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At Springfield, Mass, last week, Dwight Eisenhower told one of the few jokes of his campaign. It was the story about the colonel who asked for a promotion on the grounds of long experience in the service. The commanding officer refused and said: "Do you see that mule over there? He has been in that battery for 25 years, and he is still a mule." Ike used the story to illustrate the difference between real experience and mere endurance in office.
Eisenhower himself has picked up more real political experience than many politicians (of the mule variety) get in a lifetime. Not that he started from scratch. When Eisenhower, nearly 62, took off his uniform last June and started campaigning, he had a lifetime of experience in dealing with people, cliques, passions, ideologies and issues. The U.S. Army does not run without politics; the commander in chief of the largest military coalition in history cannot command (and win) without political maneuvering, and the officer charged with transforming an international paper army into reality cannot do that job, as Eisenhower did, without learning a great deal about the political passions of Capitol Hill (or Whitehall or the Quai d'Orsay).
As SHAPE commander, he dealt and held his own with such formidable and experienced personalities as Britain's Winston Churchill, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery and General Lord Ismay, France's Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, Marshal Alphonse Juin and the late General de Lattre de Tassigny, Belgium's Paul-Henri Spaak, Portugal's Premier Salazar, Italy's Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi and Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. From Oslo to Lisbon to Ankara, Eisenhower impressed himself on governments and peoples as the unifying leader in resistance to Communism.
Nevertheless, when Ike came home to seek the nomination, he had to enroll in a new course of political education. More was involved than the techniques of baby-kissing, backslapping and speechmaking. Eisenhower learned the things that he would need if he is elected—the political geography, physics and alchemy of the U.S. He learned what sort of a foreign policy the farmers would go for, and what sort of farm policy labor would not swallow. He learned what U.S. Steel —and the C.I.O.—would do about the Taft-Hartley law; how Negroes, housewives and soybean farmers feel about a dozen issues from FEPC to foreign trade. He learned what a great and many-voiced people—organized in its unions, corporations, Elks' clubs and political parties—wants, hopes and fears.
A Crammer. The first lesson was rough—and valuable. Student Eisenhower was immediately caught up in the dramatic fight between Taftmen and Ikemen for the nomination, the most intense fight in either party since the Democratic Donnybrook of 1924. The political backroom deals of Brazos County, Texas, became as familiar to Ike as the Battle of the Bulge. He was in the center of the storm when the leadership of the Republican Party was torn down—since then a new leadership has been constructed around him.
His next teachers were professional politicians, experts, technicians who sat with him for days in his Denver headquarters briefing him on farm problems, labor problems, foreign policy.