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The man who led this peaceful overturn was a newcomer to politics. He was adopted by the liberal wing of the Republican Party which believed that the tangible gains of the New Deal could be preserved while rejecting certain fundamentals of the New Deal's philosophy. Ike thought at first he would be "drafted" by the Republicans, but he quickly found that the processes of democracy include hard and necessary tests. He passed those in the dramatic weeks when the magic number was 604—the majority of Republican Convention delegates.
He unified his bitterly divided party, defined his "crusade,'' and set out to pass the next test, in which the goal was 266 electoral votes. His campaign survived the Nixon crisis—stirred up partly out of hatred for the man who broke the Alger Hiss case—and turned an apparent setback into an advantage. It survived the egghead rebellion, the desertion of Ike by scores of intellectuals, journalists, Hollywoodians and other opinion makers.
The final victory discloses an alarming fact, long suspected: there is a wide and unhealthy gap between the American intellectuals and the people. (Stevenson made a poor showing in New York City, the font and center of eggheadery.)
The Task Ahead. Intellectuals aside, the vote for Eisenhower suggests that, despite the relative bitterness of campaign oratory, the U.S. is more genuinely united behind the President-elect than it has been for many years. Few Presidents in U.S. history have had so clear a mandate from so many divergent groups. It is, in fact, a mandate for a fresh start in the U.S.'s dealings with the world and with itself—a mandate for leadership. At no time in U.S. history has the need for leadership been so great or the leader's task so complex and fateful. In 1952, the U.S.'s (and therefore the President's) responsibility reaches into the farthest corners of the earth. It faces the greatest threat to free societies in a thousand years. It must deal not only with governments, with armies, with billions of money, with staggering weapons of destruction on the brink of war; it must deal with the souls of men—must, in Eisenhower's words, "persuade the world by peaceful means to believe the truth." That is the measure of the job which a majority of the American people has entrusted to Dwight Eisenhower.