The Age of Eisenhower Read online

  In confronting the greatest social and moral challenge of his times, the civil rights movement, Eisenhower—like many white Americans of the era—responded with caution and wariness. Crucially, though, he did not obstruct progress on civil rights. Instead he channeled it along a path that aligned with his own ideas about managing social change. Knowing that he was out of his depth on such matters, he accepted guidance from the most consequential cabinet officer of the decade, Attorney General Herbert Brownell. Together these two men worked quietly through the courts to weaken Jim Crow segregation. They appointed five moderately progressive jurists to the U.S. Supreme Court and ushered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through a skeptical Congress. The Act was a landmark only because it was so rare: the first civil rights law since Reconstruction. Eisenhower took an enormous risk, and one that was deeply uncharacteristic, when he ordered federal troops to surround Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, to ensure that court-ordered desegregation proceed despite the hostility of local authorities. It is true that Eisenhower never publicly or personally embraced the fundamental demand of African Americans for equal justice, but he did use his power to aid rather than halt the work of a courageous generation of civil rights crusaders who were just emerging onto the American scene.

  Third, Eisenhower established a distinctive model of presidential leadership that Americans—now more than ever—ought to study. We might call it the disciplined presidency. Raised in a strict and frugal family and trained for a career of soldiering, Ike believed that discipline was the key to success. Not only did he apply discipline to his own person, maintaining his weight at a trim 175 pounds and quitting a four-pack-a-day cigarette habit overnight, but discipline infused his governing style. Coming into Truman’s disorganized and improvisational White House, Eisenhower imposed order on it, establishing clear rules of procedure. Each Monday he met with leaders from Congress; Wednesday he held his weekly press conference with the print, radio, and (after January 1955) television reporters; Thursdays he chaired the National Security Council; Fridays he met with his cabinet.

  Truman did not convene his NSC often, and Kennedy simply dismissed it. Eisenhower, by contrast, endowed the NSC with enormous importance. He used the weekly meetings of this body to craft, review, and approve policies. In his eight years in office, the NSC met 366 times, and Eisenhower was present at 329 of those meetings—a 90 percent attendance rate. It is easy to lampoon this bureaucratic drudgery, but for Eisenhower good government required such constant focus. “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything,” he often remarked. “If you haven’t been planning, you can’t start to work, intelligently at least.” In the hour of crisis Ike wanted a disciplined, well-trained staff and system already in place, ready to work.15

  Discipline carried over into Eisenhower’s approach to the economy and defense. A champion of the free market, Ike told Americans that prosperity would come only to those who worked hard and made sacrifices; the government would do no more than clear a path so that individual Americans could demonstrate their God-given talents. It is no accident that Eisenhower’s closest friends were self-made millionaires who, like him, had started out in life with little. He also told Americans they needed discipline to wage and win the cold war. From his first inaugural to his Farewell Address, he insisted that to prevail in the struggle against global communism, Americans needed to demonstrate vigilance and steadfast purpose. They needed to pay taxes, serve in the military, and rally to the defense of their country. They needed to spend wisely on defense so as not to jeopardize the health of the economy or trigger inflation. Most significant, he believed, the American system could endure only if citizens willingly imposed self-discipline and prepared themselves to bear the common burden of defending free government. Americans like to think of themselves as the inheritors of Athenian democracy, but Eisenhower, a soldier-statesman who believed his nation faced a dire threat from a hostile ideology, also drew inspiration from the martial virtues of Sparta.16

  Ike’s insistence on vigilance, discipline, restraint, and individual self-reliance sometimes worked against him politically. He was never comfortable in the role of a purely partisan leader. He did have strong views on many issues, and he presented himself at election time as a conservative, small-government, budget-balancing Republican. But he considered the president a national leader, above the partisan fracas. This tendency to leave the job of party politics to others got him in trouble. In the elections of 1954, 1956, and 1958 Republicans lost 68 seats in the House and 17 seats in the Senate, and Eisenhower had no good answer for this implosion. When Democrats attacked him from late 1957 on for his alleged lapses on a series of issues, from national defense to economic growth and social programs, Eisenhower failed to mount an effective partisan rebuttal to these charges. In 1960 Senator John Kennedy got a jump-start in the presidential campaign, running against the allegedly cold and complacent Republican Party, and nimbly raced to victory.

  Yet one of the reasons Americans admired Eisenhower was his indifference to narrow party advantage. Though voters put Democrats in charge of Congress, they loved Eisenhower: he garnered an astonishing average approval rating of 65 percent during his eight years in office, higher than Ronald Reagan (53 percent) or Bill Clinton (55 percent). More striking, Eisenhower found support in both parties. Over eight years, 50 percent of Democrats approved of his performance. In our more polarized times, such cross-party affinity is rare. On average only 23 percent of Democrats approved of George W. Bush during his eight years in office, while a mere 14 percent of Republicans offered their approval of Barack Obama during his two terms. Eisenhower had that rarest of gifts in politics: he brought Americans together.17

  • • •

  And so we come back to that scene on the deck of the Williamsburg depicted so movingly by Captain Beach, a scene filled with pathos and deep humanity, and in a way the perfect metaphor for the Age of Eisenhower. There sat the most powerful man in the world, relaxed in a circle of wounded soldiers, men who had given so much for their country, men who would never be whole again. It was a moment of quiet intimacy, a gathering of brothers. “I know these men,” Ike had said.

