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

by William I. Hitchcock

For a man who claimed to dislike politics as a profession, Eisenhower certainly leaned into campaigning. His speeches were combative, vague on policy proposals, and full of biting criticism of the Democrats. In Joliet, Illinois, on September 15 he reminded his audience, “We are waging a crusade, a crusade to get out of the governmental offices not only these people who are tempted by money but the people who have been venal enough and weak enough to embrace Communism and still have found their way into our government. Let’s get rid of them!” Journalist Marquis Childs observed that Ike enjoyed making these “blunt and even brutal denunciations of the Truman Administration that draw cheers from orthodox Republicans.”

“People who saw, in the flesh, the candidate’s tall, straight figure and ruddy, smiling face, and who heard from his own lips his straightforward, un-oratorical talk, caught again something they remembered from their youth. He didn’t quip; he didn’t sound erudite; he was like a member of the family.” The effect was noticed by the press. “Eisenhower’s stock is rising,” observed Roscoe Drummond of the Christian Science Monitor. “Ike is no fancy orator . . . and he occasionally will trip over his syntax.” But his audiences were huge, sympathetic, and star-struck. “He is good on the hustings not because of what he says or the way he says it but because he projects a dedicated personality. More than one listener has remarked to me after a rally: ‘That man sure is sincere.’ ”

Yet Eisenhower worried that dumping Nixon might do more damage to his candidacy. He directed Paul Hoffman, an old friend who was now head of the Ford Foundation, to undertake a careful investigation of Nixon’s records with the help of the accounting firm Price Waterhouse. He asked Nixon to release all documents relating to the fund; the senator would have to be “clean as a hound’s tooth” in order to continue the fight against corruption—a remark that, when reported to Nixon, struck him like a punch to the solar plexus. Ike told the press, “I believe Dick Nixon to be an honest man,” and then clammed up, awaiting developments. To hedge his bets, he alerted California’s other senator, William Knowland, to join the campaign train in case he was needed to replace Nixon.

Instead he gave a performance on September 23 that rescued his political career from almost certain destruction. Known as the “Checkers” speech for its unctuous reference to the Nixon family dog, it was a landmark in modern American political history. Its most notable feature was that it was broadcast live on television and that 60 million voters watched it.

Watching the broadcast from a campaign stop in Cleveland, Eisenhower was furious. But although Nixon had disobeyed him by not offering to resign, Ike had to grant his running mate some respect for fighting. At the end of the speech Eisenhower strode out onto the stage of the Cleveland Public Hall, where 15,000 people had been waiting to hear his previously scheduled address. The audience had just heard Nixon’s broadcast through the loudspeaker, and the atmosphere in the hall was electric. Eisenhower knew he had little choice but to offer praise for Nixon. “I have been a warrior and I like courage. Tonight I saw an example of courage,” he began. “I have seen many brave men in tough situations. I have never seen any come through in better fashion than Senator Nixon did tonight.” The audience responded

with tumultuous applause. Still, Eisenhower prolonged Nixon’s agony another day by ordering Nixon, through a public telegram, “to fly to see me at once” in Wheeling, West Virginia, where Ike would be campaigning the next day and would render his verdict in person.

Nixon had saved his skin and his career. But at what cost? Ever after, Ike would treat him with suspicion and a certain disdain. Nixon’s failure to fall on his sword, his public pleading, his naked ambition, his almost painful self-exposure on television—all this repelled the proud Eisenhower. He could admire the way Nixon had fought for survival. But he could never trust him.

To his everlasting regret, Eisenhower did in fact buckle, allowing his praise of Marshall to be excised from his speech. Why? The answer that is often given is that he was a novice in politics and didn’t understand the significance of the issue. But nothing could be further from the truth. Eisenhower understood exactly what he was doing. To win in November he felt he needed to shore up his support from the Old Guard and the right wing of his party; the moderates would be for him anyway. He would grit his teeth and appease McCarthy.

Truman was roused to fury by the events in Milwaukee. He adored Marshall, and he was outraged at Eisenhower’s decision to place party unity above personal loyalty. Truman decided to go on the attack. In speeches in Oakland and San Francisco just a day after Eisenhower’s Milwaukee fiasco, Truman linked Eisenhower with “a wave of filth” that he claimed Republicans were spreading.

The 1952 election was not Eisenhower’s finest hour. He made regrettable mistakes

on the campaign trail, allowing Nixon to outmaneuver him during the fund scandal, refusing to break with right-wing zealots like McCarthy and Jenner, and failing to rally to the defense of George Marshall, his mentor and a true national hero. His criticisms of Truman were acidic and hypocritical, given his own role in forging America’s security policy under Truman’s leadership. The campaign needlessly poisoned his relations with the outgoing president.

