WHAT'S WRONG ABOUT THE EISENHOWER CANDIDACY
What's Wrong about the Eisenhower Candidacy THE CURIOUS events at Gettysburg the morning of July 10 emphasized afresh what is wrong about President Eisenhower's quest for a second term. The morning...
...It would be difficult to conceive a more striking example of hypocrisy run wild than the proceedings at the convention of Tennessee Republicans recently...
...Walter Lippmann, writing for the staunchly pro-Eisenhower New York Herald Tribune, summed it all up in a single sentence: "He is the unanimous candidate of a party that will not follow him as a leader...
...Roosevelt and Mr...
...We are informed by Robert J. Donovan, author of the quasi-official book, Eisenhower, the Inside Story, that the President felt so strongly two years ago about the reaction-ridden elements in his party that he toyed for a time with the notion of building a new political party...
...Eisenhower as a candidate to help them get elected—so they can return to office to torpedo his program...
...A switch of 16 Republican votes would have cleared the measure through the House...
...He fought a little, just a little, on a few occasions several years ago...
...This seems an extraordinary state of mind for a man who refuses to invoke party discipline, who fails to fight for principal measures in his program, and who treats his supporters and opponents in the Republican Party with a curious impartiality...
...Well, what's so wrong about all this...
...In the first place the proceedings of the day represented a complete repudiation of the President's earlier promise to discuss frankly the state of his health...
...Eisenhower decided reluctantly to seek a second term...
...On final passage the bill itself was defeated, 224 to 194, with 119 Republicans and 105 Democrats against, and 119 Democrats and 75 Republicans for...
...The elaborate casualness, so obviously stage-managed in order to blur the fact that the President had only a few days before emerged from a second period of long hospitalization, creates a serious doubt that the electorate can expect the truth about the President's health during the campaign...
...Senators Knowland and Bridges and their kind will doubtless be even more powerful during the second term, for they will be dealing with a President who not only recoils congenitally from exercising militant political leadership, but a President who is now physically unequipped for the rough, tough battles ahead...
...Eisenhower because they feel he is entitled to a second term and because they like his policy of moderation need to understand that there is even less prospect that his program will prevail in a second term than in the first...
...Truman fought for their principles, tangled with the enemies in their party, named names, exercised discipline, and provided affirmative direction when major issues were being resolved by Congress...
...In fact, the beaming Senators recalled, the Chief Executive had said he was "in much better condition" than he had been February 29 when he announced his decision to seek a second term...
...It was to prevent the leadership of the Republican Party from falling into hands like theirs, we have been told by some of his associates, that Mr...
...His commitment to cautious progress is clear...
...The very Republicans in Congress who clamor most loudly that they "like Ike" have been burying their hatchets deep in the President's legislative program—without a whimper of complaint from the White House...
...Mr...
...The two Senators, Knowland and Bridges, who joyfully brought the news of his second candidacy, will cheerfully cut his throat—again— when the election is over and victory is theirs...
...Now none of this, of course, is new...
...The President not only declined to face the nation with a radio and television report, but he was not available for questioning by White House correspondents...
...Reece could hardly have intended to include himself among "the American people...
...It is all the more inexplicable in a man who must know that his towering prestige and popularity would make victory for his program certain—if he would only choose to fight as the President of his country and the leader of his party—rather than reign as a constitutional monarch above the battle...
...He submitted to no questions...
...The significant statistic, however, is this one: 95 Republicans who voted for the Powell Amendment, voted against the bill on final passage, even after their amendment had been adopted...
...He is a great patriot, a thoroughly decent human being, and a sincere disciple of moderation and tolerance...
...Eisenhower returned to his farm, leaving Congressional leaders, principally Senators William Know-land and Styles Bridges, to tell the press what had been discussed...
...There is hardly an observer in Washington who doubts that a personal appeal from a healthy Dwight Eisenhower—or even some last minute personal letter from Gettysburg—would have changed enough Republican votes to make the difference...
