Eisenhower vs. a Democratic military leader in 1952

There was a short-lived board shared timeline by election called the AH Chain Mk. 1 which had President Dewey sacking MacArthur in Korea, causing the latter to become a Democratic presidential candidate in revenge. He didn't get nominated, but he was an option in that timeline, which I am still amused by to this day (it wasn't the most plausible scenario). That said, the seemingly-overwhelming majority of Republican military leaders in WWII makes me wonder who could possibly challenge Eisenhower in '52. WWI guys like Truman don't count for the sake of this thread. Could Patton run as a Dixiecrat? If there aren't any generals, were any of the admirals such as King or Nimitz possibly Democrats, or even have any political ambitions at all? Anyway I was robbed of the irony of MacArthur as a Dem so I wanna see what's the next best thing. I'm also specifying '52 because I want to see two WWII military leaders battle it out in the election, and no switching Eisenhower over to Democrat does not count that's just lazy.
 
Well, it's not exactly what you were looking for, but there was an actual chance of Eisenhower vs. MacArthur in 1948, with Eisenhower as a Democrat and Truman as his VP.

When it comes to 1952, there weren't very many military men willing to run besides Eisenhower and MacArthur, and MacArthur wouldn't run as a Democrat. I suppose there is a possibility of Patton as a Dixiecrat, but he was considered a loose cannon and likely wouldn't have been nominated. You could possibly see a Draft movement amongst the Democrats to try and get James M. Gavin on board. You could also maybe see a draft for Omar Bradley.

Personally, I think it would be pretty interesting to see a three way race in 1948 between Eisenhower as a Democrat, MacArthur as a Republican, and Patton as a Dixiecrat.
 
1952 was a highly Republican-leaning year. A military leader as the Democratic candidate would hardly neutralize that fact.
 
Part of the problem for the Dems was the incredibly fast military drawdown after WWII. It bit the US and the free world in the ass when Korea broke out. There were large numbers of veterans recalled who were seriously pissed that they had to go back into uniform because the military had been allowed to decay so much so fast, and they were voting Republican after this.
 
Part of the problem for the Dems was the incredibly fast military drawdown after WWII. It bit the US and the free world in the ass when Korea broke out. There were large numbers of veterans recalled who were seriously pissed that they had to go back into uniform because the military had been allowed to decay so much so fast, and they were voting Republican after this.

That seems very short-sighted given that occupation was going to happen and that everyone knew the Soviets were a threat.
 
Wtf why would Truman be a veep.


I had a post here some years ago on that:

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Eisenhower-Truman Democratic ticket in 1948

Yes, I know it sounds far-fetched, but Truman apparently did propose the idea, if one can believe his diary of July 25, 1947:

"At 3:30 today had a very interesting conversation with Gen[eral] Eisenhower...

"Ike & I think MacArthur expects to make a Roman Triumphal return to the U. S. a short time before the Republican Convention meets in Philadelphia. I told Ike that if he did that that he (Ike) should announce for the nomination for President on the Democratic ticket and that I'd be glad to be in second place, or Vice President. I like the Senate anyway. Ike & I could be elected and my family & myself would be happy outside this great white jail, known as the White House.

"Ike won't quot [sic] me & I won't quote him."

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/diary/page23.htm

(That wasn't the first time Truman had offered to support Ike for the presidency. "General,' he told Ike as they rode together with General Bradley at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, 'there is nothing that you may want that I won't try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1948.' [1] But this offer could be dismissed as having been made at a time when Truman was not yet fully accustomed to the presidency and was toying with the idea of stepping down in 1948. To see Truman repeating the offer as late as 1947--this time with the suggestion that he, Truman, be Ike's running mate--is more surprising.)

Moreover, "[t]hat fall [of 1947], Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall, very much impressed by his subordinate Eisenhower, revealed to Truman that if Ike were to challenge Truman, Royall would not oppose him--and offered to resign. Truman not only urged Royall to remain, he requested a favor: Would he approach Ike with the same bargain Truman had previously extended personally to Ike? Again, Eisenhower declined.

"'Was Truman serious?' wondered his biographer Alonzo Hamby. 'Did he expect Eisenhower to be a figurehead president who would let the second-in-command run things? Did he simply want to escape back to the familiar setting of the Senate? Or did he expect Eisenhower to decline and thereby remove himself from the race at an early date?'

"Hamby never provided an answer to his questions, and we may never provide one either. We do know, however, that Harry Truman tendered his offers in private and spent the rest of his life denying ever having extended them. Ike 'said I offered him the presidency,' Truman informed author Merle Miller, 'which I didn't. In the first place, it wasn't mine to offer. What happened [was]...we had a talk, and again he assured me he had no political intentions whatsoever of going into politics. I told him that was the right decision. And it was.'

Harry Truman's diary, of course, argues otherwise. So does testimony from such witnesses as Kenneth Royall, Sam Rosenman, and International News Service (INS) reporter Robert G. Nixon, to all of whom Truman confided his actions.

