The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s - Hardcover

William I. Hitchcock is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and the Randolph Compton Professor at the Miller Center for Public Affairs. A graduate of Kenyon College and Yale University, he is the author most recently of The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. For more about the book, visit AgeofEisenhower.com.

The Age of Eisenhower PROLOGUE

“When I think about Dwight Eisenhower,” wrote Capt. Edward Beach Jr., Eisenhower’s naval aide, “I like to recall an incident that took place aboard the presidential yacht Williamsburg shortly after he was inaugurated for his first term in 1953.”

The Williamsburg, a steel-hulled vessel of 1,800 tons, had served as President Harry S. Truman’s pleasure craft; he used it for cruises with friends and political cronies. In May 1953 President Eisenhower ordered it decommissioned. He thought the ship frivolous and wasteful and felt it should be used for recreation by GIs who had been injured in the Korean War. One evening the president met the ship at the dock in the Washington Navy Yard as it returned from a cruise on the Potomac.

“As Eisenhower boarded the Williamsburg, he stepped in among the soldiers, brushing aside his Secret Service guards with words to the effect, ‘Just let me be for a while. I know these men.’?” Captain Beach remembered the scene:

The soldiers crowded in around him. They were young men whose bodies had been ravaged by war in some way; some lacked an arm or a leg, some hobbled on crutches, others had heartbreaking facial disfigurements. . . . They gathered as close to the President as they could get, and I heard him talking to them.

This was an Eisenhower that the public never saw. He talked to the soldiers of love of country, and of sacrifice. He said their country would never let them down, but no matter how much it did for them it was nothing compared to what they had done for it. And then he said that even with all they had already given, they must yet be prepared to give more, for they were symbols of devotion and sacrifice and they could never escape that role and its responsibilities.

Beach never forgot the electricity of Eisenhower’s presence and the impact it had on these wounded warriors. “His voice had a deep friendly warmth, with a somewhat different timbre than I had ever heard before. It reached out and grabbed the men around him, so that they kept crowding in closer and closer as he talked, as if an unseen magnet were pulling at them.”1

Historians who study Eisenhower know how those men felt in his presence. Ike draws you in. He radiated authenticity, idealism, sincerity, and charisma, and these personal qualities were the keys to his political success. Between 1945 and 1961 no person dominated American public life more than Eisenhower. He was the most well-liked and admired man in America in these years. And he was also the most consequential. This book argues that the era from the end of the Second World War up to the presidency of John F. Kennedy deserves to be known as the Age of Eisenhower.

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Such a claim would once have prompted chuckles and even sneers from historians, journalists, and politicians. From the start of his active pursuit of the presidency in 1951, right through eight years in office, and for a decade after he retired to his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, critics styled Eisenhower as a lightweight, an amateur, an orthodox pro-business do-nothing president, a lazy leader who, despite all his grinning, was often callous and distant, more interested in golf than governing. The Washington press corps depicted him as unimaginative, slow-witted, out of touch, and frankly uninterested in the daily affairs of the country. Even as the nation enjoyed a period of unprecedented prosperity at home and a stable if fragile peace abroad, and even as the American people grew ever more fond of Ike, his political rivals were scathing about his shortcomings as a leader. It is the central paradox of the Eisenhower presidency: that a man so successful at the ballot box and so overwhelmingly popular among the voters could have been given such poor marks by the political class.

His critics never grasped the profound appeal of the man and never appreciated the depth of his political talent. His two-time opponent for the presidency, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, mocked Eisenhower as dim and tongue-tied and declared him little more than a tool of wealthy right-wingers. President Truman, campaigning on Stevenson’s behalf in 1952, went further: he told whistle-stop audiences across the country that Eisenhower had only “a military mind” and that voters should “send Ike back to the Army where he belongs.” The radical muckraker I. F. Stone, writing what many liberals felt, predicted that Ike, a “rather simple man who enjoys his bridge and his golf and doesn’t like to be too much bothered,” would be a “president in absentia.” Even after his resounding triumph at the polls in 1952, Eisenhower still earned nothing but scorn from his critics. “Poor Ike,” Truman said on his way out of office. “It won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen.”2

