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

by William I. Hitchcock

This was an Eisenhower that the public never saw. He talked to the soldiers of love of country, and of sacrifice. He said their country would never let them down, but no matter how much it did for them it was nothing compared to what they had done for it. And then he said that even with all they had already given, they must yet be prepared to give more, for they were symbols of devotion and sacrifice and they could never escape that role and its responsibilities.

Beach never forgot the electricity of Eisenhower’s presence and the impact it had on these wounded warriors. “His voice had a deep friendly warmth, with a somewhat different timbre than I had ever heard before. It reached out and grabbed the men around him, so that they kept crowding in closer and closer as he talked, as if an unseen magnet were pulling at them.”1

It is the central paradox of the Eisenhower presidency: that a man so successful at the ballot box and so overwhelmingly popular among the voters could have been given such poor marks by the political class. His critics never grasped the profound appeal of the man and never appreciated the depth of his political talent.

In a 1982 book titled The Hidden-Hand Presidency, political scientist Fred Greenstein added depth and detail to the sketch offered by Kempton and Wills. Drawing on new evidence, Greenstein argued that Eisenhower’s apparent aloofness and absenteeism had been part of a deliberate governing strategy. Greenstein believed that Ike hid his abilities and his own engagement with the issues in order to exercise power more effectively. He used intermediaries to do his political dirty work, baffled reporters with garbled syntax, refused to publicly acknowledge political rivals by name, delegated responsibility to cabinet secretaries, and fed the public reasoned, calm, simple bromides about the American way of life. “Eisenhower went to great lengths,” Greenstein concluded, “to conceal the political side of his leadership.”10

The subsequent cascade of studies on Eisenhower’s cold war policies shattered forever the myth that Ike was disengaged from the running of government. And it became increasingly difficult to sustain the idea that he “hid” his power and authority.11 The Eisenhower era suddenly looked, well, interesting. The new research revealed a complex president who at times showed exceptional restraint in the use of America’s power but who also had a taste for daring and even recklessness, especially when ordering the use of covert operations against left-wing governments. The documents portrayed a deeply engaged leader struggling to forge policies in a vast array of fields, from civil rights to economic policy, infrastructure, science and education, religion, communist “subversion” on the home front, and national security policy abroad. Eisenhower now appeared principled but adaptive, ideological at times but usually pragmatic, a problem-solver who dominated his cabinet, the military, and the bureaucracy and put his imprimatur on the age.12

Dwight Eisenhower must be counted among the most consequential presidents of modern American history.14 Eisenhower shaped the United States in at least three lasting ways. First, he dramatically expanded the power and scope of the 20th-century warfare state and put into place a long-term strategy designed to wage, and win, the cold war.

Unlike the isolationist faction in his own party, he believed that to defend freedom and liberty at home, Americans would have to defend these principles overseas as well. These views did not lead Eisenhower to seek war. On the contrary, he ended active hostilities in Korea, avoided U.S. military intervention in Indochina in 1954, deterred China’s military adventures in the Taiwan Straits in 1955 and 1958, compelled Britain and France to reverse their ill-conceived invasion of Egypt in 1956, and even established stable personal relations with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Eisenhower built the United States into a military colossus of a scale and lethality never before seen and devoted an enormous amount of the national wealth to this effort.

Second, Eisenhower recast domestic politics by strengthening a national consensus about the place of government in the lives of American citizens.

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.

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.

“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.”

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

Though fragile-looking, she possessed “the warm earthiness of the people of the western plains and mountains. She was restful to be with, yet her enthusiasm for life was expressed in constant movement, so that she rippled in the breeze of her own excitement.” In Mamie, Eisenhower had found a vital partner, a woman of energy, charm, and sociability who devoted herself to his career.12 Their happiness was touched by tragedy in the late winter of 1920, when their three-year-old son, Doud Dwight, whom they had nicknamed Icky, contracted scarlet fever. The young couple had been amassing armfuls of Christmas presents and putting them under a spindly Christmas tree in their cramped Camp Meade quarters. But the gifts were to remain unwrapped, for by Christmas Day Icky’s condition had worsened, his fever soared, and he drifted in and out of consciousness. In the early hours of January 2, 1921, he died.

