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He came to our lunch of eight people two days after the March 18 Minnesota primary of 1952; and he was an Eisenhower none of us had ever known: pink-cheeked as always, but bubbling, expansive, joyful. The Minnesota primary, just over, had been contested by both Taft and Stassen, Minnesota's favorite son. And Eisenhower, not listed on the ballot, on a write-in vote, had come in second to Stassen with 37.2% of the total to Stassen's 44.4% on the regular ballot! (Ike's one-time chief, Douglas MacArthur, it should be noted, won only 1/2 of 1% of the vote that day.) Following Eisenhower's New Hampshire victory a week earlier, it was a phenomenal showing, an earthquake. There could no longer be any dodging the reality that Ike was the leading Republican candidate for President of the U.S.
His good mood that day was too irrepressible to quench. He had Politicians' Euphoria, a condition I later came to recognize on election-night victories—that moment of vulnerability when candidates are at their loosest and most expansive. Ike held a drink in his hand, and I found myself in a corner encouraging his indiscretion. Baron Krupp had just been freed from Allied imprisonment; and two of us launched him on that subject. There was nothing we could do about Krupp now in 1952, said Ike; we had to let Krupp go free; but he didn't like it. If he had to do it over again, he would do it differently. Shoot all the war criminals you're going to shoot right away, then let the rest go free, said Ike. Like the Malmedy massacre of American GIs by Nazi storm troopers. He felt we should have caught, convicted and shot the SS killers immediately after victory; all shooting after a war should be done within six months. He did not like the Nuremberg trials either. But the trials had been Roosevelt's idea. As he talked about Roosevelt, his own admiration and exasperation came through. He picked out Roosevelt's vast geographical knowledge as the President's most extraordinary quality, and then, with irritation, spoke of the difficulty of pinning Roosevelt down to specifics. the stubbornness of Roosevelt, his own inability to get clear instruction from him. We finally sat down to lunch and Grover said flatly that since we were forbidden to talk politics at Ike's military headquarters, we were here to talk politics in his, Grover's, home. So—how about it?
At which Eisenhower took over, as if on cue.
What he wanted most, he said, was to keep the U.S. Army from being sucked into politics. It's bad for Americans to think of military figures in a political way; and now here he was, a general and a political figure. He made a rather impassioned speech about the vital separation of military from civilian in American life. He'd made the mistake, on Jan. 7, of stating he would never run for the presidency unless there was a "clear-cut call to political duty" from the American people, and he shouldn't have used that phrase. What was a clear call? he asked rhetorically. The New Hampshire primary? The Minnesota write-in?
He'd never sought the nomination, not once. Even in 1948, he went on, when the Democratic "big wigs" told him he could have their