Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tom Wicker
Read between
June 6 - June 9, 2019
“Young man,” she said, “I would vote for Eisenhower if he were dead!”
Now that’s popularity!
the indispensable leader who in four years in the White House had kept the Cold War with the Soviet Union from turning hot and atomic. Throughout his tenure (1953 to 1961), as it turned out, Eisenhower was one of the best-loved presidents of the century, with an average 64 percent Gallup poll approval rating over the eight years of his two terms.
A self-proclaimed nonpolitician, Eisenhower was strongly conservative in domestic affairs and a convinced internationalist in foreign relations—though a hard-line anti-Communist.
Eisenhower avoided direct personal involvement in the two great moral issues of 1950s America, school desegregation and McCarthyism—though in the latter case his admirers claim that his deliberately above-the-battle stance was an effective opposition tactic. Standing aloof, in both cases, may have guarded and even extended his popularity—but at the expense of opportunities to provide moral leadership to a nation badly in need of it.
Eisenhower’s great political strength as president was his dedication to middle-of-the-road policies, and his insistence that he was guided only by devotion to duty and a sense of the national interest.
Ike’s manifest abilities and Marshall’s good opinion caused the chief of staff to send him to London as chief of the European theater of operations. There the modest small-town boy from Kansas with the infectious grin and the easygoing manner made instant friends with most British officials, including Winston Churchill (but not Generals Alan Brooke and Bernard Montgomery).
Eisenhower hated that decision, but command of Torch was beyond anything of which the unknown young officer of a few months earlier could have dreamed. It led on to command of the invasion of Europe—and ultimately to a great political career capped by the presidency of the United States.
All agreed that he was a superb commander, perhaps the best in history, of allied forces—a position demanding tolerance and patience with ambitious subordinates from different countries, skilled diplomacy in reacting to the sometimes imperious ways of FDR, Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Joseph Stalin, and masterly management of the conflicting interests of wartime allies.
To the American public after the war was won, he was simply the conqueror of Hitler, the man who had brought victory in World War II—a typical American who had risen to a demanding occasion by hard work and high merit. So it was not surprising that, in a tradition dating back to George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, and U. S. Grant, the new war hero, in whom still could be detected the modest Kansas farmboy, was quickly touted for the White House. Both Republicans and Democrats wanted him at the top of their tickets.
Few men have had such extensive experience in high office and international affairs. Eisenhower, by common consent, had handled all his responsibilities superbly—though at Columbia, some of the faculty regarded him as uninterested in scholarship and bored with paperwork.
It’s a question not easily answered, however, whether as 1952 approached Eisenhower clandestinely courted the Republican presidential nomination or stubbornly sought to avoid it; in seeming to do the latter he may well have cleverly done the former.
His political views, unexceptional and shared by millions of voters, were quintessentially Republican, midwestern, middle-of-the-road, patriotic, opposed to the dependence on the state he thought was fostered by the New and Fair Deals, and suspicious of Democratic “extremes.” He disliked labels like “liberal” and “conservative” though calling himself a “liberal Republican.”
In international affairs, Eisenhower was an early and devout supporter of the United Nations, to the point of favoring UN control of atomic weapons. But postwar Soviet actions in Poland, Germany, Greece, and in the UN Security Council, in defiance of the Yalta agreements, slowly diminished Eisenhower’s hopes for an amicable world.
“What the hell are you talking about?” he retorted to Merriman Smith, when in a post-presidential interview the veteran United Press International reporter said he believed Eisenhower did not like the role of politician. “I have been in politics, the most active sort of politics, most of my adult life. There’s no more active political organization in the world than the armed services of the U.S.”
Taft was the champion of the conservative wing of the Republican Party (“blind, stupid isolationists,” as Eisenhower later called its members).7
These “blind, stupid isolationists” now control the Republican Party in the age of Trump.
Among other dramatic moments, they saw Everett Dirksen of Illinois, second only to Taft in the hearts of the so-called Old Guard, point a long finger at Dewey, the losing presidential candidate of 1944 and 1948 but one of the architects of the Eisenhower campaign, and voice the frustration of Taft’s followers: “We followed you before and you took us down the path to defeat. Don’t do it to us again!”
