They knew how to play to the media, including television. But the mood was nasty. At one point John Wayne, who was a Taft man, jumped out of his cab to shout at an old mess sergeant running an Ike sound truck, “Why don’t you get a red flag?” The issue, as the Taft forces saw it, was what did the general stand for. “I like Ike,” said Eisenhower’s buttons, so the Taft people countered with buttons of their own that said, “But what does Ike like?” On the floor, during a struggle over rules, Senator Everett Dirksen announced that he was addressing himself to “all our good friends from the Eastern
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