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Book Summary: “The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s” by William Hitchcock
Eisenhower got short shrift in his time - beloved by American Joe Normals but largely underappreciated by community leaders, historians, and other politicians, who bought into an image of him as basically asleep at the wheel, golfing while the Soviet Union launched sputnik. More careful history, coupled with recently released archival information, has revealed a portrait of an astute leader constantly manipulating massive operations behind the scenes. I’ll break things down roughly by domain:
Foreign Policy:
Despite being a Cold Warrior who castigated Truman for losing China and bungling the Korean War, Eisenhower mostly managed to steer clear of direct conflict himself. He immediately negotiated a detente in the Korean War, deftly resisted the surge of warhawk voices trying to get him to commit to war in Vietnam, and backed off China and the USSR from Taiwan and West Berlin.
In all of these conflicts Eisenhower often got buffeted from both sides by warhawks who thought he was playing nice with communists and by peace seekers who thought he was recklessly risking American engagement, but in each instance he protected American interests and diffused the situation without escalating to an actual war.
To highlight a case study of this approach, in the Suez Crisis of 1956 Eisenhower found both France and England had lied to his diplomats' faces and brazenly violated international law by invading Egypt. Much hung in the balance: the international order of “rule of law” that Eisenhower had worked so hard to create post-World War 2, the opinion of the Global Third World whose alliances would be so crucial in the Cold World, and the relationship between America and its allies, whether they would be allowed to betray America and still be supported or whether the US would assert itself as leader of the western world.
And nuclear war. This was a more real possibility than I think most realize - the Soviet Union was threatening to do anything necessary, and moreover was desperate to reestablish their credentials as an anticolonialst power a week after rolling tanks into Hungary. While the fact that Nasser later became opposed to America has caused many to criticize his move, in the context of the moment Eisenhower’s handling of the situation seems deft and reasonable. His decision to choke off Britain’s financing both legitimized the rules-based international order, established America as the post-war hegemon, and prevented a direct conflict between the four great powers with worldwide implications.
The Modern Warfare State:
The President who warned us about the Military Industrial Complex was well qualified to do so, seeing as he built it. Between World Wars 1 and 2 Eisenhower had been perpetually frustrated that America let its defenses atrophy during peacetime then rapidly scrambled to put it all together when a conflict emerged. His novel policy was for the first time to emphasize massive defense spending during peacetime to prepare for eventual conflict, and indeed he spent half the budget on defense, or roughly 10% of GDP:
The darker side of this is that Eisenhower also presided over the creation of the modern Intelligence Community, which under him led coups in Iran and Guatemala and prepared regime change for the DRC and Cuba. This set off a trend of replacing democratically elected leaders with brutal dictators that terribly damaged American prestige in the eyes of the Third World.
For a poignant example of the immediate backlash of this kind of spycraft, the CIA pressured Eisenhower relentlessly to approve the U-2 plane flights over the Soviet Union despite Eisenhower’s fears that it would jeopardize his attempt at detente. Indeed, on the eve of a joint conference between the two powers, a U-2 plane was downed. Kruschev initially assumed that Eisenhower wasn’t responsible, but instead of blaming CIA Chief Dulles for misleading him about the operation, Eisenhower took full blame for the decision. It was probably the responsible thing to do as a leader but it ruined any chance at a thaw in the Cold War.
A further irony is that a large reason for the perception of Eisenhower as an absentee President, golfing instead of governing, was that Americans had no idea these massive operations were happening behind the scenes. When talk started to emerge of a “missile gap,” no one knew that Eisenhower’s spies had been taking photos of Soviet missile sites for years and knew that those fears were overplayed; when events happened in far away corners of the world and Eisenhower seemed not to be acting at all, no one knew that his spies had already infiltrated the government and were busy at work.
Governing to the Center
In this commitment to “not burdening the Treasury,” in almost each year Eisenhower fully balanced the budget. He did this by keeping Truman’s wartime high taxes in place, including a top marginal tax rate of 90% (on a tiny sliver of the population). In this he was castigated by the right flank of his party, but he kept the nation’s fiscal health in check while also building the most powerful military on the planet, millions of homes, and the modern highway system. Arguably he kept the pursestrings a little too tight, as his reductions in federal spending are partially credited with the recession of 1957, but he managed to hold the US off its present path of endless debt.
