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March 2 - March 31, 2019
On May 17, 1954, in a unanimous decision written by the new chief justice, the Supreme Court ruled that the segregation of schoolchildren by race “deprived the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities.” To separate students solely on the grounds of race “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”
When Dent asked Eisenhower if his Republican administration would pay a political price among southerners for the decision, Ike bristled: “The Supreme Court, as I understand it, is not under any administration.”
In a vulgar exchange with Warren at a stag dinner, the president is alleged to have said that white southerners were “not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.” This sort of language was regrettably common among men of Eisenhower’s inner circle.
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.
it appeared that the White House did not wish to involve itself too directly in the affairs of the South. One reason for this excess of caution lies in the fears stoked by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that black activists were tools of the Communist Party.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a bespectacled 42-year-old African American woman, refused to give up her seat on a crowded Montgomery, Alabama, public bus to a white person.
She had long-standing ties to E. D. Nixon, the president of the local NAACP chapter.
Nixon founded the Montgomery Improvement Association and on December 5 secured a charismatic 27-year-old Baptist preacher to serve as its president. His name was Martin Luther King Jr., and his nonviolent boycott would soon transform the politics of the South and the country.
By its 12th week the boycott had become national news.
“Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” which rapidly earned the sobriquet “The Southern Manifesto.” It denounced the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown as an abuse of power,
The South now spoke with one voice: it would not recognize federal law. A constitutional crisis loomed.67
After all Eisenhower had done, Rabb asserted, “Negroes had not demonstrated any kind of gratitude,” and most of the responsible officials in the White House had become completely disgusted with the whole matter. He said there was a feeling that “Negroes were being too aggressive in their demands; that an ugliness and surliness in manner was beginning to show through.” What black leaders wanted, Rabb told Morrow, “far exceeded what reasonable white people would grant.” And Rabb was Ike’s chief adviser on minority affairs.68
As resistance to Brown increased, and as the battle lines formed for a prolonged period of conflict, Eisenhower retreated from the battlefield, seeking the comfort of the distant hills, while Brownell continued to fight in the trenches below.
Ike would be America’s most admired man for ten straight years between 1951 and 1960.
the key to Eisenhower’s success lay in his ability to balance, in his own person and in his policies, the contradictions in American society.
Reinhold Niebuhr, the leading Christian intellectual of the era and a professor at Union Theological Seminary, published a searing essay in the New Republic in June 1955 that addressed the surge in popular piety. 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.
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.
Unlike the boom times of the Gilded Age or the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, the prosperity of the 1950s ran both deep and broad. The bane of American society in the 21st century—drastic economic inequality—did not afflict the nation to the same degree during the roaring ’50s. Incomes grew at roughly the same pace for all groups, and those at the very top of the economic pyramid paid far more taxes than the wealthy do today. Instead of enriching only a few fat cats, 1950s-era prosperity helped create and nourish what is now a vanishing species: the American middle class.
Eisenhower made significant choices that reflected his philosophy of government. This he described succinctly: “a liberal attitude toward the welfare of people and a conservative approach to the use of their money.”
Always keen to balance the budget, Ike felt little urgency in cutting personal income taxes. Tax
In the Eisenhower years marginal tax rates for the lowest brackets floated at between 20 and 26 percent; unlike today, working people on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder paid income taxes, in addition to social security payroll taxes. But rates were progressive: the moderately well-off paid much more. A head of household who earned $20,000 in 1953—the equivalent of $175,000 today—faced a marginal tax rate of 52 percent. As for the very wealthy, they were soaked. The top marginal rate was 91 percent in 1953, though very few Americans made enough money (over $200,000) to qualify for that
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The president abjured what later became known as supply-side economics—the theory that tax cuts would work as a stimulant to business and would pay for themselves by generating economic dynamism. No, he insisted that taxes be trimmed only as a reward for cutting spending.
When, in the spring of 1954, Democrats in Congress called for significant tax cuts, Eisenhower took his case to the public. In a television address he sympathized with his audience. “I know how burdensome your taxes have been,” he said, but Americans also wanted certain important improvements, like an expansion of social security, unemployment insurance, more public housing, better health care, and more schools. “These things cost money,” and that money would come from taxes.
Rather than offer across-the-board tax cuts, Eisenhower kept income tax rates high while giving away a certain amount of revenue through tax loopholes.
The impression that Eisenhower had repudiated his campaign tax pledges made conservatives anxious; so too did his warm embrace of the signature New Deal program, the Old Age and Survivors Insurance Program, better known as social security.
As a candidate Eisenhower had denounced what he called the creeping socialism of the New Deal and declared that if Americans wanted “security” they could go to jail and have their meals and housing provided for free. But once in office he adopted a far more generous, and indeed progressive outlook on the provision of social security benefits for working Americans.
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.23
This principle of effective yet restrained government led Eisenhower to champion a program for national health insurance, a policy area of infamous complexity and entrenched interests. As early as his State of the Union message in January 1954, he expressed his convictions on the subject: “I am flatly opposed to the socialization of medicine,” he began predictably. But he did believe that with the rising costs of medical care and health insurance, many Americans had no protection against sudden injury or illness. He floated the idea of a “limited government reinsurance program” to backstop
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Between those who wanted “socialism” and those who sought “to eliminate everything the Federal government has ever done,” there had to be some common ground. Mere hostility to government was not a winning formula.
