Robert taft running mate?

bguy

Donor
During the first ballot at the 1952 Republican convention, Taft sent a message to California Senator William Knowland requesting a meeting after the first ballot was over to see if they could "work something out", so that certainly sounds like Taft was going to offer the vice presidency to Knowland. Taft's friends also said that Taft was going to go with either Knowland or Everett Dirksen and of those two Knowland does make more sense. He's a young, World War 2 veteran from an important swing state that the Republicans lost in 1948. He supported NATO (which will help reassure Republican internationalists about a Taft candidacy.) He's a fiscal conservative but is good friends with one of the leading Republican liberals, Earl Warren, (even serving as Warren's campaign manager at the convention that year.) And Knowland provides geographical balance to the ticket (which Dirksen does not).
 
In OTL, Taft recommended Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois to serve as Eisenhower's vice presidential nominee, however, Eisenhower rejected his recommendation. Like Eisenhower, it would probably be in Taft's best interest to select a vice president outside of the Midwest. Here are some potential candidates that hailed from the west (which the Republican Party looked to swing away from the Democrats):
  • Senator William F. Knowland of California
  • Governor Daniel Thornton of Colorado
  • Governor Arthur B. Langlie of Washington
 
Knowland was young (44), a veteran, from an important state which provided geographical balance, etc. Moreover, while ideologically compatible with Taft, he was a Warren supporter, so might not be as offensive to the party's internationalist wing as some other possibilities. (The internationalists would also note that despite Knowland's reputation as an "Asia Firster," flowing from his staunch advocacy of Chiang Kai-shek, Knowland had voted for the Marshall Plan and--unlike Taft--for the North Atlantic Treaty.) In fact, a biography of Knowland is entitled One Step From the White House: The Rise and Fall of Senator William F. Knowland. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2567 The point being of course that if Knowland had deserted Warren for Taft, and Taft had won the nomination and general election with Knowland as his running mate, and Taft had died on schedule from cancer, Knowland would become president in 1953.
 
Being from Ohio, Taft will be looking for a running mate to assist his election.

Probably Harold Stassen
Stassen is not the best running mate in any election other than the 1940 election.

During the first ballot at the 1952 Republican convention, Taft sent a message to California Senator William Knowland requesting a meeting after the first ballot was over to see if they could "work something out", so that certainly sounds like Taft was going to offer the vice presidency to Knowland. Taft's friends also said that Taft was going to go with either Knowland or Everett Dirksen and of those two Knowland does make more sense. He's a young, World War 2 veteran from an important swing state that the Republicans lost in 1948. He supported NATO (which will help reassure Republican internationalists about a Taft candidacy.) He's a fiscal conservative but is good friends with one of the leading Republican liberals, Earl Warren, (even serving as Warren's campaign manager at the convention that year.) And Knowland provides geographical balance to the ticket (which Dirksen does not).
Governor Earl Warren of California would be a good call, similar to Richard Nixon.

Maybe you could also look into having the female vote, Margaret Chase Smith.

Candidates from the south and lower house:
- Representative Dewey Jackson Short of Missouri
- Representative Thruston B. Morton of Kentucky
- Representative Brazilla Carroll Reece of Tennessee
- Representative Dayton E. Phillips of Tennessee
- RepresentativeJohn Jennings, Jr. of Tennessee
 
Being from Ohio, Taft will be looking for a running mate to assist his election.


Stassen is not the best running mate in any election other than the 1940 election.


Governor Earl Warren of California would be a good call, similar to Richard Nixon.

(1) Stassen wasn't constitutionally eligible in 1940 (only 33 years old).

(2) The fact that Dewey-Warren couldn't carry California in 1948--despite Henry Wallace getting almost 5 percent of the state's vote--threw doubt on the usefulness of Warren in enabling a GOP ticket to carry California.

Besides, Warren was too liberal for most Republicans. To Truman, Warren was a good man who was in the wrong party for accidental reasons (Warren himself acknowledged that "I was a Republican simply because California [had been] an overwhelmingly Republican state"). Truman said to a California crowd in June 1948, "Your governor pursues forward-looking, liberal policies. He's a man of sense and a man of ability. The facts of the case are he is a real Democrat and doesn't know it." https://books.google.com/books?id=2oS_DhU7zfkC&pg=PA183 This was hardly the sort of sentiment to endear Warren to most Republicans. As I noted, Knowland would be satisfactory to internationalists without being nearly as incompatible with Taft ideologically as Warren was.
 
