Remembering the days when both parties liked Ike

Are we facing the demise of the historic two-party system that has served the nation so well?  

Will the next presidential election be between Trump or a Trumpian type on the right and a Bernie Sanders facsimile on the left with third and maybe fourth parties vying for those of us in the center right and left with no place to go?

Have we ever seen such a mess in modern presidential history?

The answers are No, Maybe and Yes.  

The two-party system will survive but we could see strong third or fourth parties influence the next election as they did several times in the past.  (See Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond in 1948 and Ross Perot in 1992.)  There’s a  chance that one or both parties will come to their senses in the next few months and at least one party will nominate a centrist.   Maybe even two.

As to messes in presidential history, the messiest campaign and election took place nearly 70 years ago.  Most people remember the 1948 election as the year the polls were magnificently wrong and Harry Truman held up the newspaper erroneously proclaiming his defeat.

But it started out as the year nobody liked Truman, the incumbent president, and everybody liked Ike, the conquering hero of World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower.  And when I say everybody, I mean Republicans and Democrats.  That neither of them knew what he stood for didn’t at all matter.

Liking Ike and disliking Harry had nothing to do with reality.  Upon succeeding Franklin Roosevelt for most of his fourth term, what Truman did was make the decision to use the atomic bomb to hasten the end of World War II and avoid the casualties of an invasion of Japan, preside over postwar prosperity and save much of Europe from communism with the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine.  But people were tired of the Democratic Party and didn’t want to see a fifth term of Democratic presidents.  In fact, Congress voted in 1947 to amend the Constitution to assure it wouldn’t ever happen again.  It would be ratified by the states in 1951.

The Republicans were burdened with a field of the usual suspects—candidates who had either been rejected by the party in the past or the trio who had lost to Roosevelt—Herbert Hoover, Alf Landon and Thomas Dewey.  

It didn’t take much to convince many Republicans that Ike would be  an attractive and winnable alternative.  They knew nothing of his politics but, to paraphrase Vince Lombardi, winning wasn’t the only thing, it was everything for the victory-starved GOP. 

But when they asked, Ike, who was by then president of Columbia University, said no.   

That didn’t stop some enthusiasts from entering his name into one of the few important primaries, in New Hampshire, where one either had to run or formally withdraw.  Ike was forced to issue a near-Shermanesque reply, announcing, “I could not accept the nomination, even under the remote circumstances that it were tendered me.”

That settled things with the Republicans, but not with the anti-Truman Democrats, who interpreted Ike’s statement as a hint that he was a Democrat at heart.   

The Eisenhower Democrats were a formidable and diverse bunch:  Walter Reuther, head of the auto workers union; James Roosevelt, the late president’s oldest son; southern Democratic senators like Lister Hill of Alabama and Claude Pepper of Florida, and big city bosses Jacob Arvey of Chicago, Frank “I am the law” Hague of Jersey City and even the new party chairman from Connecticut, John M. Bailey.

The Democrats kept trying to draft Eisenhower right up to the July convention when he told the party he would refuse its nomination under any circumstances.  

The rest is familiar.  Truman overcame the defections from his left with the Wallace Progressive Party and from the reactionary Southern segregationists who ran Thurmond and cracked open the Solid Democratic South for the first time.  Dewey, certain of victory, ran like Hillary Clinton and lost.

But what if Eisenhower had run in 1948, almost certainly as a Republican?  

Truman had offered to support the general for president at the Potsdam conference in 1946 and may not have run against him in 1948.  Let’s assume, then, that Ike had run and won the first of his two terms in 1948 instead of 1952.  His running mate wouldn’t have been Richard Nixon, who had been a senator for all of a year, but he might turned to another Californian, Dewey’s actual 1948 running mate, Earl Warren.

With Warren in his second term as vice president in 1953, would Ike have picked someone else for chief justice, and how would that have impacted the decisions on school segregation, abortion, reapportionment, the rights of the accused and other decisions of the Warren Court without Warren?  

Would there have been no Nixon presidency and therefore no Watergate?  Would John Kennedy have been considered too young and inexperienced, at 39, to be nominated at the end of Ike’s second term in 1956?

So much of our history could have been different if the general had not chosen to keep his name from being entered into the New Hampshire primary. 

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at rahles1@outlook.com.