TWENTY-SIX

Little Rock

A most interesting subject for detailed study would be Eisenhower’s role in connection with the segregation storm in the South, his part in bringing about that storm, in subtly promoting its increased violence, and in steering it towards the ultimate objective of his Communist bosses who planned the whole thing far in advance.

—ROBERT WELCH, FOUNDER, THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY

Never in the postwar era was American prestige higher than in the aftermath of Suez. Small nations could scarcely believe the United States would support Egypt, a Third World country, in a fight against two of America’s oldest allies, or that it would come to the aid of a Muslim state resisting Israeli aggression. “Never has there been such a tremendous acclaim for the President’s policy,” Henry Cabot Lodge reported from the United Nations. “It has been absolutely spectacular.”¹

More than any Western statesman, Eisenhower recognized that the age of imperial rule had passed. Both at Dien Bien Phu and during the Suez crisis he urged his European allies to bury the corpse of colonialism and move on. In his memoirs, Eisenhower wrote that the three weeks of the Suez affair were “the most demanding three weeks of my entire presidency.”² In the midst of a contentious election campaign, Ike had reined in his wartime partners in the face of fierce Democratic criticism; deterred the Soviets from intervening during the Suez crisis; avoided needless provocation at the time of the Hungarian uprising; and preserved the peace. Any misstep could have triggered a chain of events leading to nuclear war. Throughout these crises Eisenhower had exercised personal control. American policy was not set in the State Department or the Department of Defense or by White House assistants, but by the president himself. Even more than on D-Day or at the time of the Battle of the Bulge, Eisenhower assumed direct command.

Domestically, Eisenhower’s record was no less impressive. By 1956 he had balanced the federal budget, and when unemployment rose and recession threatened in the aftermath of the Korean War, he had nipped it in the bud with the interstate highway program—the mother of all stimulus programs. But the most serious domestic challenge Ike faced—and the most intractable—was the question of civil rights and equality for African Americans.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, adopted after the Civil War, states unequivocally, “No State shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” So long as Grant was president, and federal troops remained in the South, the amendment was enforced, and former slaves were guaranteed equality, particularly the right to vote. But after the disputed election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, the United States Army was withdrawn from the South (part of a quid pro quo in which Democrats agreed not to challenge Hayes’s election), and from that point on African Americans suffered systematic discrimination at the hands of a white southern society that, like the Bourbons of France after the revolution, had “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”

The first casualty was the right to vote. Southern states adopted literacy tests, the poll tax, and property qualifications (all with “grandfather clauses” insulating poor whites) that stripped blacks from the voting rolls.^a When that was insufficient, violence and intimidation followed. Lynchings became commonplace. The resulting all-white legislatures enacted Black Codes—codes of laws pertaining to African Americans—that legalized racial segregation. The constitutionality of these “Jim Crow” statutes was open to question, given the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.^b The issue reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 in the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson, testing the legality of a Louisiana law requiring blacks and whites to ride in separate railroad coaches.³ This was an era when reconciliation with the white South was at the top of the nation’s agenda, and the Supreme Court, by a vote of 7–1, upheld racial segregation as constitutionally permissible. The equal protection clause, said the court, required equality; it did not mandate a “commingling” of the races. “If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane.” The resulting doctrine, known as “separate but equal,” became the law of the land for the next fifty-eight years. The United States was a racially segregated society, and the Supreme Court had given that segregation a constitutional blessing.^{4 c} “Separate but equal,” of course, was a myth. Facilities were segregated, but they were rarely equal, and African Americans suffered accordingly.

This was the world to which Eisenhower was accustomed. There were virtually no blacks in Kansas when he grew up, none at West Point, and the Army was strictly segregated, with the few black units, such as the 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry regiments, commanded by white officers. Eisenhower himself had briefly served as executive officer of the 24th Infantry at Fort Benning in the 1920s. The assignment had been a punitive one inflicted by the chief of infantry, and Ike quickly managed a transfer. World War II was fought with segregated units, black soldiers were most often assigned as support troops, and segregation was accepted as a fact of American life. Whether it involved restaurants, hotels, restrooms, athletic events, water fountains, parks, schools, or swimming pools, Americans for the most part lived in a segregated world. Eisenhower’s friends were white and many were from the South. At the professional level he did not encounter African Americans. That is not to say Ike was racially prejudiced. He simply did not question racial segregation—a situation to which the Supreme Court of the United States had given its seal of approval.

