The Charlotte News

Saturday, July 12, 1952

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Jack Bell, that General Eisenhower had set out this date on a Republican "shining promise" crusade for the presidency, with his 39-year old running mate, Senator Richard Nixon of California, at his side. The latter, Mr. Bell indicates, "dramatized the new GOP bid for support of the nation's younger people." Having been a lieutenant commander in the Navy, Mr. Nixon completed an Army-Navy team for the Republicans.

He next recaps the General's nomination acceptance speech of the previous night, indicating that he had been dressed entirely in blue—"a color that pleases the eye of TV cameras". He had stated a goal of "total victory" and promised to campaign in "every nook and cranny of this land". He said that he knew that the battle could not be won by a few or by divided or uncertain forces. He urged especially younger people to join his cause and promised to work "intimately" with the three candidates who had lost the nomination, Senator Taft, Governor Earl Warren and former Governor Harold Stassen. Each had pledged his full cooperation to the campaign.

Senator Nixon, as a member of the California delegation which had solidly supported Governor Earl Warren, had not voted for the General during the first-ballot selection process, which eventually gave way, after former Governor Harold Stassen threw Minnesota's support to the General, putting the latter over the top, finally resulting in unanimous acclamation by the convention. The end of the first ballot had provided General Eisenhower with 595 votes, nine short of the necessary 604 for nomination, to 500 for Senator Taft, until the change of the Minnesota vote, followed by a groundswell of changes, led by Texas, from Senator Taft to the General.

That's all right, because, according to reports, Governor Warren never liked Mr. Nixon anyway, thought he traveled with henchmen who appeared to be a little on the crooked side, like guards for a gangster.

Leaders of the new RNC expected General Eisenhower to approve Arthur Summerfield of Michigan, reputed to be the largest Chevrolet dealer in the world, as the new chairman and chief of the election campaign. The RNC had 68 new members, expanding to 138 from the former membership of 106, of whom 36 serving during the previous four years had been replaced, along with 32 new state chairmen, who became additional members as a bonus to states which had voted Republican in the previous election.

Southern Republicans were expressing optimism that the General could carry the South in November, but said that their major problem was organizing their forces, having come to the convention badly split between the General and Senator Taft. The fact that the General had promised to campaign in the South had encouraged them. They believed that the Democrats had only one candidate, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, who could carry the South. The chairman of the Florida delegation predicted that, without question, the General would carry that state in the November election—as he would.

Saul Pett of the Associated Press provides the first of a five-part series on the life of General Eisenhower, the first of which indicating his rise from humble beginnings in Abilene, Kansas, to become the General who had planned and organized the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944, had returned home to become chief of staff of the Army, the president of Columbia University, and, most recently, spending a year and a half as supreme commander of NATO. Only eleven years earlier, he had hoped no one would think him conceited for asking for command of a regiment, and had become angry ten years earlier when someone had suggested that he ought to become president, responding, "Baloney!" He had never been inside a political headquarters until a month earlier, following his return from the NATO command.

His forebears had been simple German folk, originally named "Eisenhauer", meaning "hewer of iron"—or "iron beater", as it had been translated when he first took over as commander of the Allies in Europe in June, 1942. (At the time, he was so unknown that reporters often misspelled his surname as "Isenhower".) The family had migrated from Germany to Sweden in the 17th century, then to Holland, and finally, around 1732, to the United States, first settling in Pennsylvania, then about 150 years later, in Kansas. His ancestors had been Mennonites, highly moral, almost puritanical, and militantly pacifist. He was born on October 14, 1890 in Denison, Texas, and his family had moved to Abilene, Kansas, two years later. His mother, Ida Eisenhower, apparently the dominant influence in his home while growing up, had become, prior to her death in 1946, a Jehovah's Witness and a conscientious objector to war. The General had said many times that he hated war but had never explained his profession vis-à-vis his mother's teachings. According to his biographer, John Gunther, his mother had disapproved of his choice of profession but never had opposed it. His father had opened a merchandise shop in Abilene, but failed at it, later working as a mechanic in a creamery, and never had earned much. The General had said that his father had failed twice, but that each time, his mother had just smiled and worked harder. His family, as he grew up, lived in a frame house on the "wrong side of the tracks", and young Dwight, like his five brothers, of whom he was the middle in age, sometimes had to wear his mother's high-button shoes.

