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

by William I. Hitchcock

In the Eisenhower years the United States spent about 10 percent of its GDP each year on the military establishment—a higher percentage than any peacetime administration before or since. This book offers abundant evidence that the man who warned later generations about the military-industrial complex did a great deal to build it.

It is easy to lampoon this bureaucratic drudgery, but for Eisenhower good government required such constant focus. “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.”

“I have been and am an adherent to the Republican Party and to liberal Republican principles.”

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.

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.

Asked about civil rights legislation, he gave what would become a sort of mantra for him: “I do not believe we can cure all of the evils in men’s hearts by law.” This was both his personal belief and a pitch to southern white voters that he would be no crusader in this field.

Only after great prodding by the press did Eisenhower make a statement, rather impromptu, about his former boss. He told a press conference in late August, “General Marshall is one of the patriots and anyone who has lived with him, worked with him as I have, knows that he is a man of real selflessness.” There was “nothing of disloyalty in General Marshall’s soul.” However, when pressed by reporters if this implied a rebuke to McCarthy, Eisenhower said he would not discuss “personalities” and would support all Republican candidates for election to ensure Republican control of Congress, even if he did not agree with all their methods. That meant supporting McCarthy and Jenner for reelection.

That night in Milwaukee, Eisenhower delivered a blistering attack on the Democrats and the Truman administration that sounded very much like a speech that could have been given by MacArthur or Nixon. Unbeknownst to Eisenhower, however, his staff had released to the press the original text of the speech, including the praise for Marshall. Journalists who had been expecting a bold statement of support on behalf of Marshall listened in vain.

way to sell out your mentor to terrible people to gain basically nothing given the final election results

But Taft’s outburst was a harbinger: despite months of work to trim the budget, Eisenhower would get no easy pass from the GOP Old Guard. The archconservative Republicans mistrusted Eisenhower and were ready to pounce on any sign that he would simply carry on Truman’s policies.

Put another way, the United States consistently spent 10 percent or more of its GDP each year on defense during the Eisenhower years, a higher percentage than any peacetime administration in U.S. history, before or since.

What had Eisenhower learned from the Korean experience? Above all, he concluded, no more Koreas. Yet he also came to believe—erroneously—that America’s warlike disposition and atomic threats had been essential in bringing the Chinese to the armistice table. These twin conclusions—avoid quagmires and carry a big nuclear stick—would shape Eisenhower’s strategic thinking for the duration of his administration.

In reply to Churchill’s appeal at the conference’s opening session for a real effort to strike a deal with the new leaders of the Soviet Union, Eisenhower delivered a vulgar tirade in front of all the diplomats and officials of the three national delegations. Churchill’s private secretary, John Colville, recorded the scene: “[Eisenhower] said that as regards the prime minister’s belief that there was a New Look in Soviet policy, Russia was a woman of the streets and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath. America intended to drive her off her present ‘beat’ into the back streets.” Colville noted “pained looks all round.”

While the press responded with hearty praise for Eisenhower’s “dramatic,” “eloquent,” and “moving” address, the Soviets quite predictably called his bluff, responding that instead of discussing nuclear sharing, the Great Powers should agree to ban all atomic weapons. Since the United States had no interest in halting atomic weapons production, the Soviet counteroffer was swatted away, and the arms race continued unabated. Indeed it might be asked: Was Eisenhower really committed to moderating the cold war or to altering his recently designed cold war strategy? The evidence suggests he was not.

If the White House was not turned into a stage for sparkling entertainments, Eisenhower did rely heavily upon formal evening dinners with members of the “power elite.” He kept up a heavy schedule of men-only dinner parties to entertain political supporters, hear from business leaders, and receive reports on public opinion from men he had reason to trust.

Rather Eisenhower in 1953 improvised in dealing with McCarthy, at first trying to ignore him, then trying to outdo him in the Red-hunting business, then trying to seduce him with promises of new legislation to destroy communism in America. None of these tactics worked. Not until the spring of 1954, when an emboldened McCarthy turned his investigatory resources on the U.S. Army and on members of the administration, did Eisenhower choose to fight back.

Look at your country. Here is a country of which we are proud. . . . But this country is a long way from perfection—a long way. We have the disgrace of racial discrimination, or we have prejudice against people because of their religion. We have crime on the docks. We have not had the courage to uproot these things, although we know they are wrong. Now, [your] courage is not going to be satisfied—your sense of satisfaction is not going to be satisfied, if you haven’t the courage to look at these things and do your best to help correct them. . . . It is not enough merely to say I love America, and to salute the flag and take off your hat as it goes by, and to help sing the Star Spangled Banner.