  These kindred spirits felt bound to one another not by their desire for power or their yearning for material rewards or their partisan affiliation. Instead, these men formed a family because of their belief in the ennobling act of personal sacrifice and public service. In their midst, Ike drew their attention not to the benefits they could now expect from their government but to the additional role they must play as exemplars of the American spirit. Nothing could more perfectly capture the hopes and the enduring appeal of the Age of Eisenhower.

  PART I

  * * *

  DUTY

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  Ascent

  “The homely old saw had proved to be true: in the United States, any boy can grow up to be president.”

  I

  “NO PRESIDENT HAD EVER HAD so little experience of politics and so little firsthand experience of American life” as Dwight D. Eisenhower, asserted the veteran political journalist Marquis Childs in his 1958 book, The Captive Hero. And many critics echoed this claim: after a long career in the protective, isolated world of the American military, including lengthy postings overseas in Panama, the Philippines, and Europe, Eisenhower, upon taking office as president, knew little about the basic rhythms of ordinary American life and was unschooled in the ways of politics.1

  True, Eisenhower had spent his adult life in the hierarchical, rule-bound world of the army, and he’d never been elected to anything in his life. But Childs was doubly wrong. Eisenhower was intimately familiar with the nature of rural American life, having been raised by God-fearing, dutiful, and frugal parents in the Kansas farmlands, and he left Kansas at the age of 20 to enter upon a career in the most political of institutions, the U.S. Army, in which he rose, over many years of patient labor, to a position of preeminence.

  His humble origins and
his extensive leadership experience were the twin sources of Eisenhower’s popular appeal and his political success. He had deep roots in Middle America, of which he remained proud and by which he set his moral compass. At the same time he learned how to operate in, and finally dominate, a massive bureaucracy filled with ambitious egos hungry for glory. As Garry Wills memorably wrote, Eisenhower made his ascent to power by climbing “a slippery ladder of bayonets.”2

  Not only did he achieve greatness in the American armed services; during the Second World War he asserted control over the British Army as well, forging its fractious, skeptical generals into a cohesive fighting force alongside the Americans. Together—and under his command—they defeated the Germans. His leadership of the combined Allied armies in Western Europe required vision, patience, compromise, goodwill, and inexhaustible persistence: precisely the skills that prepared him for the White House. As chief of staff of the U.S. Army just after the war, he faced huge problems of winding down the national military establishment while retooling for a global cold war. For four years he was president of Columbia University, where he navigated the complexities of academia. And in his final post before winning the presidency, as supreme commander of NATO, he directed 12 nations toward the common goal of mutual defense and rearmament.

  Far from being inexperienced upon taking office in 1952, Eisenhower could reasonably look upon the presidency as a job for which he was extraordinarily well prepared—far more so certainly than his predecessor, Harry S. Truman, had been upon taking office after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sudden death, and certainly more than his 43-year-old successor, John F. Kennedy, the junior senator from Massachusetts. Expressing supreme confidence in himself, Eisenhower jotted down this remarkable observation at the end of his first day in the Oval Office: “Plenty of worries and difficult problems. But such has been my portion for a long time—the result is that this just seems (today) like a continuation of all I’ve been doing since July 1941—even before that.”3

  It is hard to imagine a man with a stronger sense of himself and his origins and a man as tested by war, the burdens of command, and the politics of world leadership as was Dwight D. Eisenhower on the day he took office as the 34th president of the United States.

  II

  There was nothing inevitable in this ascent. Eisenhower’s forebears had emigrated from the Susquehanna Valley of Pennsylvania to Abilene, Kansas, in 1878. They formed part of a colony of prosperous Mennonites who were searching for a new start in the wide-open plains of the West. The family patriarch, Jacob Eisenhower, a minister of the River Brethren Church, saw opportunity in Kansas and desired greater distance from the influence of modernity that was starting to encroach upon the Plain People of south-central Pennsylvania. In Abilene, Jacob bought hundreds of acres of rich farmland, built a large homestead with ample room for gatherings of his church flock, and settled into a life of farming and worship.

