improve the country's foreign policy. A poll released in late March surveyed

independent voters and found that sixty-one percent did not believe that Republicans

would jeopardize America's commitments in Europe.14 Although some pundits

disagreed with this assessment, the GOP stood to profit on Korea and Cold War. 15

 Polling data and conventional wisdom seemed to show that Taft's oppositional

stance would pay dividends against the Democratic Party. Taft's major obstacle,

however, was not Truman, but Eisenhower. Taft had to convince his own party that he

was capable of managing American involvement overseas without jeopardizing the

fragile postwar balance. Here, Taft ran into the same charges of isolationism that he

had been fending off since 1944. Lodge, Stassen, and Adams each made Taft's

foreign policy record a topic of conversation. They claimed that the Ohioan's Senate

career showed incompetence at best and, at worst, a total disregard for American aims

in Europe. During the New Hampshire primary, Lodge told voters that Eisenhower

was all that stood between America and a communist Europe, giving the clear

impression that Taft would abandon the continent to Soviet aggression if elected.16

 Taft and the conservatives countered that Eisenhower would be incapable of

questioning or criticizing Truman's foreign policy because of his prominent role in

NATO. Upon his return from Paris, Eisenhower dispelled this rumor quickly and

efficiently. As his biographer notes, the General had been a loyal member of the

Democratic foreign policy establishment and carried out the orders of Roosevelt and


14 Washington Post, 30 March 1952.

15 In February, James Reston of the New York Times predicted that Eisenhower would continue most of
the Democratic foreign strategy. He also forecast that Taft would be faced with a Democratic majority
in the Senate and thus incapable of drastically overhauling Truman's Cold War plans. Reston
contended that, if elected, Taft "wouldn't consciously try to turn the clock back, but he might very well
let it run down," meaning Taft could not make the changes he wanted and, therefore, would do little to
protect American interests abroad. See New York Times, 27 February 1952.

16 New York Times, 8 March 1952.