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

by William I. Hitchcock

Eisenhower knew his Scripture, yet it is noteworthy that after leaving home for the army, he did not attend church until 1953, when he joined the National Presbyterian Church in Washington and was baptized there at the age of 62.

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.

As early as 1930 he grasped the need for modern states to build a standing “military-industrial complex.”

Over time, close association with MacArthur provided Eisenhower with a role model of the kind of military leader he did not want to be.18

cannot conceive of any set of circumstances that could ever drag out of me permission to consider me for any political post from Dog Catcher to ‘Grand High Supreme King of the Universe.’ ”

Augusta National did not invite a black man to play there until 1974 and did not include black members until 1991.

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.

The states would send 1,206 delegates to the convention; a nominee would need 604 to win. By the time Eisenhower gave his speech in Abilene, Taft could say with some confidence that he had already lined up 500 delegates.

everything would come down to the politicking on the floor of the convention,

Brownell wrote a “Fair Play” amendment to the convention rules that proposed that contested delegates not be allowed to vote on the seating of other contested delegates.

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,

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.

Eisenhower had 845 votes to 280 for Taft.

Eisenhower could offer an olive branch to these disaffected Tafties in his choice of a vice-presidential running mate.

Dewey suggested just the right man for the job: the junior senator from California, Richard M. Nixon.

In a memorable backhanded compliment, Eisenhower praised Nixon to the assembled delegates as “a man who has shown statesmanlike qualities in many ways, but has a special talent and an ability to ferret out any kind of subversive influence wherever it may be found.”16

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.

At age 62, Eisenhower was the oldest man to be elected president since James Buchanan in 1856.

What emerged in October 1953 was the document “Basic National Security Policy,” referred to by its numerical designation, NSC 162/2. In a briskly written 27 pages, the NSC staff described a strategy for “meeting the Soviet threat” while avoiding any “serious weakening of the U.S. economy or undermining our fundamental values and institutions.” It was one of the most important statements of American security policy ever written, for within it lay the plans for the creation of the military-industrial complex.43

For Eisenhower religious faith was the single most important distinction between the free world and the communist world.

In a striking passage in the letter to John, he wrote that the Rosenbergs had to be executed as an example to other would-be traitors.

Traitor without declaration of war?

Eisenhower White House issued Executive Order 10450,

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 politically active person who had “traitorous thoughts” of course had to go. But so too did anyone “who might be subject to blackmail” due to shameful behavior. The principle of denying access to government service for allegations of immoral behavior was now a settled rule for the new team.24

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.”31

If the Gray board’s methods had been more scrupulous than McCarthy’s, the results were the same: the personal destruction of a decent patriot whose only crime was a persistent sympathy toward political ideals considered dubious in an age of peril.

Eisenhower’s CIA went way beyond intelligence analysis; it engaged in global propaganda, foreign sabotage, subversion, economic warfare, coups d’état, and political assassination.

The coups in Iran and Guatemala were symptoms of a larger pathology, namely, the delegation by the American president and Congress of enormous power and resources to a largely unaccountable and opaque agency to conduct a range of subversive and violent operations against the nation’s enemies. Here, in the story of the growth of the CIA, is the most striking evidence that Eisenhower, who warned later generations about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, did so much to build it.1

June 1949 Truman signed into law the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which gave a free pass to the CIA to receive and spend government money off the books:

money appropriated to the CIA would not need to be accounted for.

Eisenhower had not the slightest concern that the United States had interfered in the parliamentary functions of a sovereign state.

Land and the Killian team knew that sending American planes into Soviet airspace was enormously dangerous. Indeed the U.S. Air Force had been doing just that since at least 1946. Using modified bombers such as the RB-29, the air force sent planes mostly along the periphery of the USSR

In 1951 and 1952 numerous missions were sent across Soviet territory, but Soviet radar and fighter aircraft often spotted and intercepted these flights; a considerable number of them were shot down. Eisenhower continued the practice and personally approved of occasional overflights despite the loss of aircraft and their crews.

Eisenhower “asked many hard questions” and then approved the concept of the new U-2 spy plane. It was Eisenhower himself who saw the need to keep the plane out of the hands of the military bureaucracy and to allow the CIA to run with it.

He insisted the plane be funded off the books and that no active military personnel be used as pilots; the CIA would run the show.

August 1955 the U-2 aircraft was ready for its first test flight.

essential to keep American national security policy hidden from the enemy, but he also found it desirable to hide such matters from Congress and even members of his own administration; the U-2, for example, was never discussed in the National Security Council,

It is a paradox, hardly the only one of these years, that a man who so ardently championed America’s dynamic, free-market society, and who asserted that America could defy communism while sustaining its democratic values, did so much to obscure the inner workings of the nation’s security from public debate.

While his tactics worked in the short run to keep America out of another Asian war, Eisenhower nonetheless committed resources and prestige to Indochina in the cause of containment—and for that cause, just a decade later, Americans would fight and die. Eisenhower avoided war in 1954, but he also sowed many of the seeds that would yield a harvest of sorrow in later years.8

French tried to create a plausible Vietnamese nationalist alternative to the charismatic Ho. They transformed Bao Dai, the pliant former emperor of Annam and the scion of the Nguyen dynasty, into a head of state, and they set up a national parliament to provide the illusion of local political autonomy. The strategy never worked.

Without military success, the political strategy withered, since noncommunist politicians perceived that Bao Dai did not have the leverage to deliver Vietnamese independence from France. The French could win neither on the battlefield nor in the hearts of the Vietnamese.

chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Arthur Radford,

“Two good American divisions with the normal American aggressive spirit could clean up the situation” in 10 months, he told the top State Department planners.

“If funds are not available to carry on in Indochina,” Laniel told Dillon, “the only alternative is eventual withdrawal.”16 Some might call it blackmail, but it was simply a statement of the truth: France could keep the war going only if the United States picked up the tab. And the American leadership accepted the arrangement.

On August 6 the NSC gave provisional approval for $385 million in increased aid. A few weeks later Eisenhower formally signed off on the additional funds.17

By providing a total of $785 million to France’s war just in fiscal year 1954 alone (equivalent to $6.3 billion today), Ike made plain that the Indochina war stood at the very top of his list of national security priorities.

If America was drawn into war in Indochina through Chinese provocation, Dulles asserted, the resulting conflict “might not be confined to Indochina.” Hinting at a possible nuclear war against China

the French should falter in their commitment to the war, then America might well have to send in its own troops to rescue Southeast Asia—a prospect Eisenhower strongly opposed.

It was a colossal gamble. And for once Eisenhower’s usual luck at games of chance failed him.

Eisenhower spoke decisively. The minutes record his adamant opposition to sending American soldiers to Indochina: “He simply could not imagine the United States putting ground forces anywhere in Southeast Asia. . . . There was just no sense in even talking about United States forces replacing the French in Indochina.