confident, and first achieved
national fame for his part in exposing Alger Hiss on the
House Un-American Affairs Committee in 1948,
He was the unanimous choice of a committee of thirty-
two Republican leaders, after four hours of deliberation,
as "Ike's" running-mate in the 1952 campaign. A young
war veteran with a good record, personable and pro
gressive, Nixon was acceptable to all the factions of the
party. He had shown a genuine understanding of the
world problem; he had given an exhibition of skill, re
straint, and persistence in the exposure of Alger Hiss,
winning the commendation of both pro- and anti-Corn-
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 231
munists; he was admired by individuals as diverse as
Irving Ives and Robert Taft. His greatest opposition, in
fact, came from Governor Earl Warren of California,
who was far from pleased by the selection of Nixon for
Vice-President and remained so until the eve of the elec
tion. Warren was an avowed candidate for the Presiden
tial nomination and the old New York-California axis
established by Dewey in 1948 had been shaken by War
ren's failure to realize in time that "Ike's" candidacy had
become a bandwagon. Nixon had urged Warren to re
lax and enjoy the inevitable, but the governor was stub
born and met with unnecessary disappointment.
Nixon's past career had given little indication that he
was of national stature. He was a very normal sort of
young California war veteran, born of Quaker parents in
the little town of Yerba Linda, and brought up in the
Quaker tradition of thrift, faith, and hard work. He went
to the public schools and delivered groceries and worked
at filling stations after school hours to earn money. He
went on to attend Whittier College in Whittier, Cali
fornia, where he developed into a successful debater and
played football, although never making the Varsity. On
graduation, he received a scholarship to study at Duke
University Law School. With his law degree, he re
turned to enter a law firm at Whittier and five years later
was just beginning to build up a practice when Pearl Har
bor altered all his personal plans.
Those plans included his family life, for in 1940 he had
232 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
met and married pretty Patricia Ryan, a Nevada girl of
his own age who was teaching classes in typing and short
hand at the local high school. When war came, Nixon
promptly joined the navy and went on to serve in the
South Pacific, winning two battle stars and two special
commendations nothing very dramatic but a good testi
monial to courage and character.
After V-J Day, he returned to Whittier, re-estab
lished his home, and started to make up for the four years
of lost time. He wasn't allowed to do so. A citizens com
mittee in the old 12th Congressional district of California
urged him to run for Congress in 1946 against the en
trenched five-term New Deal Democrat, Jerry Voorhis.
In that year of meat shortages and "Had enough?",
Nixon won the seat and was re-elected two years later.
In 1950, a similar group of California citizens urged him
to run for the Senate against another New Deal Demo
crat, Helen Gahagan Douglas. Again Nixon was success
ful, winning the senatorship with the overwhelming ma
jority of more than seven hundred thousand votes.
In the meantime, trouble was brewing for "Poor Rich
ard." As a poor man, he lacked the personal fortune nec
essary to finance the political end of a senatorship from a
large state such as California. Accordingly, his friends
set up a special fund under independent audit and con
trol to defray such expenses as mailing, printing, travel,
and entertainment. As a conspicuous opponent of Com
munism in the matter of Alger Hiss and as the man who
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 233
had defeated two prominent New Deal Democrats, his
support inevitably came from conservative business in
terests in Southern California, chiefly those in oil and
real estate.
In the middle of the Presidential campaign, the Demo
crats exploded their giant cracker. The Nixon fund was
"exposed" and the impression was piously given that
Senator Nixon had been bribed by "selfish corporate in
terests" to serve their private profit at the expense of the
public. The "scandal" was well-timed and the Repub
licans were flabbergasted, as the Democratic smear-pic
ture was far out of harmony with "Ike's" crusade for
honesty in government. Many upper-bracket Repub
licans argued that "Ike" should dismiss Nixon from the
ticket like a clumsy butler. Others argued that this would
be fatal to the party's success. Senator Taft and Governor
Dewey, like two estranged parents hovering at the bed
side of a sick child, both urged Eisenhower to stand by
Nixon. And on the Nixon train, Bill Rogers communi
cated with his law partner, Jack Wells, who was working
with Dewey in New York, to give Nixon time to present
his defense.
Actually, the "scandal" proved to be the turning point
in the campaign. Nixon's nationwide telecast from Los
Angeles, with his pretty wife paralyzed with nervousness
at his side, and his account of his personal finances, his
wife and children, and the dog "Checkers," was de
nounced as "soap opera" by the disgruntled Democrats.
234 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
But it more than made the case for the propriety of the
Nixon fund. Women wept as they watched the televi
sion screen, and one man at Dewey headquarters said
somberly: "When he came to talk about his financial
problems, I almost cried myself; they were so like my
own!" Governor Stevenson of Illinois was revealed 'to
have administered not one, but three, similar funds on his
own behalf, and was never able to recapture full public
attention after the failure of the Nixon smear.
Some time after the election it was discovered that the
Democrats had also prepared elaborate forgeries as a fol
low-up charge against the Republican Vice-Presidential
nominee and the whole episode boomeranged in a sharp
reminder that bad morals, like bad manners, are also very
bad politics.
Under the Constitution of the United States, Dick
Nixon is the man who will become President if Eisen
hower should be unable to perform his duties. Three
times in the present century, a Vice-President has be
come our chief executive as a result of the death of the
President of the United States: "Teddy" Roosevelt after
McKinley's assassination, Calvin Coolidge after Harding
contracted ptomaine poisoning in Alaska, and Harry
Truman after F.D.R. died of a cerebral hemorrhage at
Warm Springs, Georgia. "Teddy" and "Cautious CaT
were distinct improvements over their predecessors,
Truman a costly anticlimax. What qualities which might
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 235
become of national and world importance does Nixon
possess?
On the record, Nixon is a Quaker, very much in ear
nest, but humorous, an advocate of social advances in the
teeth of the intense conservatism of many California Re
publicans. He lacks wide experience of the world outside
the United States or deep familiarity with national af
fairs. He is dependable, loyal, hard-working, honest, and
a little brash.
But his wife, Pat Nixon, is evidence that this deadly
serious young lawyer is the kind of man most Americans
like and trust. She is not only pretty and the mother of
two pretty little girls; she is the self-reliant kind of busi
ness girl who is typical of millions of other American
women who earn their living. She worked her way
through the University of Southern California by doing
research, grading papers, and acting as sales clerk in de
partment stores on Saturdays and during her vacations.
Before that, in order to accumulate money for her college
course, she had worked as an x-ray technician in New
York City and, after her graduation in 1937, supported
herself by teaching typing, shorthand, and commercial
practice at the Whittier High School.
During the war, until her husband was assigned to sea
duty with the Pacific Fleet, she followed him around
from one naval establishment to the next in order to be
with him, and supported herself at various jobs in the va
rious places he was assigned, once as a teller in a local
236 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
bank and again as a research worker on a government
project. In Congress she acted as his secretary without
drawing the salary the job rated. Slightly built she is
only five foot five and tips the scales at 1 10 pounds and
with reddish blonde hair, she is decorative as well as smart
and useful Most Americans who have seen her, as mil
lions did during the campaign on television, will con
clude that if a woman like that admires and respects a
man, that man must be absolutely straight and depend
able.
3. MESSRS. REPUBLICANS
Part of the inevitable price paid by the Republicans for
being out of power too long was that party leadership in
Congress automatically gravitated to men from "sure"
Republican states and congressional districts. Such "sure"
constituencies were so congenitally G.O.P. that there
was a premium on stand-pat conformity and a tendency
to regard Republicanism as a religion with rigid articles
of faith.
Men of this conservatism are needed to prevent the
party from becoming nothing but a receptacle for op
portunists and expedients, but when they dominate its
counsels they tend to make policy a matter of official
party dogma rather than trust to events, experiment, and
public opinion to determine their course of action.
The great protagonist of this process during the
twenty years in the Democratic wilderness was Ohio's
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 237
Senator Robert A. Taft, "Mr. Republican," the thrice-
defeated contender for his party's Presidential nomina
tion. If Taft rather than Willkie had been nominated in
1940, his friends believe it is possible he might have won
because Taft favored staying out of World War II and
would have run on a straightforward peace policy. If
Taft rather than Dewey had been nominated in 1948,
there are many Republicans who insist that Taft would
almost certainly have beaten Truman in the Presidential
contest. But if Taft, rather than Eisenhower, had won the
1952 nomination, there was not a single major Repub
lican leader outside the Middle West who would have bet
a plugged nickel on Taft to defeat Adlai Stevenson.
What kind of a man is it who can command such fa
natical loyalties and arouse such bitter opposition as this
sixty-four-year-old son of the good old President and
Chief Justice William Howard Taft? "Bob" Taft is one
of the most honest, dependable, and intelligent men in
public life. He is also one of the most irritating and un
imaginative politicians in the history of the Republican
Party.
His capacity ta exasperate was first formalized when
his easygoing father, who had married the brilliant and
strong-minded Helen Herron, exclaimed in the course of
an argument with his eldest son: "If I had never set eyes
on you in my life and met you in the middle of the Gobi
Desert, I'd say: There's a child of Nelly Herron!' "
The former President was not the first or last parent to
238 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
be provoked by the practical side of genetics, but it is
notable among those who know the family that, whereas
Bob's brother Charlie is well-known for his pronounced
religious activities, Bob is the man to whom people al
ways turn for help in time of trouble. He was born to
wealth and political privilege in Cincinnati in 1889, at
tended his Uncle Horace's Taft School in Connecticut,
graduated from Yale in 1910, and received his Harvard
law degree in 1913. These dates are important, for they
mean that Taft's whole character and outlook were
formed when the Republican Party had been secure in
the saddle for fifty years and when the world as a whole
had prospered under the fax Erittanica for nearly a cen
tury. To call a man an isolationist because he honestly
prefers such a state of affairs to the present world confu
sion is scarcely fair to him or to history. But to believe
we can turn back the page of history is scarcely fair to the
rest of the world, which knows it can't be done.