In his diary he spelled it out clearly: “The Republican Party must be known as a progressive organization or it is sunk.”34
Eisenhower voiced much deeper concern about the prospect of reelection. To Swede Hazlett he confided that he did think about the question of age; he would turn 65 in October 1955 and would hit 70 in his last year of a second term. “No man has ever reached his 70th year in the White House,” he pointed out, and wondered if that barrier should be broken. After all, “the last person to recognize that a man’s mental faculties are fading is the victim himself.”
Nixon later admitted that he was “completely unprepared” for the shocking news of the heart attack, relayed to him in the early afternoon of September 24 by Hagerty. After putting down the receiver, Nixon sat in a stupor in an armchair in his Washington home. After a while he called his close friend and confidant William P. Rogers, the deputy attorney general, and asked him to come to his house. The two men sat together awhile, talking about Nixon’s next move. But with news of the president’s illness now flooding the airwaves, reporters started to crowd Nixon’s front lawn. Only then did Nixon
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When he gave his first press conference, he nonchalantly declared that the Eisenhower “team” would carry on as usual. Any political implications of the president’s illness, he said, were “unworthy of consideration.” Yet on Monday evening Nixon held a four-hour strategy session with Len Hall, the Republican national chairman, to discuss precisely that subject. Adams, who returned from a fishing vacation in Scotland, sat in on the discussion and refused to speak. Nixon grasped why: “Adams’ sole loyalty was to Eisenhower.” He would have no part in discussing a future without him.
The vice president did not occupy center stage during the weeks that followed the heart attack. Sherman Adams did.
Adams who along with Attorney General Brownell (also hastily returned from a European vacation), decided that there was no need to turn power over to the vice president.
Adams viewed Nixon as far too inexperienced to run the government. The cabinet met on September 30 and, despite Nixon’s initial resistance, decided that Adams would go to Denver on October 1 to take command of the president’s affairs there and act as the “sole official channel of information between Eisenhower and the world.”
For the next two months the Eisenhower administration was managed by a committee consisting of six men: Adams, Nixon, Brownell, Dulles, George Humphrey, and Jerry Persons.
Of these, Nixon was the least consequential. He chaired the NSC and cabinet meetings, as he had done occasionally during the first term. But he had no executive power or authority to speak for the administration. Meanwhile Dulles controlled the State Department, Humphrey the Treasury, Brownell the Justice Department. Most important, Adams, seated at Ike’s bedside, controlled access to the stricken president.
it was not until January 9, 1956, that Eisenhower returned to the White House to resume his official duties—almost five months from the time he had left the capital in mid-August,
on January 13 he held a quiet dinner for his most senior advisers and cabinet members—except, significantly, Nixon. Ike told Nixon that the dinner was to discuss Eisenhower’s future, and “since you are going to be so much the object of conversation, it would be embarrassing to you” to be present. What Ike really meant was that the dinner guests would likely say that Nixon certainly could not replace Eisenhower in 1956.41
Nixon drew praise in the press for being a good team player during Eisenhower’s illness, yet it also became clear that he had no serious role to play in the administration. Nixon was superfluous. Eisenhower, with his sixth sense for picking winners and losers, understood this. During his long recovery he spent many hours wondering if Nixon could fill his shoes. His conclusion: decidedly not. Nixon was able, loyal, hardworking, devoted, but he was not ready to be president.
The suggestion to step off the ticket and take a cabinet job seemed to Eisenhower a constructive one. But it came as a shattering blow to Nixon and triggered yet another of his famous “crises.”
Eisenhower asked him “five or six times” to join the cabinet. Each time, Nixon refused;
Eisenhower thought he was offering Nixon a chance to improve himself; Nixon considered Ike’s advice a political cyanide capsule.
Ike briefly discussed with Adams the idea of having two vice presidents, one to handle domestic policy and the other foreign matters, men of substance who could handle the heavy burdens of government and bring to the president only the most crucial decisions. Ike did not have Nixon in mind for either role.
Eisenhower told RNC chairman Len Hall that Nixon, while having done a fine job as vice president, was “making a mistake” in seeking to stay on the ticket: “I think he would do better by taking a Cabinet post.” Even so, Eisenhower would not directly order Nixon off the ticket. Ike did not like confrontation and hated to deliver bad news. He hoped Nixon would interpret the offer of a cabinet job as a presidential command. But Nixon did not comply.
The price of rejecting Ike’s advice was public humiliation, which duly came and which Nixon never forgot or forgave. With good reason, Nixon concluded years later that Eisenhower “was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized.”
In the pages of the new magazine National Review, William F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell articulated conservatives’ deep disappointment with the president’s record.
here for Buckley lay the genuine danger of Eisenhower: to resist “the socialist tidal wave,” Americans needed ideas, passions, and beliefs; Ike had given them only “aimless mush-headedness.” Eisenhower himself was mostly immune to these kinds of criticisms, but Buckley’s critique laid the groundwork for a campaign to push the GOP further to the right once the Age of Eisenhower had run its course.12
As he examined the president in the early hours of June 8, Snyder realized that this was no mere attack of gas. Eisenhower began to vomit, his blood pressure was 160 over 90, and he was perspiring. The problem demanded immediate operative relief. At 1:30 in the afternoon Snyder ordered an ambulance and had Eisenhower transferred to Walter Reed Hospital.
