The Question of Ike

In the year 1951, it was Ike Eisenhower's destiny that the U.S. should look at him over the shoulder of a question mark. When his five-starred Constellation took off from Paris last week, the full-time business of running Europe's defenses may have been uppermost in his mind, but he landed, nonetheless, right in the middle of the biggest question of domestic politics: Is Ike a candidate for President in 1952? Reporters asked it as he landed at New York's Mitchel Field, asked it again when he greeted his grandchildren at Fort Knox, Ky., and asked it every time he turned around in Washington.

Ike's answers had just enough iron in them to make them soldierly and just enough evasion to make them interesting."I have never had any political aspirations period." Is he a Republican or a Democrat? "I will not indicate political leanings of any kind . . . I'm on a job in which the United States has invested worlds and world's of treasure and time and thought, and for me to imply or indicate any partisan political leanings of any kind would be a disservice to the country." Could a reporter say the general was definitely not a candidate? "Of course you can't say that."

Washington's political soothsayers skipped a heartbeat as Ike, on his way to his appointment with Harry Truman, stopped in the White House lobby to look at a painting called The Peacemakers. In the picture are Abraham Lincoln, General Grant, the last professional soldier to become a U.S. President, and General Sherman, a professional soldier who refused a presidential nomination. Ike said that he had been discussing the picture recently. He pointed up to a fourth man in the picture, Admiral David Dixon Porter, and said with a poker face: "This is the one I couldn't remember."

Ike and Truman climbed into the presidential limousine and were off to Blair House and a private luncheon that lasted for more than an hour. On the way over, Truman showed Ike some pictures of the renovated White House.

Would Truman invite Ike to move in by offering him the Democratic nomination? It was a wild guess. But certainly Republicans-for-Ike seemed worse off, at the moment, for Ike's homecoming. Up to now, they had been able to push their bandwagon on the strength of confidential hints and wise looks brought back from Ike's headquarters in Marly. But now, as New York Timesman. Arthur Krock put it, the Sphinx had come to the Cave of the Winds. As Ike was leaving the White House, a reporter asked: "Have you given anyone authority or a go-ahead to undertake any political activity in your behalf?" Ike stared at the reporter and snorted. Then his eyebrows went up and he exploded "No!"

He left the political uproar behind as he crossed the Potomac for his conferences at the Pentagon. There all signs indicated that he was gravely preoccupied about the business of defending Europe: He needed a fighting army by 1952, and he had been getting only one-fifth of the heavy arms aid the U.S. had promised NATO's armies (see FOREIGN NEWS). But whether Ike had come home to talk Western defense or U.S. politics, or both, the U.S. was going to be looking his way for a lot of answers.

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