Bob Taft's career followed the lines predestined for
one born to Republican wealth and privilege in the days
before the two world wars. He practiced law; he began
a lifelong devotion the year after he got his law degree by
marrying Martha Bowers, still his wife and the mother
of his four sons. During the first war he worked with
Herbert Hoover in the United States Food Administra
tion and later in the American Relief Administration in
Europe. Shortly after Ohio elected its last President, in
1920, "Bob" Taft went into Ohio politics. He served
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 239
five years in the state legislature, ending as speaker of the
house in 1926. He also served a term in the state senate
and was elected to the United States Senate in 1938, the
year which witnessed the first major political reaction
against Roosevelt. Since then he has been re-elected to
two additional six-year terms and has made himself both
feared and respected in Congress.
Taft is a baffling mixture of conservatism and liberal
ism, of high moral courage and a numbing lack of moral
imagination. During the Republican 80th Congress, he
served on the Senate Labor Committee and sponsored
liberal measures for public housing and education. He
also sponsored the Taft-Hartley Labor-Management Re
lations Law. He dared to speak out boldly, and alone, in
protest against the kangaroo-court legal lynching of the
German war criminals at a time when most public men
preferred to close their eyes to the judicial murder of for
eign leaders for having lost the war. He was branded as
an enemy of labor, yet he single-handedly blocked Tru
man's f ascistic proposal to draft the railway workers into
the army in order to break the strike in 1 946. Yet he could
not see why he should refuse to benefit by the "theft'* of
the Texas delegates to the 1952 Convention, even after
he was reminded how his father lost in 1912 because
"Teddy" Roosevelt had charged a similar Taft "theft"
of southern delegates. He is a smiling, flat-voiced man
with a tart tongue. He makes needless enemies, is apt to
talk too much and too soon, and is also able to change his
240 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
position swiftly and gracefully if he finds himself mis
taken or misinformed.
His failure to win the 1952 Republican nomination
threatened for a time to cost "Ike" the election. Taft's
supporters were deeply, in fact religiously, loyal to "Mr.
Republican" and harbored fierce resentment against the
Eisenhower forces. It was only after the legendary "Sur
render of Morningside Heights," when "Ike" and Taft
made a public parade of harmony during the campaign,
that the Senator persuaded his followers to throw their
strength behind the Republican national ticket. Taft
himself campaigned vigorously across the nation for
"Ike," and a fair share of the credit for Eisenhower's vic
tory must go to the good sportsmanship of the man whom
"Ike" defeated at Chicago after the bitterest Republican
convention contest in forty years.
Washington newspapermen confidently predict that
Taft will sooner or later break with the Eisenhower ad
ministration, but Washington newspapermen, collec
tively, have never yet been right. "Bob" Taft has per
sonally abandoned all Presidential ambitions and has
every motive to make a success of his party's return to
power. The chances are that he will remain absolutely
loyal to the President, although differing with him
strongly on many issues, unless faced with a real nation
wide revolt of the conservative Republicans. These he
must follow, because he is their leader.
Although the conservative Old Guard wing of the
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 241
party was badly damaged in the 1952 election, it still
contains able and powerful leaders, of whom perhaps the
most influential, next to Taft, is Senator Eugene D. Mil-
likin of Colorado, chairman of the Senate Finance Com
mittee. Millikin is a large, good-natured, studious man
of sixty-two who was born in Hamilton, Ohio, but
whose parents moved to the Silver State at a time when it
was one of Wall Street's most prosperous colonies, a vir
tual satrapy of the Rockefeller coal-and-iron interests.
He graduated from the University of Chicago Law
School the same year that Taft obtained his Harvard law
degree and two years later popped up in Colorado poli
tics as Governor Carlson's executive secretary. When we
entered the first World War, Millikin promptly enlisted
as a private in the Colorado National Guard and served
with the infantry in France and with the army of occu
pation in Germany, ending up as lieutenant-colonel of
engineers with a citation for distinguished service from
General Pershing.
Back home in Denver, he engaged in business and law
practice with former Colorado Senator Schuyler from
1919 to 1933, and later married the Senator's widow. In
1941, following the death of Senator Alva Adams, the
Governor of Colorado appointed Millikin to fill the
vacancy in the Senate. Millikin was elected in his own
right in 1942, re-elected in 1944 and again in 1950. He is
an expert on banking, currency, and fiscal policy, an un-
dramatic, likable bruin of a straightforward conserva-
242 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
tive. He can be relied upon not to rock the Republican
boat.
More dramatic and less dependable, from the adminis
tration viewpoint, is "Bertie" McCormick's Senator from
Illinois, Everett McKinley Dirksen, chairman of the Re
publican Senate Campaign Committee and one of the
party's ablest speakers. Dirksen was born in Pekin, Il
linois, in 1896, and received a law degree from the Uni
versity of Minnesota. He married a home-town girl,
Louella Carver of Pekin, and was all set to practice law
and support his family when the bugles sounded for
World War I. Like Adams, he promptly enlisted as a
private and was promoted from the ranks to corporal, to
sergeant, and finally to second lieutenant in the course of
eighteen months' service overseas with the 328th Field
Artillery, the 19th Balloon Company, and general staff
intelligence. After the war he dropped law and went into
business as a draining and dredging contractor, as manu
facturer of electric washing machines and as co-owner of
a wholesale bakery in Pekin.
His business success led to city politics. In 1926 he
was elected commissioner of finance of Pekin for a four-
year term. After losing a primary fight for Congress in
1930, he was elected to the House of Representatives in
1932 and served there continuously until 1949, when he
retired voluntarily. In 1950 he ran for the Senate and
was elected with a majority of two hundred and ninety
thousand votes over Democratic Senate Majority Leader
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 243
Scott Lucas, with an assist from "Joe" McCarthy. Dur
ing this same period he became increasingly active in Re
publican national affairs, at conventions, on the party's
policy committee, and as a campaigner.
Dirksen was the man designated to do the hatchet job
on Governor Dewey at the 1952 Republican Conven
tion, and his speech rates as a piece of masterly insult and
polished impertinence. To the delighted whoops of the
packed galleries, he chided and rebuked the leader of the
Eisenhower forces in terms which bit like hydrochloric
acid. Dewey simply went out and had his shoes shined,
and with "Ike's" nomination, the incident passed down
the drain, where it belonged. But Dirksen is still a vigor
ous man of fifty-six, with ambition, organizing ability, a
thick skin, and a sound digestion. If Dirksen's friend and
ally, the f ormidable publisher of the Chicago Tribune,
should decide to expel the Eisenhower administration
from the Republican party, it is likely that Everett Dirk
sen, rather than Robert Alphonso Taft, will be the
leader of the secession.
4. WAYNE MORSE AND "JOE" MCCARTHY
The chief opposition that Eisenhower faces for the
present within his own party comes from two mutually
exclusive Senators, one a crypto-Democrat and one a
former Democrat Wayne Morse of Oregon and " Joe"
McCarthy of Wisconsin.
244 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Morse has staked his convictions and career on the
theory that Eisenhower has surrendered to reactionary
political and industrial interests, that no good fruit can
come from any tree watered by Senator Taft, and that
by 1960 or even by 1956 there will be a sharply radical
change in the political climate. Stated another way,
Morse is gambling that there will be peace, not war, with
Russia and that the Eisenhower administration will
bungle the economic and social readjustments which
must follow any extensive industrial demobilization.
Self-righteous, contentious, and more than a little un
happy in his present lonely political position, Wayne
Morse is a man of deep convictions and great personal
charm. He is dark-haired and dark-moustached, lean
and wiry, looking a bit like a Mississippi steamboat gam
bler who has acquired religion, and is possessed of a fine
legal brain and a skill in parliamentary debate which are
being wasted by his self-imposed isolation, high and very
dry between the two evenly divided parties in the Senate.
Wayne Lyman Morse was born of Baptist New Eng
land parents on a farm near Madison, Wisconsin in 1900.
At the University of Wisconsin he shone as a debater
and went on after graduation to take a job as debating
instructor at the University of Minnesota, where Harold
Stassen was one of his students. Even after receiving his
Minnesota law degree in 1924, Morse continued to take
an interest in debating, first as a young law professor and
then as dean of the law school at the University of Ore-
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 245
gon. As a matter of fact, he nearly debated himself out of
his teaching job as a result of the skill and power with
which he argued against an officially approved merger of
the university with Oregon State College.
In Oregon he also became so deeply interested in the
theory and practice of labor arbitration that he was even
tually appointed to the War Labor Board in 1942. Dur
ing the war, Morse dared to lock horns with Secretary of
the Interior Harold Ickes when the latter broke the War
Labor Board's wage formula in favor of John L. Lewis's
United Mine Workers. Ickes got the coal without a
strike but Morse saved his administrative soul, and Roose
velt encouraged the contentious young Oregonian to go
into politics rather than remain in the executive branch
of government. Oregon is staunch Republican territory
and in 1944, when tfre veteran Senate Minority Leader,
Charles McNary of Oregon, died in office, the governor
naturally appointed a conservative Republican, Guy
Cordon, to fill the vacancy. But Oregon is also progres
sive-minded, so F.D.R. sent word to the New Deal
Democrats to pitch in and vote for Morse in the Re
publican primary. They did and Morse won the primary,
like the regular election, with the help of the Democratic
administration. Six years later, in 1950, he was again
elected, once more largely with the help of Democratic
and labor votes, this time with the largest majority in
Oregon's history.
