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

by William I. Hitchcock

“The failure of any prominent member of the administration to speak out against and deplore the present condition of terrorism and economic sanction against Negroes,” he wrote, “is causing deep concern among Negro leaders in the country today.” Morrow reported a widespread feeling that the administration “has completely abandoned the Negro in the South and left him to the mercy of state governments.” He urged a public denunciation of the lawlessness in the South as well as a meeting between Eisenhower and a high-level delegation of black political and religious leaders. Yet with Hoover’s reports circulating in the White House, linking African American activism with communism, Morrow got nowhere with his suggestions. The White House remained publicly silent.57 Only after considerable persuasion from Rabb did the president agree to place a brief mention about civil rights in his State of the Union speech on January 5, 1956. It was a tepid statement, buried deep in a long speech. “It is disturbing that in some localities,” Eisenhower said, sounding as if the matter had just been brought to his attention, “allegations persist that Negro citizens are being deprived of their right to vote and are likewise being subjected to unwarranted economic pressures. I recommend that the substance of these charges be thoroughly examined by a Bipartisan Commission created by the Congress. It is hoped that such a commission will be established promptly so that it may arrive at findings which ...

The South now spoke with one voice: it would not recognize federal law. A constitutional crisis loomed.67 No wonder, then, that Eisenhower’s advisers were becoming exasperated. However, their anger was not directed at southern white leaders but at black activists. Fred Morrow, despondent, wrote a long and revealing entry in his diary about the atmosphere in the administration. Even Max Rabb, normally a close ally, gave Morrow a “tongue-lashing” about black behavior. 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.

Indeed, despite his successes in pushing moderate civil rights reforms in his first term, Eisenhower tried his best to stay clear of the subject during the fall election season for fear of alienating whites in the South who might be tempted to vote Republican. For Eisenhower, it was time to let the civil rights issue cool off a bit.

As an acute observer of the era, William Lee Miller, noted in a 1958 essay, Ike was ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. He “combined the perennial grandeur of success in battle with the familiar friendliness of the man next door.” He found a way to reconcile the cross-cutting tendencies of the American character: the “practical, competitive, individualistic, externally-minded, environment-mastering and success-seeking on the one side, and the spiritual, idealistic, friendly, team-working, moralizing, and reform-seeking on the other. Mr. Eisenhower exactly summarized both.”

Actions that might have seemed hypocritical and even schizophrenic in a lesser man appeared, when performed by Eisenhower, to be evidence of a tempered and moderate philosophy that transcended mere politics. He could trumpet the virtues of capitalism and individual success even as he called for Americans to go to church more often and abjure materialism. He insisted on conservative government, demanded tight budgets, and inveighed against the dangers of “statism,” yet he also hailed the beneficial role of government in providing public schools, roads and bridges, airports and public housing, hospitals and old-age pensions to American citizens. The last president born in the 19th century welcomed innovation, modernity, new technologies, the space age, and global travel and communication. Liberal intellectuals like Adlai Stevenson and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., as well as right-wing pundits such as William F. Buckley, found Ike’s political shape-shifting infuriating. But the voters admired his uncanny ability to float above the partisan scrum.

Human rights, Eisenhower asserted, are granted by God, not the state. And as such they are inviolable. The government must protect and defend these rights; it must never abridge them. Between man and his Creator, no government should intervene.

unless that makes some white southerners angry

“a liberal attitude toward the welfare of people and a conservative approach to the use of their money.”

“The good American,” he suggested, “doesn’t ask for favored position or treatment. Naturally he wants all fellow citizens to pay their fair share of the taxes, just as he has to do, and he wants every cent collected to be spent wisely and economically. But every real American is proud to carry his share of that national burden.”

