1952 United States presidential election

The 1952 United States presidential election turned the closing months of Harry S. Truman’s presidency into a contest over his record, above all the stalemated war in Korea. Truman was not the Democratic nominee, but he campaigned with the force of a candidate, treating the result as a judgment on his administration. His vigorous defense of its policies could not overcome Dwight Eisenhower’s popularity or public anxiety about the war: Eisenhower’s promise to go to Korea helped determine the outcome, and his victory was overwhelming.

A referendum on Truman’s presidency

With the campaign under way in September, Truman put aside any wounded pride at not being the nominee and entered the fight energetically. He believed the election was a referendum on his presidency and, as the contest gathered force, could not imagine remaining on the sidelines. The new Democratic Party chairman recalled that Truman was eager to campaign and made a strong public showing.

Truman and Adlai E. Stevenson traveled separately and followed entirely different schedules. Stevenson campaigned by plane; Truman returned to the rails aboard the Ferdinand Magellan presidential car, crossing the country without appearing on the same platform as his party’s nominee. Their contrast was striking: Stevenson was an eloquent speaker, while Truman presented himself as a fighter and a believer, speaking in the familiar, combative style of his 1948 campaign.

He argued that a Democratic vote served the interests of ordinary people, praised Stevenson, invoked Franklin Roosevelt’s memory, attacked the Republican Party, and defended his Fair Deal programs. At first, he directed his sharpest criticism not at Eisenhower but at Robert Taft, whom he associated with Republican reactionaries. Truman said he liked Eisenhower as an Army general, but questioned whether the candidate understood what the presidency required. At Whitefish, Montana, he portrayed Eisenhower as being influenced by Taft and urged voters who admired the general to send him back to the Army.

Campaigning in two registers

The campaign’s hardening tone exposed the distance between Truman’s personal regard for Eisenhower and his judgment of Eisenhower as a political opponent. Truman privately continued to say that he liked him, and he had written to him in friendship even as he objected to the people advising him. But as Eisenhower’s attacks intensified, Truman accused him of denouncing a foreign policy he had helped shape and carry out as Army Chief of Staff and head of NATO. Truman called him a tool of Wall Street and argued that his military career had left him unfamiliar with ordinary life.

Eisenhower, for his part, condemned what he called a mess in Washington and attacked the administration over alleged corruption and cronyism. Richard Nixon concentrated his attacks into the slogan K1C2—Korea, Communism, and corruption—and accused Truman, Stevenson, and Dean Acheson of betraying Democratic principles. Truman understood Nixon’s charge to include an accusation of treason against himself and did not forget it. The contest had become not merely a disagreement over policy but an exchange of sharply personal judgments about competence, loyalty, and the government’s character.

Campaigning also gave Truman an outlet for his energy. He traveled aboard the Ferdinand Magellan presidential car, ate fried chicken with his fingers in its dining room, and traded stories and wits with his staff. After a day of eight speeches between Ohio and upstate New York, he played piano in a Buffalo hotel at 1:30 in the morning; in California, he washed his socks in a bathroom sink. A local Iowa reporter observed that Truman seemed especially fit and pleased by the strenuous work of giving his opponents hell. The road brought out a familiar, animated campaigner even as the political ground beneath him grew less favorable.

Korea becomes the decisive issue

The polls showed Eisenhower well ahead and identified the stalemate in Korea as the issue troubling voters most. On October 24 in Detroit, Eisenhower delivered a forceful speech, calling Korea a burial ground for twenty thousand American dead and promising that, if elected, he would go there. Truman responded that Eisenhower had agreed with the administration’s Korean policy from the beginning. At Winona, Minnesota, he argued that the skills of a professional general did not make someone a good president: the conduct of war, he said, differed from the practice of civilian government.

Truman’s challenge was direct. If Eisenhower knew how to end the war, Truman argued, he should say so at once rather than wait until after the election; acting immediately could save lives. He condemned the use of the conflict for political advantage and considered Eisenhower particularly unentitled to do so, given his knowledge of the administration’s policy. At the Pentagon, Eisenhower’s former colleagues on the Joint Chiefs were also angry. Omar Bradley recalled that Eisenhower knew the details of the war and the delicacy of the armistice negotiations, and that a visit to Korea could not produce the result his campaign implied.

Truman recognized the force of the promise nonetheless. In the final days, he told his press secretary that they might be facing more than they could control. His defense of the administration’s record could not match the clarity of Eisenhower’s pledge to act, especially when the war had become the concern most voters associated with the election.

The result and its immediate aftermath

Eisenhower won decisively, carrying all but nine of the forty-eight states, including Illinois, where Stevenson was from, and Missouri, Truman’s home state. Eisenhower’s share of the popular vote exceeded that of any Democratic victory since Franklin Roosevelt’s win in 1936. Korea was the issue that cut deepest, but the result was also a personal triumph for Eisenhower: his popularity and appeal as a candidate made him formidable. Republicans gained control of Congress, though narrowly; their Senate majority was one seat.

Truman privately concluded that perhaps no one could have defeated Eisenhower in 1952. Reports, including one from the Kansas City Star, that Truman had harmed Stevenson’s chances hurt him deeply. The campaign had been his own vigorous defense of the administration, yet its outcome left him facing the possibility that his participation had made the defeat worse for his party’s nominee.

He nevertheless sent Eisenhower congratulations and offered him the use of the Presidential aircraft Independence for a trip to Korea, adding the pointed qualification, “if you still desire to go to Korea.” Eisenhower declined and flew there by military plane under heavy security at the end of November. He toured the front for three days and returned having concluded that the situation was intolerable. Truman, who had written that he sincerely wished Eisenhower did not have to make the risky journey, had warned that the campaign promise could not by itself resolve the war. The election settled who would take office; it did not settle Korea.