Nixon tried to patch over the differences, but Eisenhower made his triumphal entry into the Chicago Amphitheater still steaming over the Rockefeller pact, the U-2 disaster, and other accumulated insults to his military expertise. In his televised address, he scarcely mentioned Richard Nixon or the Republican Party. Instead, he declared that “just as the biblical Job had his boils, we have a cult of professional pessimists, who…continually mouth the allegation that America has become a second-rate military power.”
