Authors: Jim Newton
Party rules at the time called for all delegates to be provisionally seated while rules matters were debated. The Fair Play Amendment, however, forbade contested delegates to vote on their own seating. Taft supporters argued it was unfair to change long-standing rules. Brownell countered that it was unfair to allow contested delegates to seat themselves. Taft controlled the relevant rules committee but hurt himself by refusing public and press access to the committee’s hearings in the days leading up to the convention. When Brownell and Ike’s supporters theatrically showed up outside the door, the newsman John Chancellor joined the group. He knocked on the door and was denied entrance, too. On July 2, with the convention’s opening less than a week away, the committee voted to recommend the seating of Taft’s Georgia delegates, a victory for Taft, of course, but one that reinforced the Eisenhower campaign’s claims of “stolen” delegates and party secrecy. In Fraser, Colorado, where Eisenhower spent the day fishing (catching ten trout, the legal limit), he announced: “I’m going to roar out across the country for a clean, decent operation. The American people deserve it.” In politics, as in war, he was a quick study.
That was where matters stood on the eve of the Republican convention. And with that technical debate the first order of business, the delegates began to assemble. They streamed to Chicago by car and train—a few lucky ones made the trip by plane—arriving to brass bands and banners. They swarmed bars and restaurants and filled the lobbies of the city’s grand hotels, reuniting with old friends and trading rumors and strategies with journalists and colleagues. They presented their credentials at the counters of the Congress, the Blackstone, and the Conrad Hilton. At the Hilton, the Eisenhower forces had already pulled a fast one. Brownell realized at the last minute that the Eisenhower campaign had no place for its headquarters. Luckily, Brownell’s clients included the American Hotel Association. He rang up two associates from the Hilton chain, and they found space. Although Ike and Mamie stayed at the Blackstone, their headquarters were two floors above Taft’s—at the Hilton.
As the delegates arrived, they got the first whiff of the week—Chicago’s convention hall was a little too close to its stockyards for many tastes. But to win the White House, the Republican Party would need the cattle states, which had defected to Truman in 1948. The rest of the map was tantalizing but murky. Could southern states committed to the Democratic Party since Lincoln be drawn across the aisle? Could California, which slipped away to the Democrats in 1948 despite Governor Earl Warren’s place at the bottom of that ticket, be coaxed back into its traditional alignment? Delegates buzzed over those questions late into the night, seduced by the enormity of their opportunity. For decades, Republicans had gathered, often in Chicago, to pick a nominee. This year, they knew they had the chance to pick a president.
There were warnings and conflicting signals. In the week leading up to the convention, the
New York Times
editorial page featured a provocative series. The headline said it all: “Mr. Taft Can’t Win,” in parts 1, 2, and 3, no less. “We conclude this series,” the paper’s editorial board wrote on July 3, “with the argument that the Taft record and campaign are of such a character that the Senator is not likely to pick up the independent or Democratic votes which the Republicans must have to succeed. General Eisenhower, on the other hand, is in a position to attract precisely that additional support that can spell the difference between Republican victory and one more bitter, frustrating and ruinous Republican defeat.”
In raw terms, however, Taft held the advantage. He came to Chicago with a lead in delegates: the Associated Press calculated that Taft had 530 of the 604 needed to win; Eisenhower had 427; Warren 76; Harold Stassen 25; and a few other candidates divided up the balance. Taft contested the AP’s calculations; his campaign publicly insisted it had 600 delegates, on the verge of locking matters up.
To the attentive ear, however, there was a note of desperation in the Taft camp. On July 5, reeling from the charges that his campaign was stealing delegates, Taft complained of “libel” and “vituperation,” shrill notes that hardly conveyed confidence. Even his rejection of the AP delegate count seemed fishy; no matter how often he insisted that the matter was all but won, the press refused to accept his analysis and continued to cover the race as a hot contest.