Probably Harold Stassen

Not only was Stassen too much of an internationalist for Taft, but the latter probably still had a grudge against Stassen for challenging him in the Ohio primary in 1948. Besides, in 1948 Stassen had not been a very adroit campaigner for Dewey:

"...Dewey deputized Stassen to carry the inflation fight to Truman. But while Truman personalized the issue for consumers, Stassen entangled himself in a heavy-handed and largely pointless broadside on government bureaucracy, attacking Washington for purchasing twenty-five million pounds of lard during July 1947. 'This purchase,' Stassen contended...'compared with fifty million pounds of lard for all the preceding year, has caused lard and all other fats, including oils, to skyrocket.

"A foray to the Midwest to discuss farm prices proved even less salutary. At Detroit's Masonic Temple on Tuesday, September 7, Stassen rebutted Truman's Labor Day address--and merely alienated labor. Some suspected Dewey of sabotaging his onetime rival. 'Stassen is the first casualty of the campaign...In two times at bat, Stassen appeared to have lost...his greatest source of political strength before--agriculture and labor,' pronounced columnist Tris Coffin--and no one argued with him."
David Pietrusza, *1948: Harry Truman's Improbable Victory and the Year that Transformed America,* p. 331.

See also Robert G. Donovan, *Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945-1948*, p. 420 http://books.google.com/books?id=d0uu-j32elUC&pg=PA420 on how a Minnesota Republican congressman, August H. Andresen, wrote to Dewey that Stassen had done the GOP ticket much harm among farmers (by attacking the administration for trying to keep food prices up by making unnecessary grain purchases).

Stassen was "wrong" geographically--a ticket with two Midwesterners--but that (as well as his ideological differences with Taft and his decision to contest the 1948 Ohio primary) might have been forgiven if there was any actual evidence Stassen would help the ticket in the Midwest. As 1948 shows, however, there was very little such evidence.
 
Since this is the second thread in the last month or so to make the 1952 election cycle rockin' good fun by the displacement of Eisenhower, how do the Democrats react? The Republican National Convention concluded roughly ten days before the Democrats met. Do we think there are significant knock-on effects? Does Harriman get a boost or is he still seen as too elite and too liberal to go taking risks with the Solid South base? And on that front, does the nominee decide to go with someone like Kefauver because Tennessee was already one of the first swing states in the region (and to put a little youth on the ticket opposite Knowland) or like Fulbright who was already building foreign-policy experience if it is indeed Stevenson rather than the well-traveled Harriman? Could someone launch an effort to draft George Marshall -- he was a Georgian, after all (not as the presidential candidate but as VP, a sort of counter-Ike.) And what is Tricky Dick up to as his vice presidential star fades? Does he decide then and there that he's going to become the reasonable face of HUAC and displace McCarthy, doing his career-long head-fake towards moderation while pursuing his own relentless agenda? Does he decide, inbetween senatorial cycles, to throw his hat in and run for Governor of California in '58 to build a power base for the 1960 convention if Taft wins? And if Taft doesn't win does he move even faster on something like a HUAC coup to keep himself on the front pages when it comes time to defeat the Democrat in '56? Questions, questions...

