The Case Against Ike

After months of sniping, Colonel Robert R. McCormick's Chicago Tribune last week opened up a full-dress attack on Dwight Eisenhower as a candidate for President.

"As a Republican candidate," said the bitterly isolationist Tribune, "Eisenhower would be a joke. He was one of the coterie owing his advancement to George C. Marshall when the latter was Mr. Roosevelt's Army chief of staff . . . For Roosevelt and Marshall to install Eisenhower as Supreme Commander in Europe necessitated jumping him over 366 officers who ranked him. Eisenhower achieved his advancement through New Deal patronage, and he is not likely to forget it... Eisenhower was picked up by the extremely wealthy internationalists comprising the board of trustees of Columbia University and was named president of Columbia. But Truman kept showering favor upon him . . . When the Administration determined to send American troops into an Atlantic Pact army in Europe, Eisenhower, with the support of the Truman Administration, was given the job of commander of the European Army . . .

"His military biographer, Captain Harry Butcher, says that it was a byword among American officers that 'Eisenhower is the best general the British have.' Eisenhower got this reputation by acceding to a British war plan calculated to allow the British commander, Field Marshal Montgomery, to achieve all of the decisive breakthroughs ... It was he who called off General Bradley's victorious armies when they were across the Elbe, thus reserving for Russia the enormous political advantage of capturing Berlin . . . Eisenhower it was, also, who turned General Patton from his unchecked advance upon Prague and let the capital of Czechoslovakia fall to the Red Army ... It was little wonder that Eisenhower was received in Moscow and there awarded a Soviet military decoration, for his contributions to Stalin were great."

The man whom McCormick labeled "the logical candidate," Ohio's Senator Robert Taft, took pains to make it clear that he did not buy the McCormick line. It is "unreasonable," said Taft, to accuse Ike of letting the Russians take Berlin and Prague, for he undoubtedly had his orders. "It may be true that Eisenhower was sympathetic to Montgomery, but I don't blame him for that," said Taft.

Point by point, Eisenhower men could answer the distortions and exaggerations in the Tribune blast, but in the months to come, those charges would be heard again & again. Bertie McCormick had written the textbook for the anti-Eisenhower campaign.

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