ANY ATTEMPT to assess Eisenhower’s eight years as President inevitably reveals more about the person doing the assessing than it does about Eisenhower. Assessment requires passing a judgment on the decisions Eisenhower made on the issues of his time, and every issue was political and controversial. Further, all the major and most of the minor issues of the 1950s continued to divide the nation’s political parties and people in the decades that followed. To declare, therefore, that Eisenhower was right or wrong on this or that issue tends to be little more than a declaration of the current politics and prejudices of the author. The temptation to judge, however, is well-nigh irresistible, and most of the authors who write about the 1950s give in to it.
Thus William Ewald, in Eisenhower the President, concludes “that many terrible things that could have happened, didn’t. Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency gave America eight good years—I believe the best in memory.” There were no wars, no riots, no inflation—just peace and prosperity. Most white middle-class and middle-aged Republicans would heartily agree with Ewald. But a black American could point out that among the things that did not happen were progress in civil rights or school desegregation. People concerned about the Cold War and the nuclear arms race could point out that no progress was made in reducing tensions or achieving disarmament. People concerned about the Communist menace could point out that no Communist regimes were eliminated, and that in fact Communism expanded into Vietnam and Cuba. On these and every issue, in short, there are at least two legitimate points of view. What did not happen brought joy to one man, gloom to another.
One of the first serious attempts at assessment was by Murray Kempton in a famous article in Esquire magazine in September 1967. Kempton called the piece “The Underestimation of Dwight D. Eisenhower,” and in it he admitted that Eisenhower was much shrewder and more in control of events than he, or other reporters, had ever imagined during the fifties. Eisenhower was “the great tortoise upon whose back the world sat for eight years,” never recognizing “the cunning beneath the shell.” Garry Wills took up the same theme in his 1970 book Nixon Agonistes. Such judgments were little more than confessions on the part of the reporters, and they shed little light on the Eisenhower Presidency.
Members of the academic community also confessed. Thus Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who wrote speeches for Stevenson during the presidential campaigns of 1952 and 1956, was—at that time—critical of Eisenhower for failing to exercise vigorous executive leadership, as Schlesinger’s heroes, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, had done. Later, after Watergate, Schlesinger wrote The Imperial Presidency. In that book, Schlesinger’s major criticism of Eisenhower was that Eisenhower went too far in his use of executive powers, especially in his proclamation of the principle of executive privilege when he refused to turn over documents or personnel to McCarthy’s investigating committee, and in his insistence on exclusive executive responsibility during foreign-policy crises.
To repeat, then: To say that Eisenhower was right about this or wrong about that is to do little more than announce one’s own political position. A more fruitful approach is to examine his years in the White House in his own terms, to make an assessment on the basis of how well he did in achieving the tasks and goals he set for himself at the time he took office.
By that standard, there were many disappointments, domestic and foreign. Eisenhower had wanted to achieve unity within the Republican Party, on the basis of bringing the Old Guard into the modern world and the mainstream of American politics. In addition, he wanted to develop within the Republican Party some young, dynamic, trustworthy, and popular leaders. He never achieved either goal, as evidenced by the 1964 Republican Convention, where the Old Guard took control of the party, nominating a candidate and writing a platform that would have delighted Warren Harding, or even William McKinley. Franklin Roosevelt did a much better job of curbing the left wing of the Democratic Party than Eisenhower did of curbing the right wing of the Republican Party.
Eisenhower wanted to see Senator McCarthy eliminated from national public life, and he wanted it done without making America’s record and image on civil-liberties issues worse than it already was. But because Eisenhower would not denounce McCarthy by name, or otherwise stand up to the senator from Wisconsin, McCarthy was able to do much damage to civil liberties, the Republican Party, numerous individuals, the U.S. Army, and the Executive Branch before he finally destroyed himself. Eisenhower’s only significant contribution to McCarthy’s downfall was the purely negative act of denying him access to executive records and personnel. Eisenhower’s cautious, hesitant approach—or nonapproach—to the McCarthy issue did the President’s reputation no good, and much harm.
Eisenhower had wanted, in January of 1953, to provide a moral leadership that would both draw on and illuminate America’s spiritual superiority to the Soviet Union, indeed to all the world. But on one of the great moral issues of the day, the struggle to eliminate racial segregation from American life, he provided almost no leadership at all. His failure to speak out, to indicate personal approval of Brown v. Topeka, did incalculable harm to the civil-rights crusade and to America’s image.
Eisenhower had hoped to find a long-term solution for American agriculture that would get the government out of the farming business while strengthening the family farm. In this area, he and Secretary Benson suffered abject failure. The rich grew richer thanks to huge government payments for the Soil Bank, the government in 1961 was more closely and decisively involved in agriculture than it had been in 1953, and the number of family farms had dropped precipitously.