ETA: Well frak, all these years of assuming and I went to check what town Marshall was born in and he's Pennsylvanian. But he's from Pennsyltucky not the cities and it's very much a battleground state in a year where Taft is the nominee, and the military still carries enormous respect in the South. On the other hand this could be an opportunity for Lyndon Johnson to live OTL's Dick Nixon experience: freshman senator, new blood, from a state the Dems' can't afford to lose (and that went towards Eisenhower because his pledges on offshore Gulf oil drilling), and while he's not really that much of a war hero he did have that ethically questionable (ie whether there were really any grounds for it) Silver Star he liked waving around. Also he's still Sam Rayburn's fair-haired boy, which will help soothe the Congressional grandees like Russell and so on. Both of them (Marshall and Johnson) would seem to have an edge dealing with a Taft/Knowland ticket. Poor John Sparkman probably misses his chance though. That's a shame: when he was young, Sparkman was a leading light among the hill-country North Alabama liberals who briefly got control of the state party under Big Jim Folsom, the first Southern governor to promulgate an anti-lynching law. But then they lost out to the flatland segregationists, and from the Sixties on Sparkman spent his career tacking back from his youthful progressive ideals with one eye on a primary challenge from the Wallace machine if he didn't toe the line. One of the sadder stories in Southern politics. But I'll stick by the idea that either Stevenson/Marshall or Stevenson/Johnson makes life more interesting for Taft/Knowland.
 
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OK, here's a posit. A Taft/Knowland ticket emerges on the Republican side, and the Democrats reply, after considerable deliberations at the vice-presidential level (once Stevenson's made peace with the grandees and gotten his leg up on Harriman) Stevenson picks LBJ as a way to combine youth, New Deal commitments, and border-state Southernness on the ticket. I've flipped the four states that were closest in OTL's 1952 election (Rhode Island, Missouri, Tennessee, and Delaware, all decided by 1-2% even with Ike on the ticket), granted Adlai his home state on the basis of momentum and more adroit campaigning against someone who's not a bipartisan national treasure, and two other states -- Pennsylvania and Massachusetts -- that were within 5% and where a combination of the very most liberal Republicans (faced with a ticket of an America First isolationist and a right-wing anticommunist versus Adlai Stevenson) and pro-New Deal undecideds (wooed by Ike's "Third Way" IOTL) could be swung to the Democratic side. It looks like this (with electoral votes included for each state):

genusmap.php


That still leaves Taft up 312-219, out of a pre-Hawaii/Alaska/DC total of 531 electoral votes (so majority is 266.) The key is New York, and to what degree Taft has made enough enemies there post-convention because those 45 electoral votes put a Stevenson/Johnson ticket just one shy of a majority, with a wide variety of other states to try and pick off (strong candidates for emphasis would be Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Maryland, possibly Michigan or Florida.) But this map plus moving heaven and earth to swing New York to the Democratic column puts the GOP's best shot at retaking the White House (given the extra four years of Truman's favorables going downhill and twenty years of party fatigue) on a knife edge. What it does, though, is move both major parties closer to civil war -- outside NY and PA Stevenson would really owe his election to reestablishing a Southern base, while having run the Northeastern Establishment/Western progressive side in '48 and the Midwest Old Right/West Coast New Right side in '52 after a pair of fractious conventions the GOP might manage to lose both, and enter a toxic blame cycle running in both directions.
 

bguy

Donor
Since this is the second thread in the last month or so to make the 1952 election cycle rockin' good fun by the displacement of Eisenhower, how do the Democrats react? The Republican National Convention concluded roughly ten days before the Democrats met. Do we think there are significant knock-on effects? Does Harriman get a boost or is he still seen as too elite and too liberal to go taking risks with the Solid South base? And on that front, does the nominee decide to go with someone like Kefauver because Tennessee was already one of the first swing states in the region (and to put a little youth on the ticket opposite Knowland) or like Fulbright who was already building foreign-policy experience if it is indeed Stevenson rather than the well-traveled Harriman?

Taft has a lot of potential voter appeal in the south, so I can't see the Democrats going with Harriman, and I think they will need a southerner as veep. Your idea about LBJ as the Democrat veep candidate is certainly interesting but was LBJ prominent enough in 1952 to get offered the vice presidency? (Also Sparkman at least offered northern liberals something in that he was a leading advocate for public housing, so they could probably swallow him on the ticket a lot easier than they could LBJ who in 1952 would probably be viewed as just one of Richard Russell's stooges.) OTOH if the Democrats don't put LBJ or another Texan on the ticket then Taft probably carries Texas given his long standing support for letting Texas control its tideland oil.

