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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 line and signaled to his adversary that he, and his nation, would not retreat.
America’s use of nuclear brinkmanship made Eisenhower look tough and determined, but it deeply alarmed the European allies, who now feared more than ever that the United States might trigger a global nuclear
war. Ike’s menacing warnings may also have pushed China into a search for its own nuclear weapon as a counterweight to America’s. Just 10 years later, in 1964, China would test its first nuclear bomb.
His ambition to contain Chinese influence and suppress communist rebellions in Asia led him to make a series of dramatically hawkish public statements that pledged American prestige in Asia, and from which neither he nor his successors could easily walk away. By resorting to nuclear brinkmanship and constantly speaking about falling dominoes, Eisenhower narrowed his options for dealing with future crises. At some point America would have to make the terrible choice between living up to its promises or skulking away.
Far from claiming that he followed a grand strategy in Asia, he admitted that America “threaded its way, with watchfulness and determination through narrow and dangerous waters between appeasement and global war.” To a great degree he managed to accomplish that balancing act. His successors, alas, did not.
More difficult, he went on, was the issue of promotion. Black men without the opportunities for education that whites might have had would always be at a disadvantage in a desegregated army, Ike said. A better practice was to keep black units intact, thus allowing them to develop a cadre of black officers. Eventually, Eisenhower hoped, “the human race may finally grow up,” and such concerns would disappear. But for now, “if we attempt by passing a lot of laws to force someone to like someone else, we are just going to get into trouble.” These comments reveal a man who believed that racial
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The Court meant not just equal facilities but equal treatment inside the classroom. The plaintiff in the Oklahoma case, George McLaurin, was studying for a doctoral degree in education. He was forced to sit in a sort of alcove in the classroom, separated from the white students; he was assigned to a separate table in the library and took his meals at a separate table in the cafeteria.
The Court objected to this treatment, ruling that “the Fourteenth Amendment precludes differences in treatment by the state based upon race.”
Rather, the Fourteenth Amendment’s “great and pervading purpose” was “to establish complete equality for Negroes in the enjoyment of fundamental human rights.” If the segregation of public schools by state mandate resulted in any form of inequality, Brownell suggested, then it was necessarily unconstitutional and the Court must ban it.
Warren was a dignified national political figure. Tall, broad-shouldered, of Scandinavian descent, he was a three-time winner of the California governorship and a former state attorney general. He had been the GOP vice-presidential candidate in 1948 and had a reputation as a moderate and a man of integrity. Warren had challenged Ike for the GOP presidential nomination in 1952, but this former political rivalry did not hurt his standing with Eisenhower, who, after the general election, told Warren that he hoped to appoint him to the first vacancy on the Supreme Court.
By the fall of 1953, then, Eisenhower had made some key decisions. He had used executive authority to push desegregation in the armed forces; he had aided those seeking to ban segregation in the nation’s capital; he allowed his attorney general to present an antisegregation argument before the Supreme Court; and he had appointed a noted
California moderate as chief justice. All this on the eve of the arguments in Brown v. Board of Education.
Defying the opinions of his southern friends, Eisenhower backed Brownell. The attorney general’s brief, filed on November 27, was a bombshell. “GOP Backs NAACP,” announced the Pittsburgh Courier in a banner headline.
Brownell, in writing his brief and advising the Court, had acted “according to his own convictions.” This was a remarkable statement: the president asserted that he had delegated one of the most explosive issues facing the nation to his top legal officer. His convictions—not Eisenhower’s—would shape the administration’s position.
The Court’s peroration was a damning indictment of the entire structure of Jim Crow segregation: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
Perhaps the best that can be said is this: Eisenhower did not lead the nation toward civil rights reform, but he could sense which way history was moving and did not wish to be left behind.
Ike also told Hagerty of his worry that “some of the Southern states will take steps to virtually cancel out their public education system,” a move that would “not only handicap Negro children but would work to the detriment of the so-called ‘poor whites’ in the South.”35
These comments have irked historians for many years. Stephen Ambrose, a prominent (and usually obsequious) biographer, wrote in 1990 that Eisenhower’s “refusal to lead [on civil rights] was almost criminal.” Eisenhower’s failure to laud the Brown decision “did incalculable harm to the civil-rights crusade and to America’s image.”
Southerners certainly did not see Eisenhower as moving slowly on civil rights. Quite the contrary. Governor Byrnes said he was “shocked” by the Brown decision and asked “how long . . . local government [could] survive” in the face of such powerful assaults on states’ rights. He did urge the public to show “restraint” and to “preserve order,” but his administration had already secured approval from voters to close public schools rather than integrate them. Governor Talmadge considered the ruling tyrannical and unjust and promised that Georgians would “fight for the right under the United States
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This ambiguity would create many problems in the future. But taken as a whole, there could be no doubt that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional and must end. “The more I think about it,” said Thurgood Marshall two days later, “I think it’s a damned good decision!”