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. Eager to sever any link to the heartless policies of the previous Republican administration, Eisenhower unambiguously embraced the principle of social security in his 1953 State of the Union address. “The individual citizen must have safeguards against personal disaster inflicted by forces beyond his control,” he insisted. Three weeks later he used a homely metaphor to reassure Americans: “It is a proper function of government to help build a sturdy floor over the pit of personal disaster, and to this objective we are all committed.” Eisenhower would be no Herbert Hoover.

history.” A few “Texas oil millionaires” and the occasional hard-liner might still oppose social security. But, he said, in memorably blunt terms, “their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

He told a gathering of his close advisers that “the time had come to start the fight against the Old Guard within our party.” If the GOP was to have a chance of winning majorities in the future, it first had to reform itself by bringing forward the “progressive moderates” in the party. In his diary he spelled it out clearly: “The Republican Party must be known as a progressive organization or it is sunk.”

Political analysts caught on to Ike’s emphasis on reforming his party and banishing the ghosts of Coolidge and Hoover. New York Times columnist Arthur Krock saw that Ike had drawn a key lesson from the November 1954 defeat: “The Republican party must accept the political verities of the second half of the twentieth century instead of indulging in nostalgia for the dead past and continuing to run against Presidents Roosevelt and Truman.”

Certainly the Republican Party must identify itself with economic freedom and individualism. But “we must never be a party that is indifferent to the sufferings of a great community where, through some unusual cause, people are out of work, where people can’t educate their own children, where through any kind of disaster, natural or economic, people are suffering.” Eisenhower thought these ideas formed a “middle way” philosophy that could transform the Republican Party into the majority party in the United States—if only his loyalists would simply follow his advice.

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. Hagerty was the official spokesman and orchestra conductor. 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.

As his strength recovered he mused frequently about whether to stay in politics or retire. In a late October letter to Swede Hazlett, he revealed that his decision to run hinged on the issue of a successor: “I am vitally concerned in seeing someone nominated who not only believes in the program I have been so earnestly laboring to have enacted into law, but who also has the best chance of election. This is the tough one.” But no one came close to matching his political strength. He had no viable protégé, and he knew it.

In fact 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.

On August 8, just before a press conference, Hagerty advised Eisenhower that black voters in the North were likely to fall in line behind the Democrats anyway, and too much pressure on civil rights would alienate white southerners. Ike agreed. When asked by reporters later that day if the GOP platform should explicitly embrace the Brown decision, Eisenhower dodged the question. “I don’t know how the Republican plank on this particular point is going to be stated,” he said.

In the days before the Republican convention in San Francisco, Eisenhower directly intervened in the drafting of the party platform. On August 19 he called Herbert Brownell to demand a change in the civil rights plank. Ike had seen a draft

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.

The president also shaped his acceptance speech, which he delivered to the GOP convention on August 23, to avoid any provocative language on civil rights. Speechwriter Arthur Larson, who worked with Eisenhower throughout July and August on this speech, tried to insert a “strong and unequivocal condemnation of racial discrimination,” but the president objected. In a number of conversations with Larson, Eisenhower repeated by-now familiar themes about the need to “understand the Southerners as well as the Negroes.” In Larson’s account of these discussions, Eisenhower stressed the point that “equality of political and economic opportunity did not mean necessarily that everyone has to mingle socially—‘or that a Negro should court my daughter.’ ” Larson reluctantly drafted a speech that omitted the charged terms race, racial, and Negro, downplayed any notion of a national civil rights crisis, and instead hailed a number of “quietly effective actions conceived in understanding and good will for all.” 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.”

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.”

What did the Republican Party really stand for? What was the 1956 election really all about? Unlike 1952, when Eisenhower was a newcomer to the party, he had now earned the right to define the values of the GOP—his party. Republicans, he said, wanted a government that promotes individual liberty and freedom while also protecting each citizen “against falling into the depths of poverty and misery through no fault of his own.” Good government must enhance free enterprise but also encourage community values and mutual goodwill so that no American will be left behind. Government must operate with thrift and integrity but “must never pinch pennies where the security of the nation is concerned.” Government must arm for war but strive toward world peace through cooperation and diplomacy. 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.

In such an anxious time, he asked, what does American stand for? “What are the marks of America—and what do they mean to the world?” He gave a clear answer: Americans believed in the rule of law. That principle had won the admiration of so many millions of the world’s peoples. America was a land without “class or caste,” a country that did not judge a man by his “name or inheritance.” It was America’s mission to uphold the rule of law around the world. “There can be no second-class nations before the law of the world community.”