Before then, Morse had made his conscience sharply
246 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
felt in national politics. In 1948, he broke with Harold
Stassen and favored the nomination of Senator Arthur
Vandenberg of Michigan in 1948, partly because he be
lieved Vandenberg's leadership was needed to unite the
party and also and this is pure Wayne Morse in order
to lead the Republican party away from control by the
Taft "reactionary wing."
Since then, Morse had tended to take his own position
entirely from Taft. Whatever Taft is for, Morse is
against; wherever Taft feels at home, Morse suffers an
attack of political claustrophobia. His break with Eisen
hower in 1952 followed this too simple substitute for
political self-examination.
Even before the Republican Convention Morse had
been miff ed when Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts
bustled into Oregon before the primary and tried to take
the leadership of the Oregon Eisenhower delegates away
from Morse, although the latter had been one of the first
Eisenhower supporters on the floor of the Senate. Then
on his return home from a quick inspection of American
military bases in Europe Morse read in the newspapers
about the "Surrender of Morningside Heights." This
conference between Senator Taft and General Eisen
hower was a bitter blow to a man who had consistently
opposed the "reactionary wing" of the G.O.P. for nearly
eight years in the Senate; when it was announced that
"Ike" and Taft were in over-all agreement on labor
policy, Morse simply went wild.
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 247
He acted with less than his usual clearheadedness. Two
serious accidents with horses had left him weak and in
constant pain, and he swiftly painted himself into a
home-made suit of tar and feathers. First he announced
that he could not support "Ike" but that, as an elected
Republican, he had no moral right to support "Ike's"
Democratic opponent. Then two weeks later, he came
out in support of Stevenson and spoke for him. There
were rumors that Truman had promised to make Morse
Attorney General and the President had, in fact, already
given Morse's private secretary a post on the Labor Re
lations Board, but it would be completely unfair to con
clude that Morse was seduced by Democratic patronage.
He fell from Republican virtue, but in his own time.
After the election, he refused to congratulate the winner
or to seek reconciliation with the party he had aban
doned. He told both Republicans and Democrats that
he wanted no Senate committee assignments from either
party and then was outraged when he lost his post on the
committees which deal with defense and labor matters.
His role in the Senate became one of niggling nuisance,
as when he blocked confirmation of Eisenhower's Cabi
net officers on inauguration day on the ground that he
had not studied the committee hearings on the individu
als.
He has become bitter and still lacks the great cause
which could dramatize and utilize his lonely eminence as
one man in the Senate who could dare to speak the truth,
248 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
since he has no party to consider and no career to be
served. He tells his friends that he expects to be defeated
in 1956 by the angry Oregon Republicans who re
warded his "ratting" in the campaign by sending him a
pair of gold cufflinks in symbolic similitude of an equine
posterior.
At forty-four, Joseph R. McCarthy is just about as
far to the right of Wayne Morse as a man can be and still
stay inside the solar system, let alone the Republican
Party. He comes uncomfortably close to being what
Henry A. Wallace used to call "the common man." He
is, in fact, the kind of man who commonly comes to the
top in periods of turmoil. He is tough, shrewd, and so
controversial a public figure that to most Americans he
is either saint or devil, never an ordinary hard-hitting
self-made Irish lawyer from the cutover lands of Wis
consin. Well-built, dark-haired, clean-shaven, he has the
smooth face of an actor.
And he has staged an impressive act. As wartime dif
ferences of opinion hardened into postwar conflicts of
policy between Washington and Moscow, "Joe" Mc
Carthy had his chance at the Big Time. He moved right
out on the stage of the American Communist drama and
has made a political career of exposing Soviet spies, Com
munist sympathizers, loyalty risks, security risks, and
sexual deviates in the State Department.
McCarthy's own explanation of the violent antago
nism he has aroused is contained in the statement he made
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 249
in numerous campaign speeches in Wisconsin: When he
was a boy on a farm in Wisconsin his mother kept chick
ens; every now and then a skunk got into the henhouse
and started to kill the poultry; so somebody had to go in
and kill the skunk; for some time afterwards, McCarthy
explained, whoever had done that necessary job wasn't
very popular in his mother's kitchen.
He first came on the scene in 1909, as one of a large
family of children born to poor Irish Catholic parents
on a farm in Appleton, Wisconsin. He had a hard life.
He got as far as the eighth grade in the public school,
and then had to go to work in a grocery. In order to
qualify to study law at Marquette University, he com
pleted a four-year high school course in a single year
when he was already twenty* He supported himself at
law school by giving boxing lessons. As a poor lawyer
and a Democrat, he ran against the local Republican
judge in 1939 and was triumphantly elected circuit
judge at the age of thirty. He was re-elected in 1945,
without opposition, while absent on service in the Pa
cific with the Marine Corps. He had enlisted in June of
1942, and spent two and a half years on active duty in
the Marine Corps air branch. He was a good fighter and
earned citations for bravery.
In the meantime, unlike most Irish Democrats, he had
switched sides in politics, joined the Republicans and
made a try for the G.O.P. Senate nomination from Wis
consin in 1944, but was passed over in favor of the in-
250 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
cumbent, Alexander Wiley. Two years later his time
had come, and at the Oshkosh convention of the Wis
consin Republicans he beat the late Senator "Bob" La-
Follette for the nomination.
In Washington he soon received what was usually
considered the accolade for integrity, the wrath of the
Truman administration. After he had made wild charges
in a radio speech about the number of Communists in
the State Department, suave Democratic Senator Mil-
lard Tydings of Maryland leisurely undertook to deal
with "Joe" McCarthy. When the smoke had cleared
away after the 1950 elections, Tydings was no longer a
Senator, and other Democrats who had supported him in
the attack on McCarthy had also been beaten, like Scott
Lucas in Illinois, or were clearly doomed to defeat, like
"Bill" Benton of Connecticut.
At this point, the Democrats decided that McCarthy
was worse than a nuisance; he became a "national men
ace" or, better still, an effective campaign issue against
the Republicans. It was a good idea but it didn't work.
In retrospect, it can fairly be said that "Joe" McCar
thy, whatever his methods and his motives, rendered a
service to the country in dramatizing a state of affairs
which could be extremely dangerous to our survival in
case of war with the Soviet empire. The Truman ad
ministration, not unnaturally, tried to minimize the dam
aging facts and spoke loftily about "red herrings," but
mousetrapped itself when both the Alger Hiss case and
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 251
the election returns showed that Senator McCarthy was
not barking down a political posthole.
McCarthy's role in the 1952 campaign was a reminder
that nothing builds up a western Senator so much as to be
attacked by eastern newspapers and politicians. He won
renomination and re-election to the Senate without much
difficulty, although running well behind Eisenhower in
Wisconsin. Under "Ike," he continued to jab and nag at
the State Department, his pet target, and to act as final
authority on who was fit and proper to serve American
diplomacy. In attacking "Ike's" approved choice for
American Ambassador to Moscow, because Bohlen had
been at the Yalta Conference, McCarthy edged onto the
same lonely ground occupied by Wayne Morse of Ore
gon, since "Ike" can command the overwhelming sup
port of the Democrats, in addition to most of the Re
publicans, whenever he finds it necessary to overrule Mc
Carthy and his Democratic Yalta Ego, Pat McCarran of
Nevada.
If, as many Americans believe, there is an irrepressible
conflict between America and Russia, McCarthy seems
to have chosen his ground more wisely than has Wayne
Morse. Even if peace should break out, he can take com
fort in the career of Congressman Hamilton Fish of New
York, who also exploited the anti-Communist issue in
the 1920's. Fish survived politically the whole period of
Soviet-American friendship and it was not until 1942,
252 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
when Russia was actually our ally against the Axis, that
Dewey encompassed his defeat.
Morse has no such prospect. Even if peace should be
restored he has failed to appreciate the fact that there
may be no automatic economic depression to give point
to his warnings. Yet he, like McCarthy, represents the
extremes of policy between which the Eisenhower ad
ministration and the New Republicans must steer a
middle course.
5. Two LOYAL OPPOSITIONS
This course is made much easier by the fact that there
are two "loyal oppositions" in Congress the two Demo
cratic parties, north and south.
The ivy has begun to grow over the bitter feud be
tween Progressive and Old Guard Republicans in the
forty years which have passed since the Taft-Roosevelt
rift of 1912, but moss, blasted oaks, and owls' nests line
both sides of the deep Mason-Dixiecrat chasm which di
vides the twenty-two Senators of the Solid South from
the twenty-five Democrats of the northern and Border
states. These two halves of the Democratic donkey were
stitched together by jobs and subsidies and a lot of soft
soap under Roosevelt and Truman, but the deep differ
ence of their interests, policies, and philosophies of gov
ernment led to the ominous Dixiecrat breakaway of 1948
and the wave of southern votes for Eisenhower four
years later.
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 253
By an odd coincidence, the Solid Southerners with
their deep Colonial roots are closer biologically if not
logically to the New Republicans than to the northern
Democrats. And the northern Democrats, with their in
dustrial interests and multi-racial electorates, are closer
philosophically to the New Republicans than they are to
the Congressional representatives of the one-party sys
tem of the Solid South.
