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March 5 - March 18, 2024
Although Eisenhower would eventually win the praise of posterity for staying out of the Indochinese war in 1954, at the time most observers believed that he and the United States had suffered a terrible defeat. Critics said that Eisenhower had abandoned France, an old ally, as it was engaged in a death struggle with communist insurgents. The president looked on as Dien Bien Phu and northern Vietnam fell to communist battalions.
in order to compensate for the loss of prestige the West had suffered due to the communist victory in northern Vietnam, the United States would rededicate itself to shoring up military and economic ties to Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines, as well as Australia and New Zealand. Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam too would come under the American umbrella. A new regional security treaty, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, would pull Asian states into a military alliance backed by American power.
Thus, on January 24, Eisenhower sent a message to Congress asking for authority to use armed forces to defend Taiwan—indeed to do more than that: to repel attacks on “closely related localities” that might be a preliminary to an attack on Taiwan. That could only mean Quemoy and Matsu. “Our purpose is peace,” Eisenhower declared, but then insisted that he be given authority to wage war if the line he now drew was crossed. Four days later the “Formosa Resolution” passed the two houses of Congress with near unanimity. Unlike during the Dien Bien Phu crisis, Eisenhower had laid down a bold red
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By September 1952 Eisenhower had broadened his message somewhat, stating that he would eagerly abolish segregation in the nation’s capital and continue to expunge it from the armed services. In enforcing Jim Crow segregation in Washington, D.C., he said, “we have the poorest possible example given to those of other lands of what this country is and what it means.” But he would not impose new laws on the South. “An ounce of leadership,” he said in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, “is worth a pound of law.”
He then announced a concrete action: “I propose to use whatever authority exists in the office of the President to end segregation in the District of Columbia, including the Federal Government, and any segregation in the Armed Forces.”8
“Wherever federal funds are expended for anything, I do not see how any American can justify—legally, or logically, or morally—a discrimination in the expenditure of those funds among our citizens.” There was little ambiguity in this message.10 The next day Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens produced a memo for the president’s press secretary, James Hagerty, that confirmed Dunnigan’s assertion: there were indeed segregated schools being operated on military installations in Virginia, Oklahoma, and Texas. These schools, however, were funded by the states and supervised by local school boards.
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JUST AFTER CHRISTMAS 1955 EISENHOWER received some welcome news from George Gallup, the pollster and director of the American Institute of Public Opinion. Americans, Gallup reported, considered Eisenhower the most admired man in the world, at the head of a distinguished pack that included Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur, Harry Truman, Albert Schweitzer, Pope Pius XII, and the Rev. Billy Graham. Yet the president was probably not surprised by the honor. He had also topped the list in 1954. And in 1953, 1952, and 1951. Indeed Ike would be America’s most admired man for ten straight years
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Stable prices created a sense of predictability, allowing Americans to think ahead about how to spend their extra cash. Homeownership spiked: more Americans owned their own homes in 1960 than in 1950 (53 percent compared to 48 percent). The newest appliance in those homes was the television, which was present in 87 percent of American households by 1960. As the suburbs expanded, Americans bought more cars. In 1950, 59 percent of families owned a car, but by 1960, 73 percent did. And most of those cars were made in America by one of three companies: General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler. And of
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On October 4 the Soviet Union successfully put into orbit the world’s first man-made satellite, a 184-pound aluminum sphere named Sputnik, meaning “fellow traveler.” Moving at 18,000 miles per hour and orbiting the Earth every 96 minutes, the satellite carried a simple radio transmitter that emitted periodic beeps. “An eerie intermittent croak—it sounded like a cricket with a cold—was picked up by radio receivers around the world last week,” noted Life magazine. Not only was it audible; some Americans claimed they could see it in the night sky, a bright dot moving rapidly through the
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And the best way to attract leading minds to work on space was to separate it from purely military projects. In remarkably rapid fashion Congress passed legislation creating NASA, and Eisenhower signed the bill on July 29, 1958.42
The United States and the USSR began exploratory talks in summer 1958 about an atmospheric test ban treaty, and in response to growing public pressure Eisenhower announced a one-year moratorium on such tests on October 31.
This success in lowering the heat over Berlin was clouded by unsettling news. John Foster Dulles was dying. In February he had gone to Walter Reed for another operation on his cancerous intestines. Ann Whitman noted in her diary that the postoperation report was “not good”: “The doctors feel there is no use attempting another operation—they are going to give him radiation every other day.” The president, who, Whitman wrote, “did not dwell on death” and was rarely shaken by the loss of friends, was “hard hit.” He even mused about dying and seemed in a funk at the prospect of losing his closest
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Herter had been acting secretary during the last stages of Dulles’s illness. He was a mild-mannered gentleman, almost crippled by severe arthritis, and not nearly as hawkish as Dulles. Ike seemed reluctant to face the fact that Dulles was dying and said he would not “rush to a decision in the matter” of replacing him. But Dulles had made up his mind. On April 15 Eisenhower announced to the press that Dulles would resign his post. On May 24 he died.
By the time of Khrushchev’s departure, at 11:00 p.m. on September 27, the cold war had shifted from a bitter rivalry into something else, a competition to be sure, but one that could be disputed with words and ideas rather than nuclear weapons. The two leaders had engaged with one another on a personal, human level as never before. Khrushchev’s visit had been at times tense and awkward, at times comic and downright goofy. But it had sparked curiosity and even some goodwill. Ike told a press conference that the “threat” of war over Berlin had been lifted. In his last act in the United States,
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To JFK the Age of Eisenhower had been bland, unimaginative, and sclerotic. Privately Kennedy jeered at Eisenhower, calling him “the old asshole” to members of his entourage. Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger Jr. that Eisenhower was “a terribly cold man. In fact, he is a shit.”2 Kennedy may in fact have believed some of the caricature he drew of the president. But if, as he arrived at the White House on December 6, he expected to find Eisenhower dim-witted and distant, out of touch with the realities of governing, he was deeply mistaken. Eisenhower brought the president-elect into the Oval Office
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“Eisenhower was better than I had thought,” he later confided to his brother Robert. Ike had a “strong personality,” and JFK “could understand, talking to him, why he was President of the United States.”4
John F. Kennedy took the oath of office on January 20, 1961, as the 35th president. The youngest man elected president, he took over the reins of government from the oldest man to serve as chief executive up to that time. Kennedy understood the importance of this generational divide, and his remarks on that cold January morning stressed a new beginning and a New Frontier, a break with the ways of the past. “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century,” he said, consigning Eisenhower (born in 1890) to the dustbin of history. After Kennedy’s swearing-in, Ike
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