(See Cover)
When President Eisenhower announced his decision to run again, the Republican elephant on which he will ride was well-fed, laden with campaign fodder, and already lumbering off on a well-plotted course toward the campaign of 1956. Around Republican National Committee headquarters in the Cafritz Building, just three blocks from the old State Department building where Ike made his announcement, there was a lively hum of activity as the President spoke. The staff numbered 125 workers (up from the off-year complement of 75), and was rapidly growing to its campaign peak of 300. In a large, pale-blue, partitioned-off room, young writers turned out speech kits and campaign slogans. Researchers diligently probed the records of Democratic candidates for campaign ammunition. The committee's regional traveling men slammed in and out of the office with the latest cardiograms of the public's political heartbeat. Office boys lugged big bundles of outgoing mail; in the past month nearly 400,000 pieces of G.O.P. propaganda have been mailed to all parts of the country. Tickers kept up a sporadic jabber of political news from all over. And filed away was precious provender for 1956's electronic election: $2,000,000 worth of contracts for prime TV time next fall.
The Jangling Summons. In the midst of this busy scene a burly, quick-moving man barked directions, flopped restlessly around his office from one chair to another, longed for the 4½ daily packs of Viceroys he had given up last fortnight, conferred endlessly with associates, and paid minute-to-minute obeisance to the jangling summons of his telephone (in one normal day, recently, he received 94 incoming calls, not counting interoffice conversations). At 10:52 a.m., the precise moment when the President's press conference broke up, Leonard Wood Hall, chairman of the Republican National Committee, fastened a gold-colored Ike pin on his lapel and made a prediction. "This," he said earnestly, "is going to 'be one of the hardest campaigns we ever fought. Now that Ike has done what he has done, we're all going to have to come up to it by working harder than we ever did before."
For Len Hall the President's decision was the payoff of a political bet made five months ago. After Ike's heart attack, when nearly everybody else in the U.S. wondered whether the President would be able to finish his first term let alone try for a second, Hall foresaw how much havoc Ike's failure to run would play with the Republican Party. "I'll cross that bridge when I come to it," he said, "and when I come to it, I'll jump off." On Sept. 26, two days after the heart attack, Hall announced: "There is no change as far as I am concerned in campaign plans and strategy."