This Democratic division means that Eisenhower can
count on not one but two loyal oppositions and that he is
likely to command at least half of the Democratic votes in
Congress on any issue, conservative or progressive, which
he may advocate as the policy of his administration. This
fact somewhat dims the hopes, in advance, of any con
ceivable Old Guard Republican revolt against "Ike's"
leadership. The divided Democrats guarantee the New
Republicans more freedom of action in the 83rd Con
gress than the actual party division indicates.
The leaders of the southern Democratic Party in Con
gress are able, plausible, and attractive men. In previous
Congresses they have tended to co-operate with the Old
Guard wing of the Republican Party and have repeatedly
applied a legislative brake to New Deal legislation.
Possibly the most respected of them all is sixty-six-
year-old Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia. Byrd,
with the late Carter Glass (who in his latter days imag
ined he had invented the Federal Reserve System), has
254 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
been the fiscal conscience of his party for the last twenty
years.
His political career began, quietly enough, with his
ten years' presidency of the Shenandoah Valley Turn
pike Company from 1908 to 1918. His interest in good
roads, like his advocacy of the "pay-as-you-go" principle
in government, won him election to the Virginia state
senate in 1915. In 1926 he was granted a four-year terjn
as Governor of Virginia and he was a remarkably good
one, deserving credit he has never received from vocifer
ous northern "liberals" for his Anti-Mob Violence Law
of 1928 a measure which put a complete stop to lynch-
ings in the Old Dominion from that day to this.
Byrd maintained his technical political virginity dur
ing the Eisenhower campaign with an all but metaphysi
cal adroitness, but was known to favor "Ike" and have
endearing young qualms about Adlai, so his state duti
fully voted Republican for the first time since 1928.
Byrd was also personally responsible for calling to Eisen
hower's attention the hellish fact that Charles Wilson's
holdings of General Motors stock would constitute a
"conflict of interest" in the latter's post as Secretary of
Defense.
Of greater individual charm and personal legislative
ability than Byrd, though scarcely Byrd's match as a
political power, is Senator Richard Brevard Russell of
Georgia. Like Byrd, Russell is of old English Colonial
ancestry, but is more of a southern senator's senator than
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 255
is Byrd and shines in committee work and as general
manager of the southern Democratic Party in Congress.
Tall, pleasant, easy-mannered and extremely adroit,
"Dick" Russell made himself the leader of the southern
forces opposed to the nomination of either Estes Ke-
fauver or Harry Truman in 1952. He stayed with the
party during the Presidential campaign, not too vigor
ously, and saw that his state turned in a conventional
Georgia majority for the Democratic national candi
dates.
Russell was born in the little Barrow County town of
Winder, Georgia, in 1897 and is a fair representative of
the New South which grew up after the Spanish- Ameri
can war. That South has thrown off the Ku Klux Klan
infection and is slowly adjusting itself to labor unions and
similar phenomena of the industrial age.
There is a still newer South than the agrarian Dixie of
Harry Byrd and Dick Russell, and that is the industrial
South which is rising in such states as Alabama and Ten
nessee, and which came of age under the New Deal.
That South is represented by Senator John Sparkman of
Alabama, his party's candidate for Vice-President in the
1952 political barbecue.
Sparkman was one of the eleven children of a poor
sharecropper in the Alabama hill country. He was born
in 1 899, had to walk six miles a day to the local Morgan
County school, and somehow managed to scrape to
gether seventy five dollars to send himself to the Uni-
256 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
versity of Alabama at Tuscaloosa in 1917; he worked his
way through college.
After getting his law degree in 1923, he moved to
Huntsville, Alabama, where he entered a law firm in
1925 and combined the Siamese-twin practice of south
ern law and Democratic politics so successfully that he
was elected to Congress in 1936. He served five useful
and undistinguished terms in the House of Representa
tives and then, when old Senator John Bankhead, uncle
of Tallulah, died, went to the Senate in his place. Two
years later he was automatically re-elected to the Senate
and will stay there more or less forever, as do most pro
fessional politicians from the Deep South.
Sparkman's record in national politics is that of a man
who is as liberal as his Alabama constituents allow a man
to be and as non-partisan as a southern Democrat allows
himself to be.
Men like Byrd, Russell, and Sparkman can be relied
upon to support the Eisenhower administration on most
foreign-policy issues and on all policies which represent
the conservative preference for allowing local authority
and individual initiative a fair place in the scheme of
things.
By contrast, the northern Democrats are the product
of a genuine two-party system of politics. Except for
three or four kept Senators who represent special labor
or gambling interests, they have to face a large, critical,
and mixed general electorate at regular intervals. Fre-
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 257
quently they owe their election to public revolt against
standpat Republican policies and candidates. Hence they
tend to be more articulate and infinitely more progres
sive than the average southern Democrat. President
Eisenhower can count on them to support his leadership
on any issue which is in harmony with progressive politi
cal principles, since they are New Republicans in all but
name. With the collapse of organized labor as the domi
nant political power in the industrial states, the average
liberal Democrat of the North has nowhere to go but the
White House.
Consider the representative case of Senator Guy Mark
Gillette of Iowa. Guy Gillette, is, for all practical pur
poses, a progressive Prairie Republican who just happens
to wear the Democratic label. He was born in the small
town of Cherokee, in northwest Iowa, sixty-four years
ago, nine years after his father, of old English and French
Huguenot New England ancestry, took up a farm in the
country. He fits the prevailing New Republican climate
in other respects, too. He is a devout Presbyterian, a
Mason, and has always been elected with the help of Re
publican votes.
Gillette's career has also been typical of the New Re
publicans. He went to the Cherokee High School and
then obtained his law degree from Drake University at
Des Moines in 1900, was admitted to the Iowa bar, and
returned to practice law in his home town. Before that he
had enlisted at the age of fourteen in the Iowa National
258 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Guard and served in the Spanish- American war. He also
tried to enlist in the Boer Army in the South African war
but was prevented by the State Department's unsympa
thetic interpretation of the neutrality laws. Gillette was
a Democrat in a ninety-six-per-cent. Republican com
munity but in 1907 was elected as Cherokee County
prosecutor and in 1912 was sent to the Iowa state senate
for a four-year term. When America entered World
War I, he promptly enlisted in the army and served as an
infantry captain. Incidentally, his brother Claude be
came an admiral in the United States Navy. In 193 2, with
the New Deal sweep, he was elected to Congress and re-
elected in 1934. Two years after that, Gillette decided
to run for the Senate and won in that year of Roosevelt's
forty-six-state landslide. In 1938, he was elected for the
full six-year term but was beaten in 1944. Four years
later he ran once more for the Senate and won by the
largest majority in the history of Iowa politics.
Gillette's record is not particularly partisan. He is a
steady, calm, level-headed man of deep integrity who
survived Roosevelt's attempt to "purge" him in 1938.
He refused Truman's offer of a judgeship on the United
States Customs Court for the unusual reason that he did
not know anything about customs law.
Eisenhower can count on moderate Democrats like
Guy Gillette to follow their convictions and give him
their support, without regard to party labels, whenever
they believe the President is right.
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 259
This is equally true of intellectual Democratic leaders
such as Senator Paul H. Douglas of Illinois. Douglas is
conscientious, emotional, exceedingly intelligent, and,
like Gillette, owes his seat in the Senate to many thou
sands of Republican protest votes which in his case were
cast against the corrupt Republican political machine in
Illinois.
Paul Douglas is, in fact, a sort of Tom Dewey in re
verse. Dewey was born in Michigan and moved east.
Douglas was born in New England at Salem, Massa
chusetts and moved west. He spent his boyhood on a
primitive farm in northern Maine and worked his way
through Bowdoin College by waiting on tables, mixing
concrete, handling baggage at the local depot, and sell
ing gelatin desserts. He also found time to play center on
the Bowdoin football team and graduated, Phi Beta Kap
pa, in 1913, when he was barely twenty-one.
After becoming Professor of Industrial Relations at
Chicago University in 1923, his work as an economic and
political thinker, author, and legislative draftsman won
him a national reputation. In the 1930's he helped Demo
cratic Governor Homer bring Illinois up-to-date on sucfi
matters as utilities legislation and old-age pensions. He
also helped draft the monstrously complicated Federal
Security Act.
When we entered the second World War he enlisted
as a fifty-year-old private in the Marine Corps. After
basic training he was assigned to combat duty in the Pa-
260 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
cific. He was wounded at Peleliu, receiving a bronze star
for heroism in action, and was wounded a second time,
very seriously, at Okinawa. After fourteen months in
the hospital he was discharged in 1946 with the rank of
lieutenant-colonel.
Two years later, like Guy Gillette, Douglas incurred
Truman's jealous enmity by being elected to the Senate
from Illinois by a majority of over four hundred thou
sand votes, whereas the President scraped through by the
pitifully small margin of thirty thousand votes in the
huge Illinois electorate. Much of the Democratic Party
history of the second Truman administration revolved
around Douglas' bold fight to keep his campaign promises
and the Democratic President's attempt to mow him
down. Douglas fought and won his battle to prevent the
White House from pocketing the Federal judiciary in
Chicago. He was largely responsible for forcing the ad
ministration to permit the Federal Reserve Board to per
form its duty to check inflationary credit in 1951. He
argued, unsuccessfully, for economy in appropriations,
including overlavish defense funds, and sponsored, with
equal lack of success, intelligent amendments to the Taf t-
Hartley law. His Senate record was so brilliant and inde
pendent that, for a time, he appeared the ablest Presi
dential candidate his party could nominate. But he would
never permit his name to be considered.
