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

by William I. Hitchcock

The team of doctors who gathered at Walter Reed were wary of conducting the operation Snyder recommended on a 65-year-old man who had suffered a heart attack only nine months earlier. As Snyder wrote later, “Everyone hesitated to put a knife into his abdomen.”

At 2:25 a.m. the doctors gave Eisenhower general anesthesia; at 2:59 Heaton made the first incision, and for two hours he snipped away at Eisenhower’s innards, searching for, then finding, and then cutting out the constricted portion of the ileum. It was for Heaton a familiar operation, one he had performed “scores of times.” But there could be no denying the tension in the room. At 5:00 in the morning Heaton finished his work and deemed the operation a success.

reporters wanted to know, who had been in charge while the president was unconscious? The answer seemed to be, as usual, Sherman Adams.

“no thought had been given to transferring presidential powers” to the vice president. (The Twenty-fifth Amendment, clarifying the procedures for presidential succession, did not become law until 1967.)

He stoically endured frequent enemas (one of “milk and molasses,” another of olive oil). He had diarrhea and did not eat solid food for a week. His weight dropped to 158 pounds—almost 20 pounds lighter than usual. Two weeks after the operation he continued to endure “moderately severe anorectal pain” and hemorrhoids. After three weeks he moved to his home in Gettysburg to continue his recuperation.

Larson drew a painful and damning conclusion after this experience: “President Eisenhower, during his presidential tenure, was neither emotionally nor intellectually in favor of combatting segregation in general.”

Clinton, Tennessee,

On September 2 the Tennessee National Guard arrived in Clinton in force, bringing with them seven tanks, three armored personnel carriers, and over 100 jeeps and trucks. This show of force dispersed the rioters but also generated considerable press across the country.

When another reporter asked him if he had any message about the civil rights crisis for the nation’s young people who were just about to start the school year, Eisenhower fell back on his usual platitudes: “It is difficult through law and through force to change a man’s heart.” He denounced the actions of “extremists on both sides,” thus equating the actions of stone-throwing segregationists with the work of black lawyers and church leaders who, he said, “want to have the whole matter settled today.”

African Americans who had looked with such hope upon the important achievements of Eisenhower’s first years in office now felt the president had turned his back on their struggle.

Nixon spoke to the group first, promising a fighting campaign on behalf of the Republican Party. He insisted he would vigorously “set the record straight” if the Democrats should ever dare to distort Ike’s record. He relished his role as attack dog, saying with glee, “You don’t win campaigns on a diet of dishwater and milk toast.”

Here in a nutshell was the basic message of the Age of Eisenhower: Government must be moderate, efficient, empathetic, responsive, and compassionate. It must govern with restraint, wisdom, and a constant insistence on frugality. Above all, government must adhere to a disciplined policy of limited spending and limited interference in the lives of American citizens.

A Republican Looks at His Party by Arthur Larson, who at the time was a lawyer working in the Labor Department and had since become one of Eisenhower’s chief speechwriters. The book appeared in the spring of 1956, and Eisenhower read it while he was convalescing

Under a flapping white circus tent on his Gettysburg lawn, he casually blended the New Deal ethos with a dose of homespun conservative rhetoric about states’ rights and individual liberty. His concoction raised not a single Republican eyebrow amid the picnickers—an indication of his supremacy over a party that had once viewed him as a dangerous outsider.

Referring to Stevenson, Ike said, “This fellow’s licked and what’s more, he knows it! Let’s go to the ball game.”

Dulles wanted to make it plain that Nasser “cannot cooperate as he is doing with the Soviet Union and at the same time enjoy most-favored-nation treatment from the United States.”

Dulles now began to contemplate an outright break with the Egyptian leader. Unfortunately, at the crucial moment of decision, Eisenhower was sidelined by illness. From June 8 to July 16 he was either in Walter Reed Hospital or recovering in Gettysburg from his intestinal surgery. Just three days after returning to the Oval Office—thin, still in pain, and irritable—Eisenhower met with Dulles to discuss the Egyptian issue. On July 19, in a 10-minute conversation, Dulles outlined his proposal to withdraw financing from the Aswan Dam project.

no sooner had Nasser made his announcement on July 26 than three determined states, Britain, France, and Israel, lined up together in hopes of forcing a confrontation that might weaken and even destroy the defiant Egyptian colonel.

Macmillan prophesied that Nasser’s seizure of the canal would trigger successive acts of defiance toward Britain across the Middle East and lead to “the destruction of Great Britain as a first-class power and its reduction to a status similar to that of Holland.”

Eden was an ill man. In April 1953, while undergoing an operation to remove his gallbladder, the surgeons had damaged his bile duct. For years afterward Eden endured recurrent infections and fevers and constant abdominal pain. His doctors prescribed a drug called Drinamyl to treat the pain; it contained both a barbiturate and an amphetamine—rather like taking a sleeping pill with six cups of strong coffee. For three years Eden popped these pills that, after prolonged use, left him a nervous and exhausted wreck, prone to mood swings and outbursts of euphoria followed by depression.