...The delegates whooped it up for a second term for President Eisenhower, and then proceeded to adopt a platform which repudiated, in pretty harsh language, the Eisenhower position on such dominant issues as foreign aid, the Bricker amendment, the United Nations, the Mc-Carran-Walter Immigration Act, and the qualifications of Chief Justice Warren...
...The Powell Amendment was adopted, 225 to 192, in the House o£ Representatives, with 148 Republicans and 77 Democrats voting for it, and 146 Democrats and 46 Republicans voting against it...
...His dedication to peace is unchallenged...
...The recent tragic defeat of the measure to provide long-needed federal aid for school construction is a case in point...
...For the most part he acted out the part assigned him by his public relations experts—to behave as though nothing of consequence had happened since February 29, and to pretend that his emergency abdominal operation was hardly more serious than a green-apple belly-ache...
...Republican B. Carroll Reece, boss of Tennessee Republicanism and as relentless a reactionary as the GOP harbors, personified this two-tone approach to the Eisenhower candidacy...
...The basic issue was confused, to be sure, by the Powell Amendment, which would have required, as a condition of receiving federal aid, that states and school districts comply with the Supreme Court's decision voiding racial segregation in the schools...
...But he will not lead, which means he will not fight for his principles when he is confronted, as he has been and is, by outright insurrection in his own ranks...
...In our generation both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman carried to victory many a candidate who voted consistently against the President's program...
...Eisenhower exercises none of these principles of Presidential leadership...
...But what strikes us as more disturbing, for its symbolic significance, was President Eisenhower's chosen instruments for breaking the news to the country—Senators Knowland and Bridges, who represent precisely those worst elements in the Republican Party against whom the President is supposed to be at war...
...Anthony Lewis, a Washington correspondent for the pro-Eisenhower New York Times, put it squarely on the line when he wrote: ". . . the influence of the President could have been decisive...
...The motives of many of these 95 must be obvious: they paid their respects to the rising Negro vote in pivotal districts by voting for the amendment, and then they reverted to their anti-Eisenhower rejection of the principle of federal aid to education by killing the bill...
...But he has no taste for it, and now, perhaps, no energy for it...
...In Wisconsin, moreover, Republican isolationism spilled over into outright rejection of Senator Alexander Wiley, a faithful Eisenhower servant in the field of foreign policy, in favor of endorsement of Representative Glenn Davis, who, if elected, would almost certainly become a member of the Bridges-Jenner-McCarthy clan that President Eisenhower despises...
...For example, at the convention of Wisconsin Republicans a month before, delegates shouted their praise of their peerless leader, the President, and then proceeded to adopt a platform which scorned most of his major principles...
...During the last Congressional year he voted against President Eisenhower on 75 per cent of the foreign policy issues, on 59 per cent of the domestic issues—for a 67 per cent over-all repudiation of the man who "is trying to do the right thing...
...Independent voters who lean toward Mr...
...But President Eisenhower said not a word during the debate, even when some of the members of his own party were known to be wavering and waiting for a sign from the White House...
...The Senators chatted with reporters on the contents of the legislative program, and somewhere along the way joyously blurted out the news that the President was feeling well enough to run for reelection, and would...
...Republican politicians, in other words, need Mr...
...nor did the medical specialists who performed his abdominal operation, two of whom happened to be "vacationing" on the Eisenhowers' Gettysburg farm...
...And clearly the state of his health will be the dominant consideration for countless voters...
...But Mr...
...In a rousing speech that followed the adoption of the anti-Eisenhower platform, Reece cried out that "the American people support President Eisenhower because they are confident he is trying to do the right thing...
...Much the same brand of doublespeak was unveiled at a number of other state conventions...
...There have been hypocritical coat-tail riders almost since the dawn of American political history...
...The morning went like this: • The President rode out to Gettysburg College, where he conferred with Republican Congressional leaders—ostensibly on a 14-point legislative program for the dying days of the 84th Congress...
Vol. 20 • August 1956 • No. 8
