Presidential Election of 1952

IN 1952, INCUMBENT President Harry S. Truman decided not to run. The Democrats nominated Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. The Republicans nominated General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower won the election, ending 20 years of Democratic control of the White House. The fight for the Republican nomination was largely between General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio. The primaries had been split fairly evenly between the two men, and the nomination came down to the wire. When the 1952 Republican National Convention opened in Chicago, most political experts rated Taft and Eisenhower as neck-and-neck in the delegate vote totals.

Ultimately, Eisenhower won the nomination based largely on the perception that he was a sure winner. Eisenhower took the nomination on the first ballot. He chose as his running mate Senator Richard Nixon of California, best known for his pursuit of Alger Hiss, the accused spy. It was felt that Nixon had valuable credentials, as a campaigner and anti-Communist. A March 1952 poll found that Eisenhower was the most admired of all living Americans. Eisenhower would have been a difficult opponent for any challenger. General Eisenhower emerged as a World War II war hero for coordinating the D-Day landing on Normandy. When the war in Europe ended (V-E Day) in 1945, many expected him to enter politics.

The obvious candidate for the Democratic nomination was incumbent President Harry S. Truman. Since the newly passed Twenty-Second Amendment did not apply to whoever was president at the time of its passage, he was eligible to run again. The Twenty-Second Amendment states,

Truman served three years as president, after Franklin Roosevelt's death, in 1945, and was elected in 1948. The polls showed that Truman entered 1952 with low approval ratings, partly because the Korean War was dragging into its third year. In addition, Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy was involved in a well-publicized search for Communists. “Korea, Communism, and Corruption” were the albatrosses the Republicans were prepared to blame on President Truman in the primaries and general election of 1952, if he ran for a second term of office.

Truman's main opponent was Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, who had chaired a nationally-televised investigation of organized crime in 1951, and was known as a crusader against crime and corruption. Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee defeated Truman in the New Hampshire primary. A month later, on March 29, 1952, Truman surprised the country by announcing that he would not be a candidate for re-election. Truman liked Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson as his successor, but Stevenson, who was then running for the Illinois governorship, declared that he was not interested in running for the presidency.

Although Kefauver went on to win most of the other primaries, the majority of states still chose their delegates in state conventions, which meant that the party bosses were able to choose the Democratic nominee. These party bosses (including President Truman) strongly disliked Kefauver because of his investigations of organized crime that had revealed connections between mafia figures and many of the big-city Democratic political organizations. As a result, the party bosses viewed Kefauver as a man who could not be trusted, and they refused to support him for the nomination. Instead, with President Truman taking the lead, they began to search for other, more acceptable, candidates.

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