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cooperate. Eisenhower foiled him. “May I think that one over?” Eden said. Yes, Ike replied. “Call me anytime you please.”
Upon returning to the White House, Eisenhower sent Eden a cable, reinforcing the message he had delivered over the phone. He desired “that the UN Force will
promptly begin its work and the Anglo-French Forces will be withdrawn without delay. Once these things are done, the ground will be favorable for our meeting.” In short, Eisenhower would not welcome his old friend to the White House until the British had fully conformed to American wishes.
Eisenhower understood the gravity of the problem but decided to use the oil shortage to his advantage. He wanted to get the British and French to withdraw completely from the Suez Canal Zone. To bail them out now, while their invasion forces remained in Suez, would “get the Arabs sore at all of us, and they could embargo all oil.”
Allen Dulles added that prolonged instability in the region would
The end of the colonial era, he explained, had opened promising new vistas for the emerging nations, but had also created instability that “international Communism” now sought to exploit. “Russia’s rulers have long sought to dominate the Middle East.” The United States must frustrate their plans. He asked Congress to approve a program of economic and military aid to friendly Middle East nations. He also asked Congress to permit “the employment of the armed forces of the United States to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of such nations, requesting such
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Ike wanted a clear message sent to Moscow that the Middle East now formed part of America’s beat in the world, and from now on America would police it. This policy “involves certain burdens and indeed risks for the United States,” he solemnly noted. But Americans had already given “billions of dollars and thousands of precious lives” to the cause of freedom in Europe and Asia. The United States would expand its sphere of influence to ensure unfettered access to the black gold beneath the sands of Arabia. In early March Congress overwhelmingly passed the resolution.
And in the Middle East in 1956 Eisenhower again expanded the range of American global commitments. Not content to compel his European allies to stand down from their ill-conceived Suez adventure, he now sought to impose an American order on the Middle East. Of course the Eisenhower Doctrine was expressed in the language of self-determination and liberty, but beneath the finery of good intentions lay the cold steel of military power. In January 1957 Eisenhower declared that the United States would fight to protect its interests in the Middle East; more than six decades later it is fighting
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King had sent open telegrams to Eisenhower, Nixon, and Attorney General Brownell decrying the violence and beseeching the White House for help. “A state of terror prevails” across the South, he declared. He asked the president to use his “immense moral power” by coming to the South, making a major speech, and condemning these
acts of violence. King sent a pointed message to Nixon questioning why, having conducted a “fact-finding” mission to Austria to examine the plight of Hungarian refugees fleeing Soviet repression, he would not also come to the South to examine the repression of American citizens there.
And yet—and here is the real story—Eisenhower overcame his limitations. Despite his deep-seated aversion to social movements and to the increasingly urgent demands for action on civil rights, he presided over two enormously important developments that would shape the history of race in America. He lent support to Attorney General Brownell’s strenuous efforts to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957; and he used the power of his office to enforce court-ordered school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, overcoming the resistance of the demagogic governor, Orval Faubus. Eisenhower may at times
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Rather, black voters in the South turned away from the Democratic Party because of its ferocious hostility to Brown. In the two years since the Court’s decision, white southern Democrats had openly taken up the cause of white supremacy by signing the Southern Manifesto. In this charged political climate, GOP strategists believed, modest progress on civil rights might win over blacks to the Republican Party for a generation.
As a result of these pressures, Eisenhower placed civil rights at the center of his State of the Union address, which he delivered on January 10, 1957. He reiterated the four-point proposal he had submitted to the previous Congress: (1) to create a bipartisan congressional commission to investigate civil rights violations; (2) to create a Civil Rights division in the Department of Justice under a new assistant attorney general; (3) to empower the attorney general to pursue contempt proceedings against anyone who violated civil rights stemming from the Fourteenth Amendment; and (4) to empower
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same in connection with a violation of voting rights as laid out in the Fifteenth Amendment. Brownell had succeeded in leading a reluctant president to embrace civil rights legislation by emphasizing the aim of protecting constitutional rights, especially the right to vote. How could that be controversial?