Not until August 1922, with the birth of their son John, did the Eisenhower family begin to feel whole again. But every year on Icky’s birthday, Eisenhower sent Mamie a bouquet of roses.14

In the fall of 1929, Eisenhower was assigned as an aide to Brig. Gen. George Van Horn Moseley, then serving as executive assistant to Frederick Payne, assistant secretary of war. After a delightful but marginal assignment in France, Eisenhower was able to observe and participate in the making of national defense policy. “Except for the fact that I do not like to live in a city,” he confided to his diary, “I am particularly pleased with this detail. The General is alert and energetic and certainly enjoys a fine reputation for accomplishment in the Army. I am also looking forward to the opportunity of learning something about the economic and industrial conditions that will prevail in this country in the event of a major war.”16 For two years Ike studied the problems of industrial mobilization in wartime, the start of a lifelong concern with the problem of America’s military preparedness. In the late 1920s the U.S. Army was in dreadful shape, with barely 120,000 men. (By comparison, Eisenhower would have three million men under his command in Europe at the close of World War II.) Congress had slashed the army’s budget, and as a consequence the links between industry and the military procurement process had withered.

As early as 1930 he grasped the need for modern states to build a standing “military-industrial complex.”17 Eisenhower had a way of being noticed by senior officers, and by 1931 the new chief of staff of the U.S. Army, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, had come to see in Major Eisenhower a valuable talent. MacArthur was America’s leading soldier.

Most officers tried hard to respect the line drawn by tradition between politics and the military, while MacArthur “chose to ignore it.” As a result Eisenhower’s duties under the chief of staff began “to verge on the political, even to the edge of partisan politics.” Over time, close association with MacArthur provided Eisenhower with a role model of the kind of military leader he did not want to be.18

As the military leader of a multinational alliance, Eisenhower faced a preeminently political task: to fuse together the British and American military establishments, with their wholly contrasting traditions, organizations, and operational doctrines, into an effective fighting force. Such an amalgamation proved enormously difficult for, as historian Max Hastings has recently shown, American opinion toward the British in mid-1942 was low indeed. The Americans thought the British were shy of fighting after their licking at Dunkirk in May 1940, and British reluctance to open up a second front in France sustained this opinion. One English visitor in America declared that “anti-British feeling was beyond belief,” especially among senior army officers.27 Eisenhower had to reverse this tide, quickly.

All this was unknown to the wider world, of course. Publicly Eisenhower cultivated the image of a sturdy American fighting man, all business and little fun. The press played up these traits: a profile of the general on the eve of the North African campaign described him as “tall and lean with hard muscles around his jaws and lips that can straighten into an Archimedean line, blue eyes that glint like marbles—he is as tough as hell.” The reporter wrote that the general was known informally as “Ike,” the nickname he’d had since childhood. “He is the best liked and least social of any American officer in London. The town is full of stories about him, but hardly anyone outside military circles knows him.”

“Well, Ike, you’re going to command Overlord,” Roosevelt casually told him in the backseat of an armored Cadillac in Cairo in December 1943. It was the biggest command job of the war. Eisenhower earned it through his competent management of the troops, his disciplined strategic focus, and his scrupulously fair treatment of his resentful and frequently embittered British allies. Overlord was the turning point in Eisenhower’s career. The fame and accolades he earned leading the invasion of France in 1944 and then the final assault on Germany in 1944–45 transformed him into the face of American victory and set spinning the wheels of fortune that would carry him to the White House precisely nine years after being told of his new command.36 In planning the invasion of France, Eisenhower’s skill and experience shone. Not only did he attack the operation with his usual logistical and planning talent, but he had to fight strong headwinds from none other than Churchill, who never liked the prospect of an invasion of France and thought it likely to end in disaster. By now Eisenhower was an old hand at dealing with strong personalities: his days were full of exchanges with men such as Patton and the always difficult British combat commander Gen. Bernard Montgomery, to say nothing of Churchill and Roosevelt.