So Paul Douglas is another of those northern Demo
crats upon whom Eisenhower can rely for thick-and-thin
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 261
support for all measures on the plane of national honor
and interest in foreign affairs and of rational progress in
domestic issues. He will continue to follow his own con
science in voting, but those who have observed a good
New England conscience in action believe that, when
the chips are down, Paul Douglas may prove to be a bet
ter Eisenhower Republican than many who bear the
name and reputation of Republican.
In any case, it is important to note that the election
returns of 1948, like those of 1952, show the strength of
independent and progressive opinion in American public
life, since the liberal Democrats ran embarrassingly far
ahead of Truman in 1948. This lends point to the corre
sponding Old Guard-Progressive cleavage in Republican
ranks.
6. THE MIDDLE WAY
The political future lies with the progressive Republi
cans, regardless of the apparent conservative strength in
Congress. Conservative Republican leadership domi
nates the House of Representatives, as well as the Senate,
through seniority and committee chairmanships which
go to Congressmen from "sure' 7 Republican districts. But
since the more representative electorates are to be found
in the large industrial states, taken as a whole, and not in
isolated one-hundred-per-cent. G.O.P. bailiwicks, it is
easier and more instructive to trace their impact in the
Senate than in the House. For example, while Speaker
262 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Joseph Martin has been elected to Congress from Massa
chusetts almost since the memory of man, Massachusetts
as a whole has shifted from Republican to Democratic
and back again.
The brutal fact is that the conservative wing of the
Republican Party was badly hurt in the 1952 election,
while the progressive wing made a powerful showing.
Old Guard Republican Senators were actually beaten in
Missouri, Montana, and Washington in the same election
in which Eisenhower carried their states with majorities
which ranged upward from fifty-one to fifty-nine per
cent, of the total vote. In Indiana, conservative Senator
Jenner was re-elected with a majority of only 110,000,
but "Ike" carried the state by 335,000. In Wisconsin,
Senator McCarthy was sent back to Washington with a
140,000 majority, getting fifty-four per cent, of the vote,
but "Ike" got over sixty-one per cent, of the same vote
and had a majority of 357,000. Even in Utah, conserva
tive Senator Watkins had less than half the majority
which "Ike" received in that sober-minded Mountain
State.
The story on the progressive side of the Republican
ledger is equally clear. Only one prominent "Ike-liker,"
Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, failed of re-election, los
ing to young John Kennedy by seventy thousand votes,
while Eisenhower swept the Bay State by more than
two hundred thousand votes. In this case, the Taft Re
publicans knifed Lodge, while Kennedy ran on a more
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 263
liberal program. However, in New Jersey the veteran
liberal Senator Alexander Smith ran close to "Ike," get
ting fif ty-six per cent, of the total vote while Eisenhower
got a bit better than fifty-seven per cent, of the same
electorate. And in New York State, the progressive Re
publican Senator Irving M. Ives almost equalled the
Eisenhower vote. Ives actually received a plurality of
1,332,000 votes over his Democratic rival, as compared
to "Ike's" 848,000 margin, but was helped by the attitude
of the New York Liberal Party, a wholly-owned sub
sidiary of David Dubinsky's International Ladies Gar
ment Workers Union, which supported Stevenson for
President but cast 489,000 votes for a separate spite candi
date for the senatorship.
So if the Republican Party is to succeed and hold of
fice, it must obviously follow the "middle way" in
politics, as developed by Dewey at Albany and repre
sented in Washington by Irving Ives.
As with Dewey, Ives never wanted to enter politics in
the first place and has been repeatedly trying to get out
of politics ever since. He resents them but they fascinate
him. Again like Dewey, every time he tries to return to
private life, he goes up higher. On form alone his Senate
colleagues expect to see him forced to run for (and be
elected as) Governor of New York State whenever
Dewey decides to evacuate Albany.
Irving Ives is another of these small-town, middle-
class, old-stock Americans who illumine the Eisenhower
264 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
movement like the stars in the flag. He was born and
raised in the little town of Bainbridge, New York, not
far from Oneonta, in a community of some thirteen
hundred people, where everyone knows everybody else
and where it still isn't necessary to lock your doors at
night. His education was entirely normal for the com
munity: first the public school, then Oneonta High
School, and finally Hamilton College at Clinton, New
York, which he entered in 1914.
His college education was interrupted, first by a seri
ous illness and then by a serious war. He enlisted in the
infantry, took instruction under a regular army captain
named Eisenhower, and went overseas with the A.E.F.,
taking part in the St. Mihiel action and the bloody Meuse-
Argonne offensive. On his discharge, he returned to
Hamilton and graduated with the highest scholastic
honors in 1920 at the age of twenty-four. He next got a
job with the Guaranty Trust Company of New York
and three years later went to Norwich, New York to
handle upstate business for the Manufacturers Trust
Company. Much to his surprise, he was elected to the
New York State Assembly from Norwich after a
squabble in the local Republican organization, and so
gave up banking and went into that mainstay of the poli
tician without a law degree, the insurance business. Dur
ing thirteen consecutive terms in Albany, he became suc
cessively minority leader, speaker of the assembly, and
Republican majority leader. He pioneered in labor legis-
THE FIGHT FOR THE WATER HOLE 265
lation and achieved national prominence in 1945 for his
part in framing the famous New York State Anti-Dis
crimination Law, the first legislation of its kind in Amer
ica, which prohibits discrimination in employment be
cause of race, creed, color, national origin, or ancestry.
Ives was also the author and sponsor of the state law
which created the New York State School of Industrial
and Labor Relations at Cornell University, and then re
signed to become its first dean. Politics soon caught up
with him again, and in 1946 he was nominated for the
United States Senate and, thanks to Dewey's successful
campaign for the governorship, won a smashing victory
over the supposedly "unbeatable" former Governor
Herbert Lehman. The landslide proportions of his re
election victory in the 1952 campaign automatically
move him up to the king row of Republican candidates
to succeed Tom Dewey at Albany.
Ives is of old New England ancestry originating in
Connecticut, and traces his transatlantic descent back to
the Norman Conquest when the original Yves came to
England with William the Conqueror. He is a power
fully built man, with a strong voice, who delivers his
addresses with force and conviction, while his record on
labor, social, and related legislation is so outstandingly
progressive that Colonel McCormick of the Chicago
Tribune marked him down for reprisal and defeat in the
1952 campaign which didn't hurt Ives at all in New
York State.
266 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
His career, record, and character point clearly to the
direction the New Republicans must follow if they wish
to hold their majorities in Congress and develop pro
gressive programs and policies under the Eisenhower ad
ministration. That is what the election returns declare
and, so long as "Vox populi, vox dei" is a principle of
representative government, the election returns are al
ways right.
X
RENDEZVOUS WITH HISTORY
1. UNFINISHED BUSINESS
TWENTY years ago, Roosevelt and Hitler came to
power almost simultaneously. Each had a mandate to
restore prosperity and alleviate the social unrest caused
by a great economic depression. Hitler soon took the
road to rearmament and war, and Roosevelt followed his
example, rather belatedly and in the face of deep national
reluctance to be involved in another European conflict.
The final test of strength between the American nation
and the Third Reich, which resulted in the utter defeat
of the axis, forced Roosevelt to abandon the measures
good and bad adopted under his New Deal mandate of
1932 and 1936. But the problems with which those meas
ures assumed to deal with remain the unfinished business
of the United States.
Today, by a curious parallel, there has been a change
in the governments of the United States and the Soviet
Union as dramatic and as unpredictable as the earlier
267
268 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
change which brought Roosevelt and Hitler to power in
1933. Stalin has died and his harsh Communist dictator
ship over the Soviet empire and its satellites has been re
placed by a new group under the comparatively un
known Malenkov. The change of regime in Moscow
and Washington is one of the portents of our age. For
the first time in many years the American people are
represented by a strong President and a competent politi
cal administration. Roosevelt was a powerful political
leader but an indifferent administrator. Truman was
neither strong nor competent in his choice of adminis
trators. Eisenhower and the New Republicans are pow
erful personalities and able executives.
Their basic duty in the worldwide conflict which has
developed between the Soviet empire and the free world
is to make and keep this country strong, free, and pros
perous. Their domestic policy must, therefore, take
precedence over all developments in our foreign policy
short of war. They face a formidable task.
We have still to solve the problem of how to maintain
a powerful military establishment without crippling
taxes and without wasting the blood, toil, and treasure of
our citizens.
We have still to bring our finances into balance, check
inflation, and avert economic depression. The munitions
economy inherited from the previous administration has
provided employment and profit for millions of Ameri
cans; its replacement by an economy of production,
RENDEZVOUS WITH HISTORY 269
distribution, and exchange will be difficult and may prove
unpopular.
We must still solve the problem of employment, out
side of defense and war production, in the face of the
ever-growing industrial technology and the mechaniza
tion of production. The economic utilization of atomic
energy alone will strike the roots of much employment
in coal mining, railway transportation, and oil refining.
We have still to solve the problem of agricultural over
production and of food prices which will be fair to both
the farmers and considerate of the great majority of our
citizens who do not live on farms and don't know one end
of a cow from the udder.
" We have still to strike the balance between social se
curity and socialism, between individual initiative and
collective responsibility, in meeting the hazards of old
age, illness, and unemployment.
We have still to solve the problems imposed by the
development of our great natural resources, especially
those represented by water power, whether on the St.
Lawrence River or in the Columbia River basin.
We have still to establish the appropriate role of pri
vate business, large or small, in the production and dis
tribution of wealth, since the old evils of monopoly have
inevitably returned as the end result of successful busi
ness competition.
We have still to devise the proper means by which a
free people can defend their liberties from Communist
270 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
conspiracy and still avoid the "deadly" peril of the police
state.
