Read Politics Never Broke His Heart - Washington Secretary of State

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the U.N. commander in Korea.
Truman sacked the imperious
old five-star general after Mac-
Arthur groused publicly that
his commander in chief was
timid. Gaul backed Truman;
Spellman MacArthur. Spellman
had a personal stake in the
outcome of the war. Gaul had
his full sympathy on that score.
John and his roommate,
Sam DeSimone, an Amherst
grad, stretched an Eisenhower
for President banner across
E Street near their rooming
house. From Sam’s dad, a haberdasher,
John received his first
pair of grey flannel slacks. The
package also contained a huge
salami. “I think Sam told him
Spellman Family Album
Spellman with Georgetown Law School classmates
Dewie Gaul, center, and Robert J. Kresse.
Gaul and Spellman lived in the rooming house
in the background during their first year of
law school and often argued politics way past
bedtime.
I was poor and he felt sorry for me. The GI Bill paid for tuition and books,
but they didn’t give you much to live on. I spent a lot of time in cafeterias or
eating beans out of a can.”
During the summer of ’52 John worked the graveyard shift in the
metal-fabricating shop at the Boeing Company, which was developing a
revolutionary swept-wing commercial jetliner that would become the 707.
In his spare time he saw a lot of his Seattle U classmate, Lois Murphy, who
was working at Peoples Bank in downtown Seattle. No one in Seattle, union
or business, was willing to hire a woman for a job in labor relations. John
and Lois talked politics a lot. She defended the Democrats. He liked Ike.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER was an athletic Kansas boy with an infectious grin
and steely self-discipline. After he graduated from West Point, his career stagnated
for decades as the Army shrank after World War I. February of 1940,
found Eisenhower arriving at Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, finally a lieutenant
colonel. Twenty-three months later he was a four-star general, propelled
past men with far more seniority by his genius for strategy and diplomacy.
“Amid the finger-pointing mania of the early 1950s, Eisenhower
emerged as a nearly ideal presidential candidate.” 6 John Spellman was
among thousands of young vets who rejected the isolationist conservative