Eisenhower acknowledged that the crisis in the Middle East posed “a test of our principles” because it asked Americans to choose between friendship with old allies and respect for the law. But America had made its choice and would uphold the integrity of the law of nations. “We cannot proclaim this integrity when the issue is easy—and stifle it when the issue is hard.” Law must govern nations just as it must govern free peoples. “We cannot and we will not condone armed aggression, no matter who the attacker and no matter who the victim.” More than a campaign speech, Eisenhower’s remarks revealed his deep devotion to a world based upon law rather than force.

and yet he wad still cool with overthrowing democratically elected governments

If Britain had to withdraw its forces now, without winning some kind of new international agreement to control the canal, “the loss of prestige and humiliation would be so great that the Government must fall.” Macmillan, who was prone to rhetorical flights, told IMF president Eugene Black the next day that they “were probably witnessing the end of western civilization, and that in another 50 years yellow and black men would take over.” Such were the apocalyptic sentiments of the British leaders.

such drama queens the world had in the '50s

And in the Middle East in 1956 Eisenhower again expanded the range of American global commitments. Not content to compel his European allies to stand down from their ill-conceived Suez adventure, he now sought to impose an American order on the Middle East. Of course the Eisenhower Doctrine was expressed in the language of self-determination and liberty, but beneath the finery of good intentions lay the cold steel of military power. In January 1957 Eisenhower declared that the United States would fight to protect its interests in the Middle East; more than six decades later it is fighting still.

But in November 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling of a federal three-judge panel in Browder v. Gayle that declared segregation of public buses unconstitutional. When this decision was implemented just before Christmas 1956, allowing blacks to sit anywhere they chose on buses in Montgomery, white vigilantes unleashed a wave of violence, tossing dynamite into the homes of civil rights leaders and blowing up their churches. King’s home was hit by a drive-by shotgun blast. Integrated buses were struck by gunfire; a pregnant woman was grievously injured in both legs while riding in a bus across town. On January 10, 1957, the home of King’s fellow minister Ralph Abernathy, as well as three churches, were damaged by bombs.

States' rights at its finest -_-

King had sent open telegrams to Eisenhower, Nixon, and Attorney General Brownell decrying the violence and beseeching the White House for help. “A state of terror prevails” across the South, he declared. He asked the president to use his “immense moral power” by coming to the South, making a major speech, and condemning these acts of violence. King sent a pointed message to Nixon questioning why, having conducted a “fact-finding” mission to Austria to examine the plight of Hungarian refugees fleeing Soviet repression, he would not also come to the South to examine the repression of American citizens there.

“[I have] a pretty good and sizable agenda on my desk every day, and as you know I insist on going for a bit of recreation every once in a while. . . . I have expressed myself on this subject so often in the South, in the North, wherever I have been, that I don’t know what another speech would do about the thing right now.” In an act of astonishing bad taste, he then departed Washington for 10 days of turkey shooting at the Humphrey plantation in Georgia.

Despite his deep-seated aversion to social movements and to the increasingly urgent demands for action on civil rights, he presided over two enormously important developments that would shape the history of race in America. He lent support to Attorney General Brownell’s strenuous efforts to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957; and he used the power of his office to enforce court-ordered school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, overcoming the resistance of the demagogic governor, Orval Faubus. Eisenhower may at times have been an unwilling combatant in these struggles, yet in the end he did act, and decisively, to advance the progress of civil rights.

Why did Eisenhower, so wary of the civil rights cause, find himself in the surprising role of abetting it? For one thing, there was the promise of a glittering electoral prize in black votes. Eisenhower received 40 percent of the African American vote in 1956—a higher percentage, by far, than any Republican presidential candidate between 1932 and today. (Nixon would win 32 percent in 1960, but since then Republican presidential aspirants have managed to garner on average only 9.6 percent of the black vote.)

In this charged political climate, GOP strategists believed, modest progress on civil rights might win over blacks to the Republican Party for a generation.