On Clay’s advice, Eisenhower appointed Charles Erwin Wilson, the millionaire head of the General Motors Company (nicknamed “Engine Charlie”), to run the Pentagon. A successful engineer and industrial manager, his central qualification for secretary of defense was that he had led GM during the Second World War and had worked with the government to rapidly expand production of trucks, tanks, armored cars, and aircraft engines for the war effort.

Yet he was politically an outsider, and Eisenhower paid a price for picking a man with few political connections and no common touch. Ike later confessed that Wilson never found a way to “sell himself and his programs to the Congress” and proved no match for the service chiefs in the Pentagon, who ran circles around him.3

Nor would they have doubted for one moment the thesis that America was in peril, fighting for its life against communism, or that disloyalty must be rooted out of public life, or that government itself was something to be looked on with suspicion, an impediment to the healthy functioning of the free market and the pursuit of individual happiness. These men had not been brought into the cabinet for their diversity or heterodox ideas. Quite simply they embodied the Age of Eisenhower.

Eisenhower tried to walk a fine line: he accepted MacArthur’s offer to meet and discuss Korea, though he privately dismissed MacArthur’s plan, which was little more than an atomic ultimatum to the Reds: end the war in Korea or experience all-out atomic attack. Instead Eisenhower issued a statement that was measured and restrained: there was “no simple formula for bringing a swift, victorious end” to the Korean War; he

wanted a “satisfactory solution” and an “honorable peace,” and in the meantime Americans would continue “our world-wide struggle against Communist aggression.” Privately, though, he was furious at Truman for disparaging his Korean trip as a political stunt.

Americans would not shrink from the struggle against communism, he insisted. They would fight, with full conviction of the moral rightness of the American way of life, and without compromise or appeasement. “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

burden as a prisoner’s chains.”

To drive home the strategic significance of these “super” weapons, the outgoing secretaries of state and defense, Dean Acheson and Robert A. Lovett, prepared an alarming report for the new administration. Their message must have made Ike’s blood run cold: despite its increasingly powerful arsenal of atomic bombs, the United States could do almost nothing to halt a Soviet first strike. “As of mid-1952,” Acheson and Lovett wrote, “probably 65–85% of the atomic bombs launched by the USSR could be delivered on target in the United States.” Only a crash program of investment in building a continental defense shield of interceptor aircraft and radar stations could help improve the nation’s ability to survive such an onslaught.

What was needed was a “dynamic” and “active” approach, combining nuclear deterrence—he spoke of hitting the enemy with “shattering effectiveness,” if necessary—with a determined effort to “liberate” the enslaved peoples behind the Iron Curtain. Eisenhower himself echoed these sentiments in his State of the Union address on February 2, 1953. The president declared, “The free world cannot indefinitely remain in a posture of paralyzed tension, leaving forever to the aggressor the choice of time and place and means to cause greatest hurt to us at least cost to himself.” It was time for a “new, positive foreign policy.” Following Dulles’s lead, Eisenhower denounced Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime deal with Stalin at Yalta, which, according to the Old Guard, legitimated the Soviets’ “enslavement” of Eastern Europe. The president also signaled that he would no longer restrain the Nationalist Chinese in Taiwan, and their leader, Chiang Kai-shek, from waging war against mainland communist China.

But on March 5, 1953, Josef Stalin died, and the landscape of the cold war briefly shone in a new light. Eisenhower, sensing an opportunity, asked his advisers: Did Stalin’s death open up the chance for a thaw in the U.S.-Soviet conflict? Secretary Dulles and the CIA answered no: the Soviets, they argued, would remain just as hostile and aggressive under Stalin’s successors as they had been since the birth of the Soviet Union more than three decades earlier. If anything, Moscow might be even more inclined to take risks now, as a show of strength during the transition to new leadership in the Kremlin.

“At the present time,” Malenkov averred on March 15, “there is no disputed or unresolved question that cannot be settled peacefully by mutual agreement of the interested countries. This applies to our relations with all states, including the United States of America.”

The speech came to be known as “The Chance for Peace.” In it the president stressed the terrible waste of the superpower arms race and painted a picture of a world that could be turned toward more productive pursuits:

“The Chance for Peace” failed to ease the cold war because Stalin’s death did nothing to alter the fundamental ideological and geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Each superpower still saw the other as a looming threat to its security, its belief system, and its vision of the future. The ideological trenches were dug too deep, and the risks of appearing weak or engaging in appeasement were too great, for either side to commit to a genuine thawing of relations. The Soviet Union was now in the hands of a nervous team of men who had risen in the Soviet system by slavishly attending to Stalin’s every caprice. For a brief moment, Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev, Lavrenti Beria, and Nikolai Bulganin had hoped that a thaw with the West would buy them time to transition to a post-Stalin period of rule. But they dared not loosen the reins over the communist bloc for fear of letting it slip away.