In the few cases that had come before the court in the 1930s and ’40s testing the doctrine of separate but equal, the court had ruled that states were required to provide comparable professional and graduate educations for blacks and whites. But these decisions did not challenge the basic holding in Plessy, and indeed reinforced it.⁵

That changed in 1954 when the Supreme Court, in a decision written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, reversed the holding in Plessy v. Ferguson and held that racial segregation, in and of itself, was a denial of the equal protection of the laws. The decision of the Warren Court was unanimous, and the case, Brown v. Board of Education, involving the desegregation of public schools in Topeka, Kansas, introduced a new era of racial equality.⁶ But the decision in Brown, while it enunciated a new principle of law, bound only the litigants to the case. The struggle to attain equality engulfed the nation for the next two decades, and Eisenhower’s leadership would prove critical.

Legal scholars have sometimes criticized Chief Justice Warren’s epic decision in Brown because it relied on contemporary evidence and argued broad principles at the expense of judicial precedent. That criticism overlooks the fact that the great constitutional decisions of Chief Justice John Marshall—decisions that defined the very nature of the American system of government—were also based on principle, not precedent. Like Brown, the decisions of the Marshall Court in Marbury v. Madison, the cornerstone of the Supreme Court’s constitutional authority; McCulloch v. Maryland, upholding the broad legislative powers of Congress; and Gibbons v. Ogden, defining the commerce power, are innocent of legal precedent.⁷ Like in Brown, the argument of the chief justice was so convincing that precedent was unnecessary. Like in Brown, the issues were so fundamental that precedent was beside the point. And like in Brown, the decisions in Marbury, McCulloch, and Gibbons were unanimous. Earl Warren and John Marshall understood that when dealing with the nation’s fundamental structure, the court must speak with one voice. A unanimous court leaves no doubt about the law of the land.

The decision in Brown came down on May 17, 1954, near the end of the court’s 1954 term. With one blow, the Supreme Court deprived racial segregation of its constitutional legitimacy. The Eisenhower administration had filed an amicus curiae brief in Brown arguing that Plessy v. Ferguson be overturned, and at the invitation of the court Assistant Attorney General J. Lee Rankin presented oral argument. Asked by the justices whether the Eisenhower administration thought school segregation was constitutional, Rankin replied that it did not.⁸

While Eisenhower accepted segregation as a fact of life, he personally had no patience with racial discrimination. But as president he recognized how divisive the issue was in the South, and he wanted to move forward cautiously. Ike’s goal was to keep the country united under the rule of law. Unlike Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, who spearheaded the fight for racial equality, Eisenhower sought to stake out a nonpartisan position grounded in the president’s constitutional responsibility to take care that the laws be faithfully enforced. He eschewed the bully pulpit and preferred to remind the nation of its duty to obey the law. Eisenhower recognized the need for change, but wanted to achieve it with the cooperation of the white South if possible. That was consistent with Ike’s instinct to build coalitions based on consensus and was in many ways exactly what the country needed to buffer a change that was so fundamental. In retrospect, it is difficult to say that he was wrong.

But there is no doubt where Eisenhower stood. In his first State of the Union message in February 1953, Ike said, “I propose to use whatever authority exists in the office of the President to end segregation in the District of Columbia, including the Federal Government, and any segregation in the Armed Forces.”^{9 d} When Representative Adam Clayton Powell, the prominent black congressman from Harlem, called Eisenhower’s attention to the fact that despite President Truman’s order to integrate, two-thirds of the units in the Army were still segregated, Ike moved swiftly. Where Truman had tried to convince the Army to desegregate, Eisenhower ordered it to do so. “Wherever Federal funds are expended,” he told his news conference on March 19, 1953, “I do not see how any American can justify a discrimination in the expenditure of those funds.”¹⁰ Military officers (such as General Omar Bradley) who had found dozens of reasons why desegregation was premature were not willing to resist a direct order from the commander in chief. On October 24, 1954, Defense Secretary Charles Wilson announced that the last racially segregated unit in the armed forces had been abolished.¹¹

