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

by William I. Hitchcock

put together by Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, the chairman of the platform committee, which stated that the Eisenhower administration “concurred” with the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. The president insisted that was untrue: his administration merely “accepted” the ruling and would follow the law; the Court’s decision was its own. He expressed his frustration to Brownell at being caught “between the compulsion of duty on the one side, and his firm conviction on the other that because of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the whole issue had been set back badly.” He felt that any direct link between himself and Brown would appear as an affront to the white South. If the platform drafters did not change the language to distance Eisenhower from Brown, “he would refuse to go to San Francisco.” Needless to say, Bush altered the language of the civil rights plank as directed by Eisenhower.