Eisenhower abjured these drastic swings in spending; they suggested an unwillingness to think ahead and stay prepared for future conflict. In his time in office defense outlays remained remarkably steady and substantial, averaging $46.5 billion a year. This was a huge sum, representing roughly 50 percent of annual federal budget outlays during his administration. Put another way, the United States consistently spent 10 percent or more of its GDP each year on defense during the Eisenhower years, a higher percentage than any peacetime administration in U.S. history, before or since.

“We expect to live as a free state,” he told the country in a public radio address, “which means we must develop a [defense] program that can . . . carry the security burden for a long, long time if that is necessary, and we will do it without complaining because we prize our freedoms that highly.” This was a maxim to live by in an age of peril.

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.

After listening to the reports, Eisenhower thanked the teams for their hard work but reflected that “the only thing worse than losing a global war was winning one.” The American people had no desire to wage a war of annihilation against the USSR and then find itself responsible for yet another long-term project of rehabilitation of a defeated enemy. The best policy for the nation must be one of strategic patience, resilience, and vigilance. Great Power war in the nuclear age was simply unthinkable. As one shrewd participant noted, Ike flatly contradicted the rhetorical fulminations of Dulles: “Roll-back sank, it was finished off as of that day.”

Eisenhower now directed his national security team to draft the strategic concept paper that would define the basic principles of American policy for a long cold war with the Soviet Union. What emerged in October 1953 was the document “Basic National Security Policy,” referred to by its numerical designation, NSC 162/2.

Eisenhower’s policy, then, cannot be called restrained or passive. To be sure, it envisioned patience rather than provocation and war. But to wage a prolonged geopolitical and ideological struggle with the communist bloc required a transformation in American capabilities and mentalities. In these first months of his presidency, Eisenhower laid down a blueprint for the warfare state—an official plan to mobilize the nation and put it on a permanent war footing. The military-industrial complex had begun to take shape.

Churchill’s private secretary, John Colville, recorded the scene: “[Eisenhower] said that as regards the prime minister’s belief that there was a New Look in Soviet policy, Russia was a woman of the streets and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath. America intended to drive her off her present ‘beat’ into the back streets.” Colville noted “pained looks all round.”

Colville noted in his diary that Eisenhower’s announcement of his intention to use nuclear weapons in the case of war, even a peripheral war like Korea, was news “which far outstrips in importance anything else at the conference.”48 Eisenhower expressed some annoynace at the British in his diary that night: “We have come to the conclusion that the atom bomb has to be treated just as another

weapon in the arsenal”; the British, by contrast, still see atomic weapons as marking “a completely new era in war” and “cling to the hope (to us fatuous) that if we avoid the first use of the atom bomb in any war, that the Soviets might likewise abstain.” Secretary Dulles, in his own account of these exchanges, noted that American “thinking on the subject was several years ahead” of Britain’s and that the British leaders worried that “there was a danger of our taking action which would be morally repellant to the rest of the world.”

While the press responded with hearty praise for Eisenhower’s “dramatic,” “eloquent,” and “moving” address, the Soviets quite predictably called his bluff, responding that instead of discussing nuclear sharing, the Great Powers should agree to ban all atomic weapons. Since the United States had no interest in halting atomic weapons production, the Soviet counteroffer was swatted away, and the arms race continued unabated. Indeed it might be asked: Was Eisenhower really committed to moderating the cold war or to altering his recently designed cold war strategy? The evidence suggests he was not.

The Soviet Union, he believed, remained bent on world domination. Only deterrence and a credible threat to use nuclear weapons would halt Soviet expansionism. Eisenhower’s UN speech certainly held out the hope that atomic energy might aid the developing world in the long run, but he nowhere suggested that he was ready to stop the rapid expansion of America’s nuclear arsenal.

He spoke of how Truman’s national security policies had been improvisational, expensive, reactive to Soviet threats, and unsystematic. The United States, Dulles announced, had inaugurated a new strategy to deter the USSR from any aggressive action. From now on America would “depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate instantly by means and at places of our choosing.”

Driven by a desire to cut the costs of defense, the New Look relied heavily upon a powerful nuclear deterrent instead of a large ground army.

To understand his reluctance to tangle with McCarthy, consider that by the time Eisenhower came into office, anticommunism had flourished in America for over three decades. Since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the U.S. government had viewed communism as a sinister, secretive, revolutionary ideology hostile to freedom, to religion, and to private property—in short, entirely un-American. In the 1930s politicians hostile to the New Deal tried to stymie Roosevelt’s plans for social reform by invoking the specter of communism. Anxieties about subversive activities inside the country led to the passage of the Smith Act in 1940, which compelled resident aliens to register with the government and made it illegal to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government.