In the weeks after the second Brown ruling, southern whites ran a campaign of intimidation and reprisal against African Americans that was designed to raise the price they would have to pay if they persisted in challenging Jim Crow.
On January 26 Rev. King was arrested on a trumped-up traffic charge and locked up overnight. Four days later an unknown assailant set off a bomb on the front porch of King’s home while his wife and infant daughter were inside. No one was injured, but the firebombing of the young pastor’s home confirmed the worst fears of federal authorities: the South was erupting into violent racial strife.
On February 29, 1956, the president announced that he would run for reelection. At a stroke the White House began thinking about everything through the lens of politics. In a memo to Adams, Rabb went so far as to call for “a new look at our civil rights policy from a partisan viewpoint.” He felt it was time to break “this iron curtain of silence on our civil rights case” and seek out northern black voters.
The FBI director had been invited to give an update on the racial tensions in the South since Brown, and he did not miss his chance. His report to the cabinet was chilling. Once again using the old canard that the NAACP was being infiltrated by the Communist Party, Hoover depicted black activist organizations as provocative and dangerous. Their spokesmen, he said, had declared that “white blood will flow,” and he singled out the bus boycott in Montgomery as an example of the NAACP’s revolutionary activities. Hoover praised white southerners who had reacted to provocations by forming citizens’
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It denounced the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown as an abuse of power, described the Court as having destroyed in a stroke “the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races,” denounced “outside agitators” who wanted to bring “revolutionary changes,” and pledged to halt the implementation of school desegregation. The document was signed by 82 representatives and 19 senators—about one-fifth of the Congress, all Democrats except for two Virginia Republicans. Every one of the signatories, including
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On July 23 it passed the House by 276–126 votes, drawing bipartisan support from Republicans and northern liberal Democrats. The first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction now moved on to the Senate.
In late August 1956, exactly a year after Emmett Till’s horrific murder, a voice Eisenhower would come to hear frequently rose up from the front lines of
the racial struggle and called for the president to turn his attention to Montgomery, a city marred by racial violence, the bombing of the homes of religious leaders, mass arrests, and intimidation of black citizens: “Hundreds of Negroes are being arrested daily on trumped up charges and fined. The revival of the Ku Klux Klan is a constant threat and the robed members are allowed to demonstrate in the city without police interference whatsoever. Thousands of Negroes in the city of Montgomery and the state of Alabama are deprived of their right to vote.” Surely now was the time for the
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If this was an example of Ike’s “hidden hand,” it was a disappointing performance for those who yearned for some sign from America’s most powerful and popular leader that their struggle was also his.
vulgar films like Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire that glorified “a deteriorating personality” offered more evidence of a collapse of morals.
Graham’s influence hung on some of Eisenhower’s campaign statements. When Ike was asked to describe his religious beliefs for the Episcopal Church News in September 1952, he responded, “You can’t explain free government in any other terms than religious. The founding fathers had to refer to the Creator in order to make their revolutionary experiment make sense. . . . It is ours to prove that only a people strong in Godliness is strong enough to overcome tyranny and make themselves and others free.” He concluded, “What is our battle against communism if it is not a fight between anti-God and
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Niebuhr had no time for the likes of Norman Vincent Peale and Bishop Sheen, whom he described as mere entertainers. Graham he treated with more respect and more venom. Niebuhr attacked Graham’s “perfectionist illusions” and his “simple religious moralism,” which claimed that “conversion to Christianity could
solve the problem of the hydrogen bomb.” Niebuhr accused Graham—and Eisenhower—of equating faith with “good plumbing” as the core values of the “American Way of Life.” What angered Niebuhr was the smug, complacent, self-regarding contentment of powerful men, both in government and in the churches, who decided that simple “religious faith” would resolve the social and political crises of the age.
In truth, Eisenhower was not a small-government conservative, although he successfully sold himself as one to the public. He believed government should create the conditions in which Americans could pursue their own ambitions. This implied not a small or diminished government but an effective one. Good government should deliver meaningful enhancements to citizens within the limits of fiscal restraint. Ike believed in making government work “for the little fellow,” as he put it, and in particular that meant providing social security, health care and insurance, housing, and highways.