Eisenhower alerted the British prime minister to his firm opposition to war. The use of force against Egypt, he insisted, would rally Arab opinion to Nasser, certainly lead to a cutoff of oil shipments to Europe, and open the door to wider Soviet influence. Yes, Nasser must be deflated, Ike agreed, but Suez was “not the issue on which to do this by force.” Eden, however, refused to accept such counsel.

Even as the British and the French kept up a pretense of negotiations with Egypt through the United Nations, they moved secretly to prepare an invasion.

Israel should be prevailed upon to attack Egypt; Britain and France would intervene, ostensibly to separate the warring sides; in the process the Canal Zone would be occupied, and the Egyptian Army and Air Force destroyed. Nasser would be so humbled by the defeat that his ouster would naturally follow.

They kept their actions secret, deliberately lying to their American colleagues about the plan, even though they knew that a wider Arab-Israeli war might well draw the United States into direct conflict with the Soviet Union. Eden’s actions were not merely reckless. They amounted to outright betrayal of Britain’s closest ally.

On February 25, 1956, in a bid to strengthen his standing in the Soviet political structure, Khrushchev had issued a stunning denunciation of Stalin and his tyrannical era.

Khrushchev promised, the true principles of communism would be restored.

all designed to send the message that the communist experiment in Eastern Europe would no longer rely upon terror. The world would see a new communist bloc, made up of willing socialist states working in harmony toward a common Marxist future.

In Poland, long one of the most ardently anti-Soviet nations of Europe, workers called Khrushchev’s bluff and began to agitate for improved pay and working conditions. In late June 1956 a wildcat strike erupted into a major uprising in the city of Poznan,

shots were fired into the crowd by the Polish security forces; over 50 marchers died.

Soviet Red Army would use force to ensure Poland’s continued obedience.

in Hungary, anti-Soviet feeling surged. On October 22 students, intellectuals, and factory workers gathered at the Technological University in Budapest and adopted a wide-ranging list of demands, including the removal of Soviet troops and the replacement of the pro-Moscow leadership with Imre Nagy,

spontaneous demonstrations popped up across Budapest.

October 23 the Hungarian Security Police fired into the crowd, killing unarmed demonstrators. Hungary was on the brink of revolution.

Hungarians defied the Soviet troops, and open combat broke out in the streets.

Eisenhower issued a short statement deploring the violence in Budapest

in private he told Dulles to take things slowly.

Any sudden American action designed to profit from Moscow’s troubles might bring about greater tragedy.21

Eisenhower explicitly directed Ambassador Bohlen in Moscow to convey this message to “the highest Soviet authorities.” He wanted them to know the United States would take no active measures to free Hungary from Soviet rule.22

Eisenhower was heading back to the presidential airplane when he received the dreaded news: Israeli forces had begun an invasion of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Eisenhower asked if the United States should invoke its obligation under the 1950 Tripartite Declaration, an agreement signed by the United States, Britain, and France that pledged the Great Powers to stop any nation in the Middle East that launched an aggressive attack against its neighbors. That implied supporting Egypt against Israel.

The whole picture now came plainly into view: Britain wanted Israel to attack Egypt, knew about it, and would use it as a screen to wage its own war on Nasser. The painful realization set in: the Americans had been duped.

Britain and America now found themselves “in a very sad state of confusion” which, if allowed to continue, could open the door to a general war in the Middle East and Soviet intervention on Egypt’s side. “Then the Mid East fat would really be in the fire.”

Egypt had “brought this attack on herself,” Eden argued—an outrageous falsehood, since the attack had been carefully planned by the British, French, and Israelis.

Dulles met with the British and French ambassadors and tore into them, calling this “the blackest day which has occurred in many years in the relations between England and France and the United States.”

Perhaps most galling, the Anglo-French action “may well obliterate the success we have long awaited in Eastern Europe” by giving the Soviets the cover they needed to crush Hungary.

UN Security Council debated a resolution calling for Israel to withdraw its forces from Egypt. In an unprecedented development, the United States and the Soviet Union supported the measure, but Britain and France vetoed it.

British and French forces began to bomb Egyptian airfields, ports, railways, and radio towers. They justified these air attacks as a necessary preliminary operation before their troops could land and secure the canal.

“There can be no peace without law,” he concluded. “And there can be no law if we invoke one code of international conduct for those who oppose us and another for our friends.”

Anyone wishing to make the case for Eisenhower as a master of the arts of politics and diplomacy need only look to the first 10 days of November 1956. In these anxious hours any mistake or miscalculation could have led to global war.

Eisenhower managed the dispute over Suez with assurance and wisdom that headed off what could easily have become a far more deadly conflagration.