Morrie Landsberg reports on the new running mate, Senator Nixon, who indicated that the "great issue" of the campaign would be Communism and the fight against it, "an issue," he contended to a press conference the previous night, "the Democrats are stuck with." He said the Democrats had failed to halt Communist aggression and that the country had to have a more effective program "to save ourselves from being destroyed from abroad and within the country." The Senator had made his name as a member of the House Committee on un-American Activities in 1948, when former Communist courier Whittaker Chambers had testified in August before the Committee that former State Department official, Alger Hiss, had, during the latter 1930's, attended Communist meetings, then subsequently testified that Mr. Hiss had provided him during 1937-38 with secret State Department documents to be forwarded to the Russians, resulting in the revelation in November, 1948 of the microfilm which Mr. Chambers claimed he had taken of the Hiss-provided documents and stored in a pumpkin on his Maryland farm, transferring them recently from a dumbwaiter shaft at his nephew's home in Brooklyn where he contended they had been stored for a decade, subsequently digging them up for Congressman Nixon and HUAC lead investigator Robert Stripling, originally produced in response to a discovery request by Mr. Hiss's attorney in Mr. Hiss's civil suit for defamation against Mr. Chambers, based on statements the latter had made implicating Mr. Hiss as a member of the Communist Party, a charge which Mr. Hiss had dared Mr. Chambers to make outside his umbrella of civil immunity afforded by the Committee hearings, which Mr. Chambers had then obliged on a "Meet the Press" radio broadcast. Congressman Nixon had testified before the grand jury on the matter in December, 1948, which ultimately resulted in indictment of Mr. Hiss for perjury before the grand jury regarding the matters, concluding in early 1950 with Mr. Hiss's conviction and sentence to prison for five years, after a prior jury had hung in 1949.

Senator Nixon indicated that if he had written the Republican platform, it would have been much shorter with fewer adjectives, "more direct and simpler to read". He believed the domestic policies set forth by the platform lacked directness in some instances, especially on labor legislation. He said that his views on domestic and foreign policy were very close to those expressed by General Eisenhower, that his main contribution to the ticket would be his ability "to conduct a fighting campaign". Mr. Nixon had defeated Democratic Congressman Jerry Voorhis in his first bid for elective office, the House race in his home district in California in 1946, winning re-election in 1948 and then defeating Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas in the Senate race of 1950. He had been born in Yorba Linda, California, in 1913 and had finished Whittier College in 1934, before graduating from the Duke University Law School in 1937, and then returning to his hometown of Whittier to practice law. He had begun active duty in the Navy in August, 1942, after a period of months serving in the Office of Price Administration. He had been married to his wife, Pat, in 1940 in a Quaker ceremony, and they had two daughters, Julie and Tricia.

They would, soon, have a famous addition to their family, whom Tricia would name "Checkers", a little black and white cocker spaniel.

And the rest, as they say…

The President, according to a long-time Democratic associate, said that the best chance for the Democratic victory in November over General Eisenhower would be an all-out Fair Deal platform, and that he would oppose any watering down of the foreign and domestic proposals for which he had campaigned since the beginning of his Presidency.

Had the President's researchers wanted to dig into the background of Senator Nixon beyond the superficial matter encompassed by Mr. Landsberg's biographical sketch, they would have found that he was nicknamed while at Duke, "iron butt", for his persistent study in the library, enabling him to graduate number three in his 26-member class, one of three third-year students therefore inducted to the prestigious Order of the Coif. They might have cleverly thus coined such a campaign phrase, designed to appeal to the all-important labor vote in the industrial states, as: "Iron Beater and Iron Butt Won't Butt or Beat Big Steel". Of course, that inevitably would have prompted Republican rejoinder, designed to appeal to the clean-as-a-hound's-tooth crowd, that they would, however, "Beat and Butt the Big Steal".

In Korea, B-29's began around-the-clock bombing of enemy installations in Pyongyang, in the greatest air attack of the war thus far. More than 1,400 tons of bombs were dropped during a record 1,330 sorties the previous day, breaking the old record of 1,283 sorties set on May 1. Associated Press correspondent Stan Carter, who had flown on one of the previous day's daylight missions, said that allied airmen had foreseen that the enemy would charge, as they had over Pyongyang radio, that the prisoner of war camps near Pyongyang had been hit by the bombing, the Communists claiming unknown numbers of allied prisoners dead among the 2,000 persons they claimed had been killed in the raids. Mr. Carter had reported that extreme caution had been taken to avoid the prospect of hitting the prison camps, with briefing officers having pinpointed their exact locations. It was described as the largest 24-hour allied bombing strike of the war against a single target area. The Air Force indicated that it lost only one plane, which had been hit by heavy flak over the target. Five other allied planes had been lost during the week.

Ground action was reported to have been extremely light.

A U.S. Air Force B-17 search plane crashed 35 miles northeast of Snag, near the Yukon-Alaska border, the previous night, killing one of its eight-member crew. A Canadian paramedic rescue team had been dropped at the crash site to aid the survivors, three of whom were suffering from second and third degree burns. The plane had been on a flight from Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage to Whitehorse in the Yukon when it crashed.

On the editorial page, "The Republicans Have Named a Winner" praises the nomination of General Eisenhower, whom the newspaper had supported as the Republican nominee since January 8, a day after the General had first announced his availability for the GOP nomination. It finds that it was also a reflection of an upsurge in public opinion in favor of the General. But the victory had left "wounds of bitterness and disunity" within the party, which had to be healed prior to the general election. The General's visit to Senator Taft's headquarters, as well as his acceptance speech the previous night, displayed his power to reunite the party and strengthen it for the coming battle.