But that sort of carping could not contend with the rousing chorus of approval from Republican activists who understood what a godsend Eisenhower was for their party. At its national meeting, the Republican National Committee (RNC), now under the direction of former New York congressman Leonard Hall, passed a glowing, worshipful resolution praising Eisenhower in language that bordered on a cult of personality: “In Dwight Eisenhower we have a political leader whose vigor, judgment and wisdom have breathed fresh life, energy and determination into our party organization.” There was something
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Certainly the Republican Party must identify itself with economic freedom and individualism. But “we must never be a party that is indifferent to the sufferings of a great community where, through some unusual cause, people are out of work, where people can’t educate their own children, where through any kind of disaster, natural or economic, people are suffering.” Eisenhower thought these ideas formed a “middle way” philosophy that could transform the Republican Party into the majority party in the United States—if only his loyalists would simply follow his advice.
BY THE START OF 1955 Eisenhower had attained extraordinary popularity and prestige in American public life. He had tamed the war in Korea and avoided American entanglement in Indochina. He had brought fiscal balance back to Washington. He had guided the nation through a brief recession and ushered in an era of robust economic growth. His expansion of social security aided millions. His defanging of McCarthy won him wide respect. Even his tepid support of civil rights for African Americans aligned with public opinion in much of the nation.
The Geneva summit of 1955 grew principally from the need of the new post-Stalin leaders in the Kremlin to show the world a moderate face.
Yet he saw that Stalin’s foreign policy had failed to win security and stability for his country. Stalin’s brutal behavior had triggered a robust Western response, from the infusion of Marshall Plan dollars to the creation of NATO and the rearming of Western Germany. Most worrisome, the United States had developed a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons and the aircraft to deliver them anywhere in the world.
Dulles believed that Khrushchev’s charm offensive sprang from fundamental weakness. The Soviet economy had failed to meet basic consumer needs; the subventions to satellite states in Eastern Europe and China had become a costly burden; and the Russians were struggling to keep up with the Americans in the arms race. Dulles concluded that the Soviets wanted “a pause” in the geopolitical contest, and he was not inclined to give them one.
Eisenhower, unlike Dulles, felt he could not appear “senselessly stubborn,” as he put it later. If proposals for peace and reconciliation were on the table, America must at least consider them. The public in America and in Europe, so accustomed to bad news about the Great Power rivalry, had been heartened by signs of a softening coming from Moscow. Intransigence now would be bad publicity for the United States.
In Geneva he wished “to conciliate, to understand, to be tolerant, to try to see the other fellow’s viewpoint.” Throwing aside his earlier caution, he now asserted that the Great Powers had a chance to take “the greatest step toward peace, toward future prosperity and tranquility that has ever been taken in the history of mankind.” With soaring rhetoric like this crackling across the national airwaves, no wonder Dulles was worried!
The conference opened on Monday morning, July 18, at the Palais des Nations, a sprawling, white neoclassical behemoth that once housed the ill-fated League of Nations. As the world leaders took their places—Nikolai Bulganin for the USSR, Eden for Britain, Eisenhower for America, and Prime Minister Edgar Faure for France—it became apparent that there would be no private meeting of the minds.
This formal atmosphere encouraged ponderous moralizing. The four leaders took turns laying out their positions, restating views that were already well known and on which they appeared to be inflexible.
Yet once the leaders adjourned from their set-piece exercises at the conference table, little ripples of cordiality began to radiate through the meeting rooms. Between breaks the delegations chatted around groaning tables of food and drink, and the quartet of leaders entertained one another at dinners and cocktails throughout the week, allowing some spontaneous discussions.
He had been drawn to the idea of a mutual weapons-inspection program that would open both American and Soviet military installations to regular monitoring. Given the intense security and secrecy that had always surrounded military bases in both countries, this seemed a quixotic idea at
best. Yet the context helps explain Eisenhower’s thinking: just a few months earlier, James Killian had made his heart-stopping presentation in the White House about the vulnerabilities of the United States to a surprise attack. In reply the president had ordered a rapid program to get the U-2 spy plane operational. Its first test run would come in August. Eisenhower desperately wanted the information the secret overflights would provide to be sure that the USSR was not preparing a major attack. But how much easier it would be if both sides simply opened their skies to aircraft for approved
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When, on the afternoon of July 21, the Big Four met to discuss disarmament, Eisenhower took the floor to present a general statement on the desirability of reducing world armaments; it was platitudinous. Halfway through, he stopped, removed his reading glasses, looked directly at Bulganin, and spoke as if off the cuff. His words were simple and moving, though carefully prepared. He said he had been searching his heart and mind for a suitable demonstration of the good faith of the United States in the search for peace, and he hit upon this: “to give each other a complete blueprint of our
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The plan offered to share information equally; neither side would benefit more than the other. We need, Ike insisted, “a departure from established custom.” But Khrushchev dismissed the scheme as worthless and a distraction from the real need to reduce weapons. His response was “100 percent negative.”