Schools on military bases posed an additional problem. Those in the South were segregated, and many were operated by local school boards. Eisenhower ordered those to desegregate as well—fifteen months before the court’s decision in Brown. Where local boards refused, the federal government simply assumed control of the schools and desegregated them. By the beginning of the 1955 school year, all schools on military posts were operating on a racially integrated basis. Hospitals run by the Veterans Administration were desegregated by order of the president in September 1953.

Navy yards in the South, employing thousands of civilian workers, proved particularly difficult to desegregate. “The Navy must recognize the customs and usages prevailing in certain geographic areas of our country which the Navy had no part in creating,” said Robert Anderson, Eisenhower’s first secretary of the Navy, on May 28, 1953.¹² Ike overruled him. Eisenhower told Congressman Powell that he would not permit the desegregation of federal facilities to be obstructed by his subordinates. “We have not taken and we shall not take a single backward step,” the president said. “There must be no second class citizens in this country.”¹³ The Navy yard in Charleston, South Carolina, was the last holdout. “Not even President Truman deemed [desegregation] necessary at such installations,” Governor James Byrnes wrote Eisenhower in August 1953.¹⁴ Despite his affection for Byrnes, Ike was unmoved. On January 14, 1954, the Charleston yard reported that the last vestige of segregation had been eliminated.¹⁵ Eisenhower successfully integrated the armed forces, the VA hospitals, Navy yards in the South, and the schools on military bases well before the Supreme Court held “separate but equal” unconstitutional. Adam Clayton Powell—scarcely anyone’s Uncle Tom—put it best in a speech to his constituents on February 28, 1954. “The Honorable Dwight D. Eisenhower has done more to eliminate discrimination and to restore the Negro to the status of first-class citizenship than any President since Abraham Lincoln,” he said.¹⁶

When the decision in Brown was announced, Eisenhower immediately ordered the schools in the District of Columbia desegregated.¹⁷ Washington’s schools, he told the D.C. commissioners, should be “a model for the nation.”^{18 e} But the court left open how desegregation was to be achieved elsewhere. Unless local school boards acted on their own initiative, the issue remained in limbo. Not until a year later did the court hand down a second decision (Brown II) providing guidance as to how integration should proceed. In another unanimous decision, also written by the chief justice, the Supreme Court entrusted desegregation to the local school boards, supervised by the ninety United States District Courts scattered across the country. The Supreme Court set no timetable, except to say that desegregation should proceed “with all deliberate speed.”^{19 f} As the court decreed, integration would be achieved through legal process at the local level, not by sweeping judicial fiat or executive intervention.

In the hiatus between Brown and Brown II, Justice Robert Jackson died, creating a Supreme Court vacancy for Eisenhower to fill. To replace Jackson, the president nominated Judge John Marshall Harlan II of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Harlan had replaced the legendary Learned Hand on the second circuit, and now Eisenhower was tapping him for the Supreme Court. Harlan was the grandson and namesake of Justice John Marshall Harlan, the great dissenter in Plessy-Ferguson, and no appointment could have been better calculated to indicate where Ike’s sympathies lay.²⁰ Eisenhower would make three more appointments to the Supreme Court, William Brennan (1956), Charles Whittaker (1957), and Potter Stewart (1958). If Eisenhower had been skeptical of the holding in Brown, he could easily have appointed southerners who might have challenged the decision. But he did not. Harlan, Brennan, Whittaker, and Stewart supported the holding in Brown that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional, and became part of the continuing unanimity of the Warren Court on racial issues.