In 1953 Eisenhower had entertained wildly optimistic hopes for the peaceful uses of nuclear power. Electricity too cheap to meter, he believed, was just around the corner, as soon as nuclear power plants went into operation. New transocean canals would be blasted open, artificial harbors created, enormous strides in medicine taken, the world’s fertilizer problems solved, the energy for the industrialization of the Third World created. But as he left office in 1961, there had not been any such significant application of nuclear power to civilian purposes.
In foreign affairs, Eisenhower’s greatest failure, in his own judgment, which he expressed on innumerable occasions; was the failure to achieve peace. When he left office, the tensions and dangers and costs of the Cold War were higher than they had ever been. In large part, this was no fault of his. He had tried to reach out to the Russians, with Atoms for Peace, Open Skies, and other proposals, only to be rebuffed by Khrushchev. But his own deeply rooted anti-Communism was certainly a contributing factor to the failure. Eisenhower refused to trust the Russians to even the slightest degree. He continued and expanded the economic, political, diplomatic, and covert-operations pressure on the Kremlin for his entire two terms. This was good policy for winning votes, and may even have been good for achieving limited victories in the Cold War, but it was damaging to the cause of world peace.
Allied with the failure to achieve peace was the failure to set a limit on the arms race (never mind actual disarmament, another of his goals). Better than any other world leader, Eisenhower spoke of the cost of the arms race, and its dangers, and its madness. But he could not even slow it down, much less stop it. The great tragedy here is opportunity lost. Eisenhower not only recognized better than anyone else the futility of an arms race; he was in a better position than anyone else to end it. His prestige, especially as a military man, was so overwhelming that he could have made a test ban with the Russians merely on his own assurance that the agreement was good for the United States. But until his last months in office, he accepted the risk of an expanding arms race over the risk of trusting the Russians.
When finally he was ready to make an attempt to control the arms race by accepting an unsupervised comprehensive test ban, the U-2 incident intervened. Fittingly, the flight that Powers made was one Eisenhower instinctively wanted to call off, but one that his technologists insisted was necessary. In this case, as in the case of building more nuclear weapons, holding more tests, or building more rockets, he allowed the advice of his technical people to override his own common sense. That this could happen to Eisenhower illustrates vividly the tyranny of technology in the nuclear/missile age.
Another area of failure came in the Third World, which Eisenhower had hoped to line up with the Western democracies in the struggle against Russia. In large part, this failure was caused by Eisenhower’s anti-Communism coupled with his penchant for seeing Communists wherever a social reform movement or a struggle for national liberation was under way. His overthrow of popularly elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, his hostility toward Nasser, his refusal to seek any form of accommodation with Castro, his extreme overreaction to events in the Congo, were one result. Another was a profound mistrust of the United States by millions of residents of the Third World. A third result of his oversimplifications was an overcommitment in Indochina, based on an obsession with falling dominoes.
In Central and Eastern Europe, Eisenhower had hoped to take the offensive against Communism. But his unrealistic and ineffective belligerency, combined with his party’s irresponsible advocacy of uprisings and liberation within a police state, produced the tragedy of Hungary in 1956, which will stand forever as a blot on Eisenhower’s record. In his Administration, “roll back” never got started, as “stand pat” became the watchword. But the free world was not even able to stand pat, as Eisenhower accepted an armistice in Korea that left the Communists in control in the north, another in Vietnam that did the same, and the presence of Castro in Cuba.
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These failures, taken together, make at first glance a damning indictment. According to Eisenhower’s critics, they came about because of the greatest shortcoming of all, the failure to exert leadership. In contrast to FDR and Truman, Eisenhower seemed to be no leader at all, but only a chairman of the board, or even a figurehead, a Whig President in a time that demanded dramatic exercise of executive power. Eisenhower was sensitive about this charge, which he had heard so many times. When Henry Luce made it, in an August 1960 Life editorial, Eisenhower took time to provide Luce with a private explanation of his methods—“not to defend,” Eisenhower insisted, “merely to explain.”
He realized, he told Luce, that many people thought “I have been too easy a boss.” What such people did not realize, he pointed out, was that except for his “skimpy majority” in his first two years, “I have had to deal with a Congress controlled by the opposition and whose partisan antagonism to the Executive Branch has often been blatantly displayed.” To make any progress at all, he had to use methods “calculated to attract cooperation,” and could not afford “to lash out at partisan charges and publicity-seeking demagogues.” In addition, the government of the United States had become “too big, too complex, and too pervasive in its influence for one individual to pretend to direct the details of its important and critical programming.” Nothing could be accomplished without competent assistants; to command their loyalty, the President had to be willing to show patience, understanding, a readiness to delegate authority, and an acceptance of responsibility for honest errors.
