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

by William I. Hitchcock

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.

Eisenhower worked hard, and successfully, to keep the peace. His global strategy required the steady accumulation of immense national power and a willingness to deploy that power when necessary. Building on the legacy of Truman, who laid the foundations of the cold war state, Eisenhower deployed American economic muscle, diplomatic leverage, generous deliveries of arms, and a global nuclear shield to deter and intimidate America’s enemies. He mobilized science, universities, and industry to boost American military power, even going so far as to take the first steps in the militarization of space. He presided over a significant expansion of America’s secret intelligence agencies and ordered them to conduct covert operations and coups d’état around the world.

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. Biographers have often hailed his tight-fisted budget policies, but when it came to national defense, he was not stingy.

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

But once in office he adopted centrist and pragmatic policies that fairly reflected the preferences of most of his fellow citizens. Early on he made his peace with the New Deal, expanding social security, raising the minimum wage, and founding the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He even suggested ideas for a national health insurance system. Eisenhower found a way to make government work without making it too big;

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.

It is easy to lampoon this bureaucratic drudgery, but for Eisenhower good government required such constant focus. “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.” In the hour of crisis Ike wanted a disciplined, well-trained staff and system already in place, ready to work.

the government would do no more than clear a path so that individual Americans could demonstrate their God-given talents. It is no accident that Eisenhower’s closest friends were self-made millionaires who, like him, had started out in life with little.

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.

leadership of the combined Allied armies in Western Europe required vision, patience, compromise, goodwill, and inexhaustible persistence: precisely the skills that prepared him for the White House.

For Eisenhower, the outbreak of war promised action, combat, and promotion. But when war came, he did not go to France; he went to Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia, to train officer candidates. He yearned for orders that would get him into the war, and they seemed in the offing when he was posted to Camp Meade in Maryland, there to train an engineering battalion. But Eisenhower’s organizational abilities had been noted, and instead of being shipped to Europe he went to Camp Colt in Gettysburg in the spring of 1918, where he was tasked with building a new Tank

Corps. Rather than face the trials of the battlefield, he confronted the arduous duty of transforming a derelict outpost in the Pennsylvania countryside into a major training ground for men destined to be shipped to France.

Two factors worked for him: his own hard work and the support of some powerful patrons. His posting to Camp Meade led to an introduction made by a dashing, aristocratic officer named George S. Patton, whom Eisenhower had befriended, to one of the most influential and respected men in the interwar army, Brig. Gen. Fox Conner. As operations officer for the American Expeditionary Force during the war, Conner had won a reputation as one of the army’s finest minds and most respected senior officers. Eisenhower and Conner developed a strong relationship based on mutual admiration, and Conner adopted Eisenhower as a protégé.

Under the general’s guidance Eisenhower sweated out the tropical evenings in his tin-roof barracks devouring the classics of strategy, including Carl von Clausewitz’s complex treatise On War, the memoirs of Napoleon, and campaign histories of the American Civil War. He even dove into Plato and Nietzsche, borrowing books from Conner’s splendid personal library. After their daily duties were complete, the two spent many hours exchanging ideas and provocations about history, philosophy, and leadership. These sessions were invaluable to Eisenhower, and he later acknowledged Conner’s enormous impact on his intellectual development. He was therefore supremely well-prepared for the yearlong course in strategic studies he took at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth in 1925–26.

At the end of the year Eisenhower

graduated first in h...

The Conner connection that had taken Eisenhower to Panama continued to open doors. Conner secured for Eisenhower a position working for Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing, the commander of American forces in the First World War, who by 1927 was directing the American Battle Monuments Commission.

Just days after the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, Marshall ordered Eisenhower to report for duty in the nation’s capital. After a brief stint as the deputy of war plans under his friend Brig. Gen. Leonard “Gee” Gerow, Eisenhower took the helm as chief of the War Plans Division in February 1942.

“The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241 local time, May 7, 1945.”

Truman had mused in his diary the previous month about the varying quality of U.S. generals: “Don’t see how a country can produce such men as Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, Eisenhower and Bradley and at the same time produce Custers, Pattons and MacArthurs.”

He liked Zhukov, a true soldier and not a Communist Party hack, and he felt he understood the Soviet outlook: they had sacrificed more than any other nation to defeat Hitler’s armies and wanted to be sure the job of breaking Germany was done once and for all. All that was needed was “a friendly acceptance of each other as individuals striving peacefully to attain a common understanding.” It was a characteristically optimistic, even naïve view of world affairs.

“No amount of persuasive argument, based on logic, reason, and National duty, has had material effect in combating hysteria generated by pressure groups.”

