adopt his ideas, Taft remained a consistent advocate for a strong, defensive foreign

policy that did not overburden the American citizen at home.5

 In 1952, foreign policy was Taft's weakest platform position. Despite his public

pronouncements for restructuring American forces abroad, observers still regarded

Taft as an isolationist. Korea had been an issue during Taft's 1950 Senatorial

campaign but, due to the background of his opponent and the active participation of

the CIO-PAC, he had minimized its importance and made organized labor the critical

question. In 1952, he did not have that luxury. United Nations troops, mostly from the

United States, had been in Korea for nearly two years and the American people were

growing tired of the war.6 Throughout 1952, Elmo Roper-NBC polls found that an

ever-increasing percentage of the population, up to fifty-two percent in late October,

believed Korea to be the most important problem facing the country.7

 Taft, fully aware that foreign policy was both his weakness and his potential

challenger's greatest strength, had launched a proactive strike against his critics to

deflect charges of isolationism. In 1951, he published A Foreign Policy for All

Americans, a 121 page monograph that detailed his plans for American involvement

in Europe and Asia, as well as his strategy to combat the Communist threat

throughout the world. He declared that correcting American foreign policy was a

more pressing concern than limiting the expansion of the federal bureaucracy, his

traditional legislative goal, but saw the two tasks as interrelated. The government's

first duty, in Taft's estimation, was to protect American liberty at home and create a

5 For more on Taft's foreign policy, see Michael J. Hogan, A Cross oflron: Harry Truman and the
Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and
Clarence Wunderlin, RobertA. Taft: Ideas, Tradition, and Party in U.S. Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD:
SR Books, 2005).

6 See, for example, Washington Post, 23 February 1952 for a report of the ongoing peace talks.

7 Polling data quoted in Louis Harris, Is There a Republican Majority? Political trends, 1952-1956
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 22-26.