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February 15 - February 16, 2018
As a military officer Eisenhower had never registered a party affiliation or (he said) voted. (Later he said he would have voted Republican in 1932, 1936, and 1940 and Democratic—in the midst of war—in 1944.)
But he was very conservative on domestic matters, believing almost passionately in the necessity of balanced federal budgets and limited governmental intervention in the social and economic life of citizens. Not for a minute did he consider running as a Democrat.
Taft, he told a friend, was "a very stupid man . . . he has no intellectual ability, nor any comprehension of the issues of the world."21
It was not until September, when Eisenhower promised a conservative course, that Taft and his angry supporters agreed to support the parvenu party nominee in November.
Then and later Eisenhower remarked that Nixon seemed to have no friends; he never warmed up to him.
Stevenson and Sparkman, determined not to provoke another Dixiecrat walkout, ran on a platform that was considerably more conservative concerning civil rights than the one on which Truman was elected in 1948.30
For all these reasons Stevenson did not appeal much to the working-class-black-ethnic-urban coalition that Roosevelt had amassed and that Democrats needed in order to win national elections.
Liberal Democrats especially loved Stevenson—this is not too strong a verb—because he seemed to be everything that Eisenhower was not.
More damaging to Stevenson were loud and insistent charges that the Democrats had been "soft" on Communism. The Red Scare and Korea overwhelmed other issues, including civil rights and labor controversies that had been important in 1948.
Rhetoric such as this tapped into the persisting undercurrent of regional, class, and ethnic resentments that raged beneath the surface of American society in the postwar era.
The Checkers speech, as it became known, was maudlin and tasteless, and many contemporaries said so. But it was also a brave performance by a determined and aggressive man who had been abandoned by many of his so-called friends.
Eisenhower also agreed to spend one evening in New York City taping "spots," as they became known. This was an amazing event. Surrounded by advertising men, Eisenhower sat in the studio and was taped giving short "answers" to questions.
Technicians then spliced the answers to the questions.45
Use of spots—and of television coverage in general—henceforth became an indispensable tool in American politics.47
The rise of television also weakened the political parties, both locally and on the national level.
Voters tended increasingly to support individual candidates instead of party tickets.
Still, the decomposition of parties—and with it the stability and reliability of governing coalitions—became pronounced as early as the 1960s, and television had much to do with it.48
The results of the election surprised few analysts. Stevenson took nine southern and border states and, thanks in part to much increased turnout, got 3.14 million more votes in a losing cause than Truman had received while winning in 1948.
Sweeping the electoral college, 442 to 89, he even cracked the so-called Solid South by winning Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
The cease-fire agreement, indeed, was probably the most important single accomplishment of his eight-year presidency, and the one he
most cherished later.
A persistent political reality intensified these controversies in 1953–54: the aggressiveness and fury of the anti-Communist Right.51
The majority of left-liberal intellectuals in the early 1950s had come to perceive—some reluctantly—that American culture was dominated by a moderate-to-conservative, middle-class "consensus."
Eisenhower, however, refused to go beyond indirection or to challenge McCarthy head-on. There were several reasons for his reluctance to do battle. First, he agreed with many of McCarthy's goals.
Second, he feared an intra-party brawl that would further imperil his shaky GOP majorities in Congress.
Third, Eisenhower recognized that a direct confrontation with McCarthy would give the rambunctious, often uncontrollable senator even more publicity—on w...
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Eisenhower, finally, was afraid that a fight with McCarthy would diminish the all-important dignity of the presidency.
Ike's worries about the dignity of the presidential office rested on two even deeper concerns. One was to protect his own personal popularity with the American people.
Second, Ike very much wanted to promote domestic tranquility.
Whether Eisenhower should have been more bold remains one of the most contested questions about his presidency.
His refusal to challenge McCarthy represented a major moral blot on his presidency.
What really brought McCarthy down was his ill-advised attempt at the same time to ferret out subversive activities in—of all places—the United States Army.
Curbing spending, in turn, helped bolster his philosophical opposition to federal aid to education, a major cause of liberals in the 1950s, and to "socialized medicine."
The President also proved ready to accept a few moderately liberal ventures in the realm of social policy. "Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs," he warned his conservative brother Edgar, "you would not hear of that party again in our political history."82
Beyond these moves lay a larger vision of what the United States should be: a cooperative society in which major groups such as corporations, labor unions, and farmers would set aside their special interests to promote domestic harmony and economic stability.
Expanded in subsequent years, the building effort had often drastic effects on air quality, energy consumption, the ecology of cities, slum clearance and housing, mass transit, and railroads.88
On March 1, 1954, the United States tested the world's first hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. More awesome than scientists anticipated, it proved to be 750 times more powerful than the A-bomb dropped at Hiroshima.
On September 14, 1954, military leaders exploded a Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb in the air above 45,000 Red Army troops and thousands of civilians near the village of Totskoye.
The United States exploded at least 203 nuclear weapons in the Pacific and in Nevada between 1946 and 1961 and another ninety-six in 1962, exposing an estimated 200,000 civilian and military personnel to some degree of radiation.
Whether scientists, politicians, and military leaders in the 1940s and early 1950s should have done more to warn the world about radiation remains a debated issue years later.
Much later, when historians looked at once classified documents, it became clear that Eisenhower was wiser and subtler than his moralistic rhetoric suggested.
The more than $350 billion in military spending during the Eisenhower era bolstered a host of corporations and defense workers in the country.
Radford was a favorite of Republican conservatives, who never forgave Bradley for opposing MacArthur in 1951.
Ike hoped Wilson could bring businesslike economies to the Pentagon and control the interservice rivalries that still plagued defense planning. In his confirmation hearings, however, Wilson denied that he would have a conflict of interest, even though he owned $2.5 million in GM stock and had $600,000 due him in deferred compensation.
At a Cabinet meeting one aide listened to Wilson, then scribbled a note to another, "From now on I'm buying nothing but Plymouths."
From the beginning, however, Dulles became a lightning rod for criticisms of Republican foreign policies. This was in part because he seemed extraordinarily influential.
Critics who took aim at Dulles fired off many grievances. They emphasized first of all that he was moralistic and self-righteous.
What most irritated liberal opponents was Dulles's apparently inflexible and ideological anti-Communism.
Churchill said that Dulles was "the only case of a bull I know who carried his own china shop with him." The journalist James Reston added that Dulles "doesn't stumble into booby traps; he digs them to size, studies them carefully, and then jumps."22
Eisenhower backed massive retaliation for two other military reasons. First, it was obvious that the Soviets possessed a very large advantage in ground forces.