“If we are to retain any semblance of military power,” he wrote to an old wartime colleague, the American financier Bernard Baruch, “we can only do so by establishing a ready reserve of trained manpower to support our regular military establishments.”

This was a swipe at Congress but also at Truman, who had not taken Eisenhower into his confidence nor made him a key player in mapping out his global military strategy. Eisenhower was on the outside looking in, and he was tired of it.

As he put it in his Columbia inaugural address on

October 12, 1948, “Human freedom is today threatened by regimented statism. . . . In today’s struggle, no free man, no free institution, can be neutral.” Americans must fight for freedom at home and abroad or risk losing it to forces of subversion, tyranny, and a paternalist state. On the world stage he called for vigilance against Soviet aggression and tyranny, but much of his criticism was directed at the home front.

From 1948 on, Eisenhower developed a posse of wealthy, politically active Republican friends who had made their fortunes in manufacturing, oil, finance, and publishing and who served him as an informal kitchen cabinet. These men, hugely successful in their own right, virtually worshipped Eisenhower and set out to coax him into the political world. They made their considerable resources available to him, helped him develop a network of contacts across the country, and, perhaps most important, provided him with access to the private, elite world of Republican grandees.

physical.” In 1947 Robinson persuaded Ike to write his memoirs and introduced him to Douglas Black of Doubleday. Crusade in Europe, which appeared in 1948, had netted Eisenhower about half a million dollars—the first real money he’d ever had—and Robinson had been its midwife.

Eisenhower’s friends, then, were not simply wealthy: they were among the richest

and most powerful businessmen in postwar America. And they were all birds of a feather.

Like Eisenhower, they started out in life with little and had grown up as outsiders, working in small towns in the Midwest or South. They had little formal education and considered themselves men of action rather than ideas. Like Eisenhower, they were workaholics, intensely competitive, and demanding. Deeply hostile to the New Deal and its expansive federal programs, they shared a profound belief in what Eisenhower liked to call the “American system,” that is, capitalism tempered by personal responsibility and good corporate governance. They felt that government interference in the free market they had mastered was a kind of betrayal of the American ideal. Although they behaved like elitists, retreating behind a high wall of wealth and privilege, they held themselves up as proof that pedigree was no requirement fo...

They threw a protective cordon around him, gave him their absolute loyalty, and furnished him with ideas as well as political and social connections of a kind the general did not yet have. Their help would prove invaluable in opening doors for him and, at critical moments, whisking him out of the limelight for periods of rest and recuperation.

And the friendships worked both ways. Eisenhower had something none of these men possessed: star power. He was a global phenomenon, one of the few men whose face was instantly recognizable around the world and whose name stood for victory and integrity. His friends knew a good product when they saw it and were determined to see Eisenhower become president. Over the course of many weekends of golf, bridge, and hunting, they had ample opportunity to relate their fears of “statism” and a bureaucratic seizure of power. America was in trouble, they believed, and Eisenhower was the only man who could save it.

“We cannot let the isolationists gain control of government if we are to endure as a free people over the years,” he wrote Eisenhower in mid-April 1951. Within weeks Clay had formed a small group of moderate Republicans to start organizing a political campaign committee to win the GOP nomination for Eisenhower.

In 1952 he effectively pulled off a brilliant political conjuring trick. He pretended to be a nonpartisan political amateur, just an “old soldier” incapable of duplicity, while in fact he followed a ruthless and successful strategy: attack your opponent relentlessly, stress ideological themes in order to stir up enthusiasm in the base, and promise to “fix the mess in Washington.” He posed as an outsider, speaking for the average American. For a man who had been a government employee since 1915, who had worked in Washington for many years, whose friends were among the wealthiest power brokers in the nation, and who had aligned himself closely with Truman’s foreign policies, this was as neat a political bait and switch as American politics has seen in the 20th

century. And Ike did it all with a smile.

Watching Eisenhower in action, Stewart Alsop, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, called him the “most effective personality to emerge on the political scene since the death of Franklin Roosevelt.” He had a kind of “political magic,” Alsop wrote, evident from the “electric undercurrent of excitement” that filled the room. His words mattered less than his sincerity and his lack of guile. Alsop concluded, “He will be a remarkably hard man to beat.”

So serious was the issue that Eisenhower himself traveled to Dallas in late June to give a searing speech denouncing the tactics of a “small clique” of Texas Republicans who were trying to steal delegates. He pointed out that no party could “clean up the government of the United States unless that party—from top to bottom—is clean itself.” In the meantime the pro-Eisenhower forces in Texas named a rival delegation to go to the national convention, where they would continue the fight to be recognized. This nasty conflict loomed as the convention opened.

