[fieldmarshaldj]

"Even a Taft presidency would have been short-lived as he would perished from cancer before the mid-term elections and left the GOP in danger and confusion."

A President Robert Taft would've been succeeded by one of the most capable individuals this country had at the time, second in my estimation only to Gen. Patton, and that being his Vice-President, Douglas MacArthur. This country would've benefitted far more from his leadership than that of Eisenhower.

[Rockingham]

As far as I know, Taft never named a running mate in 1952, so it is speculative at best to think that Douglas MacArthur would have succeeded Taft after his death in office as President. Moreover, MacArthur's lack of domestic political experience would have been a mark against putting him on the ticket, as would also have been his lack of residence or even visits to the US from 1937 until his return home in April 1951 after his removal by Truman as the US commander in Korea.

Finally, MacArthur could easily have become a political albatross to the GOP if the Truman administration or the Joint Chiefs of Staff had leaked the true reason for his removal: MacArthur had been caught trying to provoke an expansion of war in order to attack and defeat China itself using nuclear weapons. The Joint Chiefs were appalled, and the war-weary US public would have rounded on MacArthur if this had become known at the time.

Even without such a revelation, the issue between MacArthur and Truman was known to be that MacArthur was broadly in favor of war with China, while Truman and the Joint Chiefs were against it. As Omar Bradley, the Chairman of the JCS testified before Congress: "Red China is not the powerful nation seeking to dominate the world. Frankly, in the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this strategy would involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy."

After the nation's highest ranking military officer publicly stated such an opinion, MacArthur's support in the GOP Congress evaporated and he went into near seclusion to write his memoirs. Although a revered military figure, MacArthur's eagerness to go to war with China had little public support. If named as Taft's running mate in 1952, MacArthur would likely have been a severe political liability.

[BlackElk]

Patton died on 12/21/45 which made him unavailable to run for VPOTUS with Taft in 1952. Also, Patton was a Democrat descended from Virginia Democrats although born in California. Unquestionably our greatest WW II battlefield general, however.

MacArthur would have been great on communism, foreign policy and interventionism but less so on domestic policy. He is revered in the Far East to this day but he showed a destructively liberal side in Japan as he systematically destroyed the traditional social role of Japanese men in an attempt to prevent Bushido from leading to further wars.