(4 of 8)
At the start, few of his big, set speeches were ever as effective as his short whistle-stop talks. Here Ike was in his element: half the town gathered at the depot, high-school bands playing John Philip Sousa, the kids excused from school excitedly scrambling over freight cars and station buildings for a better look. These talks were far from polished; Ike's grammar could be hair-raising. The correspondents on his campaign train gleefully kept score of his cliches; but Eisenhower somehow can get away with cliches. When he says "I love this land," or "I am one of you," the words do not sound empty. (Although Ike could never approach Franklin Roosevelt's ability to make a cliche—e.g., "I hate war"—sound like a revelation.)
Taft & McCarthy. When Eisenhower began his swing into the Midwest, he had established himself as an effective campaigner. He now faced two immediate political problems: Taft and Joe McCarthy.
After the convention, Taft took a long, long vacation at Murray Bay and allowed his friends to say that he would not support Ike unless he got certain assurances. Later, this was used to give color to an inevitable Democratic charge that Ike had sold out to Taft. Ike's duty as leader of the party was to get Taft and his friends at work in the campaign—without sacrificing those principles which induced the party to pick Ike instead of Taft. In this situation, the wise leader tries to save the beaten rival's face by superficial concessions, while retaining the substance of the victory. That is what Ike did. In his speeches there is no evidence whatever that he has surrendered any principles to Taft. In the "unity statement," the two men acknowledged their "differences" on foreign policy, stated their joint belief that the main issue of the campaign was liberty v. the Fair Deal, and agreed that the Taft-Hartley law should not be repealed.
Yet Ike treated Taft with great respect and warm cordiality at their famous meeting at Morningside Heights. Taft, not Ike, read the statement of what they had agreed upon. In terms of sheer political expediency, it might have been better if Ike had given Taft more substance and less face. But in more serious terms, Ike had met the Taft problem successfully. Taft's followers went to work for Ike—which was what the Taft followers had wanted to do, anyway. And thousands of "liberals" backed away from Ike in horror —which was what the liberals had wanted to do, anyway.