"It remains far easier to speculate about why Truman would never admit his offers to Eisenhower than about why he made them. They do not fit into the narrative of the spunky, never-say-die scrapper history now remembers, an image he did so much to foster. For all his real courage and feistiness, there were times when 'Give 'em Hell' Harry did falter, did despair of his chances, did contemplate surrender.

"And the above instances were but three of them."

David Pietrusza, *1948: Harry Truman's Improbable Victory and the Year That Transformed America's Role in the World* (2011), p. 160.

(Pietrusza might have added another reason for Truman's refusal to admit the offers to Ike: Truman became very critical of Ike's record as president, so for Truman to admit having offered Ike the presidency would be an admission not only of Truman's occasional lack of confidence in his own prospects for 1948 but of a serious misjudgment of Eisenhower's politics.)

There were of course good reasons for Truman to lose heart and to calculate what he might negotiate with Eisenhower. The American people were not sure about Eisenhower's party affiliation (in August 1947, 22 percent thought he was a Republican, 20 percent a Democrat, and the rest were uncertain) but they were sure that they liked Ike. In January 1948, when Truman's popularity had recovered somewhat from its 1946 lows (it would dip again later in 1948) polls showed Truman edging out Dewey, Stassen, and Vandenberg, and crushing Taft--but trailing Eisenhower by 47-40, losing every section of the country to Ike except the South.

The question is, Is there any plausible scenario where Ike might actually accept Truman's offer? (Truman's saying that the presidency wasn't his to offer was disingenuous; if he had announced his support for Ike, and Ike had agreed, Ike could have had the Democratic nomination with no trouble whatever. As it was, there was a strong dump-Harry-draft-Ike movement among Democrats that extended from ADA liberals to big city bosses to southern segregationists.) Note that Truman's offer of July 1947 was contingent on a MacArthur candidacy. Truman was perhaps implying that if one reason for Ike's hesitancy was a belief that military candidates for the presidency were a dangerous idea, then maybe a MacArthur candidacy would change Ike's mind because in that case there would already *be* a military candidate, and a far more dangerous one than Ike...

A MacArthur nomination was unlikely. Most of the plausible GOP candidates for the presidency--Dewey, Stassen, and Vandenberg--were satisfactory to Ike, because they were moderate-to-progressive on domestic issues and internationalists on foreign policy. As long as this was the case, Ike was unlikely to run. But could a Taft nomination change Eisenhower's mind--as the prospect of a Taft nomination made Ike run for president in 1952? In a 1970 interview, the ADA's James Loeb argued that the answer was yes:

"Eisenhower for a whole year was *clearly* available. Everybody who saw him agreed on this, and he would see almost anybody, he was then president of Columbia University; he saw Chester Bowles; he saw Leon Henderson; he saw all sorts of people... He was extremely receptive. If Robert Taft had been the Republican nominee as an isolationist, I have no question in my mind that General Eisenhower would have been available...on the Democratic ticket."

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/loeb1.htm

OTOH, would the Democrats who wanted Ike in large part because Truman was so unpopular--a joke among many Democrats was "I'm just mild about Harry"--really agree to have Truman as Ike's running mate? I suppose the answer is that *if Ike insisted on this* as the price for his accepting the presidential nomination, they would gladly go along. (The Republicans might taunt the Democrats, "You in effect admitted Truman was a failure--yet you want once again to put him a heartbeat away from the presidency?" But the Democrats could reply, "We never said that Truman was a failure. In fact, we think he has been a good president and if necessary could become one again. We just think Ike would be an even *better* president.")

Any thoughts?

[1] This is from Eisenhower's account in *Crusade in Europe,* where Ike claimed that the offer caught him completely off-guard and that he could only laugh incredulously and exclaim, "Mr. President, I don't know who will be your opponent for the presidency, but it will not be I."

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/eisenhower-truman-democratic-ticket-in-1948.299036/
 
Well I've seen James Forrestal used in various AH as an alternative FDR VP.
I'd imagine if you play around you could get the guy into to the position to be the Dem Candidate for 1952.
 
That seems very short-sighted given that occupation was going to happen and that everyone knew the Soviets were a threat.

Yes it was. The reasoning back then was a misplaced belief in nuclear weapons having made conventional wars impossible and unnecessary, which was proven to be fallacious. Add the belief that international organizations will prevent it (League of Nations, UN), a great amount of wishful thinking, and often plain old fashioned political stupidity and there it is. There is also the long standing habit (going all the way back to the nations founding, so this problem isn't the sole purview of either of todays major parties) of US administrations skeletonizing the military after each conflict, more or less counting on another power (which used to be the Europeans) to bear the brunt of conflicts until we could mobilize enough to get into the fight. I don't want to get too far from the threads POD so I'll stop sermonizing. :)
 
Part of the problem for the Dems was the incredibly fast military drawdown after WWII. It bit the US and the free world in the ass when Korea broke out. There were large numbers of veterans recalled who were seriously pissed that they had to go back into uniform because the military had been allowed to decay so much so fast, and they were voting Republican after this.
And in 1945 these same veterans were pissed that they could not get out of the service fast enough and that is why many of them voted for the Republicans in 1946.
 
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