958 ★ CHAPTER 24 An Affluent Societyhis ordinary upbringing, war service,
and close-knit family, Nixon denied the
accusations. The “Checkers speech,”
named after the family dog—the one
gift Nixon acknowledged receiving, but
insisted he would not return—rescued
his political career. It illustrated how
television was beginning to transform
politics by allowing candidates to bring
a carefully crafted image directly into
Americans’ living rooms. The 1952
campaign became the first to make
extensive use of TV ads. Parties, one
observer complained, were “selling the
president like toothpaste.”
More important to the election’s
outcome, however, was Eisenhower’s
popularity (invoked in the Republican
campaign slogan “I Like Ike”) and the
public’s weariness with the Korean
War. Ike’s pledge to “go to Korea” in
search of peace signaled his intention
to bring the conflict to an end. He won
a resounding victory over the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson. Four
years later, Eisenhower again defeated Stevenson, by an even wider margin.
His popularity, however, did not extend to his party. Republicans won a razor-
thin majority in Congress in 1952, but Democrats regained control in 1954 and
retained it for the rest of the decade. In 1956, Eisenhower became the first presi-
dent to be elected without his party controlling either house of Congress.
In his two campaigns for president, the Texas-born Eisenhower made
remarkable inroads in the Democratic South, a harbinger of the region’s later
political realignment. In 1952, he carried eight former slave states and won
48 percent of the votes cast in the states of the Confederacy. He ran strongly
among moderate whites living in metropolitan and suburban areas of the
upper South and border states. But his personal appeal did not translate into a
“coattail” effect. For the time being, Democrats continued to control almost all
southern state and local offices.
During the 1950s, voters at home and abroad seemed to find reassurance in
selecting familiar, elderly leaders to govern them. At age sixty-two, Eisenhower
was one of the oldest men ever elected president. But he seemed positively
youthful compared with Winston Churchill, who returned to office as primeA poster for Adlai Stevenson, Democratic
candidate for president in 1952. The party’s main
argument, it seems, was that Republican victory
would usher in a return of the Great Depression.
Stevenson was soundly defeated by Dwight
D. Eisenhower.