The convention was one of the last actually to be contested rather than choreographed for television. The general-turned-candidate amply demonstrated his personal appeal and his command ability—but also a certain naïveté. He allowed a group of Republicans headed by Dewey to choose his vice presidential running mate: the youthful Senator Richard M. Nixon of California.
And boy did we pay the price for that!
Watching from the White House, Eisenhower’s former patron, Harry Truman, was not amused.
For if Herbert Brownell, who was to become attorney general, had managed briefly to overcome the Old Guard–“modern Republican” split at the Chicago convention, that division would continue to afflict the party, administration, and Eisenhower, even after Taft’s untimely death in 1953.
Democratic hopes nevertheless were stirred in mid-September when the New York Post broke a story headlined “Secret Rich Man’s Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Beyond His Salary.”
This performance was remembered ever after as the “Checkers speech,” owing to Nixon’s mention of his children’s dog, Checkers. Derided by many for its sentimentality and unction, praised by others for its candor, the speech saved Nixon’s spot on the ticket (Eisenhower later told him, “You’re my boy,” perhaps defining the older man’s view of their relationship).
Wisconsin’s Republican junior senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, who had displaced Nixon as the nation’s most famous Red-hunter and was running for reelection, had called Eisenhower’s great benefactor, General George C. Marshall, a “traitor.”
That anyone could think General Marshall was a traitor is amazing to me. I wonder if Senator McCarthy actually believed this, or if he was just looking for something provocative to say, in order to stay in the headlines.
Sherman Adams, already acting as a sort of chief of staff, told Eisenhower they regarded it as criticism of McCarthy on his home turf. Without much protest, the candidate agreed to delete the passage—an unwise, or possibly a calculated decision that he and his advisers came deeply to regret. The deletion was discovered by William H. Laurence, a bulldog political reporter for the Times, who featured it the next day in his front-page story. So great was the immediate protest that the incident became the low point of Eisenhower’s campaign and remains a black mark on his record. It also was the
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Eisenhower declared that immediately after the election, he would “concentrate on the job of ending the Korean war.… [T]hat job requires a personal trip to Korea. I shall make that trip … I shall go to Korea.”12
Boom! Elected.
Harry Truman, the old in-fighter in the White House, could only cry “politics”—but to little avail.13
the Republican candidates carried five southern states—Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Florida, and Oklahoma—justifying Eisenhower’s farsighted decision, against the advice of political “pros,” to campaign below the Mason-Dixon line. Thus began the great modern transition of the South from a post–Civil War Democratic bastion to a post–World War II Republican stronghold.
No doubt the shift of the White southerners to the Republicans started with FDR’s social programs, Eleanor Roosevelt’s desegregation stances (such as her supporter for Marion Anderson) and Truman’s 1948 Executive Order 9981, ending discrimination “on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin” in the armed services. The impact was first felt in these 1952 election results.
Eisenhower later told Emmett Hughes, “There’s only one man I know who has seen more of the world and talked with more people and knows more than [Dulles] does—and that’s me.”3
Governor Douglas McKay of Oregon was named secretary of the interior; neither man nor job was of first importance but the appointment originally had been offered to Governor Earl Warren of California. Warren turned it down; had he accepted he might well not have become the chief justice who personally pulled together in 1954 the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to outlaw “separate but equal” public schools.4
Eisenhower had demanded the inclusion in the cabinet of one woman, who turned out to be the Texas publisher Oveta Culp Hobby as secretary of the Health, Education, and Welfare Department soon to be created.
Oveta Culp Hobby should be better known.
The Wikipedia article on her says: “She was the first woman who was considered for a United States presidential candidacy by an incumbent United States President; Eisenhower encouraged her to run for president in 1960, but she did not run.” The article cites for this assertion:
Smith, Jean Edward, Eisenhower in War and Peace (N.Y.: Random House, 1st ed. 2012 (ISBN 978-1-4000-6693-3)), p. 756.
