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Many presidents have a defining moment – a call to arms in a speech, a decisive action,  a public stumble.   That is not quite the case with the Eisenhower administration,  which was so undramatic that its opponents sneered at Eisenhower as a do-nothing, a mere custodian of the office pending the arrival of a real president.   William I. Hitchcock reviews more recent scholarship  and dismisses that caricature of the Eisenhower years,  and here offers a more measured look at a very measured man.  Going into this volume, I didn’t know much at all about the Eisenhower administration save for Sputnik and the Iran coup,  so this was a fun deep dive that meshed nicely with The Hidden Coalition as well as Ike and Dick. 

Although Eisenhower was encouraged to run for office the moment D-Day was over,  he demurred: he had no interest in that sort of thing, he said.  So high was his flag that even President Truman urged him to run in 1948 – the same year that Truman would run for election in his own name, and narrowly beat Dewey.   Eisenhower took a Washingtonian approach to seeking high office: he would not seek it. However,  soldier that he was,  he would serve if he was called and it was necessary.   The fact that both parties courted Eisenhower is a testament to both his established leadership during the war, and his general affability: one reporter commented that something about being around Ike just made people feel good.  He was like a grandpa with a pocket full of peppermints and a readiness to listen to every detail about how your day had gone.

That was the image.  As a president working with Congress,  Eisenhower was unpracticed and clumsy – but as a politician, he had a certain dark cunning that Nixon commented on in private. Eisenhower was no Roosevelt,  running into the action with a saber in hand yelling “Bully!”: he preferred to work behind the scenes,  managing a strong team.  He was largely aided by his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles,  who shared his vision for the world. Eisenhower won the Republican domination against Mr. Republican, Robert Taft, who was a conservative of the old school who did not believe the world was America’s to manage:  Eisenhower, by contrast, was very internationalist.  Part of this owed to the disaster of World War 2, but the Cold War also fed his desire for the United States to be pro-active in building international institutions to govern the affairs of men in a more peaceful fashion.   Specifically, he was looking at the third world and the need to win its hearts and minds to the American rather than Soviet way. This was why during the Suez crisis,  in which the British, French, and Israelis had invaded Egypt to keep its new dictator from pushing the western powers out of the canal they’d created,  Eisenhower astonishingly withheld his support.  He could not woo the third world by supporting old colonial powers. (At any rate, the Soviets were then invading Hungary:  so much for the 1950s being boring!).    Eisenhower’s desire for the United States to be regarded as the friend of liberty was also why he made what little progress in CIvil Rights that he did: he  shared the prejudices of his time, and he was extremely cautious about expanding DC’s power over State power – but at the same time, he felt America needed to live up to its creed if it expected to be taken seriously by non-aligned nations like India and those who were emerging as European colonialism began withdrawing.  There were, of course, limits to that;   Ike was an adamant cold warrior who began constructing the permanent military-industrial complex he later warned against,  and  he had no qualms overthrowing sovereign governments if they looked like they were going to flip to the Soviets. 

This was a wonderfully deep history of the period. LBJ is far more antagonistic in this than The Hidden Coalition led me to expect; he in fact   so adulterated Eisenhower’s Civil Rights bill that he makes his 1965 self look like nothing but an opportunistic hypocrite.  I had no idea how volatile the international scene was during the Eisenhower years, and the domestic front was no picnic. Either.  Hitchcock’s appraisal of Eisenhower is generally  fair and grounded in facts, though he’s much too quick to dismiss men like Taft as  extremists for merely maintaining a position that was normal before the war (not managing other nations’ business).   At any rate, the volume was well-written and I sailed through despite its girth.

Quotations

It was immensely frustrating for Eisenhower to discover that while his appeal to moderation made him admired in the country as a whole, it disarmed him in Congress. Compromise was the ultimate outcome of most congressional proceedings, but to win even half a loaf, you had to fight fiendishly for a whole one while threatening to burn down the bakery. This was not Eisenhower’s style.

Six days later Allen Dulles and Eisenhower stared at photographs of the Soviet Union taken from space. “This one satellite mission,” said the secret CIA history of the program, “yielded photo coverage of a greater area than the total produced by all of the U-2 missions over the Soviet Union.”

What explains this decisive rebuke from the voters? Eisenhower blamed “the seeming desire of the people of our country to depend more and more upon government—they do not seem to understand that more governmental assistance inevitably means more governmental control.”

Khrushchev plied his British guests with caviar, salmon, excellent vodka, Russian brandy, ballet performances, and long late-night suppers. But then Macmillan discovered what all the other Westerners who engaged with Khrushchev learned: there were two Nikitas. The first was a rational statesman, ready to talk about peace, arms control, and coexistence. The other was the communist zealot, the prosecutor, the brawler who threw angry punches in every direction.

Ike had the most sought-after and yet rarest of qualities in politics: “He makes people happy. No cavalcade I have followed in the entourage of any other political figure in this country has ever left so many smiling, glowing people behind as an Eisenhower tour.”

In the fall of 1960, Moos and his assistant, Capt. Ralph E. Williams, sketched out some ideas about the place of militarism in American life. The United States, for the first time in its history, possessed a “permanent war-based industry” and a “war-based industrial complex” that inevitably shaped governmental decisions. “This creates a danger,” Williams wrote, “that what the Communists have always said about us may become true. We must be very careful to ensure that the merchants of death do not come to dictate national policy.”

During the month of March, Kennedy became, as even his loyal and devoted chronicler Arthur Schlesinger Jr. admitted, “a prisoner of events.” The invasion plan had a momentum of its own, and the bureaucratic forces pushing for it would have been hard to resist. Kennedy drew as his chief lesson from the Bay of Pigs affair never to trust the experts, especially the generals and the CIA planners who had all but promised success. But this lesson he could have learned by heeding Ike’s warning, proffered just weeks before, that “in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

Kennedy had mocked “the old asshole” then; he was not laughing now. “No one knows how tough this job is until he has been in it a few months,” Kennedy sighed. Ike could not resist a small moment of triumph: “Mr. President, if you will forgive me, I think I mentioned that to you three months ago.”