We have still to establish the kind of steadfast foreign
policy which will command the united support of our
own people, the trust of our friends, and the respect of
our enemies.
We also have still to discover the kind of foreign eco
nomic relationship with the rest of the world which will
utilize our abundant production for the mutual advan
tage of ourselves and other nations, without running the
risks of economic imperialism or incurring the liabilities
of colonial exploitation of underdeveloped countries.
This is the unfinished business before the American
people. To handle it successfully will be to lay the foun
dation for an impregnable defense. If we can show by our
example that Moscow's dire predictions of capitalistic
doom are mere Communistic wishful thinking, then we
can deal resolutely with the larger challenge of Soviet
aggression in the free world.
2. CHARACTER vs. COMMUNISM
The New Republicans represent the best we are so far
capable of producing. The reserves on which the Eisen
hower administration can draw are those of American
character rather than national wealth. Only through
men who represent a high standard of moral decency and
broad humanity can we make an effective answer to the
past suspicion and cruel fanaticism of the Communist
RENDEZVOUS WITH HISTORY 271
conspirators. They are called upon to meet the challenge
of this age.
The twentieth century is a tremendous period of revo
lutions, of liberation, and of mass destruction. Western
science has released forces which could bring liberation
to mankind, yet threaten us all with complete disaster.
The world wars of this century have obscured the two
great political events to which they gave birth: the Com
munist revolution in Russia and in China and the libera
tion of Asia, as a whole, from western rule.
America's power to survive the forces we have helped
create will depend on the skill, strength, and determina
tion we bring to bear on these twin developments which
are now united in the form of an alliance between Soviet
Russia and Soviet China.
America, as Eisenhower took control of its political
government, stood at a height of prosperity and power.
Our scientific achievements were stupendous. Our living
standards and wealth were the highest in history. Having
determined the outcome of the two world wars, we had
achieved a position of decisive power in world affairs.
We were challenged only by the Soviet empire, with its
Marxist doctrine and its authoritarian state, and this chal
lenge found us frightened and uneasy and increasingly
uncertain as to the course we should follow.
Our science will not save us. The Soviet countries have
science, too, and possess the resources to develop it inde
pendent of our pleasure. Our wealth will not save us.
272 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
History monotonously recites the tale of rich and pros
perous countries which fell in the twinkling of an eye
under the determined attack of hard, hungry, "inferior"
peoples. Neither our standard of living nor the enormous
physical resources of this continent can guarantee our
safety or insure our survival any more than their beaten
gold and jewels could save the Incas or the Aztecs from
the Spaniards.
We cannot even count on maintaining our present
position of relative power. At least twice in the history
of the West a great power has emerged briefly, held the
balance for a few years, and then dropped back into in
significance. In the fifth century before Christ, the rich
city-state of Syracuse was swept into the great world war
between Athens and Sparta. Syracuse turned the tide
against Athens, but lacked the wisdom to bring peace to
a Greek civilization which was destroying itself. Not rich
and powerful Syracuse but obscure, semi-barbarous
Macedonia was the ultimate victor in that contest. Again
in 800 A.D. the Pope crowned Charlemagne as Roman
Emperor. The great Prankish Empire stretched from the
Pyrenees to the heart of Germany, from the English
Channel to the Danube, and challenged the power of
Byzantium. Yet after Charlemagne's death his empire fell
to pieces, and not for another eight hundred years did
France reappear as a great power in the world.
The great question is whether we, too, are under a
doom.
RENDEZVOUS WITH HISTORY 273
The slow beat of observable climatic changes decrees
that, for at least the next two or three centuries, the more
northerly lands, Russia and Canada, shall become richer
and mightier. Unless with our atomic mischief we should
succeed in exploding this planet like a firecracker, there
is nothing we can do to ward off the portent of a change
as great as that which once drove the Northmen south to
ravage Europe and colonize the Mediterranean world.
The whole earth tends to become warmer as the polar
ice-caps recede. We must begin to seek ways to adapt
ourselves to this coming shift or it will destroy us.
The Eisenhower administration is mercifully relieved
of responsibility for dealing with these predictable
changes in the conditions of human life on this planet. It
must deal with what is here and now; the most which can
be expected of it is that it shall measure up to history and,
so far as possible, place the people of this continent on
the sunny side of future events.
Failure to deal wisely with the Communist revolutions
in Russia and China and with the liberation of Asia has
already brought us close to catastrophe. The cost of
future failure could be extinction within a few short
years. The cost of partial preparedness against the con
tingency of a third World War is already becoming
prohibitive. The Defense Department estimates that it
would require twenty billion dollars for aircraft and
radar, and another seven billion for simple civil-defense
arrangements, to achieve even moderately adequate se-
274 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
curity against transpolar atom bombers in the next two
years. Even more costly would be the only fundamental
defense against atomic bombs: to disperse our industries
and break up our large cities so as to offer no major tar
gets to the enemy. Biological defense would require still
other and most costly measures. Political defense would
require elaborate police arrangements which could de
stroy the traditional freedom we seek to defend. And in
all these matters, the human element guarantees that there
can be no complete security. Somebody can always slip,
sleep, or betray his trust.
The defense of this country cannot, in fact, be assured
by weapons alone or by the power of swift and terrible
retaliation against attack. It must be political defense, an
adjustment of ideas and interests which will render world
peace as necessary as world war is catastrophic.
The first task of the New Republicans is, therefore, to
understand the character of the Russian leaders, to realize
how they became what they are and why they act as they
do. The second task is to appreciate the long-smoldering
resentment of the colored races of the world, in Africa
and South America as well as in liberated Asia, against the
manners as well as against the rule of the white nations
who have governed the planet for the last two hundred
years.
Here it is clear that the Eisenhower administration is
far better equipped than was its predecessor to deal with
the politics of peace and of racial readjustment. Not in
RENDEZVOUS WITH HISTORY 275
this century has a Republican President brought this
country into war. The Republicans have a genius for
peace and commerce. They contrived the liberation of
Cuba and prepared the independence of the Philippines
as national goals, even while our troops were still fighting
native insurrections. They negotiated peace between
Russia and Japan in 1905. They made peace with Ger
many in 192 1 and headed off the threat of a Pacific War
in 1922. They are chiefly responsible for the recent
peace of reconciliation with Japan. It is a fact that every
single Democratic President in the twentieth century has
involved this country in a serious war: Wilson in 1917,
Roosevelt in 1941, Truman in 1950. It is unfair to hold
the Democratic Party uniquely responsible for this na
tional record, but the record itself stands as an indictment
of the failure of Democratic diplomacy to avert or avoid
the conflicts into which they led the nation.
On the issue of the colored races, the Republicans are
also better able to speak to an Asia which is still hysterical
and disorderly after liberation from white colonial em
pire. The Eisenhower Republicans are, personally and
biologically, remarkably like the generation of men who
fought our bitter four-year Civil War for the purpose of
putting an end to Negro slavery in this country: deeply
religious, old-stock Americans who did not shrink from
the ordeal by fire. As in all wars, the motives of that con
flict between the North and South were mixed, sordid as
well as noble, but it remains true that the party of Abra-
276 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
ham Lincoln and The Battle Hymn of the Republic did
lead a great crusade to "die to make men free." It is also
true that the southern Democrats, who still must live
with the social and economic consequences of African
slavery, tend to color and control the foreign policy of
any Democratic President who might wish to deal in
telligently with the ungainly, turbulent nationalism of
the colored races of Asia which have recently regained
their sovereignty from white rulers. The Republicans
are relatively free from this crippling race prejudice.
These historical facts are among the resources on
which Eisenhower can draw in his approach to the
worldwide and almost irreconcilable conflict between
the two great systems of thought, culture, and political
power which stand embattled in this postwar era.
3. AMERICA OR RUSSIA
For thirty-five years, nearly two human generations,
Russia has been ruled by a small group of despotic lead
ers: Lenin, Stalin, and now Malenkov, with their Com
munist party organization, their propaganda, their pris
ons, and their secret police. These men are absolutely
committed, by their own writings and utterances, to the
conquest of the world. They have dealt in lies and deceit,
to their own people and to other nations, for so many
years that it would be fatuous to accept in good faith any
official Soviet assurance of a change of heart or abandon
ment of their established policies.
RENDEZVOUS WITH HISTORY 277
It would also be cruelly shortsighted to refuse to accept
the possibility of such a change. Just as Roosevelt and
Hitler represented the forces which combined to make
the second World War, so it is conceivable that Eisen
hower and Malenkov, between them, could restrain the
ugly impulses which portend a third world conflict
which would be the crowning catastrophe of white civi
lization.
The Eisenhower administration does not propose to
relax our guard; it calls for deeds rather than words, and
it contemplates a period of from ten to thirty years as the
necessary condition for rebuilding good faith, if, indeed,
war can be prevented. Yet in past Russian history there
have been abrupt changes of policy with a sudden change
of rulers. Even after thirty years of Stalin, there are forces
in Russia which could support such a change.
Russia is still a part, although an heretical part, of that
white western Christian civilization to which we, too,
belong. Russian literature, Russian religion, Russian art
and music, Russian science and industry, come from the
West and not from Asia. Russia is, historically, the agent
by which the religion and civilization of the West have
been spread through Central Asia and to much of the
Far East. Russia has been and can again become a creative
spiritual force.