Eisenhower himself described—and in some cases either exaggerated or oversimplified—the world the new administration perceived. It was caught up in a grim long-range struggle between former associated powers—the Free World on the one hand and Soviet Russia, with the now communized China, on the other.… [T]he world situation had continued to degenerate. Premier Mossadegh had nationalized Iran’s oil resources, and the country was drifting dangerously toward Communism. In Guatemala the Arbenz regime, since December 1950, had been attempting to establish a Communist state within the Western
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When Dwight D. Eisenhower decided in 1952 to run for president of the United States, his highest priority was foreign policy. When he entered the White House on January 20, 1953, world affairs and the nation’s role in them still were his major concerns. Eisenhower was “a man for whom the primacy of the problems of peace and war was instinctive, and for whom domestic political questions were an acquired taste.”7
On March 3, 1953, a servant found Marshal Joseph Stalin sprawled on the dining room floor of his fortresslike dacha; the Soviet dictator died five days later.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population.… We pay for a single fighter plane with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people. This is not a way of life at all.… Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
The president had opposed Churchill’s call for a summit conference in 1953, he said, because if at that time any Soviet leader had been able to sit alone at the table with Churchill, Eisenhower, and a French premier, that Russian would have been greatly strengthened in Soviet politics. That, Eisenhower said, would have tended “to minimize the struggles for power that are going on within Russia. We certainly don’t want to do that.”8
The Taft wing, thus unable to pursue one favored approach, even with a Republican in the White House, turned to another: the Dulles platform’s pledge to repudiate the Yalta agreements.
General Matthew B. Ridgway of the army, in particular, opposed the demanded cuts, an offense Eisenhower appears to have resented.
Outlined in NSC 162/2, the new defense policy would maintain offensive striking power and consider nuclear weapons as being just as “available for use as other weapons.” That was the Eisenhower “New Look,” with overall costs reduced from $35 billion to $31 billion but with “more bang for the buck”—
Ridgway, who thought the New Look was unbalanced, an “all or nothing” policy, was something of a holdout.
With the considerable benefit of hindsight, Robert Divine observed in Eisenhower and the Cold War that the Republican administration, hoping to avoid small wars and to limit defense costs, actually had “opted for a policy of deterrence” instead of Truman-style containment.1
France was losing its war in Indochina against the rebelling Viet Minh, despite the substantial American help Truman had committed in 1950 (when his primary motive was to keep France from going Communist).
To the NSC on January 8, 1954, he stated emphatically that he “simply could not imagine the United States putting ground forces anywhere in Southeast Asia.… [H]ow bitterly opposed I am to such a course of action. This war in Indochina would absorb our troops by divisions!”
Actually, indulging a taste for covert warfare that later would be well-known, Eisenhower did intervene in the French war, ordering the so-called Civil Air Transport—an airline secretly operated by the CIA and later renamed Air America—to help resupply French forces at Dienbienphu. CAT pilots flew 684 sorties and one pilot, James B. McGovern, was shot down on May 6 and died the next day.2
first American ground personnel to Indochina—two hundred air force technicians to service ten bombers he also had sent to the French.
the desperate Paris government did send its army chief of staff, General Paul Ely, to Washington in a last-ditch effort to secure the desired U.S. assistance. Ely found Eisenhower still unresponsive, in the absence of positive movement by the French on Indochinese independence or ratification of the European Defense Community—a major concern for the president since his days as SACEUR.
Radford and Foster Dulles met with the congressional leaders (including a future president, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas) on April 3, 1954. The leaders made it clear that unless intervention was supported by the NATO allies, especially Great Britain, Congress would not approve direct U.S. intervention in Indochina—approval the administration would need if it were to honor Eisenhower’s news conference pledge and avoid another “presidential war” less than a year after the Korean armistice.
in 1953, in the depths of the Cold War, from the victor of World War II, the “domino theory” had much force and a certain popular logic.
On April 30 or May 1, Cutler brought the president an NSC paper exploring the possibility of using atomic bombs in the Indochinese crisis. According to his own recollection, Eisenhower exploded: “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.”5
The president told a news conference that the “preventive war” that many were calling for was “just ridiculous in itself.”
there is no victory except through our imaginations.…”6
Eisenhower had seen to it that there had been no open U.S. intervention in the French war and no “preventive” atomic or nuclear assault on China and/or the Soviet Union.
