(3 of 8)
Slow Start. At first the echoes were not strong. Ike was an undisputed national hero, but as a political candidate he did not quite "come across." A host of problems (irrelevant to the presidency, but highly relevant to a campaigner for the presidency) beset him: his voice was flat; he looked like an old man on TV because his light hair and eyebrows did not show up, giving an impression of blankness; his rimless glasses registered as two blobs of light on the TV screen. Reluctantly he submitted to make-up for TV performances. (An Eisenhower staffer found a make-up man who had been a paratrooper; this reassured Ike, whose tables of organization had never before included a male beautician.) He discarded his glasses and exchanged them for a dark-rimmed pair, which he began to use as a prop during his speeches (as Winston Churchill had once advised him to do).
Before last June's return to the U.S.,
Ike had built up a reputation as a speaker. However, his off-the-cuff efforts proved to be full of ballooning sentences, and his speeches from prepared texts tended to be wooden. At one point he threw out all prepared texts and—while his advisers watched him as nervously as if he were a time bomb—made some major speeches off the cuff. That way his sincerity came through, but Ike was not used to the split-minute timing necessary for television, sometimes rambled on, made some blunders. Ike finally settled on a prepared text in a looseleaf notebook from which he reads, with occasional ad libs. His delivery has improved astonishingly, but he still swallows the ends of his sentences and runs over his applause.
The Message. Gradually he began to get his message over to the people; first of all, that there ought to be a change. He hammered at the "mess in Washington," at corruption, inefficiency, high taxes and high prices. The U.S., he said, must have a government the nation and the world can respect. Another aspect of the mess was the inept handling of Communism, both at home and abroad. At home, charged Eisenhower, the Administration had coddled Communists, and sneered with phrases like "red herring" at those who warned against the danger. Abroad, the Administration's foreign policy had managed to take a magnificent victory and run it into the ground to the point where 1) the U.S. was fighting a war in Korea without a plan for winning it, 2) "godless Communism" had conquered vast areas of the world, including China, at the average rate of 100 million people a year, 3) the U.S. was spending billions on defense but had no real or consistent program for winning and keeping the peace.
But the message was not only protest. Ike spoke much of the future—the limitless future which the U.S., with its resources and its imagination, ought to enjoy. The Democratic slogan, "You Never Had It So Good," Eisenhower countered with, "Why Not Have It Better?"