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

by William I. Hitchcock

“WE ARE JUST NOT CAPABLE, in this country, of conceiving of a man who does not want to be president,” Eisenhower wrote at the start of 1950. It was a long diary entry, and it read like the draft of a speech—one he was obviously rehearsing for the many visitors who came to see him at 60 Morningside Heights to talk politics. “I do not want a political career,” he insisted. “I do not want to be publicly associated with any political party.” He would do anything for the public good, as a “military officer instantly responsive to civil government.” Yet he wished to ride above the partisan fray. He wanted to use his Columbia presidency as a platform to laud the virtues of “the American system,” a political order he considered “far superior to any government elsewhere established by men.”1 Yet the country would not leave Eisenhower alone. The Gallup poll in the spring of 1950 showed him ahead of Truman by 30 points in a head-to-head matchup of presidential contenders.