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Related to the Taft issue is Eisenhower's endorsement of Senator Joe McCarthy. Eisenhower and his advisers decided early in the campaign that Ike would ask for the election of the whole Republican ticket in each state. Ike did not endorse McCarthy until the voters of Wisconsin made him the Republican nominee. Considering McCarthy's smashing primary victory, Eisenhower gave him, by any political standard, cool, correct treatment. In Green Bay, Wis. Ike stressed the difference between McCarthy and himself, but added that they differed on "method," not "objectives," i.e., uprooting of Communism in Government. In his big Milwaukee speech, in which he endorsed the entire Republican ticket in Wisconsin, Eisenhower did not mention McCarthy's name. He said: "We would have nothing left to defend if we allowed ourselves to be swept into any spirit of violent vigilantism. [But] at the same time we have the right to call a spade a spade. That means, in every proved case, the right to call a Red a Red."
Eisenhower feels that he must act as a spokesman for the whole Republican Party, which, he says, he did not "invent." He feels it is not his function as presidential candidate to tell the people of Wisconsin whom they ought to send to the Senate. Says he: "The idea of forcing uniformity within a party is precisely the thing that most European countries have been doing to their own injury . . . This splinter party system of Europe ... is what the Democratic spokesman recommends for us Americans."
The Issues. As the Eisenhower train rolled through the Midwest and on toward the West Coast, the land—green and golden in the fall sunshine—gave a measure of Eisenhower's task. For it was prosperous land; the' barns were trim, the houses were freshly painted and had that indefinable look a house wears when its people are not in want. It was Eisenhower's job to show what was beneath this prosperity, and beyond it. He had to show that the larder was not so full as it seemed, and that distant places like Korea or Indo-China were threatening the safety of the safest, newest farmhouse roof. He kept hammering away at high taxes, inflation, high prices, the explosive uncertainties and frustrating deadlock of the Korean war.
Foreign Policy. The key to his idea on foreign policy is in these sentences: "The containing of Communism is largely physical, and by itself an inadequate approach to our task . . . Dollars and guns are no substitutes for brains and will power." When Adlai Stevenson remarked, "A wise man does not try to hurry history," Eisenhower replied: "Every American knows the answer to that one. Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him."
In Europe he favors the system of alliances and U.S. aid, but he feels that the U.S. has not done nearly well enough providing moral leadership for Europe: "Europe has not achieved the ability to become independent of our purse strings."