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

by William I. Hitchcock

them.”1 Historians who study Eisenhower know how those men felt in his presence. Ike draws you in. He radiated authenticity, idealism, sincerity, and charisma, and these personal qualities were the keys to his political success. Between 1945 and 1961 no person dominated American public life more than Eisenhower. He was the most well-liked and admired man in America in these years. And he was also the most consequential. This book argues that the era from the end of the Second World War up to the presidency of John F. Kennedy deserves to be known as the Age of Eisenhower.

It is the central paradox of the Eisenhower presidency: that a man so successful at the ballot box and so overwhelmingly popular among the voters could have been given such poor marks by the political class.

“Poor Ike,” Truman said on his way out of office. “It won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen.”

Dwight Eisenhower must be counted among the most consequential presidents of modern American history.14

Eisenhower shaped the United States in at least three lasting ways. 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.

These views did not lead Eisenhower to seek war. On the contrary, he ended active hostilities in Korea, avoided U.S. military intervention in Indochina in 1954, deterred China’s military adventures in the Taiwan Straits in 1955 and 1958, compelled Britain and France to reverse their ill-conceived invasion of Egypt in 1956, and even established stable personal relations with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Eisenhower worked hard, and successfully, to keep the peace.

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. Raised in a strict and frugal family and trained for a career of soldiering, Ike believed that discipline was the key to success.

“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.”

Not only did he achieve greatness in the American armed services; during the Second World War he asserted control over the British Army as well, forging its fractious, skeptical generals into a cohesive fighting force alongside the Americans.

Together—and under his command—they defeated the Germans. His 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. As chief of staff of the U.S. Army just after the war, he faced huge problems of winding down the national military establishment while retooling for a global cold war. For four years he was president of Columbia University, where he navigated the complexities of academia. And in his final post before winning the presidency, as supreme commander of NATO, he directed 12 nations toward the common goal of mutual defense and rearmament.

Far from being inexperienced upon taking office in 1952, Eisenhower could reasonably look upon the presidency as a job for which he was extraordinarily well prepared—far more so certainly than his predecessor, Harry S. Truman, had been upon taking office after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sudden death, and certainly more tha...

Even the normally restrained chief of staff of the U.S. Army, General Marshall, exulted in his success, writing a glowing personal tribute to him on V-E Day: “You have completed your mission with the greatest victory in the history of warfare. You have commanded with outstanding success the most powerful military force that has ever been assembled. . . . You have made history, great history for the good of mankind.”

he called for a great effort to return the world to peace: “As I see it, peace is an absolute necessity to this world.” Americans “should be strong but we should be tolerant. We should be ready to defend our rights but we should be considerate and recognize the rights of the other man.” He had begun his transition from soldier to statesman.4 At this moment of triumph Eisenhower was 55 years old and the world’s best-known and most-respected soldier. He embodied America’s victory over fascism and Nazism.

President Truman understood this. A practiced politician, he had a nose for winners. In mid-July, Truman traveled to Europe to meet with Churchill and Premier Josef Stalin of the Soviet Union at the great postwar conference at Potsdam, Germany. By this time Eisenhower had returned to Europe in his role as commander of the military occupation of the defeated nation, and he welcomed Truman to Germany.

The two had met only a few times before, though the president obviously had a high opinion of America’s foremost soldier. 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.”

To cultivate the friendship, he agreed to visit Moscow in August. It was an eye-opening trip. “When we flew into Russia in 1945,” he recalled, “I did not see a house standing between the western borders of the country and the area around Moscow—a distance of over 500 miles.”

In late May 1947 Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM and a member of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University, offered Eisenhower the position of president of the university. In fact it was the second time he had made

In February 1950 the Custom Tailors Guild released its annual poll of the best-dressed men in America. The top 10 included Clark Gable, the dashing screen superstar; dancing impresario Arthur Murray; and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, whose bespoke suits, made by Farnsworth Reed, had won him best-dressed honors in 1949. But Acheson was a distant second in 1950 to none other than Eisenhower. The Guild declared that Columbia’s president “shows perfect judgment in wearing clothes which reflect the dignity of his office and his role of elder statesman.”

For those who may recall Eisenhower as a somewhat sedate, rumpled, and even sickly president, it may come as a surprise to find that in the early 1950s he was considered the very paragon of American masculinity.

The Korean War, which broke out on June 25, 1950, with a surprise invasion of South Korea by communist North Korea, upended world affairs as well as domestic politics in the United States. Truman responded quickly, committing U.S. troops under a United Nations flag to defend South Korea, but the war was a disaster for the allied forces that fought there.

Only one American soldier had the prestige and reputation to go to Europe to lead this rapid rearmament. On October 27, 1950, Truman asked Ike to take the job of commander in chief of all allied forces in Europe.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had been formed in April 1949 but still had no integrated military structure and no commander to lead it. Truman needed Ike to go to Europe, galvanize the allied nations, spur their military rearmament, and forge them into a fighting force powerful enough to hold back any Soviet assault. Eisenhower of course could not say no.

Eisenhower welcomed these bold actions. He took a leave of absence from Columbia and in January 1951, with Truman’s approval, set off for a three-week trip to European capitals to make a preliminary assessment of the political and military picture there.

Did Eisenhower want to be president? He said repeatedly to his closest friends that he did not want a political career.

IT HAS LONG BEEN ASSERTED that Eisenhower swept into the White House as the 34th president on a wave of personal popularity rather than for any set of ideas or policies. Certainly Eisenhower was popular, universally known and admired for his war service. Yet in the election of 1952 he did not rely on his reputation as an apolitical soldier to stay above the fray of the campaign. Quite the opposite. Rather than playing it safe, rising above faction and controversy, coasting on his name recognition, Eisenhower jumped into the mess of electoral politics with gusto. In running for president, he was vehement, polemical, and partisan. He lambasted the Truman administration, heaped abuse on the New Deal, and curried favor with the right wing of his party. Why did he do so? Eisenhower deeply believed in the conservative, small-government, balanced-budget positions he celebrated on the hustings; he maintained an instinctive aversion toward New Deal policies and bureaucracies.

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.