Presidential Elections Explained: Part 5

This is the fifth part of my look at the presidential-election process. At the end of Part 4, World War II had ended, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was dead and Harry Truman had pulled off one of the greatest upsets in American political history.

In 1948 a mostly Republican dominated congress created the 25th Amendment making Washington's tradition of a two-term president a permanent fact of presidential politics. Ratified by the states the next year it assured that the example of FDR would never happen again. You will see as we go along the amendment worked more against the party that created it than the party it was made for. One part of it's law did allow the current occupant of the White House the opportunity to be exempt to it's rules and run for another term if he wished. By the end of the '50s, no one was certain if Truman would run for another term. However waiting in the wings was a man who would represent the 1950s to many Americans. He was Dwight David Eisenhower, the greatest general since U.S. Grant and the planner of D-Day as well as the man who won the war. Let us move on and see where he and Truman went from here.