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He grasped his Eisenhower jacket by the lapels and tugged it. "I can't, I won't drag this uniform through politics. It's been all my life," he said. We must help him; what should he do?
We all knew what he was going to do; but now we had been conscripted as advisers to tell him how to do it. He had made us a council of his friends. Few sophisticated reporters today would let themselves be so trapped in confidence and thus barred from breaking a great story; but Eisenhower had more candidate skill than any amateur on first run I have ever known.
It was a jovial lunch as we fell to at table. Grover, a bachelor, rarely gave his gifted cook an opportunity to prepare the hearty Burgundian meals in which she specialized, so now for the great General Eisenhower she had outdone herself. The wine went round and round, the pastries of ham-curls stuffed with goose liver piled up.
My notes reflect all the contradictions of impression of anyone who met Eisenhower only occasionally: the mixture of simplicity and astuteness, the beguilement he could cast over any conversation he wanted; the boy-scout sincerity; the shrewdness of manipulation; his understanding of the twisting corridors of government.
If he was going to run, he said—and by now it was so obvious he would that we were all practically marching into the White House with him—he must resign soon. But he couldn't lay down the NATO command overnight. He had to give Bob Lovett (Secretary of Defense) at least six weeks to find another man for the command. And he wanted to be home by May 15. if he was going to run his own campaign. But Truman had always been "decent and honest" with him. He could not challenge President Truman except openly. We found ourselves all agreeing with Ike's final thought: to write his resignation letter to Truman in a sealed envelope, but to send the envelope to Lovett for delivery, with Lovett being told what was in the envelope. And then leave it to both of them to decide how to announce that General of the Armies Dwight D. Eisenhower was leaving the U.S. Army to campaign for the presidency.
What I find most authentic today in the notes I typed after that lunch was the spontaneous sound of the Republican voice 25 years ago. Ike could have had the 1952 nomination, I now know, on the ticket of either party. But I find my notes picking up his theme—a theme which then sounded fresh to me, but now, on the larynxes of Republican orators, sounds as old-fashioned as a lament from the Prophets. Ike was closing the lunch with his credo.
"The people have the right to know what I stand for," Ike began. His ideas were clear: this business of centralism in government. There was too much of the bureaucracy, too much looking to Washington. He wanted to get the federal government organized so it did not wipe out the states and the municipalities and the communities. He didn't want to have people looking to Washington for everything. The problem was that the federal government was "taking so much money from everyone it left no resources for local government to run its educational apparatus. That was the problem ..."
This was