Instead of standing up to McCarthy, Eisenhower preferred to point to his own success in “cleaning up the mess in Washington.” On October 23 the head of the Civil Service Commission, Philip Young, delivered the news to the press that the administration had dismissed “1,456 subversives” from federal service. The number was never precisely explained, and the dismissed employees were not identified. What seemed to matter most was that all but five of the 1,456 were holdovers from the Truman years.

suuuuuuuuuuuuuuure Jan

In fact the president faced serious disadvantages in taking command over the anti-McCarthy forces. Perhaps most important, his own party was deeply divided over the matter. The Old Guard Republicans in the Senate shared many of McCarthy’s prejudices and fears and were sympathetic to his brand of reactionary, isolationist, conspiracy-laden, communist-obsessed, vulgar populism.

Hoping to diminish the impact of the Peress issue, Eisenhower drafted a statement that he read to the press corps on March 3, in which he acknowledged that the army had made an error in failing to expel the communist-leaning dentist.

2020 level of weird scandals

He explained that “it is essential to efficient and effective administration that employees of the Executive Branch be in a position to be completely candid in advising with each other on official matters” without those conversations being subject to congressional scrutiny. Therefore he blocked all employees of the Department of Defense, including John Adams, from discussing in the hearings any “conversations or communications” that constituted confidential advice to the president or to his advisers. The January 21 meeting was off limits, as were any other conversations in the White House on the McCarthy affair.

executive privilege, brought to you by Ike

Indeed it cannot be said that Eisenhower showed much moral courage in confronting what he knew to be a reprehensible demagogue who was holding Congress hostage to his personal crusade against subversives.

In a 2–1 decision the board recommended to the AEC that Oppenheimer’s security clearance not be reinstated because, although he was “a loyal citizen,” he also had “fundamental defects in his character” and so could not be trusted. The national security state was now eating its own. Eisenhower considered this a sterling example of the proper way to purge the government of subversives.

The CIA was initially designed to analyze intelligence gathered by a variety of government and military entities. With Eisenhower’s active support, Dulles transformed the agency into the operational headquarters of a secret struggle against the Soviet Union and many other nations considered threatening to American interests. Eisenhower’s CIA went way beyond intelligence analysis; it engaged in global propaganda, foreign sabotage, subversion, economic warfare, coups d’état, and political assassination. Not until the mid-1970s, when congressional investigations revealed the scale and scope of these activities, was any real restraint placed upon the agency.

America had to find new means to weaken the ties binding the Soviet imperium. The stakes were extremely high, and if Eisenhower had any qualms about the ethics of using secret and often brutal means to destroy America’s enemies, he never expressed them.

Furthermore the CIA reports that reached the president summarized a complex picture in bold strokes: Mossadeq was not himself a communist, but his regime was letting the communists in through the back door. If he stayed in power, the West would be forever barred from Iran, and the “loss of Iran” would be added to the rolls of ignominy alongside the loss of Czechoslovakia in 1948, the loss of China in 1949, and the invasion of South Korea in 1950.

“There can be no doubt whatsoever that this campaign had reached a very large audience.” The CIA Art Department prepared posters and handbills, copied them by the tens of thousands, and flew them into Tehran. These materials purported to show that Mossadeq was a tool of the communists and had secretly secured the support of the Tudeh Party to sustain him in power. The propaganda also asserted that he was planning to lash out against religious leaders and the army.

Over the long term, the most effective instrument for maintaining Iran’s orientation toward the West is the monarch, which in turn has the Army as its only real source of power.” Military aid would “cement Army loyalty to the Shah and thus consolidate the present regime.” This remarkably candid analysis dispelled any notion that the new government in Iran was based on popular support: the army, and American military aid, would prop up the shah for the next quarter century.

Arbenz wanted to bring modernity and development to his poor country by stimulating small farming and rolling back the predatory economic practices of large companies and their allies. But the local origins of his policies were lost on the U.S. government. In the highly charged atmosphere of the early cold war, this kind of aggressive land reform aligned with the state-sponsored social reform projects being imposed by socialist and communist governments around the world.

But was it such a great victory? Arbenz was no Soviet puppet but a leftist, reform-minded politician who had the bad fortune to face off against powerful foreign interests at the height of the cold war. His country posed no threat to the United States, or other Central American nations. His ouster brought down international condemnation on the coup, which was widely assumed to have been supported from Washington, and fomented anti-Americanism throughout Latin America. And Castillo Armas quickly turned into a pliant, if needy foot soldier for the United States, dependent on handouts of economic and military aid. Thereafter Guatemala endured three decades of repression, civil war, death squads, and terror.

