As much as the 1950s has produced images of suburbs, rock music, sock hops, and happy families, the decade was in many ways a troubling time. Over it loomed the threat of nuclear war, as children ducked under their desks at school to practice for possible A-bomb attacks and adults worried that communists lurked everywhere. When Dwight Eisenhower ran for president in 1952, he projected the confident side of post–World War II society and the desire of many Americans for a reassuring voice in the nuclear darkness. Eisenhower’s role as commander of the European theater in World War II made him the most famous man in America, perhaps in the entire world. Many compared him to George Washington, with his status as a military hero and father figure. Like Washington, Dwight David Eisenhower 287 Eisenhower inspired trust. "I’m going to try to be as truthful as I can be,” he said. Unlike Washington, however, he refused to take a public stand on moral issues—a fault that compromised his presidency. k Dwight David Eisenhower was born in Denison, Texas, on October 14, 1890, the third son of David and Ida Stover Eisenhower. In 1891 his father moved to Abilene, Kansas, and Dwight, called "Little Ike,” grew up in a small, two-story, white frame house. The elder Eisenhower, a failed shopkeeper, worked as a mechanic at a creamery. Both he and Ida were devout Mennonites and pacifists. She had an enormous influence on Ike through her enthusiasm for life and her preaching in favor of worldly success and divine spirituality. In Abilene, a small town with fewer than 4,000 people, Ike imbibed mainstream values, among them patriotism and conservative politics; almost everyone in town voted Republican. He later recalled that as a boy he got caught up in the town’s political excitement: "The earliest national election I can recall is that of 1896, in which William McKinley opposed William Jennings Bryan. I . . . helped campaign that year by marching in a nighttime parade with a flaming torch made of a rag and soaked in coal oil.” Ike had a terrible temper as a child and fought to control it throughout his life; yet he was outgoing and friendly and flashed a grin that disarmed intimates and later charmed the voting public. In school he liked spelling and math, and in his teens he played football and baseball and organized the Abilene High School Athletic Association to promote games. Enthralled with military history, he sometimes ignored his chores and schoolwork while he pored over the pages of a book. Young Eisenhower wanted to attend the University of Michigan, but in 1910 a friend, Everett "Swede” Hazlett, convinced him to take the service academy exam. Ike’s score failed to qualify him for the Naval Academy, but it did qualify him for West Point. He entered the military academy in 1911, much to the regret of his mother, who abhorred war and any kind of violence. An average student and something of a nonconformist who occasionally disobeyed rules, Ike excelled at football. A writer for the New York Times extolled his potential, but a knee injury ended his playing days, after which he became a cheerleader and coach of the junior varsity. Eisenhower graduated from West Point in 1915 and was assigned as a second lieutenant to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. Just a few days later, he met the daughter of a successful Denver meatpacker, 18-year-old Mary Geneva Doud (called "Mamie,”) and began courting her. She thought him "the handsomest male I have ever seen.” He later recalled that she "was a vivacious and attractive girl . . . saucy in the look about her face and in her whole attitude.” They married in July 1916 and had two sons, Doud Dwight, born in 1917, and John Sheldon, born in 1922. Doud died at age four from scarlet fever. When the United States entered World War I, Eisenhower yearned to join the fight but never got his opportunity. In San Antonio he trained the 57th Infantry so effectively his superiors promoted him to captain and sent him to Camp Colt in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, an abandoned facility that he converted into a bustling tank training center. There he combined strict discipline with empathy to earn the respect of his men and the loyalty of his fellow officers. Still he felt disappointed about missing combat, and he told a friend, "I suppose we’ll spend the rest of our lives explaining why we didn’t get into this war. By God, from now on I am cutting myself a swath and will make up for this.” Between the two world wars, Eisenhower served in several different military posts. From 1922 to 1924 he worked as executive officer under Brigadier General Fox Conner in the 288 Dwight David Eisenhower Panama Canal Zone. Ike developed a friendship with his commander and later called his time in Panama "a sort of graduate school in military affairs.” Conner helped him enter the army’s command and general staff school at Leavenworth, Kansas. Applying himself diligently and plunging into a pressure-packed atmosphere that others found exhausting but that to him was exhilarating, Eisenhower graduated first in his class in 1926. After a year at the Army War College, he went to France, where he researched the role played by the American army in World War I and wrote a guide to French battlefields. Eisenhower returned to the United States in 1929, and after serving on the staff of the assistant secretary of war, in 1932 he joined the new Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, as an aide. He spent several years with MacArthur. Though Eisenhower found the general too flamboyant and disagreed with him on some issues, including the way he handled the Bonus Army protest in Washington during the Great Depression, Ike learned much and developed a good rapport with the general. MacArthur called Eisenhower "the best officer in the Army.” From 1935 until Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Ike servedas MacArthur’s assistant in the Philippines, helping to reorganize the army in the archipelago. By 1941 Eisenhower had attained the rank of full colonel and was named chief of staff for the Third Army. His impressive victory over the Second Army in a mock battle earned him promotion to the temporary rank of brigadier general and caught the attention of General George C. Marshall. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Marshall called Ike to Washington to serve as his assistant chief of staff. World War II revived Eisenhower’s military career at a time when he was nearing retirement, and an inglorious one at that, with a small pension and without an outstanding record. After Eisenhower had helped to develop strategy for the Pacific, Marshall placed him in charge of the Philippines and Far Eastern Section of the War Plans Division. In February 1942, he was made head of the Operations Division, in which role Ike and his staff planned an attack by American and British forces against the Germans from the west, along the French coast. Pleased with Eisenhower’s work, Marshall appointed him commander of the European Theater of Operations in June 1942. Ike showed at least one of the qualities needed for seeking public office when he established an excellent rapport with the press. He looked like a commander, and many reporters liked his warmth and sense of humor. The American public also liked what it saw, as newspaper photographs revealed a sometimes pensive, sometimes smiling general. President Roosevelt soon chose Eisenhower to command the western attack on Germany, called Operation Overlord, and the general worked grueling hours to finish and coordinate the plan. But before Overlord could begin, two problems had to be dealt with: First, he adeptly handled a controversy that erupted when General George Patton slapped a private in a hospital. Ike could have dismissed Patton but instead convinced reporters who had heard of the incident to keep it quiet. Second, he expertly commanded the conquest of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Sicily, and southern Italy. Although his victory hurt the Germans, they continued to control most of Europe. Eisenhower launched Operation Overlord on June 6, 1944. American, Canadian, and British troops arrived at the beaches of Normandy, where they confronted the German army’s formidable defensive line. The Allied attack used the largest air and sea armada in history. Under Ike’s plan, aircraft struck the French railway system and damaged Germany’s ability to transport its troops. Eisenhower encountered numerous problems, primarily from giving too much authority to his battlefield commanders, who failed to capture Antwerp quickly and end the war before winter. He also misread the German willingness to counterattack at the Battle of the Dwight David Eisenhower 289 Bulge, though he recovered by quickly moving reinforcements into place and turning the enemy back. The fighting men liked Ike. While other officers saw their recruits as soldiers, he saw them as civilians in uniform, engaged in a difficult, dirty, and unwanted war. He saw in their faces wheat fields and picket fences, and he recognized in them the heart and soul of small-town America, places like Abilene, his hometown. Operation Overlord collapsed Germany’s western front and forced that country’s inevitable surrender in May 1945. That December Truman appointed Eisenhower chief of staff of the U.S. Army, in which post he supervised the demobilization of troops. Even during the war, talk circulated about Ike as a candidate for president. "The possibility that I might one day become a candidate for the presidency was first suggested to me about June 1943,” he wrote in his diary. "My reaction was of course completely negative. . . . The hard military campaigns of the war were at that time obviously still ahead of us, and my diverting of our attention to political matters would have been more than ridiculous.” The talk intensified in 1947, and Ike responded by saying, "I say flatly, completely, and with all the force I have—I haven’t a political ambition in the world. I want nothing to do with politics.” He disliked the idea of going after votes and playing partisan games. In time, however, his views about running for president shifted, especially after the Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, failed to unseat President Harry Truman in 1948. Ike’s written statements at a later date show his change in attitude: About his refusing to run in 1948, he said, "I felt that I had removed myself from the political scene for once and all.” Reflecting on the year 1951, he said, "I think the argument that began to carry for me the greatest possible force was that the landslide victories of 1936, 1940 and 1944 and Truman’s victory . . . in 1948 were all achieved under a doctrine of ‘spend and spend, and elect and elect.’ It seemed to me that this had to be stopped or our country would deviate badly from the precepts on which we had placed so much faith. . . .” Reflecting on the year 1952, he said, "Always with friends I brought out [the points why I should not run]; always they were brushed aside by people who had become in some instances almost fanatical in their conviction as to my duty to become a candidate for the presidency.” While he was changing his views about running, Ike wrote his war memoirs, Crusade in Europe; left the army in 1948 so he could serve as president of Columbia University in New York City, and was recalled into the army in 1950 by President Truman to help organize the military forces for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In January 1952 Eisenhower declared himself a Republican, and soon after that he entered the race for the presidential nomination, saying he opposed a centralized government and high taxes and wanted a stronger policy toward communist expansion than that provided by the Democrats. At the Republican National Convention he supported a platform that called for the "independence of . . . captive people” in Eastern Europe, meaning people under Soviet control. This became a clarion call in the fall campaign. Ike chose a young California senator, Richard Nixon, as his running mate. Together they tapped the cold war fear of communism, though Nixon hit the Democrats much harder on the issue, and his name-calling made it a bitter campaign. As Americans warmed to the "I Like Ike” campaign slogan, the former general’s popularity, combined with a widespread public desire for change, meant that in November 1952 he easily defeated Adlai Stevenson, 442 electoral votes to 89. The only major campaign problem involved Richard Nixon, when the New York Post provided evidence that he had accepted secret 290 Dwight David Eisenhower contributions totaling $18,000 from several California supporters. Ike’s advisers urged him to dump Nixon from the ticket, but after the senator defended himself in a nationally televised speech, the general decided to keep him. Their relationship, however, never recovered, and neither one liked or trusted the other. Prior to taking his presidential oath of office, in December 1952 Eisenhower made good on a campaign promise and flew to Korea, where American and communist troops were locked in battle. He spent three days looking at conditions and several months later arranged a truce agreement ending the Korean War. When Ike’s presidency began in 1953, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was leading a campaign to purge society of communists and their influence. Though many Americans supported McCarthy, Eisenhower disliked his smear tactics. Yet in what several analysts today consider a failure of moral leadership, he refrained from criticizing the senator. Under pressure from McCarthy, the State Department began burning "liberal” books in its overseas libraries; Eisenhower mentioned the purge in a speech at Dartmouth College, saying he hoped the students would never become book burners, but he rejected suggestions that restrictions at the libraries be lessened. Eisenhower believed he needed to say little about Mc- Carthy because the senator would eventually self-destruct. That is what happened, but the president’s silence smacked of a political cowardice quite different from the image many people held of him as another George Washington. In 1953 Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as chief justice of the United States, only to hear conservatives criticize him for picking a liberal activist. When that same year the Supreme Court considered the case of Brown v. Board of Education, which would determine the issue of racial segregation in public schools, Ike invited Warren to the White House, where he said a few words to him about Southerners: "These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.” Eisenhower obviously supported segregated schools, but he refused to give the South any advice about how to respond when the court made such segregation illegal, saying he would uphold the decision. As with the Mc- Carthy controversy, he failed to provide moral leadership at a crucial moment. In developing his foreign policy, Eisenhower tried to balance his desire for a reduced federal budget with the challenges posed by the cold war. Toward that end, he wanted to build a "new look” military that would get more bang for the buck by substituting nuclear weapons for mass conventional forces. Ike never specifically committed the United states to a nuclear assault on Moscow should the Soviets attack anywhere in the world, but he implied it. He also supported his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who frequently resorted to missile rattling. Dulles said the United States would meet aggression by "a great capacity to retaliate instantly by means and places of our own choosing.” In March 1954 Dulles said, "If the Russians attacked one of America’s allies, there [is] no need for the President to go to Congress for a declaration of war.” Critics ripped that comment for its threat to the Constitution, and they said Ike’s reliance on nuclear weapons left America poorly prepared for regional or local conflicts that mandated a limited military response. To continue Harry Truman’s policy of containing the Soviet Union and its influence, Eisenhower used the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a means to intervene in other countries. In 1953 the CIA staged a coup that overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh, the ruler of Iran, and returned Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi to power. Ike acted after Mossadegh seized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and Britain, in retaliation, classified him as a communist. Soon after the coup, the shah concluded a deal beneficial to several American oil companies. Dwight David Eisenhower 291 That same year Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman nationalized 400,000 uncultivated acres held by the United Fruit Company in his country and distributed the land to peasants. The support Arbenz Guzman received from left-wing radicals in Guatemala, including communists, along with the confiscation itself, unnerved the United States, especially since John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, had business ties to United Fruit. When in May 1954 Arbenz Guzman bought weapons from Sovietbloc Czechoslovakia, Ike agreed to overthrow the Guatemalan president. A CIA coup succeeded, even though it violated the charter of the Organization of American States, which prohibited any member nation from interfering in the internal affairs of another. Guatemala’s new leader quickly took the nationalized land from the peasants and gave it back to United Fruit. These achievements through the use of stealth set the stage for a similar strategy in Vietnam. By 1954 France was fighting desperately to hold onto its colony of Vietnam against communist guerrillas led by Ho Chi Minh. As the French position deteriorated, Ike followed Harry Truman’s lead and poured more money into the battle. By early 1954 the United States was paying 75 percent of the French war cost. Later that year, as France faced defeat at Dien Bien Phu, a remote village in North Vietnam, some of Eisenhower’s advisers urged him to hit the communist rebels with nuclear weapons. Ike responded: "You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God.” But Eisenhower decided that simply to walk away from Vietnam would expose Republicans to the same charges they had leveled against the Democrats: that they were weak on communism. As happened frequently in the cold war, domestic fears about the Red menace shaped foreign policy. In April 1954 the president spoke publicly about much-discussed domino analogy: Should Southeast Asia fall to the communist advance, so would Indochina, and then Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, each collapsing in on the other like dominoes. After France lost at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Geneva Accords prohibited military interference in Vietnam by any nation and provided for elections in 1956 to unify the entire country. Eisenhower refused to sign the accords, but he promised the United States would refrain from using force to "contradict” them. Yet in August 1954 Ike sabotaged the agreement when he backed South Vietnam’s dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, by sending him military supplies. From then on, America replaced France in fighting the guerrillas. In September 1954 Eisenhower sponsored the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), a collective defense treaty with several Asian countries. He announced SEATO would protect South Vietnam, and in direct contradiction with the Geneva Accords, he placed South Vietnam on the same level as a sovereign country. By the end of 1954, Ike was sending American military advisers to help the South Vietnamese army. Two years later, after a CIA report stated that the elections promised for all of Vietnam in 1956 would result in a victory for Ho Chi Minh, Eisenhower made sure they were cancelled. He refused, though, to send combat troops to the embattled region. In his diary he wrote: "The jungles of Indochina . . . would have swallowed up division after division of United States troops, who, unaccustomed to this kind of warfare, would have sustained heavy casualties.” To later presidents confronted with the prospect of a communist victory, the jungle would appear not daunting but conquerable through the use of American military might. Another Asian crisis erupted in 1954 when the People’s Republic of China began shelling Quemoy and Matsu, islands under the control of the anticommunist Nationalist Chinese government on Formosa (present-day Taiwan). Republicans in particular cried out about protecting "free peoples,” though Quemoy and Matsu, within sight of the Chinese mainland, were no more than specks in the sea. China shelled the islands because the Nationalists had 292 Dwight David Eisenhower stationed 75,000 troops on them and were using them as bases from which to attack the mainland. Eisenhower sent supplies to the beleaguered islands and obtained a resolution from Congress granting him the right to use force to protect Formosa and the nearby Pescadores, while leaving any commitment to Quemoy and Matsu ambiguous. As the crisis continued, in March 1955 Secretary of State Dulles talked loosely about "new and powerful weapons of precision which can utterly destroy military targets without endangering unrelated civilian centers”—a veiled threat about using nuclear weapons. The president then scared the Chinese, and many Americans, when he responded to a question about whether he would employ small tactical nuclear devices by saying, "In any combat where these things can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.” Amid such threatening words, China soon ended its shelling. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955, and as the presidential election of 1956 approached, war erupted in the Mideast when Israel, Britain, and France invaded Egypt. They did so in response to that country’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalizing the Suez Canal. None of the invading countries informed Eisenhower they would attack, and he considered their act nothing less than heavy-handed imperialism. He sponsored a resolution in the United Nations calling for Israel to leave Egypt, and it passed with the support of both the United States and the Soviet Union. The Russians later threatened to use force in the Mideast. Ike reacted by placing America’s forces on worldwide alert, but the crisis cooled after a cease-fire ended the fighting among the warring countries. In order to contain communism, Ike asked for—and Congress passed— the Eisenhower Doctrine. This resolution authorized the president to give economic and military aid to any Middle Eastern country requesting it and declared the United States would send forces into the region should any country there ask for assistance "against armed aggression” from "international communism.” At about the same time, an uprising in Hungary against Soviet rule provided Eisenhower with the chance to make good on the Republican promise to liberate the oppressed people of Eastern Europe. But when Soviet tanks rumbled through Budapest to crush the rebellion (blanketed by the diversion of the Suez crisis), he did nothing, fully aware that to act with force might ignite a nuclear war. In 1956 President Eisenhower again faced Adlai Stevenson in a run for the presidency, and once again the "I Like Ike” bandwagon rolled. This time Eisenhower won with 457 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 73. As Ike’s second term began, he pushed a bill through Congress intended to guarantee African Americans the right to vote, but southern resistance and his own ineffective leadership weakened it. The final bill stipulated the attorney general could obtain an injunction against any person acting to prevent another from voting; yet the penalties for violating the law were so light and the obstacles to obtaining an injunction so great that the act carried little force. In fall 1957 nine black students attempted to integrate Little Rock High School in Arkansas. To stop them, Governor Orval Faubus called out the national guard. Ike now faced a domestic crisis. Faubus had defied both the 1954 Brown case and a court order to let integration proceed, and a white mob had attacked some of the African-American students. At that point Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock, and in late September the black students entered the high school under the shadow of bayonets. In the end Ike acted not because he supported integration, but because he wanted to uphold the authority of the federal courts. In November 1957, Eisenhower suffered a stroke. He later reported that he never completely recovered. "I reverse syllables in a long word and at times am compelled to speak slowly,” he said. Dwight David Eisenhower 293 Throughout his presidency, Eisenhower wanted to reach an arms agreement with the Soviet Union. Yet he continued to endorse disruptive CIA tactics and various forms of espionage, a dangerous strategy that soon blew up on him. While Ike arranged a disarmament conference with the Soviet Union, Britain, and France for 1960, he approved flights over Soviet airspace by America’s secret high-altitude U2 spy plane. On May 1, two weeks before the scheduled summit, the Russians shot down a U2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers 1,200 miles within the Soviet Union. The CIA told Ike he had nothing to worry about, that in any crash the aircraft would have been totally destroyed and Powers killed. With that in mind, he publicly denied Soviet charges that a spy plane had violated its borders. The Soviets then surprised him by exhibiting film retrieved from the plane and by parading Powers before the Russian public. Caught in a lie, the mortified Eisenhower proceeded to the summit anyhow. Once there, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev assailed him and the United States and then stormed out of the meeting. With the summit destroyed, any real chance to slow the arms race faded. His second term over, Eisenhower retired to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he wrote his memoirs. In the mid-1960s he conferred several times with President Lyndon Johnson’s advisers and counseled them to seek victory in the Vietnam War. On March 24, 1969, Eisenhower’s heart began failing him, and on March 28 he died. When Dwight Eisenhower left the White House, he sounded a warning "In the councils of Government,” he said, "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military- industrial complex. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.” Essayist George W. S. Trow asserts that Dwight Eisenhower "flowed so easily within [the] events he dominated that he became indistinguishable from them.” Trow adds that "I think Ike knew America had marinated on his watch.” Eisenhower’s warning, though, stands in stark contrast to unquestioned acceptance of the cold war, as if he were intent on awakening Trow’s complacent country with his earlier promise: "I’m going to be as truthful as I can be”—the very words of trust that
had won him the presidency eight years earlier.