ABSTRACT
Some have gauged the Columbia appointment as a deliberate attempt to prepare the General for the 1948 nomination. More likely Columbia simply needed Ike; and the General, his gross income $625,000 higher from the outright sale of Crusade In Europe to Doubleday and Company, was ready for the life style that had been in his mind for a long time. Columbia’s Board of Trustees was merely a subsidiary of that complex. Whether any members of that board had the Presidency of the United States in mind when they sought Ike for Columbia is hard to prove. If the affluent circle around Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Board of Trustees would have been happy to make the General President of United States as well as of Columbia, they were, in 1947 and 1948, undoubtedly more concerned with placing a Republican in Washington and the General on Morningside Heights. Only clairvoyance could have predicted Truman’s subsequent victory in 1948.