From coups to economic warfare, and sabotage, propaganda, and underground resistance, U.S. secret plans took aim at every aspect of communist power across the globe.

This reliance upon covert operations and high technology to address America’s strategic dilemmas reveals an essential characteristic of the Age of Eisenhower. During the 1950s Eisenhower and the political establishment elevated the scientific “expert” to a position of extraordinary power and prominence. Eisenhower himself disdained partisan politics and preferred to place his trust, and the security of the nation, in a cadre of patriotic scientists, technicians, engineers, and veteran military officers to provide innovative solutions to America’s strategic problems.

But in the meantime he set a pattern that would bedevil America for decades: the closing off of national security decision-making from even the most cursory review by elected officials or the public. 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. In this sense the Age of Eisenhower would live on long after Ike had passed from the scene.

Most scholars have praised Eisenhower’s wisdom and restraint as he worked through this awful problem. Despite considerable pressure from members of his cabinet, his leading military advisers, and the French government, Eisenhower did not commit American military forces to Indochina in 1954. Though willing to rattle his nuclear weapons at the Chinese to deter them from advancing into Vietnam, he “shrewdly vetoed American military intervention,” according to historian Robert Divine. Much later scholarship has sustained this argument.

Stressing Eisenhower’s adherence to the domino theory, Logevall argues that Eisenhower was “fully prepared to intervene with force” in order to halt the fall of Vietnam to the communists. What stopped him from doing so? Not his own innate caution, which Logevall dismisses. Instead he was blocked by external forces, especially the reluctance of the U.S. Congress to give him a carte blanche for military intervention, as well as the opposition of America’s crucial ally, Britain, to a wider war in Indochina. In this interpretation it was the restraint of Congress and especially the British government—not Eisenhower—that kept America out of war in Vietnam in 1954.

Although they could hardly bay for more war after three years of bloody stalemate in Korea, the GOP hard-liners did not like Ike’s decision to stop the war short of victory. As the Los Angeles Times put it, “The Old Guard is miserable about what’s happened at Panmunjom,” where the Korean armistice was signed. In order to shore up his right flank, Ike would have to show firmness in his policies toward Indochina lest he ignite a full-scale rebellion in his party over his Asia policy.

The weak link in all this was of course France, for if 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. So Eisenhower placed his bets, and his nation’s prestige, on the outcome of a war fought in tropical jungles by a beleaguered French colonial expeditionary force against a well-armed and ideologically motivated national liberation army. It was a colossal gamble. And for once Eisenhower’s usual luck at games of chance failed him.

In the National Security Council meeting of January 8, when his advisers discussed the possible need for the United States to intervene in order to prop up the French war effort, 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. If we did so, the Vietnamese could be expected to transfer their hatred of the French to us. I cannot tell you, said the President with vehemence, how bitterly opposed I am to

such a course of action. This war in Indochina would absorb our troops by divisions!” Indeed the U.S. Army had already run the numbers and concluded it would take seven army divisions and one marine division to defeat the Viet Minh. Along with support and logistics personnel, that meant sending 275,000 men to Indochina. Just months after halting a most unpopular war in Korea, Eisenhower clearly had no appetite for such a dramatic move.

out. “No one could be more bitterly opposed to ever getting the U.S. involved in a hot war in that region than I am,” Eisenhower declared in front of a room full of reporters. “Every move I authorize is calculated . . . to make certain that that does not happen.” This became the leitmotif of Ike’s Asian diplomacy: to maneuver in such a way that the war could be sustained without direct U.S. involvement. For emphasis he insisted, “I cannot conceive of a greater tragedy for America than to get heavily involved now in an all-out war in any part of those regions.”

If the United States moved in to rescue the French, Ike stated, “we would in the eyes of many Asiatic peoples merely replace French colonialism with American colonialism.” Furthermore unilateral American intervention “would mean a general war with China and perhaps with the USSR.” The only way to sustain America’s moral position in the world was through collective action in the name of freedom. To intervene alone in Indochina “amounted to an attempt to police the entire world.”