Brownell and his allies, especially Governors Sherman Adams of New Hampshire and Arthur Langlie of Washington, appealed to the convention on moral grounds: the GOP nominee would fight the Democrats on the issue of corruption, so he had to guarantee integrity in his own campaign. This accusation put the Taft forces back on their heels; in a series of narrow votes the convention agreed to accept the “Fair Play” language and awarded to Eisenhower the delegates from Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas. The tumultuous first day was, as Brownell put it, “a disastrous day for Taft.” He was stuck 100 votes short of the nomination, and the momentum was moving swiftly toward Eisenhower.

Behind the scenes, Brownell, Dewey, Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the Eisenhower team now put intense pressure on the delegates to get on the Eisenhower bandwagon. They made a simple and powerful argument: Taft could not win a national election, and Eisenhower could. With Ike on the ticket, the Republicans would be back in the White House after 20 years. It worked: early in the afternoon of Friday, July 11, the balloting began, and as state after state voted, it

became clear that Eisenhower was leading—slightly. By the time the last delegate had spoken—the Virgin Islands named its single delegate for Eisenhower—the vote stood at 595 for Eisenhower, 500 for Taft, 81 for Earl Warren, 20 for Harold Stassen, and 10 for Douglas MacArthur. Ike was nine votes short. The leader of the Minnesota delegation, Senator Edward J. Thye, leaped to his feet and asked to be recognized, whereupon he switched his state’s votes, formerly pledged to Stassen, to Eisenhower. Other delegations rose to do the same, making a second ballot unnecessary. By the time all the votes were counted, Eisenhower had 845 votes to 280 for Taft. Governor Warren, still hoping a deadlocked convention might turn to him as a fallback choice, held on to his delegates until the bitter end.

In fact the right wing of the party would never forgive Eisenhower or be reconciled to his leadership.

Yet Nixon did have some attractive features for the Eisenhower team. His youth

would counteract Eisenhower’s 62 years; his home state of California would balance out Eisenhower’s New York residency (and the impression of Dewey’s influence); and he was both a conservative and an internationalist who had the respect of the Old Guard and the Taft camp while not being beholden to them. He had also developed a reputation—appalling to some, thrilling to others—as an avid Red hunter, the man who unmasked Alger Hiss, the dapper State Department official who had passed secret documents to a communist spy. “Nixon seemed an almost ideal candidate for vice-president,” Brownell suggested. “He was young, geographically right, had experience both in the House and Senate with a good voting record, and was an excellent speaker.” According to Sherman Adams, “Eisenhower wanted above all a vice-presidential nominee with a demonstrable record of anti-Communism.” The Eisenhower campaign strategists needed an aggressive campaigner on the ticket. In Nixon, they got their man.

At the Democratic National Convention, also held in Chicago, the delegates heard a kind of talk they thirsted for like weary travelers crossing a desert of parched rhetoric. “Intemperate criticism is not a policy for the nation,” Stevenson said, chiding the Republicans. “Denunciation is not a program for our salvation. . . . What counts is not just what we are against but what we are for.” Listening to the convention over the radio 1,000 miles away in New Hampshire, a young aspiring reporter named Mary McGrory heard Stevenson’s words crackling through the night. “Stevenson’s speeches seemed beautiful to me,” she confessed. “Politically speaking, it was the Christmas morning of our lives.”

Republicans, by contrast, did not rely on oratory. They had a blunt election slogan: “Time for a change.” After 20 years of Democratic rule, this resonated. “Indignation,” observed Rovere, was “the emotional keynote of Eisenhower’s campaign.” Allegations swirled around Truman’s administration that a New Deal agency, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, had been approving loans in return for political favors. Republicans cried foul, condemning corruption in high places. They bemoaned bloated federal budgets and expansive bureaucracy, reviled

Truman’s alleged failure to combat communist subversion at home, and denounced the stumbling diplomacy that had lost China and invited North Korean aggression in June 1950. Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota tried to summarize the case against the Democrats in a scientific formula: “K1C2”—Korea, Communism, and Corruption.

Eisenhower covered 20,000 miles by rail and flew 30,000 miles across the country, visiting 45 states and 232 towns and cities. In every town where he appeared, an advance team arrived many hours before in a giant truck labeled “The Eisenhower Bandwagon.” From this emerged an army surplus jeep with a shrieking sound system that blared out “I Like Ike” songs and broadcast the message that Eisenhower would soon be passing through town. 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!”