Eisenhower’s judicial appointees to lower courts in the Deep South were equally opposed to segregation. Ordinarily, the appointment of federal judges involves significant senatorial input. But the senators from the South were wedded to segregation, and their judicial nominees invariably shared that view. The senators were also Democrats. Party affiliation afforded Eisenhower sufficient reason to ignore their preferences, and the Department of Justice under Herbert Brownell habitually recommended judges for the Fifth Circuit (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas) without senatorial endorsement. That enabled Eisenhower to appoint supporters of desegregation who did yeoman service to make the decision in Brown a reality. Elbert Tuttle of Georgia, John Minor Wisdom of Louisiana, and John Brown of Nebraska were appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, where they joined Richard Taylor Rives, a Truman appointee, to form a solid phalanx determined to enforce desegregation.^g At the district court level, Eisenhower appointed Frank M. Johnson, Jr., in Alabama; in 1956 he struck down segregated seating on Montgomery’s buses after Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat had triggered a citywide black boycott of the city buses. It was also Johnson who ordered the teaching staffs of Montgomery’s schools desegregated—a monumental step on the road to racial integration.

Resistance to the ruling in Brown was immediate. Throughout the South, White Citizens Councils sprang up, composed of outraged citizens determined to preserve white supremacy at the local level. The Citizens Councils did not wear sheets and did not burn crosses, but their tactics of bullying and intimidation were often as vicious as the Klan’s. (“The Ku Klux Klan in business suits,” in the words of one social historian.)²¹ There was also vociferous opposition in Congress. On March 10, 1956, Senator J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina announced the “Southern Manifesto,” a document signed by 101 members of Congress pledging themselves “to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision [Brown v. Board of Education] which is contrary to the Constitution.” The document was signed by every member of the congressional delegations from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia, plus a sprinkling from other states. In what has become a hackneyed refrain, the signatories said, “We regard the decision of the Supreme Court in the school cases as a clear abuse of judicial power. It climaxes a trend in the federal judiciary undertaking to legislate … and encroach upon the reserved rights of the States and the people.”²²

At his press conference four days later, Eisenhower was asked by ABC’s Edward P. Morgan to comment on the “manifesto,” particularly insofar as the president’s responsibility was concerned. Ike typically replied with a carrot and a stick. He commended the signers for pledging to use legal means to resist the court’s decision. But he coupled that with a clear warning. If they were thinking about nullification, there would be serious trouble. In words that Andrew Jackson might have used, Ike said, “I am sworn to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States and I can never abandon or refuse to carry out my own duty.”

Eisenhower pleaded for patience and moderation. He reminded the press that because segregation had been constitutional for almost sixty years, it was going to take time and effort to bring about change. “I have never yet given up my belief that the American people, faced with a great problem like this, will approach it intelligently and with patience and understanding, and we will get somewhere.”²³ Eisenhower worked behind the scenes, hoping to enlist the South’s religious leaders to ease the way. A week after his press conference, he met with evangelist Billy Graham for almost an hour in the White House. Graham said later that Ike “felt strongly that the church could make a tremendous contribution toward the bettering of race relations” in the South.²⁴

Eisenhower followed up his meeting with Graham with a lengthy letter. “Ministers know that peacemakers are blessed,” he told the evangelist. “They should also know that the most effective peacemaker is one who prevents a quarrel from developing.” Ike suggested to Graham that more qualified blacks be elected to local offices in the South, that entrance to graduate school be strictly on the basis of merit without regard to race, and that public transportation be fully integrated. “It appears to me that things like this could be properly mentioned in a pulpit.” Eisenhower also suggested that Graham might find an opportunity to commend the Reverend Joseph Francis Rummel, the longtime Catholic archbishop of New Orleans, who had desegregated the city’s parochial schools on his own authority. In a pastoral letter, Rummel warned Catholics they faced “automatic excommunication” if they supported segregation for parochial schools.²⁵

Outside of the Catholic schools in New Orleans, however, desegregation in the South was minimal. According to the NAACP, no public schools had been desegregated in eight southern states in 1955, and the economic intimidation of blacks was on the increase. In Mississippi, a state whose population included 900,000 blacks, the number of African Americans on the voting rolls had declined from 22,000 to 8,000 during the year. Racial violence also spiked upward. No lynchings had been recorded in the Magnolia State during the five years from 1950 through 1954. In 1955, there were three.²⁶ And it was not just in the South. Fiery crosses were burned in the front yards of Supreme Court justices in Washington, and kerosene was dumped under the windows of Attorney General Brownell’s house in the District.²⁷

The decisive battle in the struggle to desegregate the schools in the South was fought at Little Rock in 1957. Following the decision in Brown II, the Little Rock school board adopted a plan for the gradual integration of the city’s schools over a seven-year period. The first step was the admission of a handful of carefully selected black students to Central High School in September 1957. But in late August a group of white parents (the Mothers’ League of Little Rock Central High) brought suit in state court to block the school board’s plan and appealed to Governor Orval Faubus to intervene. Faubus testified in court that gun sales in Little Rock had increased rapidly, and he feared violence when school opened. Based on the governor’s testimony, Judge Murray Reed of the Pulaski County Chancery Court issued an injunction on August 29 to delay the integration of Central High. At that point Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s legal counsel who had argued both Brown cases before the Supreme Court, rushed to Little Rock to place the issue before the federal court.

After a brief hearing on August 30, Judge Ronald N. Davies of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas ruled that the state chancery court had no jurisdiction and ordered desegregation to proceed as planned. Schools in Little Rock were scheduled to open on Tuesday, September 3. On Monday, Governor Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to active duty in Little Rock. “The purpose of the state militia,” said Faubus, “is to maintain or restore order and protect the lives and property of citizens.”^{28 h} The following day, Central High was ringed by 250 guardsmen in battle dress, and an even larger crowd of white demonstrators determined to prevent the black students from entering. But the nine black students who had been selected to attend Central High did not appear. Rather than confront the angry mob, NAACP officials and the school board chose to return to federal court for further instructions. When they did, Judge Davies ordered the school board to proceed with integration. “This is an obligation from which I shall not shrink,” said the judge.²⁹

On Wednesday, September 4, the nine black students attempted to enter Central High. The Arkansas National Guard blocked their way while an unruly mob of more than five hundred white demonstrators shouted obscenities. Judge Davies responded by requesting the Justice Department to investigate Faubus’s claim that an imminent threat of violence justified his use of the Guard to thwart integration. Davies’s request landed on Herbert Brownell’s desk at the Justice Department on Wednesday afternoon. The attorney general, who had been following events in Little Rock closely, immediately dispatched a team of FBI agents and federal marshals to Little Rock pursuant to the judge’s request. The following day Governor Faubus sent an angry telegram to Eisenhower protesting the intervention of federal authorities. Faubus said the government agents were plotting to arrest him, claimed his telephone was being tapped, and blamed federal authorities for any future violence at Central High. Eisenhower backed Brownell to the hilt. “When I became President,” Ike fired back, “I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. The only assurance I can give you,” he told Faubus, “is that the Federal Constitution will be upheld by me by every legal means at my command.”^{30 i}

Orval Faubus was not a racist, in the sense of Mississippi’s Theodore G. Bilbo or Eugene Talmadge in Georgia. He was more of an opportunist, akin to Louisiana’s Huey Long, a southern populist from what one knowledgeable observer called the “Snopes school of politics.” Shrewd and earthy, Faubus was determined to win a third term as governor in a state where third terms were rare. And in 1957 it was clear that the path to electoral victory lay in opposing desegregation.

On September 9, federal agents in Little Rock reported to the court that there had been no increase in the sale of guns in Little Rock, and that Faubus’s orders to the Guard were designed to prevent the black students from entering the school building. Upon receiving the report, Judge Davies asked the Justice Department to enter the case and file a request for a preliminary injunction against the deployment of the Arkansas National Guard at Central High. Brownell did so on September 10. Judge Davies set the hearing on the government’s motion for September 20, and ordered Faubus to appear in court and defend his actions.³¹ The battle was joined. As Eisenhower wrote later, “The United States government and the Governor of Arkansas were now heading toward a collision.”³²

Faubus recognized he had overreached. His popularity among Arkansas’s white voters stood at an all-time high, but he faced a possible contempt citation from Judge Davies and all the consequences that might entail. As Brownell observed, “The governor’s action represented an attempt to nullify the Constitution and the laws of the United States and to disregard the orders of the federal court.”³³

Eisenhower, who was summering at the naval base in Newport, Rhode Island, was determined that whatever the district court in Little Rock ruled, that decision would be enforced. At the same time, he wanted to give Faubus the opportunity to make “an orderly retreat.”³⁴ When Representative Brooks Hays of Arkansas, the longtime liberal congressman from Little Rock, suggested that the president meet with Faubus at Newport to work out a peaceful settlement, Eisenhower was initially reluctant. The president, said Sherman Adams, would not meet “with a state governor who was standing in open defiance of the Constitution.” When Hays persisted and said Faubus “realizes he has made a mistake and is looking for a way out,” Eisenhower agreed to meet with the governor, providing that Faubus announce beforehand his willingness to comply with the orders of the district court. That statement should be “crystal clear,” the president told Brownell.³⁵ Adams and Hays drafted a statement for Faubus that was consistent with Ike’s wishes, and assumed they had an agreement. But when Faubus released the text in Little Rock, he added a proviso. He would comply with the court order “consistent with my responsibility under the Arkansas constitution,” in effect negating his commitment. Brownell told Eisenhower that this was typical of Faubus and that it was pointless to meet with him, but Ike chose to do so anyway.

Faubus arrived in Newport on September 14. He and Eisenhower met privately for twenty minutes, and then were joined by Brownell, Sherman Adams, and Congressman Hays. At their private meeting, Eisenhower offered Faubus a face-saving solution. Keep the Arkansas National Guard in place at Central High, but change their orders. Instead of preventing the black students from entering, instruct the Guard to continue to preserve order and allow the children to attend school. “You should take this action promptly,” said Ike. No one would benefit from a trial of strength between the president and a governor, he told Faubus. “Where the federal government has assumed jurisdiction and this is upheld by the Supreme Court, there can only be one outcome: the state will lose. I don’t want to see any governor humiliated.”³⁶

As Eisenhower recalled, Faubus “seemed to be very appreciative of this attitude. I definitely got the understanding that he was going back to Arkansas and would act within a matter of hours to revoke his orders to the Guard to prevent re-entry of the Negro children into the school.”³⁷ At the subsequent meeting with Brownell, Adams, and Hays, Eisenhower said that Faubus had agreed that the black children would be admitted to Central High, and Faubus did not dispute the president’s statement. “I knew Eisenhower was a persuasive person,” said Brownell later, “but I was incredulous at Faubus’s ostensible capitulation and the seemingly abrupt end of a constitutional crisis of such impact.”³⁸

Brownell’s skepticism proved correct, and Ike was wrong. When Faubus returned to Arkansas, nothing happened. The governor remained silent and the Arkansas National Guard stayed at Central High preventing the black students from entering. Eisenhower was furious. “Faubus broke his word,” the president told Brownell. According to Brownell, Ike’s voice was tense. “He was acting as a military commander-in-chief, dealing with Faubus as a subordinate who had let him down in the midst of battle.”³⁹ Eisenhower wanted to issue a statement immediately denouncing Faubus. Brownell and Adams urged Ike to hold his fire. Faubus was due to appear in court before Judge Davies on Friday, September 20. There was little doubt that Davies would order Faubus to admit the black students, and it was equally clear that the governor would refuse. Let Faubus overplay his hand. Once he was in defiance of a court order, Eisenhower would be justified to use whatever means were necessary to compel compliance.

On September 20, Judge Davies called his court to order for the hearing on Civil Case 3113, a motion by the United States for a preliminary injunction enjoining “all persons” from interfering with the integration of Central High. Faubus was represented by lawyers from the state attorney general’s office in Little Rock, who immediately moved that Judge Davies disqualify himself because of prejudice. The judge denied the motion, at which point Faubus’s lawyers packed up their brief cases and walked out. