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Ike's natural warmth could not be caught by headlines. He delighted reporters in Abilene by coming up with the word "skyhootin' " (what prices do during inflation). He misused a favorite word of Fourth-of-July orators—"shibboleth"—by adding that it meant something that's "just false; not true."* He did not once say "no comment," and pleased many with a frank substitute: "I don't know." He retired from the Plaza Theater leaving the conference in a glow, thanks to a curtain question shouted across the auditorium by a newsreel cameraman. The question: "Mr. Eisenhower, did you ever dream some day when you left Abilene that you would come back and run for the presidency of the U.S.?" Ike smiled, rubbed his head, and squinted into the lights. "I don't know what dreams crowd the head of a young boy," he said, "but I think that before I left, my real problem was whether to try to be a Hans Wagner* or a railroad conductor. I remember that both of them were very important."
The fact was that the politicians began to dream about Ike as a candidate long before he himself ever dreamed of the presidency. In 1948 he turned down substantial support for first the Republican and then the Democratic nominations. After Dewey's defeat, Ike was approached by a group of badly shaken Republican brasshats, who were beginning to fear that the G.O.P. might go out of existence unless it got a winner—and that with it would go the two-party system and all chances of ending centralized, New Deal government. Said the G.O.P. men: "We might have to use you." And they asked Ike to keep his availability open and his mouth shut.
Ike heeded only half the request, but he decided that if a political movement was building under him, it was his duty to speak out and make his position clear. As president of Columbia, he expounded his philosophy of free enterprise in a series of speeches ranging from New York to Texas. He stopped talking abruptly when Harry Truman called him back into uniform to set up SHAPE in January 1951. But the political movement bubbled and boiled at home until, at the end of 1951, Ike told his U.S. backers that he would be willing to try for the nomination.
He flew home into the arms of a campaign organization that is half enthusiastically amateur and half coolly professional. Massachusetts' Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. is its No. 1 man and coordinator. He is no great shakes as a political organizer or strategist, but he has skillfully managed to keep the diverse elements of the Ike drive in one camp (e.g., the New York Deweyites and the Westerners like Lodge slightly better than they like each other). The others on Ike's strategy board are Paul Hoffman, General Lucius Clay, Kansas' Senator Frank Carlson, Tom Dewey and Pennsylvania's Senator Jim Duff. The tough essential job of collaring delegates is left to the calloused hands of Dewey's 1948 campaign manager, Herbert Brownell.