At 11:30 a.m. on Monday, July 7, the Republican national chairman, Guy Gabrielson, banged the convention to order and turned immediately to the issue of delegate seating. Brownell had laid the groundwork for this debate well, framing it as one of fairness and openness against secretive party bosses. When Taft forces sought to allow delegates to be provisionally seated and cast ballots for themselves, Langlie countered with the Fair Play Amendment, after which Taft allies parried with an amendment to Langlie’s proposal. On the floor, there was bedlam as delegates argued over the intricacies of an issue that all understood could decide the nomination. Finally, the questions were put to votes, and on the key question Eisenhower won by 658 to 548. Taft’s floor managers suddenly understood Eisenhower’s strength and did not protest when the Fair Play Amendment itself was put before the convention. It was accepted on a voice vote. Although the full convention had yet to consider the seating of each of the contested delegations, the rules, which had once favored Taft, now gave the edge to Eisenhower.
Ike stayed away from the convention floor but monitored the roll call from his hotel suite, where he relaxed in a robe and slippers. He won a bet on the final vote and collected $1 from an aide. Mamie shrugged off a painful tooth infection for long enough to speak briefly with reporters. She too cheered the results, which she described as “encouraging,” and promised she would campaign with her husband if he were nominated: “I go everyplace I can with him. I’ve been following him for 36 years.”
Fights over procedure gave way to a less consequential but more histrionic event, Douglas MacArthur’s keynote address. It had been arranged by Taft and was intended to stir conservatives who violently opposed his firing by Truman the year before. But MacArthur—he who spoke of himself in the third person—often misunderstood his effect on those around him, allowing his stentorian voice and self-regard to overwhelm his better sense. Thundering from the podium, he declaimed that the Truman administration had “brought us to fiscal instability, political insecurity and military weakness.” The Democratic Party, MacArthur charged, had “become captive to the schemers and planners who have infiltrated its ranks of leadership to set the national course unerringly toward the socialistic regimentation of a totalitarian state.” It was, one perceptive
New York Times
analyst noted, “a stirring oration for a lost cause.” MacArthur’s time was up.
That pattern—delegate fights on the floor that formed the convention’s real business while odes to a bygone Republican philosophy emanated from the podium—continued the next day. Herbert Hoover recalled the party’s history from the dais as Herbert Brownell molded its future on the floor. Hoover complained of Democratic misrule and urged the rapid buildup of the U.S. Air Force. Meanwhile, Brownell sold Eisenhower’s case to delegates, concentrating on those pledged to other candidates on the first ballot but who would be up for grabs if there was a second. Ike did his part, meeting with two hundred delegates that day in his fifth-floor suite at the Blackstone; some wore their Taft buttons, but they came to meet the general anyway.
The following morning, the seating of the contested delegations finally came before the full convention. The results quickly established Ike as the front-runner. The Georgia slate that favored Eisenhower by fourteen to three was seated over the objections of Taft’s managers; having lost that key test, they folded on Texas, where a slate favoring Ike by thirty-three to five was approved. For the first time, Eisenhower moved ahead of Taft in the AP poll. The general told Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, “I’m going to win.” Supporters began speculating on the choice of a vice president. In Washington, Truman, who believed Taft the easier candidate for Democrats to beat in November, announced that he was “worried” about the turn of events in Chicago. “It looks like my candidate is going to get beat,” he joked.
The seating issue ended all hopes for Taft. Illinois placed his name in nomination, California nominated Warren, Maryland did the honors for Eisenhower, Minnesota tapped Stassen, and then Oklahoma nominated MacArthur. At the end of the first ballot, Ike led with 595 votes, just 9 short of victory. Stassen then declared that Minnesota would switch to Eisenhower, and the race was over. The final tally was 845 for Eisenhower, 280 for Taft.
In the ensuing bedlam, Ike left his hotel to cross the street and see Taft personally, a thoughtful gesture intended to emphasize Republican unity. As he elbowed his way through the lobby of the Hilton, Eisenhower was surrounded by Taft supporters, many of them fighting tears. He mumbled sympathies and proceeded upstairs, where he found the defeated candidate staggered by the vote but willing to pose together for the press. It wasn’t exactly a picture of a unified Republican Party, but it would do.
Ike wasted no time moving forward: he hired Tom Stephens to serve as his appointments secretary and James Hagerty to serve as press secretary. Both would remain at his side for the next eight years.
