CHAPTER 28
February 4, 1952
“Under the present administration, this nation has been allowed to lose its way. Our rugged individualism has been exchanged for centralisation, an increase in government power and overreach. Arbitrary restrictions on business and enterprise have not brought the promised prosperity. It has only encouraged waste and inefficiency in the public administration, while our leaders continue to pursue reckless economic policies that drive people out of work. Ever since the present government took office, unemployment numbers have maintained a persistent and devastating upward climb. The value of the dollar is half of what it was at the end of the last war, and the blame for this lies solely with the mismanagement encouraged by our current leaders.
I am reminded of my recent visit to Maine, where I met an old friend, a brave veteran, once a major under my command during the Pacific War, and his young family. He had won the Silver Star for bravery under fire, and when he returned home had started his own business. That small business, a symbol of the very spirit that led to our nation’s creation, has now failed, and when I met him for the first time since the war, he asked me a question I will never forget. He said ‘General, we may have won the war, but where is our victory?’
I had no answer, so instead I offered him a promise: if a MacArthur administration is elected, I would bring that victory home…”
Frederick Ayer Jr was reading over the speech that MacArthur was going to deliver in Cleveland later this week. Despite the campaign having hired a speechwriter, the general tended to insist upon writing the first draft of his speeches himself. Ayer supposed they were fortunate that he allowed anyone to edit his speeches at all. Initially, he hadn’t, and his stubbornness had set the campaign back. One speech in particular had been delivered without anyone other than Pat Echols or the general seeing it beforehand. He had denounced FDR and Truman for leading the country towards a “totalitarian state”, in particular because of Roosevelt’s attempt to ‘pack’ the Supreme Court by appointing more justices. It was fairly safe to attack Truman, who was struggling to maintain even a twenty percent approval rating, but FDR? On an issue that hadn’t been relevant for over a decade? A poll in Life magazine shortly afterwards had seen MacArthur’s name listed by several percentage points fewer than a month ago.
It was a good thing that had been in November: the electorate would forget about it in time, and MacArthur was now (somewhat) more willing to listen to his team.
One sentence had caught his eye while reading this speech. ‘Bring victory home’. It sounded optimistic. It sounded memorable. And it was the sort of thing that described MacArthur perfectly: the Democrats, and indeed every likely Republican challenger, had been in the United States over the last several years. Truman’s Recession, as it was unflatteringly named, had happened on their watch. MacArthur had been abroad, going from success to success in the Philippines, Japan and Korea. It would be the perfect campaign slogan. MacArthur could even take credit for thinking of it.
He reached for the phone. Phil LaFollette would want to know about this.
***
The slogan could not have come a moment too soon. Harold Stassen’s campaign was suffering from its association with McCarthy, but he was no longer MacArthur’s only competition. On January 17th, Robert Taft announced that he would be a candidate, and the entire MacArthur team knew he would be a much stronger challenger than Stassen had ever been.
The senator from Ohio had made two previous attempts at the presidency, in 1940 and 1948, and had long been an expected candidate for 1952: Harry Truman had named him as such during an August 1951 news conference. Even MacArthur himself, who rarely agreed with Truman about anything, had been thinking that Taft would be his biggest obstacle.
On paper, Taft should have been a weaker candidate than MacArthur. He had been openly critical of the popular New Deal, where MacArthur’s platform supported it (even if the general could not bring himself to say as much). He was fiercely conservative, guaranteeing the support of the right but alienating the left, while MacArthur’s policies could appeal to both sides of politics. Taft could not amass anywhere near the personal popularity that MacArthur carried among the general public. If party nominations were decided by the February Gallup poll, MacArthur would have won by a convincing margin.
They weren’t. They would be decided by the Republican National Convention, which would be held in July. There, the decision would fall largely to the party bosses, which put MacArthur at a disadvantage. Taft was known as ‘Mr Republican’ for good reason: many of those party bosses were his close friends, as well as senators and representatives who he regularly worked with in Congress. MacArthur, by contrast, had spent fourteen years out of the country, and his relationship with those men had been limited to the occasional letter. Convincing them to vote for an outsider and against a friend would be an uphill battle.
The solution, MacArthur decided, would be to present himself as more electable than Taft, and Ayer, LaFollette and Wood readily agreed. In the four months since announcing his campaign, MacArthur had convinced around one-third of the Republican Party’s conservative faction to back him against Taft, as well as an uncertain proportion of the liberal faction. Many liberals preferred Stassen, although their numbers were in steady decline. A far larger group held out hope for another candidate: Dwight D. Eisenhower.
‘Ike’ had been the subject of extensive speculation in the lead-up to the 1948 election, and even after he announced that he was not going to be a candidate, efforts were made to get him on the ballot regardless. Nothing less was expected this time around, and throughout 1951 a ‘Draft Eisenhower’ movement re-emerged.
It was not hard to see why. Eisenhower could take a lot of the credit for the victory over Germany in World War II, capped off with a deft rebuttal of Patton’s outbursts to the contrary. He was incredibly popular among Americans on both sides of the political spectrum, possibly moreso than MacArthur. He was a full decade younger than MacArthur, and he tended to do a much better job relating to the current generation. Many pundits on both sides thought Eisenhower was the ‘perfect’ candidate.
Certainly Harry Truman thought so. In December 1951, the president wrote to the general asking (“almost pleading”, Eisenhower later said) for him to run as a Democrat. After Truman’s politically disastrous second term, Eisenhower might have been the only person able to resurrect the party’s chances. Ike declined, believing that if he was to run at all, it would be better to run with a clean slate, untarnished by an unpopular predecessor.