Marxist Communism has been perverted by the Soviet
leaders into a doctrine of cynical absolutism. Even be
fore his death Karl Marx denounced "Marxism." He was
278 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
a German Jew who studied in England and combined in
Das Kapital the moral denunciation proper to one of the
Hebrew prophets with the intellectual apparatus of west
ern philosophy. Thus, his now outdated doctrine has a
common ancestry with the faith of the western world
and, like that faith, bases itself on the great western con
cept of the brotherhood of man. Nothing that has come
out of Asia since Buddha can parallel this concept. The
Hindus devised a caste system which makes the Jim
Crow policies of certain parts of this country look ama
teurish. The Chinese set up a cult of family devotion
which excluded the ideal of love for one's neighbor. The
original Marxist doctrine is not our enemy; it is only a
tool in the hands of ruthless men, and a return to its first
principles would render it harmless to humanity.
Since 1911 China has been exploding in revolution
under the combined impact of Christian missions, Com
munist propaganda, and western technology. The up
heaval which has begun in China and is beginning to
shake India is an irreversible process. The great future
problem before both Russia and America is to make sure
that the terrible new powers which western science and
teaching have introduced into Asia are controlled by
ethical and moral standards which will prevent their
abuse. Up to now the Kremlin has preached still more
debased ethical concepts than those which Communism
has displaced in China. This could be a doom for the en
tire world and must, out of the need for self-preservation,
RENDEZVOUS WITH HISTORY 279
be stopped until the Chinese have emerged from the dark
ages of superstition, cruelty, and tyranny which have
been traditional in Asia for thousands of years. The atom
bomb or the plague bacillus in the hands of moral illiter
ates and political barbarians is nothing that either Mos
cow or Washington dares to contemplate.
That is why, high on the agenda of the deeds which the
Soviet rulers must perform if good faith is ever to be
restored, is the withdrawal of the false Communist charge
of germ warfare against the United Nations forces in
Korea. This lie must be thoroughly investigated, ex
posed, and denounced lest the millions of Asians whom it
has deliberately deceived should conclude that future
biological warfare is justified against the free world.
Other Soviet deeds swiftly suggest themselves: the
negotiation of an Austrian peace treaty, the restoration
of freedom to Czechoslovakia and Poland, the liberation
of Germany, disarmament, control of atomic energy, the
end of Communist intrigue in free Asia and throughout
Africa and South America. These all represent actions
by the Soviet state, its puppets and its agencies, which
could accompany and justify the gradual release of ten
sion between East and West.
There is one final test of Soviet sincerity and the pro
fessed will for peace on the part of the new regime in
the Kremlin: the opening of political frontiers to travel
and exchange of goods and the opening of human minds
to discussion, comparison, and exchange of ideas. If the
280 REPUBLICANS ON THE POTOMAC
Kremlin permits citizens of the free world to travel as
easily within the Iron Curtain countries as Soviet subjects
have been free to travel in the West, if Soviet citizens are
free to read and believe and talk as they please, then the ir
repressible conflict between America and Russia will be
fought out on the level where it must eventually be de
cided: individual freedom to judge and choose. Granted
such freedom, with rising Soviet living standards and
twenty years of peace, the New Republicans may lead
the whole world to peace after fifty years of universal
tragedy and suffering.
If not, a war between Russia and America will be in
evitable. If it comes it will be neither short nor pleasant.
It would be the final downfall of white western civiliza
tion, since it would devastate if not destroy the two great
protagonists of the intellectual and material forces that
have at last created the prospect of a better and more
secure life for the human race, as well as for its swift
obliteration if they are mismanaged.
The only great power which would survive such a
war would be China itself, since the Chinese still pos
sess too decentralized a civilization to be vulnerable to
atomic attack. Hence, the survivors of a Third World
War might find that they had fought to make China the
ruler of what remained of the world. Nothing in Chinese
history, ancient or modern, encourages a belief that their
rule would be preferable to a peace of reconciliation be
tween America and Russia.
RENDEZVOUS WITH HISTORY 281
The task is not an easy one and does not rest entirely
with the Eisenhower administration. It takes two to make
a peace but only one to start a war. Yet this is the final
test by which Eisenhower and the New Republicans will
be judged by history, if there is anyone left to write his
tory after the weapons of modern war have again been
released upon the planet. The price of peace is always
high, because it involves the pride and passions of men
as well as their material interests. But today we have at
least one more and perhaps the last chance to use our
power and our wisdom and our character to bridge the
gulf of suspicion, fear, and hatred which sunders the
tragic, gifted, long-suffering people of Russia from the
brotherhood of the free world.
INDEX
Acheson, Dean, 112, 139, 154
Adams, Alva, 241
Adams, Henry, 80
Adams, John Q., 113
Adams, Sherman, 49, 78-83, 97, 153
Agriculture, under parity, 196ff.
Aldrich, Nelson, 119
Aldrich, Winthrop W., 119-121
American Commonwealth, The, 22
Anderson, Robert B., 149
Andrews, T. Coleman, 174
Athens, 272
Baker, George F., 119
Baker, Newton D., 166
Bankhead, John, 256
Baruch, Bernard, 175
Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn,
57
Battle Hymn of the Republic, The,
276
Bell, Elliott, 89f ., 94
Bellows, George, 39
Ben6t, Stephen V., 67
Benson, Ezra T., 198-201
Benton, William, 250
Biddle, Francis, 219
Bohlen, Charles, 113, 251
Boston Transcript, 128
Bradley, Omar, 33, 34, 153, 154
Bricker, John, 220
Bristow, Senator, 27
Brokaw, George T., 125
Browneli, Herbert, 57, 61, 62, 63,
85, 88, 189, 212, 215-220
Bryan, William J., 17, 24, 108
Bryce, James, 22
Burgess, W. Randolph, 172f .
Burton, John, 94
Byrd, Harry F., 173, 253ff.
Byrnes, James, 112
Byzantium, 272
Cake, Ralph, 204
Canada, 273
Carlson, Frank, 62, 241
Carney, General, 159
Casement, Roger, 84
Central Intelligence Agency, 129fL,
156
Charlemagne, 272
Chase National Bank, 119, 120
Chicago Tribune, 58, 243, 265
China, 278-, United States and, lOlf .
Church and Liberal Society, The,
100
Churchill, Winston, 32, 35, 39, 121
Clark, Tom, 220
Clay, Lucius, 70-73, 134
Clifford, dark, 78, 87, 98
Collins, J. Lawton, 155
Communism, in the United States,
213f,; versus democracy, 267ff.
' Conant, James B,, 121-123
Connelly, Matthew, 78, 98
Continental Can Co., 72
283
284 INDEX
Coolidge, Calvin, 234
Corcoran, Thomas, 98, 175
Cordon, Guy, 245
Cowles, Gardner, 65
Cowles, John, 65
Crusade in Europe, 37
Cuba, 275
Daugherty, Harry, 222
Davis, Elmer, 99
de Gasperi, Alcide, 125
de Gaulle, Charles, 33
Dewey, Frances H., 52
Dewey, George, 24
Dewey, Thomas E., and Roosevelt,
43 f.; and Eisenhower, 49-58; 45,
60fL, 69, 72, 79, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90,
92, 94, 98, 109, 112, 113, 147, 193,
207, 209, 215, 217, 218, 227, 233,
237, 252, 259, 263
Dirksen, Everett M., 242f.
Disraeli, Benjamin, 100
Dodge, Joseph M., 176-180
Douglas, Helen Gahagan, 232
Douglas, Paul H., 259-261
DriscoU, Albert, 49, 64, 86, 209
Dubinsky, David, 263
Duff, James H., 59-65, 69, 147, 209
Duff, Joseph, 60
Dulles, Allen, 112, 129 r 131-133
Dulles, John F., 36, 51, 74, 85, 107-
113, 114, 115, 116, 126, 212
Durkin, Martin P., 188-191
Early, Stephen, 78
Eden, Anthony, 121
Eisenhower, Dwight D., life of,
23-34; at Columbia, 34; political
education of, 36-42; Truman and,
45ff.; 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 61, 69, 70f.,
73, 79, 87, S 91, 95, 100, 112, 121,
126, 133ff., 142, 150, 153f., 155,
158, 163, 171, 189, 194, 198, 204,
212, 216, 218, 223, 227, 231, 233,
237, 244, 246, 251, 253, 254, 258,
260, 262, 264, 268, 272, 273, 277
Eisenhower, John S., 28
Eisenhower, Mamie, 27-30
Eliot, Charles W., 121
Equitable Trust Co., 120
Ewing, Oscar, 201, 203
Farley, James A., 51
Fechteler, William M., 155
Federal Bureau of Investigation,
219-222
Federal Security Administration,
201, 259
Federalists, 17
Fine, John S., 60
Fish, Hamilton, 25 If.
Floberg, J. F., 149f.
Florida Ship Canal, 185
Forrestal, James, 130, 150, 154
Fortune, 65, 67, 98, 133, 134
Foster, John W,, 108, 132
France, 272
Fuchs, Emil, 122
General Motors Corp., 141fT., 225f.
Germany, United States and, 102,
275
Gillette, Claude, 258
Gillette, Guy, 257f., 260
Glass, Carter, 173f., 253
Gordon, "Waxey," 54
Grant, Ulysses S., 18, 25
Green, William, 192
Gruenther, Alfred M., 157
Grundy, Joseph, 60
Guffey, Joseph, 59
Hadden, Briton, 67, 68
Hagerty, James A., 93
Hagerty, James C., 57, 87, 92-97
Hall, Leonard W., 228f.