He could occasionally lay down these heavy cares at the small home he occupied, called Telegraph Cottage, hidden in the then-remote suburbs southwest of London, near Richmond Park. Here he found time to unwind, play cards with his band of devoted aides, listen to records, stroll in the garden, and rest. In those days at Telegraph Cottage, among his ersatz family, he developed an amorous reliance on his pretty Irish driver and helpmate Kay Summersby. At a time of immense stress and anxiety, Eisenhower welcomed the attentions and ministrations of this lively young woman who gave him something else to think about than war. It is unknown if their friendship ever became sexual; the story is veiled by the fog of war. To say that they were for a time devoted to and dependent on one another is enough.

Even the normally restrained chief of staff of the U.S. Army, General Marshall, exulted in his success, writing a glowing personal tribute to him on V-E Day: “You have completed your mission with the greatest victory in the history of warfare. You have commanded with outstanding success the most powerful military force that has ever been assembled. . . . You have made history, great history for the good of mankind.”2 Within days of the German surrender, Eisenhower’s headquarters filled up with congratulatory letters from heads of state, generals, friends, and citizens. Prominent among these was an invitation from the British prime minister to receive recognition from the people of London and to be named to the Order of Merit by King George VI. On June 12, 1945, Eisenhower traveled to London to receive the key of the city and to give an address at the bomb-shattered gothic Guildhall, the ancient seat of London’s lord mayor. Eisenhower worked on his Guildhall speech for three weeks, hoping to strike the right notes at this august occasion. He wanted to stress that the war had been won by soldiers, not generals.

At this moment of triumph Eisenhower was 55 years old and the world’s best-known and most-respected soldier. He embodied America’s victory over fascism and Nazism.

Eisenhower bore some responsibility for the draft movement because he wouldn’t issue a definitive refusal to run. “I haven’t the effrontery to say I wouldn’t be president,” he had said in July 1947, in words that poured fuel on the fires of speculation. In private letters to two men he deeply trusted, Beetle Smith and his brother Milton, he tried to explain his reasoning. “I do not believe that you or I or anyone else has the right to state, categorically, that he will not perform any duty that his country might demand of him,” he wrote Smith. If a political “miracle” happened and he was genuinely drafted by a national outpouring of acclaim, a refusal would be tantamount to betrayal: “It would be almost the same thing as a soldier refusing to go forward with his unit.”27

After 20 years of the New Deal and its extension under Truman, Americans had grown content to let the government take care of them, to provide for them, and to make their decisions for them. The result was a creeping socialism that he likened to a stealth dictatorship.32

Liberals just did not understand the real world, he claimed. They were “essentially humanitarian and altruistic in purpose,” but by making the working man dependent on the state for his well-being, they were advancing the country “one more step toward total socialism, just beyond which lies total dictatorship.” Such people think “the government owes us a living because we were born.” Dependence upon state handouts, he asserted, “must be repudiated everywhere.”34

“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.

Only one American soldier had the prestige and reputation to go to Europe to lead this rapid rearmament. On October 27, 1950, Truman asked Ike to take the job of commander in chief of all allied forces in Europe. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had been formed in April 1949 but still had no integrated military structure and no commander to lead it. Truman needed Ike to go to Europe, galvanize the allied nations, spur their military rearmament, and forge them into a fighting force powerful enough to hold back any Soviet assault. Eisenhower of course could not say no. If Truman believed that sending Ike to Europe would eliminate his most formidable obstacle to reelection in 1952, neither he nor Ike ever mentioned it. If anything, Eisenhower seemed happy to leave Columbia and take the NATO command. “I rather look on this effort,” he wrote to Swede Hazlett, “as about the last remaining chance for the survival of western civilization.”6

Back in Washington, Eisenhower found the U.S. military establishment in a state of woeful disarray. He considered Truman far too complacent and prone to accept the armed services’ expressions of confidence at face value. In his diary he wrote that Truman was “a fine man who, in the middle of a stormy lake, knows nothing of swimming. Yet a lot of drowning people are forced to look to him as a life guard.”

Eisenhower may have differed with Truman on politics, but he had a scrupulous respect for the chain of command. While working at Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers in Europe (SHAPE), he refused to utter a word in public that could be construed as critical of the president. By contrast, his former mentor Douglas MacArthur knew no such restraint.