His presidency changed few minds among the commentators. A 1958 book by journalist Marquis Childs described Ike as a “captive hero,” a man unable to make decisions, passive, complacent—little more than a ventriloquist’s dummy who mouthed words prepared by others. That same year the New York Post’s Washington columnist William V. Shannon drew up a balance sheet and concluded that Eisenhower had largely sustained the policies of his Democratic predecessors in both the domestic and the international realm and had made almost no major initiatives of his own. “The Eisenhower era,” he wrote, “is the time of the great postponement.”3

Norman Mailer, the novelist, was nastier. In a celebrated 1960 essay in Esquire that hailed the nomination of the youthful and energetic John F. Kennedy for president, Mailer derided Eisenhower’s era of “security, regularity, order.” The 1950s for Mailer was a time when “many a mind atrophied from disuse and private shame.” Mailer struck a note that has continued to reverberate ever since in some circles: “Eisenhower’s eight years have been the triumph of the corporation. Tasteless, sexless, odorless sanctity.”4

With Eisenhower’s departure from office in January 1961, critics gleefully got out their spades and began to bury the ex-president. On the eve of Kennedy’s inauguration, New York Times journalist James Reston wrote an essay on the Eisenhower years that read like an epitaph. Eisenhower “was not in tune with the world-wide spirit of the age, which was convulsive and revolutionary.” He was merely “a good man in a wicked time; a consolidator in a world crying for innovation; a conservative in a radical age; a tired man in a period of turbulence and energetic action.” Scholars agreed. In July 1962 Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. published the results of a poll that asked 75 historians to rank the presidents. Eisenhower placed 22nd out of 31 chief executives, nestled between Chester A. Arthur and, incredibly, Andrew Johnson. President Kennedy himself had a good chuckle about this; after all the adulation and public frenzy, Eisenhower would now see “how he stood before the cold eye of history—way below Truman; even below Hoover.”5

Indeed Camelot almost killed Ike. Not only did Kennedy run a brilliant campaign for president in 1960, contrasting his youth and dynamism with the septuagenarian Eisenhower, but his tragically shortened life only enhanced the sense of his sparkling singularity. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had served as special assistant to JFK, rushed out an elegiac account of the Kennedy presidency. In his 1965 testament, A Thousand Days, Schlesinger used the complacent Eisenhower as a foil to better reflect sunlight upon the glittering years of Camelot. In every respect the comparison between the two men and the ideas that inspired them was unflattering to Eisenhower.6

By the time of his death, on March 28, 1969, at the age of 78, Eisenhower had been largely forgotten by the press. Obituaries summed him up as a worthy man whose greatest role had been played on the European stage in the Second World War and whose presidency was a postscript to a life of noble military achievement. The New York Times asserted that as president he “had governed effectively through sheer force of his popularity among average Americans”—a distinctly backhanded appraisal. Time magazine commented that many Americans would remember Ike “not as the 34th president whose stewardship may long be disputed, but as ‘the soldier of peace’ who led the greatest alliance of armies the world has ever seen.” By the close of his years in office, Time concluded, he was “more figurehead than president” and “out of touch with his people.” As a politician Eisenhower seemed destined to be written off as a benign mediocrity.7

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Tides, once having ebbed, always come back in. The revival of interest in Eisenhower began in the late 1960s, prodded perhaps by the deep national crisis that his successors, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon, had confronted and exacerbated. In an era of student protest, war in Vietnam, racial upheaval, and economic malaise, the 1950s began to look curiously alluring. One of his most acerbic critics, the shrewd New York Post columnist Murray Kempton, penned a 1967 essay that almost single-handedly gave rise to a new school of thought about Eisenhower. He was neither benign nor mediocre, Kempton concluded, but malevolent and brilliant. His skills ran not to governing but to manipulation, dissimulation, and guile. He sought always to profit from the success of others and to avoid the taint of any failures, especially his own. Eisenhower was “cold,” “immoral,” determined to conceal “his marvelous intelligence from admirer and critic alike.” Kempton summed up Eisenhower’s political motto: “Always pretend to be stupid; then when you have to show yourself to be smart, the display has the additional effect of surprise.”8

