What Joe Can Learn From Ike

Read: The brilliant prudence of Dwight Eisenhower

Eisenhower was barely a politician as the year began—he was known to millions, of course, as the hero of D-Day, but his political talents were not well understood. People were not even certain that he was a Republican (Democrats were also approaching him to run). But he declared his affiliation with the GOP, and early in 1952 began to run in earnest.

To unite the country, Eisenhower first had to bring together his own party, which was no simple matter. A deeply conservative Ohio senator, Robert Taft, wanted the nomination for himself. “Mr. Republican,” as Taft was known, held important cards as a party insider, but he lacked charisma, and his cranky isolationism put him at odds with the party’s more moderate wing, centered in New York and New England. These East Coast Republicans gravitated naturally to Eisenhower, whose sparkling résumé included stints as the president of Columbia University and as NATO’s supreme commander.

No one would call Eisenhower a scintillating speaker, and he looked older than his 62 years. But he understood that less could be more, and his calming speeches stood in sober contrast to the heated rhetoric of the times.   

A strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, then in its infancy, helped to lift his chances, and at the GOP convention, in Chicago, Eisenhower won the nomination on the first ballot. Party leaders seeking generational and geographic diversity selected a young senator from California as his running mate—another way in which 2020 echoes 1952 (although any similarity between Richard Nixon and Kamala Harris stops there).    

The Democrats also met in Chicago, where they nominated Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson as their candidate. He gave an eloquent nomination address and continued to speak incandescently all summer and fall, giving lucid speeches on the serious problems Americans faced.   

But Eisenhower understood that professorial lectures were not the way to win. (His university experience surely contributed to that insight.) Instead, he pursued a policy of strategic blandness, offering little in the way of details, but projecting the aura of a reliable, seasoned leader. His speeches were so vague—in his convention address, he spoke of the “shining promise of tomorrow”—that reporters called him “Extremely General Eisenhower,” and complained that he was approaching the “38th platitude,” a reference to the line dividing Korea.

The critique, though, did little to change him. He continued to speak in broad, accessible language, mixing conservative themes with a liberal commitment to “a program of progressive politics.” Even his occasional verbal stumbles helped him, projecting authenticity and character at a time when voters were worried about how angry politics had become. Eisenhower promised “to unite us wherever we have been divided,” and Americans yearned for exactly that.