The convention’s other piece of business was the selection, nomination, and confirmation of a vice president. Although the selection would prove immensely important, Eisenhower essentially turned it over to his top political aides. “He expressed surprise,” Brownell later wrote, “that for all practical purposes he could select his running mate by letting the delegates know his personal choice.” Learning this, Eisenhower ruled out several men in whom he had great confidence—his campaign manager, Henry Cabot Lodge, was running for the Senate; Brownell himself had no interest in the post, nor did Tom Dewey, who would have been a difficult sell to the convention in any case—but then wrote down the names of others who would be acceptable to him. They were Congressmen Charles Halleck and Walter Judd; Colorado’s governor, Dan Thornton; Washington’s governor, Arthur Langlie; and California senator Richard Nixon.
In 1952, Nixon was a fresh, up-and-coming senator, seasoned in the tricky politics of mid-century California. A native of Yorba Linda, a Navy veteran, and a lawyer, Nixon was a perennial outsider, a scrapper who worked hard for his achievements and resented those to whom they came more easily. He had established his national reputation in the prosecution of Alger Hiss, a debut that would stamp him to some as a brave and principled anti-Communist and to others as a snarling pugilist. He was young—Ike thought him forty-two, only to discover later that Nixon was just thirty-nine—with lovely daughters and a striking wife, whom he had courted in Nixon’s dogged fashion, first by driving her on dates with rivals, eventually wearing down her resistance and winning her hand. And though he traveled with a chip forever on his shoulder, he could be charming in his fashion and politically savvy in the extreme.
Through the weeks leading up to the convention, he had done his best to assist Eisenhower while, as a delegate from California, formally pledged to support Warren. Nixon circulated a “poll” to constituents seeking their advice on what to do if and when Warren should fall short of his presidential ambitions. He worked the California delegation to woo its members to Eisenhower even as the Warren train sped to the convention. When the delegation arrived, the buses sent to pick them up were draped with “Eisenhower for President” banners. Those machinations would seal Warren’s lifelong enmity, and Warren and Nixon would circle each other for the rest of their careers.
Ike knew of Warren’s suspicions about Nixon. On July 8, the second day of the convention, Warren sent an emissary to the general’s hotel room and asked for an audience. Admitted, the man reported that, according to Warren, “we have a traitor in our delegation. It’s Nixon … He has not paid attention to his oath and immediately upon being elected, started working for Eisenhower and has been doing so ever since. I have word he is actively in touch with the Eisenhower people.” Warren asked Eisenhower to rein Nixon in and to halt his interference in California’s politics. Ike assured Warren’s messenger that he was not behind any machinations, an assurance dutifully reported to an unconvinced Warren.
Nixon himself stewed over what to do if offered the vice presidency. Late into the night, he and his wife, Pat, sat up in their hotel room, debating whether he should accept. To do so, both realized, would derail his immediate plans for the Senate but establish him as a national figure. At 4:00 a.m., they phoned Murray Chotiner, Nixon’s Machiavellian campaign manager, and summoned him to their hotel room. Chotiner urged him to accept. “There comes a time,” he said, “when you have to go up or out.” When Chotiner left an hour later, Richard and Pat Nixon were still debating.
Neither Nixon’s ambivalence nor Warren’s discomfort affected Eisenhower’s appraisal of the young senator. He was impressed by Nixon’s handling of the Hiss case and untroubled by Warren’s allegations. Moreover, Nixon nicely balanced the Eisenhower ticket. His youth was a welcome contrast to Ike’s age (at sixty-two, Eisenhower stood to become the oldest man ever elected to the presidency), and his California base represented an important addition to Ike’s Midwest and eastern sources of support. So Eisenhower told Brownell that should top Republicans agree on Nixon, he would be happy to have him on the ticket.
Meeting in Brownell’s office, the group considered first Taft and then William Knowland, the senior senator from California. They were “knocked down.” Then Dewey, who saw early promise in Nixon, formally suggested the young senator. Paul Hoffman, the chief organizer of independents and Democrats for Ike, agreed: “Nixon fills all the requirements.” With that, the group fell in line. Brownell reported the recommendation to a pleased Ike. The convention ratified the choice, and the Republican ticket for 1952 was formed.