The theme of a devious and effortlessly political Eisenhower appeared in Garry Wills’s masterful 1970 study of the early Nixon, in which “the Great One” was the perfect contrast to the restless, insecure, and nakedly ambitious Nixon. The relationship hinged upon Nixon’s desire to supplant Eisenhower and his awareness that he never could. Eisenhower’s supreme self-confidence, his immense popularity, his ability to compel others to serve him while never appearing to ask for such loyalty—all these were mysteries of character Nixon could never hope to understand, let alone emulate. Eisenhower, Wills believed, “had the true professional’s instinct for making things look easy. He appeared to be performing less work than he actually did. And he wanted it that way. An air of ease inspires confidence.” It was in Nixon Agonistes that a leading intellectual of the era first called Eisenhower a “political genius”—a far cry from the smirks and chortles of the Camelot clan.9

The picture really began to change, though, in the late 1970s, when the voluminous archives held at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, became available to scholars. In a 1982 book titled The Hidden-Hand Presidency, political scientist Fred Greenstein added depth and detail to the sketch offered by Kempton and Wills. Drawing on new evidence, Greenstein argued that Eisenhower’s apparent aloofness and absenteeism had been part of a deliberate governing strategy. Greenstein believed that Ike hid his abilities and his own engagement with the issues in order to exercise power more effectively. He used intermediaries to do his political dirty work, baffled reporters with garbled syntax, refused to publicly acknowledge political rivals by name, delegated responsibility to cabinet secretaries, and fed the public reasoned, calm, simple bromides about the American way of life. “Eisenhower went to great lengths,” Greenstein concluded, “to conceal the political side of his leadership.”10

A “hidden” Eisenhower, then. Perhaps. But later work, drawing on much more material than Greenstein could access, suggested otherwise. During the 1980s and 1990s the boom in Eisenhower studies gained momentum, sustained not principally by biographers but by historians of U.S. foreign relations. Scholars who wanted to know about the origins and course of the cold war; the Korean War; the rise of covert operations and the CIA; grand strategy and nuclear weapons; American policies toward China, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East; the rise of the Third World—all trekked to Abilene to inspect the Eisenhower archives in hopes of finding hitherto unseen treasures. The subsequent cascade of studies on Eisenhower’s cold war policies shattered forever the myth that Ike was disengaged from the running of government. And it became increasingly difficult to sustain the idea that he “hid” his power and authority.11

The Eisenhower era suddenly looked, well, interesting. The new research revealed a complex president who at times showed exceptional restraint in the use of America’s power but who also had a taste for daring and even recklessness, especially when ordering the use of covert operations against left-wing governments. The documents portrayed a deeply engaged leader struggling to forge policies in a vast array of fields, from civil rights to economic policy, infrastructure, science and education, religion, communist “subversion” on the home front, and national security policy abroad. Eisenhower now appeared principled but adaptive, ideological at times but usually pragmatic, a problem-solver who dominated his cabinet, the military, and the bureaucracy and put his imprimatur on the age.12

Above all, the evidence showed how hard Ike worked over eight years. The allegation that he had been a golf-playing no-show was deeply unfair. “No man on Earth knows what this job is all about,” he said one afternoon in 1954. “It’s pound, pound, pound. Not only is your intellectual capacity taxed to the utmost, but your physical stamina.” It wasn’t so easy after all.13

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This book stands on the shoulders of the many previous Eisenhower scholars who have worked diligently for years to unearth the secrets of the period and to flesh out our understanding of the man and his era. It also benefits from many newly declassified documents that have become available only recently, thanks to the efforts of the dedicated staff at the Eisenhower Library. Taking into account all this material, this book offers a comprehensive account of the president and his times and concludes with a decisive verdict: Dwight Eisenhower must be counted among the most consequential presidents of modern American history.14

Eisenhower shaped the United States in at least three lasting ways. First, he dramatically expanded the power and scope of the 20th-century warfare state and put into place a long-term strategy designed to wage, and win, the cold war. T...