The Men Who Didn't

If the Taft tacticians had been brilliant at Chicago, they might have wormed their way out of the corner in which they had been placed by their own pre-convention strategy and the Brownell-Lodge counterstrategy. The Taft tacticians were anything but brilliant.

Wrong Time & Issue. Before the convention was two hours old, the Taft managers let themselves be maneuvered into the position of testing their strength at the wrong time and on the wrong issue. They were not sure whether they had the votes to win that first test. They did not even carry out their agreed plan.

When the Eisenhower forces were about to offer their resolution to prevent contested delegates from voting on other contests, a Taft strategist suggested that they could raise a point of order because the motion included seven Louisiana delegates, whose cases had been settled by the state committee. In a hasty conference, the Taftmen decided to raise the point, and to let Guy Gabrielson, then presiding, uphold it. Then, if the Ikemen wanted to seat their seven from Louisiana, they would have to appeal from the ruling of the chairman. Any assembly is reluctant to overrule "the chair." Ikemen would have had a much harder time arguing against the chair than for what they deemed their rights. Said Taft's able Floor Manager Tom Coleman: "We would have won that vote."

The Taftmen's signals jammed. When Coleman got back to the floor, Ohio's Senator John Bricker had moved to adopt the 1948 rules, and the Eisenhower forces had offered a substitute motion--the now-celebrated Langlie amendment (providing that delegations contested by more than 33 1/3% of the national committee might not vote on other contests). Who told Bricker to make his motion? Chairman Gabrielson, who at that point was apparently thinking about routine, not about Taft tactics. Things were happening so fast that Coleman had to pick the nearest Taftman available to raise the point of order. That was Ohio's paunchy Representative Clarence Brown, who had badly managed Taft's 1948 floor fight.

A Taft Gasp. On his own, Brown then decided to change the strategy.

He offered a motion to amend the Eisenhower forces' amendment. Brown later said that he got the impression that Gabrielson, worried about criticism, might overrule a point of order. If Gabrielson sustained Brown's point, the convention might overrule the chair, and old Politico Brown didn't want that to happen to a friend.

Aside from the fumbling execution, the original decision to let the Langlie amendment pass and instead to fight for the Louisiana seven was fantastic. The Langlie amendment was a serious blow to Taft's numerical strength, and might have been worth the risk of a roll call. But in no sense were the votes of seven delegates on one issue worth such a risk.

When Televiewer Bob Taft saw 1948's Brown trundling up to the rostrum to take over, he gasped. Taftmen in the convention hall were confused by Bricker's motion and Brown's switched parliamentary maneuver. Thereafter occurred the dramatic two-hour debate on the merits of the whole rule proposal (TIME, July 14); the chair put Brown's amendment to a vote. The Taft side lost it by a thumping 110-vote margin.

From there on, the Taftmen's floor tactics improved little. They fought the Georgia case, although the Monday vote should have convinced them they had little chance of winning it. They gave up on Louisiana after they had passed the point where the convention would give them any credit for the concession.

At that point, the victory-scouting Ike forces would not conceivably have compromised, yet Clarence Brown, looking back on the convention, blames it all on Cabot Lodge's insatiable greed for delegates. "He wanted to take it all," Brown mutters, "he wanted to take it all."

Most unhappy of the Taft leaders is Paul Walter, a Cleveland lawyer and an able organizer, who had developed an amazing communications network among pro-Taft delegates. Some of these were hidden in predominantly pro-Ike delegations, such as New York. Walter claimed that he had 644 votes for Taft--but these could only be delivered on an actual nominating ballot, and only if Taft looked like the winner on that ballot.

Walter's hidden delegates were of no use on the two early ballots, and these ballots convinced the hidden delegates that Taft was not the inevitable winner.

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