In discussing this position with his senior advisers, Eisenhower revealed that his patience was running out. If the communists tried to snatch all of Indochina now, he said, the U.S. response would be massive: “There should be no half-way measures or frittering around. The Navy and the Air Force should go in with full power, using new weapons, and strike at air bases and ports in mainland China.” As Dulles put it to Smith, war with China, “waged primarily with sea and air power and modern weapons”—by which he meant nuclear weapons—was “infinitely to be preferred to the task of intervention in Indochina.” Rather than wage an unending jungle conflict, the United States could simply launch a nuclear strike on China.

Although the United States was not a signatory to the Geneva Accords of July 21, 1954, which ended the war and divided Vietnam, the Eisenhower administration embraced them nonetheless. Secretary Dulles released a statement on July 23, saying that while the Geneva agreement contained “many features which we do not like,” the important thing was “not to mourn the past but to seize the future.” With France and its heavy colonial baggage gone, America could begin its own kind of nation-building in South Vietnam. One day this fledgling protectorate might come to look like West Germany or South Korea—other divided nations in which Western resolve had stabilized a dangerous frontier. South Vietnam would become a new test of America’s purpose in the cold war.

Worse, coming so soon after the Western defeat in Vietnam, it would shatter the reputation of the United States in those East Asian nations that America had pledged to defend. And the domestic politics of any abandonment of territory to the communists would be very troublesome. In a revealing comment at the end of a long and contentious meeting, Ike said “there was hardly a word which the people of this country feared more than the term ‘Munich.’ ”

In evaluating Eisenhower’s handling of the twin Indochina and Taiwan crises of 1953–55, it is difficult to support the argument that he demonstrated commendable restraint. Certainly he decided against a unilateral American intervention in Vietnam in the tumultuous spring of 1954, but the problem of confronting communism in Asia was larger than that. His ambition to contain Chinese influence and suppress communist rebellions in Asia led him to make a series of dramatically hawkish public statements that pledged American prestige in Asia, and from which neither he nor his successors could easily walk away. By resorting to nuclear brinkmanship and constantly speaking about falling dominoes, Eisenhower narrowed his options for dealing with future crises. At some point America would have to make the terrible choice between living up to its promises or skulking away.

In truth Eisenhower was caught between two powerful forces, and he did not know how to resolve the tension between them. On the one hand, he believed that equality between citizens and the rule of law were the bedrock ideals of “Americanism” as he understood that term. Therefore defiance of the Supreme Court was unthinkable. Yet he also believed that the federal government must respect local customs, habits, laws, and desires. His speechwriter Emmet Hughes wrote that Eisenhower was determined not to use federal power to push southern states toward dramatic social change: “His political faith rested on the slow, gradual power of persuasion.” According to Hughes, Eisenhower insisted, “We can’t demand perfection in these moral questions. All we can do is keep working toward a goal and keep it high. And the fellow who tries to tell me that you can do these things by force is just plain nuts.”

His go-slow instincts were driven also by certain cultural assumptions that he shared with his southern white friends. For example, the president was not above invoking the specter of race-mixing between black men and white women—an apparition many white people then considered truly horrific—to explain why the South must be allowed time to evolve in its opinions. 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.

Even Ike’s old chum Swede Hazlett stirred the pot of race and sex in a personal letter to the president. Writing in early 1955 about southern reaction to the ruling, he opined that children had no apprehension about integrated schools and would readily adapt to the new landscape. The problem lay with the “racist parents” who had “visions of walking into their parlour some night and finding a black buck courting their own blonde honey-chile. If honey-chile wants a negro date let her have it. But the chances are 1000 to 1 that she won’t—with several centuries of tradition and social usage behind it. When I was a freshman at A[bilene] H[igh] S[chool] Gertie Tyler was a classmate of mine, and a sleek good-looking negress. But I can’t recall ever having even thought of social or any other kind of intercourse with her. Ridiculous!” Hazlett thus captured Ike’s own racial sensibilities in a nutshell.

Yet in the months after the second Brown ruling, as the South erupted in anger and division, Eisenhower’s enthusiasm notably cooled. The reaction he had long feared burst out around the country. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the original five school districts in the Brown case, the school board refused to pass a budget and planned to close its schools rather than integrate them.

Court. State legislators in Louisiana foamed in anger. “We do not intend by any stretch of the imagination to mix whites and Negroes in our schools, regardless of the Supreme Court decision,” said one lawmaker, and funds were to be cut off from any schools than did so.

we like local control except when that local control does something we do not like -_-

Mass rallies in southern cities were held at which leading public figures spoke about preserving states’ rights, while Confederate flags flapped in the breeze and local marching bands thumped out “Dixie.”

look at all that "heritage"