Eisenhower’s decision to seek the GOP nomination could not yet be made public. He wanted to finish his NATO assignment without the distraction that his resignation would create, and he needed Truman’s permission to relinquish his command. So even though he knew he was going to run, he continued to feign indifference toward the political dogfight now shaping up in the Republican primary in New Hampshire. As it happened, that contest of March 11, 1952, would have a major impact on the course of the election. Both parties had candidates on the primary ballot in New Hampshire. Truman’s name would appear for the Democrats, though he had made no formal announcement of his intention to run for reelection.

On the night of March 10 a heavy blanket of wet snow fell, but this did not depress the turnout on the following day: twice as many voters came out to the polls as in the primary of 1948. And the results were stunning: not only did Eisenhower sweep the delegates, winning all 14, but he topped the popularity poll decisively, garnering 46,661 votes to Taft’s 35,838. Perhaps more significant for the 1952 national election, Kefauver edged out Truman, winning even labor-heavy districts in Manchester. The president had not campaigned in New Hampshire, but even so it was a blow to lose to a dark-horse senator from the back woods of Tennessee.

IT HAS LONG BEEN ASSERTED that Eisenhower swept into the White House as the 34th president on a wave of personal popularity rather than for any set of ideas or policies. Certainly Eisenhower was popular, universally known and admired for his war service. Yet in the election of 1952 he did not rely on his reputation as an apolitical soldier to stay above the fray of the campaign. Quite the opposite. Rather than playing it safe, rising above faction and controversy, coasting on his name recognition, Eisenhower jumped into the mess of electoral politics with gusto.

The campaign used new technology, saturating the airwaves with pioneering television commercials. Eisenhower (who grumbled about it) made a series of short ads in which citizens asked him questions about high prices, taxes, military preparedness, and more. Viewers would then see Eisenhower respond directly with a few lines of campaign boilerplate, always ending with “It’s time for a change!”

The name of one cabinet nominee was already etched in stone: John Foster Dulles would be named secretary of state.

On January 20, 1953, a cloudy and mild day, Eisenhower went to the East Portico of the U.S. Capitol to take the oath of office. Truman, his sour and mute companion in their limousine ride down Pennsylvania Avenue, now stood across from him, his face unmoved and distant. Chief Justice Fred Vinson faced Eisenhower, holding in his left hand two Bibles: one, used by George Washington in 1789, opened to II Chronicles 7:14 (“If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land”), and Ike’s own personal Bible, opened to Psalm 33:12 (“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord; and the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance”). Behind Eisenhower stood Vice President Nixon, who had been sworn in just moments earlier. Eisenhower raised his right hand, solemnly took the oath of office, and then turned to the gathered crowd.

“We shall never try to placate an aggressor by the false and wicked bargain of trading honor for security. Americans, indeed all free men, remember that in the final choice a soldier’s pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner’s chains.” Eisenhower preferred war with honor to peace with dishonor. “We must be ready to dare all for our country. For history does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.” The great task of the second half of the 20th century was to wage freedom’s battle and persuade the world to join in that struggle against tyranny. “This is the hope that beckons us onward in this century of trial,” he concluded. “This is the work that awaits us all, to be done with bravery, with charity, and with prayer to Almighty God.” Dark and ominous, Eisenhower’s speech conjured a vision of struggle, conflict, and sacrifice. The Great Crusade was off to a cheerless start.13

Just three days before his election, on November 1, 1952, the Atomic Energy Commission oversaw the test of the first hydrogen bomb—to that date, the largest explosion detonated by man.

There would be many sincere words of peace during his presidency, but Ike was always preparing for war.

What had Eisenhower learned from the Korean experience? Above all, he concluded, no more Koreas. Yet he also came to believe—erroneously—that America’s warlike disposition and atomic threats had been essential in bringing the Chinese to the armistice table. These twin conclusions—avoid quagmires and carry a big nuclear stick—would shape Eisenhower’s strategic thinking for the duration of his administration.

As commander in chief, Eisenhower could impose his new strategy on his subordinates. But selling it to America’s allies proved more difficult. In early December 1953 he traveled to Bermuda for a conference with his wartime comrade Winston Churchill, once again serving as the British prime minister.