Could someone launch an effort to draft George Marshall -- he was a Georgian, after all (not as the presidential candidate but as VP, a sort of counter-Ike.) And what is Tricky Dick up to as his vice presidential star fades? Does he decide then and there that he's going to become the reasonable face of HUAC and displace McCarthy, doing his career-long head-fake towards moderation while pursuing his own relentless agenda? Does he decide, inbetween senatorial cycles, to throw his hat in and run for Governor of California in '58 to build a power base for the 1960 convention if Taft wins? And if Taft doesn't win does he move even faster on something like a HUAC coup to keep himself on the front pages when it comes time to defeat the Democrat in '56? Questions, questions...

I don't think Marshall had any political ambitions. (IIRC he didn't even think it was appropriate for military officers to vote.)

As for Nixon I can't see him trying for the Governorship in 1958. If he's looking at a presidential run in 1960, he is going to need a unified California Republican Party behind him, so the last thing he would want is to make a bunch of enemies in the state party by trying to displace the incumbent Republican governor. (Probably still Goodwin Knight, since I assume that even if Taft doesn't put Earl Warren on the Supreme Court, that President Knowland will do so.) Maybe Senator Nixon ends up leading the Republican push for a civil rights bill if Knowland wins a second term.

As for Nixon's prospects for 1960, I guess that will depend on who President Knowland picks for his veep in the 1956 election? Any ideas on that score? I would think Knowland would need an eastern liberal for geographical and ideological balance. Maybe Christian Herter?
 
In OTL, Taft recommended Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois to serve as Eisenhower's vice presidential nominee, however, Eisenhower rejected his recommendation. Like Eisenhower, it would probably be in Taft's best interest to select a vice president outside of the Midwest. Here are some potential candidates that hailed from the west (which the Republican Party looked to swing away from the Democrats):
  • Senator William F. Knowland of California
  • Governor Daniel Thornton of Colorado
  • Governor Arthur B. Langlie of Washington
I assume Eisenhower said no to Dirksen due to his speech which is a shame. Dirksen was a good man.
 
As for Nixon's prospects for 1960, I guess that will depend on who President Knowland picks for his veep in the 1956 election? Any ideas on that score? I would think Knowland would need an eastern liberal for geographical and ideological balance. Maybe Christian Herter?

I would think either Herter or one of the Lodge brothers (Henry Cabot of course, or John who was I think the younger of them and governor of Connecticut in the early Fifties), or if he went the route of someone like Nixon or my suggestion of LBJ to get a fresh face on the ticket, Prescott Bush who was still a freshman senator in '56 (and at that point would satisfy the party liberals because of Bush's opposition to Joe McCarthy.) The bigger question though may be Knowland himself. Eisenhower had been one of the master officers of the greatest (in the sense of measurement) war in the history of mankind, and that colored his approach to things like Operation Vulture (the planned bombing campaign in support of Dien Bien Phu that was to include battlefield nukes), the Suez Crisis, how much to be seen publicly backing the Hungarian revolt, whether to "unleash Chiang [Kai-Shek]" with regard to China and things like the Quemoy/Matsu crisis, etc. Knowland on the other hand was a fire-eating anticommunist without the experience of ordering a million men into armed struggle knowing tens of thousands of them would die. We might have a rather more "exciting" 1950s particularly with him busy trying to prove he was a worthy successor to the first Republican to claim the White House since Hoover. "Living up to the job" was enough to push Johnson, a man of titanic ego and real power in Washington even before he was Kennedy's VP and successor, into Vietnam full force even as he agonized about whether it was a bad idea. How would Knowland do faced with the crises of the Fifties?
 

bguy

Donor
I would think either Herter or one of the Lodge brothers (Henry Cabot of course, or John who was I think the younger of them and governor of Connecticut in the early Fifties), or if he went the route of someone like Nixon or my suggestion of LBJ to get a fresh face on the ticket, Prescott Bush who was still a freshman senator in '56 (and at that point would satisfy the party liberals because of Bush's opposition to Joe McCarthy.)

I would imagine Henry Cabot Lodge at least would be a spent force by 1956. He presumably still lost his 1952 senate race, and I wouldn't expect President Taft to appoint him to the UN Ambassadorship, so he's been in the wilderness a long time by 1956.

Prescott Bush could be a possibility assuming he still wins his 1952 senate race ITTL. (His OTL 1952 win was pretty narrow, and Taft's coattails are likely to be a lot shorter than Eisenhower's were.)

