Dwight D Eisenhower
First term as president
After receiving Germany’s surrender on 7 May 1945, Eisenhower returned to the US as the army’s chief of staff. As well as overseeing the transformation of the armed forces to non-war status, he received many honours, including the British Order of Merit (as an honorary member) in 1945. Three years later, he resigned from the army and, in June, became president of Columbia University. During what would prove to be only a short period in academe, Eisenhower gained an understanding of the scientific community that he might not otherwise have had.
Both main American political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, wanted Eisenhower as their candidate in that year’s presidential election, but he preferred to remain at Columbia. ‘No man since Washington,’ he said, ‘has been elected unless he definitely desired it.’ However, with the establishment of Nato in 1950, he agreed to President Truman’s request that he take an indefinite leave of absence from the university and become supreme commander of the combined land forces.
Running for president
Two years later, he finally gave in and agreed to run as a candidate for the Republicans. He had initially agreed to run only if the party was overwhelmingly in favour of his candidacy. However, he found himself having to campaign strongly at the party convention against Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, part of a faction that supported the anti-Communist investigations of demagogic Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Although Eisenhower won the nomination, to make peace he had agreed to have as his running mate Richard Nixon who was conspicuously identified with the congressional investigations.
In November 1952, the popularity that Eisenhower had gained in Europe and his folksy charm – exemplified by his campaign buttons, which proclaimed: ‘I like Ike!’ – swept him to victory against the Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson. He won by a large majority despite the even balance of parties in Congress. ‘I’m going to try to be just as truthful as I can be,’ he said at one press conference. ‘And I believe this: I think even people who would classify themselves probably as my political enemies do believe I’m honest. They may call me stupid, but I think they think I’m honest.’
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H L Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
Dwight D Eisenhower, in a letter to his brother Edgar, 8 November 1954
Although Eisenhower had accepted Richard Nixon as his vice-presidential running mate, he refused to promote his career. According to Stephen Ambrose, ‘the central difference between Ike and Dick’ was that ‘Ike had a fundamental respect for people who did honest work and who paid their bills and who were pillars of the community. Nixon never really did. Nixon didn’t have a respect for others.’
Korea and McCarthy
In December, a month before his inauguration in January 1953, Eisenhower flew a 22,000-mile round trip to Korea for talks – making good a pledge he had made during the election: to secure a negotiated end to the Korean War, which had been raging since June 1950. Over the coming months, negotiations would break down four times, but finally, and only after the new president threatened nuclear attack, a truce was signed on 27 July 1953.
At the same time, Senator McCarthy, chairman of the Senate Permanent Investigation Subcommittee, was conducting hearings on alleged Communist subversion in the US and investigating Communist infiltration of the armed forces. Undercurrents of extremism and excess zeal often placed the president in an invidious position. Eisenhower cautiously tried to outflank McCarthy and his cronies by instituting a loyalty programme, but this failed to stop the political bully. However, McCarthy eventually over-reached himself, was censured by the Senate and sank into oblivion.
Eisenhower’s reputation suffered permanent damage for his refusal to stand up to the demagogue, not even giving support to his long-term mentor George C Marshall, whom in 1951 McCarthy had claimed as to be a Communist agent. But Eisenhower was a conciliator, not the best model to deal with the intimidating McCarthy. Said Dwight D. Eisenhower about the senator: ‘Never get in a pissing match with a skunk.’
US–Soviet relations
The death of Stalin on 5 March 1953 caused shifts in US relations with the USSR. For instance, the new Soviet leadership, which now included Nikita Khrushchev, consented to a peace treaty that allowed Austria to become neutral.
Meanwhile, both the USSR and the US had developed hydrogen bombs. On 8 December 1953, Eisenhower delivered his ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech at the UN General Assembly – an attempt to bring the international focus on to the non-military uses of atomic energy. ‘The atom,’ Eisenhower later wrote, ‘was non-political, neither moral nor immoral. Only man’s choice would determine the way in which it would be used.’
With the threat of nuclear war hanging over the world, Eisenhower met with the leaders of Britain, France and the Soviet Union at Geneva in July 1955. There he made his extraordinary ‘Open Skies’ proposals – that the US and USSR exchange blueprints of each other’s military establishments and ‘provide within our countries facilities for aerial photography to the other country’. The Soviets greeted the proposal with silence. According to Sergei Khrushchev, the Soviet leader’s son, Eisenhower’s proposals came as a shock to the Soviet delegation, reminding them of the Nazis’ overflights before the USSR was invaded during World War II.
Iran, Guatemala and Hungary
In August 1953, the left-wing government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran was ousted by the pro-Western Shah Pahlavi with the covert help of the CIA. At the time, his authorisation of this action made Eisenhower look strong – standing up to the Communists and keeping Iran within the United States’ orbit. It would only be in 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini led the revolution that overthrew the repressive shah and established an Islamic republic, that the Americans discovered how much the Iranians (and other Muslims) hated them for having supported the shah.
A year after the Iranian ‘adventure’, the CIA was active again, this time in Guatemala. Two left-wing presidents there – Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán – had launched a series of labour and agrarian reforms, much to the anger of the American-owned United Fruit Company, which was hugely influential in Central America. In 1954, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to give covert aid to the anti-Arbenz military force, which put right-wing Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas in power. This led to decades of repression, violence and murder, which particularly affected the indigenous Indian population.
Efforts to ease tension between the US and the Soviet Union were also less than productive. Eisenhower – who was strongly influenced by the fanatically anti-Communist secretary of state John Foster Dulles, promised to take the diplomatic offensive and free oppressed peoples behind the ‘Iron Curtain’. There was an intensification in ideological activity, but it involved rhetoric rather than action, most notably in the case of Hungary’s abortive revolt against its Communist masters in 1956.
Segregation
In domestic policy, Eisenhower pursued a middle course, continuing most of the New Deal and Fair Deal programmes of his two predecessors and emphasising a balanced budget. Then, two years into his presidency, segregation reared its ugly head.
Eisenhower had been brought up as a segregationist. Indeed, when he was six years old, in 1896, the US Supreme Court, in their ruling in the case of Plessy v Ferguson, established the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’, making segregation legal all over the United States.
Then, in 1954, Eisenhower reluctantly allowed his attorney general to make the case for integration before the Supreme Court. This time, on 17 May, the court decreed that racially segregated schools were ‘inherently unequal’ and therefore unconstitutional. The desegregation of schools in the American South began.
Little Rock
Unfortunately, Eisenhower’s lack of enthusiasm for it was obvious, and in 1957, the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, took this as a signal to refuse to allow it. He called out the Arkansas National Guard and placed troops around Central High School in the state capital of Little Rock, with orders to prevent black students entering.
Much to Faubus’s surprise, Eisenhower’s response was to send the 101st Airborne to Little Rock. He also ordered the National Guard into federal service, thus depriving the governor of his troops, who were busy helping the 101st to integrate Central High.
The schools in the rest of the South gradually became desegregated, but progress was slow. Full desegregation of the South – in all aspects of life – would have to wait for the protest movements and civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
The Little Rock crisis exemplified one of Eisenhower’s major failings: he refused to speak out publicly on difficult issues, fearful that, by taking a controversial stand, he would jeopardise his huge popularity. As a result, he avoided committing himself to matters of racial justice, just as he had refused to comment on McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch-hunts.