In other ways his centrism can look bold or cowardly, depending on your perspective. His coddling of McCarthy is hard to justify and his lukewarm handling of civil rights is a challenge as well. He desegregated military schools, and passed a toothless civil rights bill, but he refused to lead on the issue. Even his boldest action of all, sending in the troops to desegregate Arkansas, he framed squarely as enforcing rule of law - he didn’t even mention civil rights.
Leadership:
In many of Eisenhower’s addresses, on his high taxes, or his military readiness programs, he again and again urges Americans that they will need to sacrifice for the security and health of the nation. Actually, he doesn’t really urge per se, he basically just says sacrifice is what a good American knows is his responsibility and when he said it, everyone agreed. I can’t fully imagine a president now framing things like this without being castigated for it but Eisenhower enjoyed a whopping average popularity rating of 65%. Americans liked Ike. His star power, however, did not translate into broader success for his party, who lost successively more seats with each Congressional election. This is partially because Eisenhower himself wasn’t really convincingly a Republican and partially because he thought the President was supposed to be a national leader above the fray of partisan politics. When it came to likely his most important role of grooming a successor, he dropped the ball in amazing fashion; when asked by a reporter to name a major decision made by Nixon during their two terms Eisenhower responded “if you give me a week I might think of one.”
However, the strength of Eisenhower’s legacy was such that even without grooming a successor, his successors still largely found their time in office governed by the mold he had cast, in terms of national defense priorities, relatively centrist government activity, and confronting the rising currents of the third world. JFK considered himself in major contrast to Eisenhower’s doddling, asleep-at-the-wheel presidency, only for him to remark how much he ended up “behaving exactly as the Eisenhower administration would have behaved” (nowhere is this more stark than the inherited Bay of Pigs operation).
As for whether Eisenhower’s legacy was positive or negative, I’ll let you be the judge.
The US national-security establishment, more specifically, the Joint Chiefs of Staff first spied on the president, which he eventually figured out and covered up, and then probably also carried out a coup in the United States itself, mind you.
I knew about Nixon's later break with the FBI, not as much about the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I find the internal spying interesting but not really the palace coup theory; I've always assumed something like that was probably true, but nobody denies that Nixon broke federal laws (and his use of the FBI, while not directly relevant to his downfall, was also frequently and fragrantly illegal). I don't have very set opinions about his presidency in one direction or the other, but if he's a crook then it's hard for me to feel that bad for him getting ousted; I'd rather a world where more of our Presidents were held accountable for their crimes than less.
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I'm sure there's something to it but it feels like a broad enough claim that I'm not sure if it's falsifiable. If you think that the trend in decolonization would have continued anyway - as I do, since the broader trends didn't really hinge on Suez; even Egypt's sovereignty wasn't fully at stake there - then the proliferation of tiny countries able to make demands on the US to eschew leaning to the USSR would have happened regardless. Then the question that remains isn't whether the small countries could bully, abuse, and steal from the US but whether the rich, powerful countries that actually rivaled the US could do so as well. By that metric the US decisively asserted itself against the few nations that could really contest its will.
That said, if you measure stealing from the US by foreign aid, then ironically both sides of that debacle came out on top, with Israel and Egypt as our top recipients. If you see that money as a bribe to keep the conflict from bubbling up again then maybe there is something to it.
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What do you mean? McCarthy was directionally correct, and the US was shot full of communists since prior to WW2. The Roosevelt administrations, especially, were sympathetic to the Soviets and weak on communism.
What would you have had Ike do about McCarthy? How would you have addressed McCarthy's concerns, which were shared by many throughout the country?
"Directionally correct" is doing an immense amount of work here. McCarthy didn't say "there are a bunch of communists scattered throughout America," he made extremely specific and entirely fabricated claims about the communist leanings of people he didn't like, often ruining their reputations and careers in the process.
He claimed that "he had come into possession of shocking new evidence that 205 members of the Communist Party were still working for the State Department, even though their names had been turned over to top government officials" - He never produced any such list and or other evidence and only continuing to fabricate more (again, extremely specific) claims about nonexistent evidence (including, four years later, just repeating this same claim).
He held up Eisenhower's administration nominations on charges as vacuous as James Conant, who had purged communists from Harvard but not "thoroughly enough," or Charles Bohen, a State Department diplomat who had worked in Russia, but after thorough investigation turned up that he had served America patriotically, McCarthy tried instead to destroy his career by implying that his brother was a homosexual. In this fashion he wielded much of his investigatory power merely for the sake of holding power over the Eisenhower administration, whether holding up his nominations, or publicly accusing him of being soft on communists (all the while Eisenhower was busy coup-ing any left of center government), or famously threatening to target the entire army unless McCarthy's cronies were given preferential treatment:
The broader consequences of McCarthyism were not small potatoes - many people's lives were genuinely ruined on completely empty charges driven by a power hungry man. Hundreds were imprisoned and some 15,000 federal employees were fired on amorphous charges of being "un-American," which frequently meant things like supporting unions or having hobbies that suggested "sexual perversion"; tens of thousands more went without pay while being cleared. Lists of subversive, "forbidden" books were created with libraries literally burning those books. A climate of fear festered and settled over the nation.
We talk a lot here about the illiberalism and the dogmatism of the modern woke left. If I pointed out the wave of modern idpol cancellations often targets innocent people based on exaggerated and hysterical claims, I wouldn't be satisfied if someone responded by saying: "well, we may have ruined innocent lives and careers but we were still directionally correct - the US is shot full of racists, and many throughout the country share these concerns".
Eisenhower could have at any point condemned McCarthy's excesses, even at the most basic level of standing up for his friends and fellow WW2 heroes. He avoided doing this not because he or the establishment thought there was credence to McCarthy's claims (he thought they were ridiculous and hated McCarthy) but because he was afraid of alienating the right flank of his party and hurting his chances in the election.
By doing what Eisenhower actually did - build state capacity to do actual casework investigating communist subversion instead of tolerating politically motivated public witch hunts.
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This probably deserves to be its own post, rather than getting lost in the CWR
This may be true. On the reddit version of the forum I found that the standalone posts I made got less engagement than when I stuck them in the CWR, not sure if that dynamic is still true offsite though.
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I'm fine with this. The executive enforces the rules but doesn't necessarily campaign for great social change. I'm fine with a not-very-proactive executive waiting for Congress to write laws and then enforcing those laws.
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I've not read the book mentioned by OP, but I have read Eisenhower: In War and Peace which I thoroughly enjoyed. As the title suggests, it covers both his military and political service. I finished the tome with a pretty positive impression of Ike.
I like this take. Admittedly it seems that he had his hands full worrying about foreign policy to spend too much time on domestic matters. However, the model of a President who is comfortable delegating major responsibilities to his cabinet intuitively feels like a sensible one to me.
My understanding was that Eisenhower didn't have much choice w.r.t Nixon. He was lumbered with the guy by the Republican establishment whose support he needed to win the nomination. I suppose his lack of engagement in partisan politics would have also have made anointing a successor more challenging.
I think he deserves enormous credit for this. There's film footage of him trying to talk to as many servicemen as possible prior to the D-Day invasion - aware that scores would be killed 24 hours later. I suspect the responsibility of avoiding a repeat of the foreign policy failures of the 1930s would have weighed heavily on him.
I would second this recommendation.
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Hard agree that one of the highlights of his legacy was avoiding war, and that this was probably in large due to his close personal experience with its horrors. There's a poignant section of the book about him and his newlywed wife vacationing in Germany in their youth and loving it, only for him to return later at the helm of the Allied Forces laying waste to that same area.
It's true he didn't have a lot of choice with Nixon being his Vice President, absent firing him, since Nixon refused to step down on his own despite Eisenhower not personally liking him a great deal (for, as far as I can tell, no particular reason). Still, Eisenhower could have actively cultivated other Republicans to be the next leader if he had a strong preference. If he didn't, he still could have actually thrown his incredible popularity behind Nixon given that it would have made a big difference in the tightest election of the century thus far, and that despite Eisenhower's less-than-sterling impression of his VP, Nixon was running on a very similar platform and would have likely done a good job preserving and building on Eisenhower's legacy.
I think it's interesting to imagine a world where Nixon had won the next election. On foreign policy he shared much with Eisenhower, in terms of preferring to avoid direct wars and achieve things through diplomacy as well as covert operations and third world coups. The trends towards escalating in Vietnam seems almost inexorable from Eisenhower through JFK and LBJ so hard to say if that would be different. Presumably Nixon, in many ways at most a center right New Dealer, who had already promised to pursue “big government” initiatives like healthcare and housing, would have continued to expand the federal government (as he did when he actually came to power) but likely in ways very different than Johnson’s Great Society. He may well have passed his own Civil Rights Bill, given that the Civil Rights Act of 1957 had been partially his idea to continue Eisenhower’s trend of poaching black voters disaffected by the Dixiecrats - but without Johnson’s parliamentary stratagems and ruthlessness perhaps it would have been weaker, or not made it through at all.
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