Finally, Eisenhower concluded, “In war and in peace I’ve had no respect for the desk-pounder, and have despised the loud and slick talker. If my own ideas and practices in this matter have sprung from weakness, I do not know. But they were and are deliberate or, rather, natural to me. They are not accidental.”1
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Shortly after Eisenhower left office, his successor suffered an embarrassing defeat at the Bay of Pigs. In passing his own judgment on the event, Eisenhower concentrated his criticism on Kennedy’s failure to consult with the NSC before deciding to act. He chided Kennedy for not gathering together in one room representatives of every point of view, so that he could hear both the pros and cons. Since Eisenhower made such a major point of this failure to consult, it is only fair to apply the same standard to Eisenhower’s own Administration. How well did he listen to every point of view before acting?
In some cases, fully. In other cases, hardly at all. In the various Far East crises that began with Korea in 1952 and continued through Dien Bien Phu, the Geneva Conference of 1954, and Formosa, he consulted with every appropriate department and agency, listened carefully to every point of view, and acted only after he was satisfied he had taken everything into consideration and was prepared for all possible consequences. But in other areas, he was surprisingly remiss. He did not give the anti-McCarthy people a full hearing, for example, and only once met with Negro leaders on civil-rights issues. Until 1958, he allowed himself to be isolated from the nuclear scientists opposed to testing. On national defense, he gave the proponents of more spending every opportunity to express their views, but except for one meeting with Senator Taft in 1953 he never listened to those who urged dramatic cuts. Advocates of more spending for domestic social programs or for tax cuts seldom got near Eisenhower. He kept the U-2 such a closely guarded secret that only insiders who were proponents of the program ever gave him advice on how to utilize the spy plane.
But on major questions involving the European allies, he consulted with the heads of government in Paris, Bonn, and London before acting (except at Suez, and the failure to consult there was no fault of his). His record, in short, was mixed, and hardly pure enough to justify his extreme indignation at Kennedy for Kennedy’s failure to consult the NSC before acting at the Bay of Pigs.
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How effective, if not dramatic, Eisenhower’s leadership techniques were can be seen in a brief assessment of his accomplishments as President, an assessment once again based on his own goals and aspirations. First and foremost, he presided over eight years of prosperity, marred only by two minor recessions. By later standards, it was a decade of nearly full employment and no inflation.
Indeed by almost every standard—GNP, personal income and savings, home buying, auto purchases, capital investment, highway construction, and so forth—it was the best decade of the century. Surely Eisenhower’s fiscal policies, his refusal to cut taxes or increase defense spending, his insistence on a balanced budget, played some role in creating this happy situation.
Under Eisenhower, the nation enjoyed domestic peace and tranquillity—at least as measured against the sixties. One of Eisenhower’s major goals in 1953 was to lower the excesses of political rhetoric and partisanship. He managed to achieve that goal, in a negative way, by not dismantling the New Deal, as the Old Guard wanted to do. Under Eisenhower, the number of people covered by Social Security doubled as benefits went up. The New Deal’s regulatory commissions stayed in place. Expenditures for public works were actually greater under Eisenhower than they had been under FDR or Truman. Nor were Eisenhower’s public works of the boondoggle variety—the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Interstate Highway System made an enormous contribution to the economy. Eisenhower, in effect, put a Republican stamp of approval on twenty years of Democratic legislation, by itself a major step toward bringing the two parties closer together.
Eisenhower’s positive contribution to domestic peace and tranquillity was to avoid partisanship himself. His close alliance with the southern Democrats, his refusal to ever denounce the Democratic Party as a whole (he attacked only the “spender” wing), his insistence on a bipartisan foreign policy, his careful cultivation of the Democratic leaders in Congress, all helped tone down the level of partisan excess. When Eisenhower came into the White House, his party was accusing the other party of “twenty years of treason.” The Democrats in turn were charging that the Republicans were the party of Depression. When Eisenhower left office, such ridiculous charges were seldom heard.
In 1953, Eisenhower had also set as a major goal the restoration of dignity to the office of the President. He felt, strongly, that Truman had demeaned the office. Whether Truman was guilty of so doing depended on one’s perception, of course, but few would argue against the claim that in his bearing, his actions, his private and social life, and his official duties as head of state, Eisenhower maintained his dignity. He looked, acted, and sounded like a President.
He was a good steward. He did not sell off the public lands, or open the National Wilderness Areas or National Parks to commercial or mineral exploitation. He retained and expanded TVA. He stopped nuclear testing in the atmosphere, the first world statesman to do so, because of the dangers of radiation to the people who had chosen him as their leader.
In the field of civil rights, he felt he had done as well as could be done. His greatest contribution (albeit one that he had grown increasingly unhappy about) was the appointment of Earl Warren as Chief Justice. In addition, he had completed the desegregation of the armed forces, and of the city of Washington, D.C., as well as all federal property. He had sponsored and signed the first civil-rights legislation since Reconstruction. When he had to, he acted decisively, in Little Rock in 1957. These were all positive, if limited, gains. Eisenhower’s boast was that they were made without riots, and without driving the white South to acts of total desperation. Progress in desegregation, especially in the schools, was painfully slow during the Eisenhower years, but he was convinced that anything faster would have produced a much greater and more violent white southern resistance.
In 1952, when he accepted the Republican nomination for the Presidency, Eisenhower called the party to join him in a “crusade.” Its purpose was to clean the crooks and the Commies (really, the Democrats) out of Washington. Once those tasks had been accomplished, Eisenhower’s critics found it difficult to discover what his crusade was aiming at. There was no stirring call to arms, no great moral cause, no idealistic pursuit of some overriding national goal. Eisenhower, seemingly, was quite content to preside over a fat, happy, satisfied nation that devoted itself to enjoying life, and especially the material benefits available in the greatest industrial power in the world. There was truth in the charge. Eisenhower’s rebuttal also contained an elementary truth. The Declaration of Independence stated that one of man’s inalienable rights was the pursuit of happiness. Eisenhower tried, with much success, to create a climate in the 1950s in which American citizens could fully exercise that right.
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His greatest successes came in foreign policy, and the related area of national defense spending. By making peace in Korea, and avoiding war thereafter for the next seven and one-half years, and by holding down, almost single-handedly, the pace of the arms race, he achieved his major accomplishments. No one knows how much money he saved the United States, as he rebuffed Symington and the Pentagon and the JCS and the AEC and the military-industrial complex. And no one knows how many lives he saved by ending the war in Korea and refusing to enter any others, despite a half-dozen and more virtually unanimous recommendations that he go to war. He made peace, and he kept the peace. Whether any other man could have led the country through that decade without going to war cannot be known. What we do know is that Eisenhower did it. Eisenhower boasted that “the United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration. We kept the peace. People asked how it happened—by God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that.”2
Beyond keeping the peace, Eisenhower could claim that at the end of his eight years, the NATO alliance, that bedrock of American foreign policy, was stronger than ever. Relations with the Arab states, considering the American moral commitment to Israel, were as good as could be expected. Except for Cuba, the Latin-American republics remained friendly to the United States. In the Far East, relations with America’s partners, South Korea, Japan, and Formosa, were excellent (they were still nonexistent with the Chinese). South Vietnam seemed well on the road to becoming a viable nation. Laos was admittedly in trouble, but it appeared to be the only immediate danger spot.
What Eisenhower had done best was managing crises. The crisis with Syngman Rhee in early 1953, and the simultaneous crisis with the Chinese Communists over the POW issue and the armistice; the crisis over Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and over Quemoy and Matsu in 1955; the Hungarian and Suez crises of 1956; the Sputnik and Little Rock crises of 1957; the Formosa Resolution crisis of 1958; the Berlin crisis of 1959; the U-2 crisis of 1960—Eisenhower managed each one without overreacting, without going to war, without increasing defense spending, without frightening people half out of their wits. He downplayed each one, insisted that a solution could be found, and then found one. It was a magnificent performance.
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His place in history is, of course, a relative matter. He has to be judged against other Presidents, which means that no judgment can be fair, because he did not have the opportunities, nor face the dangers, that other Presidents did. We cannot know how great a leader he might have been, because he ruled in a time that required him, at least in his own view, to adopt a moderate course, to stay in the middle of the road, to avoid calling on his fellow citizens for some great national effort. He did not face the challenges that Washington did, or Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt. How he would have responded to setting precedents, rather than following them, or to a Civil War, or to a Depression, or to a world war, we cannot know. What we do know is that he guided his country safely and securely through a dangerous decade.
Shortly after Eisenhower left office, a national poll of American historians placed him nearly at the bottom of the list of Presidents. By the early 1980s, a new poll placed him ninth. His reputation is likely to continue to rise, perhaps even to the point that he will be ranked just below Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt.
In attempting to assess the Eisenhower Presidency, certain comparisons must be made. Since Andrew Jackson’s time, only four men have served eight consecutive years or more in the White House—Grant, Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. Of these four, only two—Grant and Eisenhower—were world figures before they became President. Of the four, only two—Eisenhower and Roosevelt—were more popular when they left office than when they entered. In contrast to his Democratic predecessors and successors, Eisenhower kept the peace; in contrast to his Republican successors, Eisenhower both balanced the budget and stopped inflation.
Eisenhower gave the nation eight years of peace and prosperity. No other President in the twentieth century could make that claim. No wonder that millions of Americans felt that the country was damned lucky to have him.