WHICH IS WHY HISTORIANS....:

On the second Tuesday in March sixty years ago, Republican primary voters in New Hampshire had a choice of two major candidates. One was the former Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was supported by a cabal of moderate Easterners, including the two-time Presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey and the editorial board of the New York Herald Tribune. His opponent, Senator Robert A. Taft, of Ohio--the older son of former President William Howard Taft--was the early favorite, and had the backing of the Manchester Union-Leader and of conservatives generally. Eisenhower hadn't campaigned in the state--he was still headquartered in Europe--but, when the ballots were counted, he had forty-seven thousand votes to Taft's thirty-six thousand. That didn't settle the nomination, but it did move Eisenhower persuasively forward.

The Party didn't really like Ike. He was a career soldier who had come out as a Republican only that January, and many in the G.O.P. believed that he wasn't truly one of them, although they could see that he was more electable than his chief opponent. (Many Republicans today view Mitt Romney, who won the New Hampshire primary last week, and is now the likely nominee, in much the same way.) They did like the reliable, somewhat isolationist Taft (he opposed NATO), who favored old-age pensions and public housing. But the Party, and Taft, came to terms with Eisenhower. His choice for Vice-President, Richard M. Nixon, of California, pleased the Old Guard, who admired Nixon's Red-hunting prowess, and it satisfied the need for someone who shared Eisenhower's outlook on foreign policy, which was deeply internationalist. [...]

In 1959, Vice-President Nixon, speaking to members of California's Commonwealth Club, was asked if he'd like to see the parties undergo an ideological realignment--the sort that has since taken place--and he replied, "I think it would be a great tragedy . . . if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line." He continued, "I think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion." Therefore, "when your Administrations come to power, they will represent the whole people rather than just one segment of the people."

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