party channels.63 On the same day, Dewey arrived in Chicago to much fanfare and

opened another line of attack on Taft. He compared the events of 1952 to the

Republican National Convention of 1912, in which William Howard Taft's control of

the party machinery kept Theodore Roosevelt from winning the nomination. Dewey

pointed out that the split and the subsequent three-way election kept the GOP out of

power for eight years and claimed that Taft's actions could have the same effect. Taft

countered that Dewey's statements were just more political propaganda, and declared

that "No one has been a more ruthless political dictator than Governor Dewey when

he had the chance."64 Taft also requested that Eisenhower turn his attention to

attacking Democrats instead of Republicans, but this thinly-veiled appeal for unity did

little to calm the turbulent waters.65

 The governors' statement and the controversy over the convention rules were

the first steps in a well-conceived strategy to use procedural methods to circumvent

Taft's control of the RNC. Herbert Brownell directed the Eisenhower convention fight

with the help of the staff of Young and Rubicam and other Eisenhower leaders. He

had spent a week in the New York Public Library studying the 1912 election and

analyzed the mistakes of the Roosevelt faction.66 Using history as his guide, Brownell

intended to challenge Taft's position of strength early on. With the 1952 delegates

evenly split, a slight numeric edge could make a great deal of difference. The

demographics also made convention management more difficult than in 1948, as the

nearly-even number of Taft and Eisenhower delegates, the contests, and the publicity


63 New York Times, 4 July 1952.

64 New York Times, 4 July 1952.

65 Washington Post, 4 July 1952; Greene, The Crusade, 100-103.

66 William B. Pickett, Eisenhower Decides to Run: Presidential Politics and Cold War Strategy
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 202