The American public seemed to relate to the confident, pragmatic, and accessible Eisenhower style. An admiring account in U.S. News and World Report welcomed the new attitude. “Harry Truman surrounded himself with cronies,” the magazine lamented. “Eisenhower picks men for what they can do. Franklin D. Roosevelt dealt in political theories. Eisenhower distrusts theories. Herbert Hoover held himself aloof from people. Eisenhower is warmly human. Calvin Coolidge was a silent New Englander. Eisenhower talks easily and frankly.” Eisenhower’s traits seemed to align with a new ideal of American masculinity that was visible across the decade of the 1950s.

For Eisenhower religious faith was the single most important distinction between the free world and the communist world.

ON FEBRUARY 26, 1953, ALLEN Dulles took office as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency; he held the job for the duration of the Eisenhower administration, departing under a cloud in 1961 after the failed invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. Dulles left behind a significant legacy. The CIA was initially designed to analyze intelligence gathered by a variety of government and military entities. With Eisenhower’s active support, Dulles transformed the agency into the operational headquarters of a secret struggle against the Soviet Union and many other nations considered threatening to American interests. Eisenhower’s CIA went way beyond intelligence analysis; it engaged in global propaganda, foreign sabotage, subversion, economic warfare, coups d’état, and political assassination. Not until the mid-1970s, when congressional investigations revealed the scale and scope of these activities, was any real restraint placed upon the agency.

ON NOVEMBER 2, 1953, VICE president Nixon found himself riding shotgun in a green military troop transport, enduring bone-rattling bumps as the truck ground its way along a rutted path in the dank jungle of southern Vietnam. Alongside the vice president’s vehicle, French and Vietnamese soldiers carried their weapons on their hips and periodically unleashed bursts of gunfire into the jungle undergrowth at unseen enemy targets. Suddenly a few mortars landed close by and live rounds sizzled overhead. But this was only an exercise.

Just as Nixon was sweating his way through friendly Asian capitals, Eisenhower and his advisers gathered on November 5 at the usual Thursday meeting of the National Security Council to give final approval to a top-secret paper titled “U.S. Policy toward Communist China.” Designated NSC 166/1, it drew an alarming picture. “The emergence of a strong, disciplined, and revolutionary communist regime on mainland China has radically altered the power structure in the Far East,” the paper asserted. No one could doubt the fact of China’s power. “In the course of half a decade the Chinese Communists have succeeded in defeating and replacing the National Government of China on the mainland, in consolidating, extending, and intensifying the control of the central administration, and in largely rehabilitating the Chinese economy, while at the same time undertaking a Communist political and social revolution of vast proportions.” The Chinese communists would not stop there. They wanted, the NSC asserted, to “recapture the historically Chinese territories which the U.S. and the West now hold or protect,” namely Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Eisenhower, a lifelong student of strategy, knew that deterrence could succeed in keeping the peace only if it was backed by a willingness to use force. He wanted to keep America out of war, but perhaps the best way to do that was to prepare for it. That meant sounding out Congress. On April 1, 1954, shortly after a meeting of his National Security Council, Eisenhower tasked the secretary of state to consult congressional leaders: How much appetite did they have for conflict in Southeast Asia? Would they support the use of American forces there? If Ike could tell the world that Congress had approved a resolution giving him the authority to use air and naval power to help the French, China could only conclude that America was truly girding itself for confrontation.36

Eisenhower’s strategy of deterrence encountered some unexpected trouble late in the evening of April 4. At about 9:45 p.m. the State Department received a cable from Ambassador Douglas Dillon in Paris, reporting that he had been summoned by Prime Minister Laniel and Foreign Minister Bidault. “They said,” Dillon wrote, “that immediate armed intervention of U.S. carrier aircraft at Dien Bien Phu is now necessary to save the situation.” The Viet Minh were bringing in massive reinforcements and the garrison was in grave jeopardy. The French government was seeking to cash in the chip that Radford had slipped into General Ély’s pocket on March 26: a promise to bring American aircraft into battle should France request such aid. Bidault told Dillon that “for good or evil the fate of Southeast Asia now rested on Dien Bien Phu.”42

The president had made his decision: he would not send Americans to fight in Vietnam. He told his advisers confidentially that he rejected the simplistic idea that “because we might lose Indochina we would necessarily have to lose all the rest of Southeast Asia.”