Eisenhower bore some responsibility for the draft movement because he wouldn’t issue a definitive refusal to run. “I haven’t the effrontery to say I wouldn’t be president,” he had said in July 1947, in words that poured fuel on the fires of speculation. In private letters to two men he deeply trusted, Beetle Smith and his brother Milton, he tried to explain his reasoning. “I do not believe that you or I or anyone else has the right to state, categorically, that he will not perform any duty that his country might demand of him,” he wrote Smith. If a political “miracle” happened and he was
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