To a majority of U.S. newspaper editors, Eisenhower's victory came as no surprise; in an A.P. poll before the election, U.S. editors predicted that Ike would win by a comfortable margin. It did come as a surprise to many of the campaign correspondents and the pundits, whose own personal attraction to Adlai Stevenson seemed to have fooled them into believing the voters thought that way too. Day after election, reporters and editors settled down to do a competent job of reporting and interpreting the results.
Not so the European press, to whose faithful readers the vote was a tremendous...