Eisenhower didn’t seem to grasp why the bill would stir up controversy. He had
repeatedly declared that his administration’s civil rights proposals were “moderate,” that they aimed chiefly to protect the right to vote as expressed in the Fifteenth Amendment. During the spring he repeated his view that the civil rights bill threatened no one: “In it is nothing that is inimical to the interests of anyone. It is intended to preserve rights without arousing passions and without disturbing the rights of anyone else.”
Russell began by crying foul: the president, he said, had told the country he wanted a bill to protect voting rights. But what the attorney general had sent to Congress was something else altogether. It had been “cunningly designed to vest in the Attorney General unprecedented power to bring to bear the whole might of the Federal government, including the armed forces if necessary, to force a commingling of white and Negro children in the state-supported public schools of the South.” Not only that, but the bill proposed to give the attorney general such sweeping powers that he could “force the
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Section 3 was somewhat obscure, and Russell meant to shed light on it. It proposed to give the attorney general the power to appeal to a federal court for an injunction against any individual who obstructed, or who was planning to obstruct, a citizen’s right to equal protection of the laws. If the injunction was then violated, and a court order ignored, a judge could assess penalties, including fines and imprisonment, without reference to a jury trial. In essence it allowed the Justice Department to use the federal courts to bypass local police forces and municipal and state authorities when a
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general decided equal protection was being denied.
He insisted to Brownell that for two years he had been seeking legislation to allow the attorney general to halt “interference of the right to vote.” But now he found the bill was “somewhat more inclusive,” giving the federal government wide powers—perhaps too wide. “If the bill has
been expanded to a form so general that it scares people to death, that is something else again.” By the end of the day, Ann Whitman noted, the president was “very worried” about civil rights.
According to Brownell, “Johnson went directly to the Oval Office” and told Eisenhower “that the entire bill would be defeated on the Senate floor if section three . . . was included. He said he had the votes to do this. The president was convinced and agreed that this provision be dropped.” Brownell added, “Eisenhower made this decision without consulting me”—a damning comment from the chief field general for the civil rights bill.
Eisenhower seemed unperturbed by these developments, saying the next day at his weekly press conference that in the civil rights bill “the voting right is something that should be emphasized.” He backed away from the part of the legislation
that strengthened the federal government’s hand to enforce school integration. And he strongly repudiated the idea that the federal government would ever have to use force to compel obedience to the law. “I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send Federal troops . . . to enforce the orders of a Federal court.”
This public retreat disheartened both the Republicans in the Senate who had been working hard to pass the bill and their liberal Democratic colleagues. Senator Richard Neuberger of Oregon, an outspoken liberal, said in exasperation after Eisenhower’s press conference that the president “revealed, first, that he is not thoroughly familiar with the contents of his administration’s bill, and second, that he is not enthusiastically in favor of what he does believe the b...
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“No person,” the proposed law read, “whether acting under color of law or otherwise, shall intimidate, threaten, coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of such other person to vote.” If such interference occurred or seemed likely to occur, “the Attorney General may institute for the United States, or in the name of the United States, a civil action or other proper proceeding for preventive relief, including an application for a permanent or temporary injunction, restraining order, or other order.” Nothing could be
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They did not wish to publicly oppose the right to vote, so instead they shaped the debate as one of an unwarranted expansion of federal power. They conjured up a fearful image of federal judges throwing southerners in jail without trial. It seemed un-American that a judge could imprison a person without a jury trial, but in fact it was common in contempt cases and entirely legal.
The administration denied any such purpose in the voting rights bill and also insisted that a jury trial in a case of contempt would dramatically weaken the ability of federal judges to enforce federal voting rights law in the South since southern juries could hardly be relied upon to convict white people for the crime of denying black voters their rights.
Whipping together his Democratic forces and winning over a dozen, mostly Old Guard conservative Republicans as well, on the evening of August 1 Johnson managed to pass the jury trial amendment in a 51–42 vote.
But the defeat may
also have been due to Eisenhower’s own absence of zeal. Again and again on civil rights he expressed “moderate” opinions in the face of men whose views were immoderate. He sought gradual change where others sought immediate progress or none at all. He showed dispassionate common sense; his opponents fought with passionate zealotry.