Republicans were no less keen to pull Eisenhower into their ranks. Thomas Dewey, a leader of the party’s liberal faction, had been publicly supporting an Eisenhower candidacy for more than a year now, and the prominent senator Henry Cabot Lodge had been privately encouraging the general to listen to his supporters. By January 1952, Eisenhower was starting to listen, and though he refused to announce himself as a candidate for the meantime, his opposition to running was replaced in the press with ambiguous statements suggesting that he would consider it.
His reason for running was simple: he did not feel the country would be well served with either Taft or MacArthur as its President. In Taft’s case, Eisenhower spoke with him directly, asking the senator to reconsider his isolationist policies and in particular his opposition towards America’s role in NATO, while Taft remained firm. Eisenhower did not even bother talking to MacArthur: he had served under him for seven years during the 1930s, coming to dislike him and knowing that MacArthur likely wouldn’t listen to a word he said anyway.
What few public statements Eisenhower did make at this time, combined with Tom Dewey’s outspoken support, suggested that he would campaign as a moderate liberal. When this was considered alongside Taft’s conservatism, MacArthur’s platform appeared to be somewhere between those of his two main rivals. Political commentators would spend the next several months debating whether this would prove to be a blessing or a curse: MacArthur’s policies could theoretically appeal to a wider range of voters, and in the event of a deadlocked convention, he would appear to be a more attractive compromise candidate than his opponents. On the other hand, he could not count on an ideologically-focused base to anywhere near the same extent as Taft or Eisenhower, and if either the liberals or conservatives took control of the party, they would back them instead of him.
What MacArthur could count on was a tremendous amount of momentum. Campaign posters saying ‘Vote for a Hero’ and ‘Bring Victory Home’ could be seen across the country. MacArthur’s key supporters were well acquainted with owners of desirable venues. Four months of promotion had brought in ever more donations, and a lot of people’s minds were already being made up: they had been impressed by MacArthur, so they would vote for MacArthur, and the competition would have to do something spectacular to convince them otherwise. Taft and Eisenhower, by comparison, were starting from scratch.
Four months of campaigning had also revealed where support for MacArthur was strong and where it was weak, making it possible to better direct the campaign’s time and money to where it would be most effective. MacArthur himself had already been making fewer public appearances than in the opening weeks of his campaign: a strenuous effort on the campaign trail might bring in more votes, but it would also take its toll on him physically, and at 72 he would be weakened by it far more than a younger man would (though LaFollette noted that both Taft and Eisenhower were both in their sixties). Now that he had appeared in most parts of the country at least once, it was important that future speeches be given in those areas which could deliver the most benefit to the campaign.
There were, of course, two ways to look at the question: the presidential primaries which would begin in the spring, and the electoral vote in November. Robert Wood, the architect of what became known as the ‘Northeastern strategy’, believed both could be addressed at the same time.
As the name implied, the Northeastern strategy proposed that MacArthur remain in, and campaign for, primarily those states in the Northeastern part of the country. 266 of the 531 electoral votes on offer would be needed in order to win the presidency, and with the present distribution of electors, it would be possible to win the presidency if every state east of the Great Plains and north of the Ohio and Potomac rivers voted for MacArthur, even if every other state went to the Democrats. This region, as it turned out, was also likely to be the area that would offer MacArthur his strongest support: the Steel Belt states had responded favourably to his labour policies, as had New York and Pennsylvania, and his rejection of isolationism appealed to the states on the East Coast, where freight destined for Europe would inevitably pass through.
Wood also believed that the Plains states could be relied upon as a traditional Republican base - aside from the Democratic blowouts of 1932 and 1936, they had reliably voted for the GOP candidate in every election since World War I, and no Democratic blowout would be possible this year. Furthermore, MacArthur’s Asia-focused policies were thought to make securing the West Coast likely as well, which would bring him comfortably above 300 electors. The West Coast aside, the Northeastern strategy would allow MacArthur to concentrate his campaigning within a relatively small geographic area, reducing demands for extensive travel while theoretically maximising his chances for winning where it would matter.
The South would not be a priority, and this would lead to accusations that MacArthur’s campaign was ‘sacrificing’ the region to the Democrats. Wood’s rationale for doing so was that the South had voted strongly Democratic in every election since the end of Reconstruction, and while it was not impossible for a Republican to win there - many had won a few states in past elections - it would be far more challenging to flip them compared with more competitive states. Furthermore, MacArthur had made his pro-civil rights views a known, if vague, part of his campaign platform, infuriating segregationists who still held considerable sway over the region. Though radio and TV stations would still promote MacArthur in the South, there were better uses for his campaign funds.
Taft and later Eisenhower would take the opposite view of the South, believing that the Democrats’ control of the region could be broken if the effort was made to campaign there. One of Taft’s allies and close friends, avowed segregationist Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, splashed hundreds of thousands of dollars on a press that was largely under his thumb to promote Taft, believing that if he could flip the state to the GOP, he would be rewarded with additional Senate influence under a Taft administration despite nominally being a Democrat.
MacArthur kept to his focus on the Northeast. Behind the Northeastern strategy was a plan to use the presidential primaries - non-binding votes in theory - as proof that he was the most popular candidate and thus the best choice for President. There were no Republican primaries in the South. Nearly all of them would be in the Northeast.
- BNC