  Jacob’s son David Eisenhower, not drawn to the rigors of a life on the land, hoped to establish himself in business. He spent a year at Lane University in Lecompton, Kansas, improving himself, learning Greek, and studying mechanics. At Lane he also met a pretty young woman whose family hailed from Virginia, Ida Elizabeth Stover. The two were married in the Lane University chapel in September 1885. David went into the dry-goods business in the nearby town of Hope. For two years the store succeeded, and David and Ida began to raise a family. But David lost interest in the store and moved his family to Texas in search of a new start. He found work in the small town of Denison. Just south of the Red River and the Oklahoma state line, Denison had been established only 20 years earlier and was little more than a huddle of buildings surrounding the intersection of rail lines on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad. Far from home and penniless, David and Ida had a third son, born on October 14, 1890. They named him David Dwight, and he was brought into the world in a rented home facing the railroad tracks in an isolated, rural Texas town, as far from the halls of power as an American could be at the turn of the century.4

  David, Ida, and their three boys could endure the heat and the limited prospects of Denison for only two years. In early 1891 they moved back to Abilene, where David was embraced by the extended Eisenhower clan and employed as a mechanic by the large Belle Springs Creamery, a dairy-processing plant owned and operated by members of the Brethren Church community. Cautious about spending money, David raised his family in modest and at times difficult circumstances. Combining hard work with a devout faith, he and Ida built a stable and happy life, though they always lived close to the margins and never knew financial security.5

  Abilene was a small frontier town with a population in 1892 of about 5,000. It had been settled by cattlemen in the 1850s to serve as the end point of the Chisholm Trail, along which millions of cattle were driven from ranches in Texas to stockyards and railheads in the heart of the country. Despite an early reputation as a town of loose morals and dangerous gunslingers (Wild Bill Hickok served as the sheriff in 1871), Abilene by the turn of the century had settled down to become a quiet mid-American small town, with a main street of handsome Victorian homes and a downtown of a few dozen brick buildings running north from the train depot and stockyards. No longer a rough outpost, Abilene then had 14 churches, four schools, paved main streets, a theater, two daily and four weekly newspapers, and was home to the Dickinson County Courthouse. The community valued modesty, piety, plain speaking, and family. Townspeople shared the view that hard work was a duty as well as proof of a person’s worth.

  The Eisenhowers lived in a small, white clapboard two-story home at 201 Southeast 4th Street, with tall narrow windows and a slender ribbon of porch running along the front. The home sat on a three-acre parcel just a block south of the main rail line that marked a frontier of sorts: Eisenhower’s family lived on the wrong side of the tracks and would have had limited social interaction with the more affluent families. David’s job at the creamery demanded long hours, six days a week. Stern, religious, and diffident, David was “the breadwinner, Supreme Court and Lord High Executioner” of the family, his son later recalled. Ida provided quite a contrast. Vivacious, intellectually curious, and clever, her one year of college at Lane—almost unheard of among women in Kansas in the late 19th century—revealed her passion for learning. This she passed on to her six boys, to whom she dedicated her life.

  But the Eisenhower household was no bevy of free-thinkers: as parents, David and Ida were disciplinarians, and family life revolved around work and Bible study. “Everybody I knew went to church,” Eisenhower remembered. “Social life was centered around the churches,” and in the Eisenhower family that meant close association with the Mennonite River Brethren community and its intense devotions. Every evening the family gathered in the small living room to listen as David read out loud from the family Bible. Later in life Ida and David both became Jehovah’s Witnesses, a sect devoted to Bible study, evangelism, and pacifism. Eisenhower knew his Scripture, yet it is noteworthy that after leaving home for the army, he did not attend church until 1953, when he joined the National Presbyterian Church in Washington and was baptized there at the age of 62.6

  Eisenhower was the third son and known affectionately as “Little Ike.” His larger, older brother Edgar was “Big Ike.” Arthur, Edgar, Dwight, Roy, Earl, and Milton (another brother, Paul, died in infancy) shared two bedrooms; Eisenhower shared a bed with Roy. They all became successful in their chosen fields, the youngest, Milton, becoming one of the country’s leading academic administrators. A president of Kansas State University, Penn State, and Johns Hopkins, Milton served as Eisenhower’s closest and most intimate personal adviser for the duration of his presidency. The boys shared in the manual labor of the household, whether working in the vegetable gardens, doing chores, or attending to the animals the family kept in a barn. Eisenhower spent summer weekends selling home-grown vegetables from a cart he pulled up and down the residential streets, earning the family a few additional cents.

  In these early
years Eisenhower turned in an average performance in school. Intensely competitive and a gifted athlete—strong, agile, and quick—he ran with a group of South Side boys, defending the honor of his neighborhood against the wealthier and socially more prominent lads from north of the tracks. He bloodied a few noses in frequent scraps and developed prowess in boxing. He grew to a height of 5'10", tall for the time, and sported a shock of blond hair. Throughout his life he loved to be outdoors. His relationship with nature had nothing of the masculine, self-improvement hyperbole of Theodore Roosevelt or Robert Baden-Powell, two leading figures of the day then urging teenage boys to pursue the strenuous life as a way to build character. Eisenhower was simply a country boy who, when not working or in school, spent the happiest moments of his youth fishing, hunting, camping, or playing in the breezy vastness of the plains or along the banks of the shallow Smoky Hill River.