The bigger question though may be Knowland himself. Eisenhower had been one of the master officers of the greatest (in the sense of measurement) war in the history of mankind, and that colored his approach to things like Operation Vulture (the planned bombing campaign in support of Dien Bien Phu that was to include battlefield nukes), the Suez Crisis, how much to be seen publicly backing the Hungarian revolt, whether to "unleash Chiang [Kai-Shek]" with regard to China and things like the Quemoy/Matsu crisis, etc. Knowland on the other hand was a fire-eating anticommunist without the experience of ordering a million men into armed struggle knowing tens of thousands of them would die. We might have a rather more "exciting" 1950s particularly with him busy trying to prove he was a worthy successor to the first Republican to claim the White House since Hoover. "Living up to the job" was enough to push Johnson, a man of titanic ego and real power in Washington even before he was Kennedy's VP and successor, into Vietnam full force even as he agonized about whether it was a bad idea. How would Knowland do faced with the crises of the Fifties?

On Vietnam Knowland's OTL position was that he would support U.S. intervention but only if other countries were willing to go in with the U.S. (And even then he seemed to just want the U.S. to provide air and naval support while America's Asian allies would provide any ground forces that were needed.) I kind of doubt that President Knowland will be able to persuade South Korea, Nationalist China, Thailand, or the Philippines to commit ground troops to Vietnam when the U.S. itself isn't willing to, so most likely no intervention happens.

On the Suez Crisis, Knowland in OTL was furious about the British and French intervention and supported condemning their actions at the UN, so President Knowland will presumably likewise condemn the British-French intervention and work to undermine it much like Ike did IOTL. That said Knowland was also strongly opposed to the UN imposing any sanctions on Israel for occupying the Sinai Peninsula unless those sanctions were matched with equivalent sanctions on the Soviets for their intervention in Hungary. Since that approach effectively kills any chance of UN sanctions against Israel, and since it was the threat of those sanctions that convinced the Israelis to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula, the Israelis most likely don't pull out of Sinai ITTL (which will certainly reduce U.S. influence with the Arab states.)

Quemoy/Matsu is probably the most dangerous potential flashpoint for President Knowland. IOTL during the crisis the Nationalist Chinese apparently wanted to bomb some airfields the Communist Chinese were building up from which Communist planes could have achieved air superiority over Quemoy and Matsu, but Eisenhower refused to sign off on the attack. President Knowland might very well give the green light for that bombing mission. Still, I don't think Knowland is likely to have U.S. forces directly attack the Chinese mainland unless it looks like the Communist Chinese are actually preparing to invade Quemoy and Matsu.
 
@bguy,

Well that's both detailed (about Knowland's foreign policy) and moderately reassuring, also not entirely surprising that we might have been on an earlier trajectory with regard to backing Israel's plays in the region (wonder if any of Knowland's advisers would have been bright enough sparks to consider trying to prise Nasser -- or his successor, if the consequences of the war were too much for him politically -- away from the Soviets by promising to help Egypt negotiate the recovery of Sinai?) Taiwan does sound like the likeliest source of trouble, though I would still worry whether his anticommunism would overcome standoffishness towards the French wrt Op Vulture, since once you stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb(s) it fits his post-Korea model (sort of an early version of the eventual Nixon Doctrine) of supporting someone else doing the heavy lifting. But a Knowland who's enough of an approximation of Ike to survive the decade is a good thing :) Officially putting my money now on either Herter or Bush as his nominee (that model I ginned up still has Connecticut going Republican because I think at this point in time that's the likeliest outcome, given that New York is in the very best scenario just a swing state for the Dems and just as likely holding their nose and voting for Taft, so Bush might scrape together enough straight-ticket voters to eke through.) Interesting to think there is a very outside chance, if New York politics are not butterflied too deeply by a Knowland presidency, that an ambitious Nixon in 1960 might seek out the support of a fresh young face in his first term as New York's governor, pursuing a "Northern Strategy" instead of the more familiar one -- unless he tried to set himself up as some kind of "true successor" to Taft, but Nixon's far too much of an internationalist for that ever to sell.
 
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