A state governor, backed by an armed militia, now stood in defiance of a federal court order. The battle lines were drawn.
Having established his record of selfless patriotism, Faubus claimed that the issue in Little Rock was not one of integration versus segregation but whether “the head of a sovereign state can exercise his constitutional powers and discretion in maintaining peace and good order within his jurisdiction.”
Wilkins accused Faubus of “deliberately provoking a test of the authority of the Federal government to enforce the orders of Federal courts.” Faubus seemed to think that “states are free to decide whether to abide by the Constitution and the Federal rulings or not.”
Eisenhower replied to Faubus on September 5 with a brief
and elliptical message: “The Federal Constitution will be upheld by me by every legal means at my command.” Eisenhower intended this to sound like a thinly veiled threat. Yet no one could be certain how he would act in the face of Faubus’s defiance.
Here, Eisenhower made a tactical mistake. Sherman
Adams’s good friend Congressman Brooks Hays, who represented the Little Rock district, had approached Adams suggesting the president meet with Faubus in person in Newport. When Adams proposed this to Eisenhower, saying he thought Faubus “realizes he has made a mistake and is looking for a way out,” the president accepted “without a moment of hesitation.”
Ike believed his personal touch might be able to persuade Faubus to do what a federal court order had failed to accomplish. Brownell advised against the meeting, pointing out that Faubus had no incentive to back down now and that meeting with a governor who was openly defying federal authority was unwise. Ike believed Browne...
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But when it came time for Faubus to issue his own
statement, he refused to cooperate. Rather than abide by the court order, he claimed he was obliged to “harmonize [his] actions under the Constitution of Arkansas with the requirements of the Constitution of the United States”—as if he had a right to choose which document he would obey. When he returned to Little Rock, he did not withdraw the National Guard, nor did he issue them a change of orders. The stalemate endured. Eisenhower called Brownell and admitted, “You were right. Faubus broke his word.”
He recommended that Eisenhower send in federal troops, drawing for authority on Sections 332 and 333 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which enshrines the Insurrection Act of 1807. According to the statute, “Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State or Territory by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he
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He was fulfilling his oath to defend the Constitution. With a flourish he added, “Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.”
In short, he positioned himself not as a champion of civil rights but as a defender of law and order. As he would say again and again to his southern critics, he sent troops to Little Rock to uphold the courts. The country was faced with “open defiance of the Constitution,” and if he were to tolerate that,
he would invite “anarchy.” His decision, he told one southern senator, had nothing to do with “integration, desegregation or segregation”: he aimed to uphold the law. To fail in that duty was “to acquiesce in anarchy, mob rule, and incipient rebellion,” which would “destroy the Nation.”
From the perspective of the late 1960s and subsequent decades, Eisenhower’s unwillingness to grasp the moral dimension of the issue certainly seems obtuse. But he did not govern in the late 1960s. In 1957 he saw himself acting as Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln did, and it was no accident that he invoked them both in his speech. Jackson, though a champion of
states’ rights, insisted on the constitutional powers of the federal government to enforce federal law in the face of South Carolina’s defiance during the Nullification Crisis of 1832. And in 1861, when confronting the secession of southern states, Lincoln too looked to the Constitution for his authority to preserve the Union. Eisenhower believed he was following the playbook written by his illustrious predecessors.
Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite on October 4, 1957, soon dominated the concerns of the administration; interest in civil rights sagged.
In January 1958, Eisenhower devoted his entire State of the Union speech to defense matters and the cold war, completely ignoring the extraordinary events in Little Rock.
“I do believe that as long as they are human problems—because they are buried in the human heart rather than ones merely to be solved by a sense of logic and right—we must have patience and forbearance. . . . We must make sure that enforcement will not in itself create injustice.” Fred Morrow, who had done so much to arrange Ike’s appearance at the event, wrote later, “I could feel life draining from me, and I wished I could escape.” A furious Roy Wilkins issued a bitter statement that very night: “We have been patient and we have been moderate and all we get for it is a kick in the teeth.”
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