Gettysburg, Pa. ? It was the first real television campaign. It was the first modern personality campaign. It was the first campaign to target women and black voters. It was the first time modern Republicans saw big opportunity in the South. It was the first national campaign of Richard Nixon. The future began 50 years ago, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president.

The 1952 election represented an ending (of the Democratic ascendancy that began with Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and continued through Harry S Truman’s upset victory in 1948) and a beginning (of a Republican Party that saw its role as more than saying “no”). It reflected all of the promise (mass middle-class prosperity in an age when America was supreme, challenged only by Soviet Russia) and all of the peril (the worries at home about communist spies and abroad about Cold War tensions) of the world Eisenhower’s victories made.

A half-century later, the election is still a subject of scholarly debate. Just last week, a group of experts gathered here to mark Eisenhower’s election broke into bitter debate about whether Ike was the passive recipient of entreaties to run in 1952 or whether, coolly and coyly, he orchestrated an effort to draft him to run for president. The Eisenhower presidency, moreover, is the subject of more, and deeper, revisionist thought than perhaps any other of the 20th century; many scholars now take as a matter of received truth a notion that would have been regarded as a historian’s heresy when John F. Kennedy moved into the White House in January 1961 :quot; that Eisenhower was a sage, skilled manager with a visionary outlook on the role of the presidency in the American system and of America in the world.

In truth, the Eisenhower campaign against Democratic Gov. Adlai Stevenson of Illinois was chock-full of dramatic episodes – Eisenhower’s announcement that he was a Republican after all, his triumphal return from Europe to become engaged in domestic politics for the first time, the challenge to the isolationists in the Republican Party, the nomination battle against Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, the contretemps about Nixon’s slush fund that led to the Checkers speech. Perhaps no presidential campaign before or since had so many memorable moments.

These moments led to a presidency that may be remembered as a metaphor for the sleepy 1950s but that had several incidents of great moment, represented by simple nouns that, even today, are evocative of grave tension: Suez. Hungary. Little Rock. Sputnik. The U-2.

For this era, Americans, whose favorite television program was “I Love Lucy,” chose a leader who didn’t even vote, whose syntax was a hopeless maze of jargon, and whose mastery of economics, health care, welfare and education was limited. But Eisenhower’s warm smile and confident bearing had a way of reassuring the American people, and the man who invaded North Africa, Sicily and France was not at all difficult to imagine as commander-in-chief at a time of great challenge. “Americans believed that Eisenhower, like them, was a civilian at heart,” says William Pickett, an Eisenhower biographer who argues that Ike seemed to personify the American values of discipline, humility and fair play.

His goal was much like American politicians’ goal now, in the new age of peril: to protect the American way of life. Though the embers of ambition glowed within him, he thought of himself the way William Pitt the Younger did two centuries earlier in England: He believed he was the only one who could save the country.

He played hard to get, which was the way disciplined men of ambition got their way in that period. His campaign is remembered for the sophistication of its direct-mail effort, but in truth the mail that was important flowed into the headquarters of Citizens for Eisenhower, not out of headquarters. More than 2,000 letters a day poured into the office in New York. “It was amazing how many people sent pictures of babies,” said Abbott Washburn, a key player in the citizens’ movement in 1952.

And though Eisenhower won by healthy margins in 1952 and, again against Stevenson, in 1956, it is often forgotten how difficult was his first campaign. The Republicans not only were outnumbered in the nation, the result of the success of the New Deal, but they were also riven with divisions; at best the Republican regulars and the Eisenhower forces tolerated each other. They also were used to losing presidential elections, having dropped five straight and seven of the previous nine. “Eisenhower had to run hard and claw for every vote,” says Michael Birkner, a Gettysburg College historian.

But there was one tide that ran in his favor. The country was ready for change. Eisenhower sensed it, and then he caused it.

He went after the black vote by advertising in black newspapers, making a highly visible visit to Harlem and speaking out for equal rights. He made inroads among the women’s vote (in part as a result of Stevenson’s divorce, in part because his vow to go to Korea appealed to mothers and sweethearts of draft-age men). He won the election of 1952 and then emerged from two terms as president as, in the words of retired Princeton political scientist Fred Greenstein, a “very analytical and very penetrating figure.” Who says elections never bring surprises?