Senate held hearings on the matter and issued a report titled “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government,” which concluded that homosexual conduct was “so contrary to the normal accepted standards of social behavior that persons who engage in such activity are looked upon as outcasts by society generally.” Furthermore homosexuals “lack the emotional stability of normal persons” and have weak “moral fiber,” and so could not be trusted with government secrets.

Bohlen was confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 74–13. (Thayer, meanwhile, resigned from the State Department under duress.) Eleven Republican senators, in opposing Bohlen, voted against their newly elected and immensely popular president; they also voted against Taft, against Dulles, and against the privilege of the Executive to choose its own envoys. Eisenhower won, but it had cost him a great deal of bad blood with the right wing of his own party and showed that McCarthyism was in no sense diminished simply because the Republicans had taken control of the White House.

Ignoring McCarthy was not the only plan for dealing with the publicity-hungry senator. The Eisenhower administration also tried another tactic: to seize the initiative in the anticommunist crusade. On April 27, 1953, just after the Bohlen confirmation, the Eisenhower White House issued Executive Order 10450, announcing new procedures for combing out any security risks from the federal government. The order took aim not only at those with politically disloyal ideas but also those with a dubious “moral” record. Federal employees could not demonstrate “any criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, or sexual perversion.”

The Executive Order was a sober reminder that Eisenhower, for all his antagonism toward McCarthy, was determined not to be outflanked on the issue of loyalty and subversion by the right wing of his own party.

Look at your country. Here is a country of which we are proud. . . . But this country is a long way from perfection—a long way. We have the disgrace of racial discrimination, or we have prejudice against people because of their religion. We have crime on the docks. We have not had the courage to uproot these things, although we know they are wrong. Now, [your] courage is not going to be satisfied—your sense of satisfaction is not going

to be satisfied, if you haven’t the courage to look at these things and do your best to help correct them. . . . It is not enough merely to say I love America, and to salute the flag and take off your hat as it goes by, and to help sing the Star Spangled Banner. He concluded his rambling remarks in a clear rebuke to the close-mindedness of the McCarthyites: “Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship. How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it?”

The ousting of diplomats like Thayer, the combing of libraries, and the allegations of treachery, all this was “to them a familiar and frightening scene.” Reed felt the “stature of [Eisenhower’s] administration” was “impaired” overseas, and he hoped to see “strong statements” that countered McCarthy’s allegations. Eisenhower calmly replied, “To attempt to answer in terms of personal criticism is to place yourself in the hands of the attacker.” If the president were to “point his finger at any particular individual, meaning to name anyone specifically, he automatically gives to that individual an increased publicity value. This is exactly what many people are seeking and I decline to be a party to it.”

Brownell’s accusation that Truman had knowingly advanced the career of a high-ranking Soviet agent triggered what the New York Times called “the most rancorous political brawl of the year.” Of course the charges were deeply embarrassing to Truman. But Brownell’s attack on the former president was depicted in the press as a crude political ploy designed to make the new administration appear zealous in the hunt for communist subversives. Sherman Adams later admitted that the Brownell report was designed precisely to “take away some of the glamour of the McCarthy stage play” and put Ike in the limelight as the leading actor in the anticommunist drama. But the attack on Truman made Brownell look like a political hack who was using privileged access to FBI files to dredge up evidence of Democratic malfeasance.

But the damage was done: it was clear that Brownell’s assault had opened Eisenhower up to the charge that his Justice Department was raking through the files in search of politically damaging material against the Truman administration. “The partisan feeling here tonight,” wrote Reston from Washington, “is bitter.”

But the real issue, Truman said, going on the attack, was that President Eisenhower “has fully embraced for political advantage McCarthyism. . . . It is the corruption of truth, the abandonment of due process of law. It is the use of the big lie and the unfounded accusation against any citizen in the name of Americanism or security. It is the rise to power of the demagogue who lives on untruth.” Truman offered this withering barb: “In Communist countries, it is the practice when a new government comes to power to accuse outgoing officials of treason, to frame public trials for them, and to degrade and prosecute them.” Brownell was engaged in just such “political skullduggery.”

Eisenhower directly contradicted the party chairman: “I hope that this whole thing will be a matter of history and of memory by the time the next election comes around. I don’t believe we can live in fear of each other forever, and I really hope and believe that this administration is proceeding decently and justly to get this thing straightened out.” Pressed further, he said he hoped “the suspicion on the part of the American people” that the government was infiltrated by subversive elements “will have disappeared through the accomplishments of the executive branch.”

Alsop grasped that the Eisenhower team had underestimated McCarthy, “as the Administration strategists who believe they could undercut him by ‘fighting fire with fire’ must surely have noticed.” An open breach between McCarthy and Eisenhower was now “inevitable.”