Mutual Appreciation

The Nixon case broke just as Eisenhower was finally hitting his stride as a campaigner. At every whistle stop in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and Missouri, there was a sense of mutual appreciation between Ike and the huge crowds that turned out for him. Almost overnight he began to click like an old pro. He knew it. His audiences knew it, and correspondents who had followed him since the early days of the wandering sentences and the hazy concepts could hardly believe he was the same man.

The trip through Iowa had Ike's staff forcibly restraining heady visions of victory. Crowds unequaled since Franklin Roosevelt's greatest days turned out at every step from Davenport to Des Moines. As the train passed down through the corn-hog country the farmers left their fields to wave and crane for a sight of the candidate. In Iowa City a crowd of 5,000 (out of a population of 27,000) got caught in a chilly rain but stuck out the discomfort until Ike had finished his talk.

Look Ahead. Ike's formal speeches were going better, too, and for the same reason. At the end of his text in St. Paul, Minn., he looked out from the platform to the audience of 12,000 and said, simply and genuinely: "This kind of meeting is for me an inspiration. From you I gather strength and I gather determination to carry on the job I have laid for myself . . ." At Des Moines he said: "They [the Democrats] say we must have more & more government management of the people's affairs because the people are less & less able to manage their own affairs . . . The Democratic Party looks down at the people; the Republican Party looks ahead with the people."

For the National Federation of Women's Republican Clubs in St. Louis, Ike recalled "some of the maxims written at the top of the copy books we used in grade school . . . the standards by which, in those days, greatness was judged.

"Listen to some of them: honesty is the best policy; a man is known by the company he keeps; he that goes aborrowing, goes asorrowing; a penny saved is a penny earned; birds of a feather flock together ; I would rather be right than President. Where do we stand today--where does our Government stand when measured alongside the moral principles--the sacred honor--of our founders?"

From St. Louis Ike whistle-stopped through Illinois, Kentucky and Indiana to a warm welcome from Bob Taft in Ohio. Total Eisenhower talk and travel record from Monday to Monday: 2,590 miles by rail, 1,800 miles by air (in & out of New York for the A.F.L. convention), 123 miles by motorcade, 50 speeches.

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