He had repeatedly declared that his administration’s civil rights proposals were “moderate,” that they aimed chiefly to protect the right to vote as expressed in the Fifteenth Amendment. During the spring he repeated his view that the civil rights bill threatened no one: “In it is nothing that is inimical to the interests of anyone. It is intended to preserve rights without arousing passions and without disturbing the rights of anyone else.”

turns out protecting certain citizens' (African Americans) right to vote is seen as an attack by other citizens because... heritage?

He backed away from the part of the legislation that strengthened the federal government’s hand to enforce school integration. And he strongly repudiated the idea that the federal government would ever have to use force to compel obedience to the law. “I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send Federal troops . . . to enforce the orders of a Federal court.”

narrator: he soon would no longer suffer from a lack of imagination.

The leader of the liberal forces in the Senate, Paul Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, bitterly remarked that the death of Section 3 would arouse “gleeful pleasure among the advocates of apartheid and white supremacy but deep sadness amongst those who are struggling for men to live together.”

But the defeat may also have been due to Eisenhower’s own absence of zeal. Again and again on civil rights he expressed “moderate” opinions in the face of men whose views were immoderate. He sought gradual change where others sought immediate progress or none at all. He showed dispassionate common sense; his opponents fought with passionate zealotry. It was immensely frustrating for Eisenhower to discover that while his appeal to moderation made him admired in the country as a whole, it disarmed him in Congress. Compromise was the ultimate outcome of most congressional proceedings, but to win even half a loaf, you had to fight fiendishly for a whole one while threatening to burn down the bakery. This was not Eisenhower’s style.

Eisenhower replied to Faubus on September 5 with a brief and elliptical message: “The Federal Constitution will be upheld by me by every legal means at my command.” Eisenhower intended this to sound like a thinly veiled threat. Yet no one could be certain how he would act in the face of Faubus’s defiance. Nor did his highly publicized rounds of golf lend any sense of urgency to the issue; every day from 9:00 to noon, with national attention riveted on Little Rock, Ike could be found on the fairways of the Newport Country Club, working on his game with the club pro.

Predictably he avoided the moral questions at hand. He did not champion the need for equality and fairness in America, nor did he embrace the Brown decision or praise the Little Rock Nine as heroes every bit as courageous as the men he had led into battle. He had no interest in engaging the history of race relations in America. He never mentioned Orval Faubus; he did not refer to the Southern Manifesto; he did not quote any of the prolonged declarations in favor of racial segregation made that summer in the U.S. Senate by leading statesmen of the age. In fact he went out of his way to praise the great majority of southerners, who “are of good will, united in their efforts to preserve and respect the law.”

In short, he positioned himself not as a champion of civil rights but as a defender of law and order. As he would say again and again to his southern critics, he sent troops to Little Rock to uphold the courts. The country was faced with “open defiance of the Constitution,” and if he were to tolerate that, he would invite “anarchy.” His decision, he told one southern senator, had nothing to do with “integration, desegregation or segregation”: he aimed to uphold the law. To fail in that duty was “to acquiesce in anarchy, mob rule, and incipient rebellion,” which would “destroy the Nation.”

Although black leaders continued to seek further support from the White House, Eisenhower was unreceptive. The Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite on October 4, 1957, soon dominated the concerns of the administration; interest in civil rights sagged. In November, Martin Luther King Jr. asked if the president would receive a delegation of black leaders to discuss race relations. The request was denied. In January 1958, Eisenhower devoted his entire State of the Union speech to defense matters and the cold war, completely ignoring the extraordinary events in Little Rock.

The speech reflected Eisenhower’s belief that while arms were certainly expensive and might have seemed wasteful, they provided the foundation for order in a disordered world. He asked Americans to accept the basic unpleasant fact about the cold war: To deter war, America must prepare for it. And that meant investing in science, technology, and education as well as arms manufacturing. For Eisenhower, the purpose of such a titanic effort was not war but peace—an armed and anxious peace, but peace nonetheless. Here lay the basic national security principles of the Age of Eisenhower.