Halsey, William F., 126
Hamilton, Alexander, 16
Handy, Thomas T., 158
Hanes, John W., Jr., 116
Hanna, Mark, 16, 167
Hannah, John, 149
INDEX
285
Harding, Warren G., 28, 22lf., 234
Harkness, Mrs. Edward Stephen, 66
Harrison, Benjamin, 23, 108
Harum, David, 79
Hauge, Gabriel, 57, 89-92
Haymarket murders, 24
High, Stanley, 57, 98
Hines, "Jimmy," 54
Hiss, Alger, 113, 230, 232, 251
Hitler, Adolf, 102, 117, 160, 162,
213, 267f., 277
Hobby, Oveta Gulp, 201-204
Hobby, William P., 202
Hoffman, Paul, 175
Holmes, Oliver W., 174f.
Hoover, Herbert, 48, 51, 105, 109,
144, 161, 195,213,224
Hoover, J. Edgar, 22 If.
Hopkins, Harry, 78
Hornblower & Weeks, 193
Horner, Governor, 259
Howard, Roy W., 37, 65
Howe, Louis, 78
Hughes, Charles E., 209
Hughes, Emmet J., 66, 97-100
Humphrey, George M., 164-171,
176, 180, 212
Ickes, Harold, 245
Ingalls, David, 66
Inglis, Governor, 49
I ves, Irving M., 23 1,263-266
Jackson, Andrew, 17
Jackson, C. D., 66, 98, 130, 133-135
Jackson, Robert, 219
Japan, United States and, 102, 275
Jefferson, Thomas, 17
Jenner, Senator, 262
Johnson, Hugh S., 148
Johnson, Louis, 154
Johnson, Robert, 114
Johnson, Tom L., 166
Journey to the Far Pacific, 58, 98
Kapital, Das, 278
Kefauver, Estes, 255
Keller, Harold, 58
Kelly, Edward, 210
Kennedy, John, 127, 128, 262
Kerensky, Alexander, 103
Keyserling, Leon, 92
Knudsen, William, 144
Korea, 136fL, 154
Kreuger, General, 31
Krock, Arthur, 46
Kyes, Roger M., 147
LaFoHette, Robert M., 250
LaGuardia, Fiorello H., 217
Lamme, E. C., 143
Lansing, Robert, 107, 108, 132
Lawton, Frederick J., 177f.
League of Nations, 104
Lear, Ben, 31
Lehman, Herbert, 44, 54, 110, 265
Lenin, Nikolai, 276
Lewis, John L., 192,245
Life, 65, 67, 97, 98, 134
Lincoln, Abraham, 44, 131, 146,
275f.
Lindley, Ernest K., 11
Lockwood, Paul, 95
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 62, 63, 127-
129, 180, 194, 246, 262
Lodge, John, 49, 127
Longstreet, James, 71
Lourie, Donald, 114
Lovett, Robert A., 153
Lowell, A. Lawrence, 121
Lucas, Scott, 243, 250
Luce, Clare Boothe, 66, 68, 123-125
Luce, Henry R., 65-70, 98, 123f.,
133
Limtcmla y The, 108
MacArthur, Arthur, 74
MacArthur, Douglas, 31, 70, 71,
73-77, 112, 118
MacLeish, Archibald, 67
Malenkov, Georgi, 268, 276, 277
Marquand, John P., 120
Marshall, George C, 31f., 33, 45,
107, 112, 151, 179
286
INDEX
Martin, Governor, 60
Martin, Joseph W M 229, 262
Marx, Kaxl, 277 f .
McCardle, Carl W., 115, 116-118
McCarran, Pat, 251
McCarthy, Joseph, 113, 243, 248-
252, 262
McCloy, John J., 33, 120
McCormick, Robert R., 242
Mclntyre, Marvin, 78
McKay, Douglas, 204-208, 209
McKinley, William, 24, 170, 234
McNary, Charles, 245
McNeil, James, 150
McNutt, Paul, 201
Medalie, George S., 53
Mesta, Perle, 39
Millikin, Eugene D., 241f.
Minor, Robert, 220
Moley, Raymond W., 98
Monroe, James, 113
Monroe Doctrine, 137
Montgomery, Bernard L., 33, 40
Morgan, J. P., 119
Morgenthau, Henry, 172, 181f.
Morse, Wayne, 37, 125, 127, 224,
243-248, 251, 252
Morton, Thruston B., 114
Murphy, Charles, 87
Murphy, Robert, 134
Murray, Philip, 192
Mussolini, Benito, 162
Nash, Frank C, 150
National Catholic Welfare Con
ference, 189f.
New Deal, nature of, 17f., 20, 21
New York Herald Tribune, 65, 96,
128
New York Times, 65, 93
Nixon, Richard, 37, 220, 230-236
North Atlantic Treaty Organiza
tion, 133
O'Connor, Roderic L^ 115f.
Parity, in agriculture, 196ff .
Passamaquoddy, 185
Patton, George, 33
Payne, Governor, 49
Payne, Secretary, 3 1
Penrose, Boies, 16
Pershing, John J., 241
Persons, Wilton B., 97
Peterson, Val, 97
Pfeiffer, 57
Philadelphia Bulletin, 116, 117
Philippines, 275
Phleger, Herman, 114
Pinkertons, 131
Pitzele, Mervyn, 58
Pius XIII, 125
Porter, Jack, 62
Post, Langdon, 217
Powell, Hickman, 58
Priest, Ivy B., 175f.
Priest, Roy F., 176
Pullman strike, 24
Reader's Digest, 57, 98
Remington-Rand Corp., 76
Report from Spain, 100
Ridgway, Matthew, 158, 159
Roberts, Charles W., 193, 227ff.
Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 121
Rogers, William P., 220, 233
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 78
Roosevelt, Franklin, and Dewey
and Truman, 43f.; 11, 15, 16, 17f^
40, 48, 54, 55, 56, 75, 78, 98, 103,
104, 116, 133, 137, 161, 169, 172,
177, 181, 186, 196, 208, 213, 218,
234, 245, 252, 258, 267f., 275, 277
Roosevelt, Theodore, on Bryce,
22; 16, 17, 24, 60, 74, 102, 104f.,
209, 234, 252
Root, Elihu, 104
Roper, Daniel, 195
Rose, Horace C., 174f.
Rosenman, Samuel, 78, 98
Russell, Richard B., 254ff.
Russia, United States and, 102f.,
267fT.; expansion of, 106
INDEX
287
St. Lawrence Seaway, 185
Salazar, Antonio, 190
Saltonstall, Leverett, 194
Sargent, John S., 39
Saturday Review o-f Literature, 100
Sawyer, Charles, 195
Schuyler, Senator, 241
Severeid, Eric, 165
Sheen, Fulton J., 124
Sherwood, Robert E., 98
Smith, Alexander, 263
Smith, Alfred E-, 51, 209, 210
Smith, Walter B., 114, 129f., 133,
134, 156
Snyder, John, 78, 166
Snyder, Murray, 96
Sparkman, John, 255f.
Sparta, 272
Sprague, J. Russel, 61, 229
Sprague, Robert, 142
Stalin, Joseph, 130, 132f., 160, 268,
276, 277
Stanton, Edwin, 146
Stassen, Harold E., 116, 125-127,
244,246
Stephens, Thomas E., 57, 61, 79,
83-89, 115
Stettinius, Edward, 112
Stevens, Robert T., 148f.
Stevenson, Adlai, and Truman, 47;
35, 63, 66, 218, 234, 237, 247, 254,
263
Stimson, Henry L., 105
Stimson Doctrine, 137
Sullivan & Cromwell, 108, 131
Summerfield, Arthur, 142, 193, 225-
228
Syracuse, 272
Taft, Charles, 238
Taft, Robert A., 35, 37, 55, 58, 60,
62, 64, 66, 73, 76, 79, 86, 112, 165,
189, 199, 217, 218, 227, 231, 233,
237-241, 243, 244, 246, 263
Taft, William Howard, 92, 104,
120, 237, 239, 252
Taft-Hartley law, 188, 239
Talbott, Harold E., 147f.
Taylor, Maxwell D., 158
Thoreau, Henry, 79
Thye, Senator, 126
Time, 65, 67
Transport Workers Union, 188
Truman, Bess, 29, 30
Truman, Harry S., and Roosevelt,
43f.; and Eisenhower, 45rL; 18,
30, 35, 55, 56, 74, 78, 98, 104, 105,
110, 118, 130, 133, 153, 155, 163,
166, 172, 177, 179, 181, 218, 220,
234, 252, 255, 258, 260, 261, 268,
275
Truman Doctrine, 137
Twining, Admiral, 159
Tydings, Millard, 250
United Automotive Workers, 145
United Nations, 104, 109, 137
United States, foreign policy of,
10 Iff.; commitments of, 137fF.;
agriculture under parity in,
196ff.; contemporary problems
of, 267fT.
Vandenberg, Arthur, 75, 246
Vandenberg, Arthur, Jr., 87, 97
Vandenberg, Hoyt S., 155
Vanity Fair, 123
Vaughan, Harry, 78
VisMnsky, Andrei, 128
Vogue, 123
Voorhis, Jerry, 232
Wagner, Robert F., 85, 109
Wallace, Henry A., 248
Warren, Earl, 231
Washington, George, 25, 44
Watkins, Senator, 262
Weeks, Sinclair, 191-195
Wells, Jack, 233
Wheeler, Burton K, 46
White, Harry D^ 171
White, William A., 24
288
INDEX
Whitman, Charles, 209
Wilder, Thornton, 67, 81
Wiley, Alexander, 250
Willkie, Wendell, 55, 126, 207
Wilson, Charles E., 142-146, 153,
212, 254
Wilson, Woodrow, 23, 74, 102, 104,
107, 108f., 275
Wolff, General, 132
Wood, Leonard, 93, 228
Woodin, William H., 181
Yalta, 102
Young, Brigham, 199
Zweifel, Henry, 62
110852
