Dwight D Eisenhower
Second term as president
In Denver, Colorado, in September 1955, Eisenhower suffered a sudden heart attack. After seven weeks, however, he left hospital, and in the following February, doctors announced his full recovery and he felt well enough to declare his candidacy for a second term.
The Democrats were afraid to attack him personally or to express direct doubts about his health. So they pictured the president as an amiable, naïve front man for Nixon and other ‘Red baiters’. Voters were supposed to conclude that McCarthyism would be revived if Eisenhower died in office.
These tactics failed. In November 1956, he was elected for his second term, again against Stevenson. At his inauguration in Washington DC in January, 750,000 spectators watched a parade that lasted 3.5 hours, the highlight of which was a float 408 feet long and mounted on 164 wheels, which proclaimed ‘Liberty and Strength through Consent of the Governed’. In November of that year, Eisenhower suffered a mild stroke but recovered rapidly.
Domino theory and the Eisenhower Doctrine
It was at a news conference in April 1954 that Eisenhower first used the term ‘domino theory’ – the notion that, if one country becomes Communist, other nations in the region will probably follow suit, like dominoes falling in a line – to justify American actions to ‘contain’ Communism.
Because of his belief in the theory, he sent US advisers to Vietnam, ordered a massive build-up of US nuclear weaponry – the country’s nuclear arsenal grew from 1,000 warheads to 18,000 – and, in March 1957, propounded the ‘Eisenhower Doctrine’.
This policy, agreed by the US Congress, gave the president the unilateral right to use American military forces to ‘aid’ any Middle Eastern country ‘requesting assistance against armed aggression from any country controlled by international Communism’. The following year Eisenhower used this generous suspension of congressional oversight to send US Marines into Lebanon to prop up the pro-Western president Camille Chamoun.
Cuba
Foreign relations became increasingly problematical as Eisenhower neared the end of his presidency. In 1958, Vice President Nixon was almost killed by a hostile mob during a goodwill tour in the Venezuelan capital Caracas. Anti-American feeling erupted even closer to home when Fidel Castro toppled Cuban dictator Fuegencio Batista.
In Washington, Castro told US officials that ‘the [Cuban] movement is not a Communist movement ... We have no intention of expropriating US property, and any property we take, we’ll pay for.’ But the next year, the Soviet Union agreed to provide Cuba with $100 million in credit and to purchase five million tons of Cuban sugar. After President Eisenhower declared that the US would not allow a regime ‘dominated by international Communism’ to exist in the Western Hemisphere, Havana nationalised all banks and large commercial industrial enterprises in Cuba. The US responded by imposing a trade embargo.
Eisenhower outwardly ignored Castro’s strong verbal attacks on the US but was criticised for both provoking and tolerating them. On leaving the presidency, he would bequeath his successor the abortive and divisive Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961.
The U-2 affair
Eisenhower was determined to make one last push to reach an accommodation with the USSR before he left office. A summit was scheduled to take place in Paris in May 1960.
Unfortunately a U-2 spy plane flown by Gary Powers was shot down over the USSR by the Soviets on 1 May, and despite the US president’s protestations of ignorance, Khrushchev boycotted the Paris meeting in protest. Finally, on 25 May, Eisenhower took ‘full responsibility for approving all the various programmes undertaken by our government to secure and evaluate military intelligence’. However, he refused to apologise for the overflights, arguing that the Soviets had known about them for years but had not protested.
The military–industrial complex
In Eisenhower’s view, at least initially, nuclear weapons promised national security at an affordable price. However, by the mid-1950s, once both the US and the USSR began stockpiling hydrogen bombs, his thinking about the feasibility of fighting a nuclear war shifted dramatically. At a National Security Council meeting in 1960, he said: ‘Our imagination could not encompass the situation which would result from an attack on this country involving the explosion of 2,000 megatons ... War no longer has any logic whatsoever.’
In January 1961, before he left office for his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he gave a farewell speech to the American people. While accepting the need to maintain an adequate military strength, he went on to make an extraordinary warning:
… We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three-and-a-half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government …
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
The penultimate draft of the address (which was actually written by speechwriters Ralph Williams and Malcolm Moos) actually referred to the ‘military–industrial–congressional complex’. However, it is said that Eisenhower chose to strike the word ‘congressional’ to avoid offending members of the legislature.
The warning and its legacy
It was precisely Eisenhower’s military background that gave authority to this warning. As the Washington columnist Lars Erik-Nelson noted, Eisenhower’s speech was not just a rhetorical throwaway meant to steal the thunder of the incoming Kennedy administration: it was deeply felt, grounded in his own bitter experiences.
The anti-war militants of the 1960s took Eisenhower’s warning to heart. In recent years, with the two presidential terms of George W Bush, the left has found it increasingly meaningful once more. But Eisenhower was no closet left-winger.
He didn’t blame the military–industrial complex for the Cold War – as far as he was concerned, that was the fault of Communism: ‘a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose and insidious in method’. A principled Republican, he was sceptical of all programmes funded by the federal government. He did not consider military–industrial interests uniquely insidious; rather, he distrusted government expansion generally.
The last years
Eisenhower finally left office in January 1961, succeeded by John Kennedy, former vice president Richard Nixon having been narrowly defeated. Congress restored Eisenhower’s rank as a five-star general, universities gave him honorary degrees and other organisations showered him with awards. However, none of these probably meant as much to him as the hole in one he scored in a game of golf in Palm Springs, California on 6 February 1968, the first (ex)president ever to do so. Six months later, he suffered a serious heart attack that virtually ended his active life.
He died on 28 March 1969. At his request, he was buried in his World War II uniform in an $80 government-issue casket, at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas.