These three major legislative moves—the NDEA, NASA, and Defense Reorganization Act—marked an extraordinary period of activity for the president and Congress, and they all responded directly to the challenge of Sputnik. Combined with his beefed-up defense budget, these actions revealed a shift away from the small-government Republicanism that Eisenhower cherished. The missile race, and for that matter the cold war, required robust military-industrial-scientific collaboration on a nationwide scale, the sort of thing that only the federal government could direct. As the leading historian of the Space Age has said, Eisenhower had to discard “the old verities about limited government, local initiative, balanced budgets, and individualism. The United States had to respond in kind to Soviet technocracy.”

Just six years earlier America had been at war in Korea against the forces of “international Communism.” In his first term Ike stressed that the nation was “in peril” as a result of the communist threat. The frenzy of the McCarthy era remained white hot through 1954, and in 1956 the invasion of Hungary made the Soviets look like ruthless beasts. The early phase of the space race alarmed Americans and drew their eyes upward to search the nighttime skies for Soviet rockets. Yet now, at the close of 1959, Eisenhower, at his paternal and unruffled best, assured his people that the cold war could be managed, eased, and perhaps even defrosted through the power of his ice-melting charm. All that remained was to put Ike’s warm words of peace into action.

Unfortunately Eisenhower’s CIA did far more harm than good to American interests. Rather than enhancing national security, Eisenhower’s secret wars created great human suffering, propped up awful dictatorships, left the U.S. government vulnerable to exposure and public humiliation, and alienated millions of people who otherwise had reason to like and admire the United States. Over the course of the 1950s the CIA engaged in sabotage, arms smuggling, destabilizing of governments, widespread radio and print propaganda, and the arming of insurgencies. It supplied arms, intelligence, and training to certain friendly regimes that were engaged in repression, summary arrests, torture, and murder. And it plotted the ouster and in a few cases the assassination of foreign leaders, violating American law and tarnishing America’s reputation.

Although Diem was a Catholic in a Buddhist country; although his extended family, the Ngo clan, had a notorious reputation for corruption, criminality, and connections to reactionary military circles; and although he had little popular appeal or legitimacy, he seemed to the Americans the perfect man to build a free and democratic South Vietnam. He was ferociously anticommunist. His Catholicism marked him as Western in American eyes. And he already had close friends in Washington. In fact his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had been working with the CIA since 1952 and would maintain that link for the rest of the decade.

Despite billions in U.S. aid and an unrelenting war on internal enemies, Diem had failed to defeat the communist insurgency or build any legitimacy for himself. By the start of 1960 Diem’s regime, once held up as a model of Asian freedom and democracy, had become a brutal police state standing watch over a restive and seething people.18 None of these problems led to a reconsideration of America’s strategy in Vietnam. Eisenhower remained firm: the Diem regime must be given the tools to win its fight for freedom against communism. Since the start of his administration, Eisenhower had styled Vietnam as a domino that must not be allowed to fall.

These were noble aspirations, and Eisenhower believed in them firmly. Yet they were consistently betrayed in their implementation. Instead of building freedom and democracy, the Eisenhower administration militarized “free” Indochina. It propped up Diem’s dictatorial government and provided enormous sums of money that allowed Diem to strengthen his hold on power even as he was driving his people into the arms of the communist insurgency. By the start of 1960, while Ike looked forward to his meeting with Khrushchev in hopes of resolving many cold war tensions, his administration was fanning the flames of anger and resentment across Indochina.

In short, the CIA did everything possible to ensure Lumumba’s death. In the process they formed an alliance with Joseph Mobutu, who became a loyal ally of the United States and one of history’s most repellent dictators. For three decades Mobutu ruthlessly governed his renamed country, Zaire, casually murdering political opponents and amassing a personal fortune in one of the world’s poorest nations. This too is a legacy of the Age of Eisenhower.

Eisenhower’s principal weakness as president lay in his failure to transfer his personal popularity to his party. His effortless and massive victories in 1952 and 1956 allowed him to believe that the country had ratified his ideas, when in fact they had chiefly welcomed his personal qualities of optimism, decency, and experience. During his time in office, his party imploded. In the elections of 1954, 1956, and 1958, Republicans lost a total of 68 seats in the House and 17 seats in the Senate—a

In 1960 the Republican cupboard was bare, in part through Ike’s neglect.