Watching Eisenhower in action, Stewart Alsop, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, called him the “most effective personality to emerge on the political scene since the death of Franklin Roosevelt.” He had a kind of “political magic,” Alsop wrote, evident from the “electric undercurrent of excitement” that filled the room. His words mattered less than his sincerity and his lack of guile. Alsop concluded, “He will be a remarkably hard man to beat.”
