Rising Star, Setting Sun by John T. Shaw

Author:John T. Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

VII

As 1960 drew to a close Eisenhower held several discussions with senior Republican Party officials to discuss the future of the GOP in the aftermath of Nixon’s loss to Kennedy. Eisenhower wanted to make sure the party was planted in the political center. He did not want it to move either sharply to the left, as Nelson Rockefeller wanted, or dramatically to the right, as Barry Goldwater preferred.

On December 28 the president met with Nixon, Senator Thruston Morton (also the chairman of the Republican National Committee), Bryce Harlow (Eisenhower’s top legislative aide), and Persons. Harlow took extensive notes and wrote a long memo recapping the meeting. Eisenhower said he wanted to help rebuild the party after Nixon’s credible, but unsuccessful, race against Kennedy. He was concerned that congressional Republican leaders weren’t interested in the views of others. Eisenhower said he was resolved to stay active in party matters and might host a meeting or two a year with party officials, former cabinet members, and business supporters. But he insisted, according to Harlow’s account, that he had no desire to become a “male Mrs. Roosevelt.” This apparently referred to Eleanor Roosevelt’s high profile involvement in Democratic affairs in the years after her husband had died.

Eisenhower confessed that he had initially planned to retreat from public life after leaving the White House but was now leaning toward a different approach. He intended to publish articles to elaborate on his middle-of-the-road political philosophy. The president believed most Americans thought of themselves as moderates and the Republican Party should reach out to them and make a stronger appeal to labor and business. He bemoaned that the party’s outreach to African Americans had yielded so few electoral rewards and that, despite an earnest effort these past eight years, Republicans lost, rather than gained, African American support. Eisenhower said nobody was more sincere than he in trying to help black Americans but he was convinced that it was wrong to rely entirely upon the law for remedies to discrimination. He was proud of his efforts to quietly push for intergration through moral pleas and quiet persuasion.

The president also criticized Kennedy’s emerging cabinet. He warned that Douglas Dillon, a senior State Department official in his administration, was being set up for failure if he took the job as the treasury secretary in the Kennedy administration. He was skeptical of Kennedy’s nominee to be defense secretary, Robert McNamara, saying he took the job because of the prestige of running the Pentagon. McNamara, he argued, was not well versed in the challenges facing the Department of Defense. Morton, as the party chairman, worried that between four hundred and five hundred experienced Republicans would be leaving government when the Eisenhower administration ended, and said the party apparatus should help them find jobs and keep them in the Republican network. The president strongly agreed.

The conversation on the future of the Republican Party ultimately turned to the last presidential campaign. Nixon blamed his defeat on voter fraud, an ill-advised commitment by his

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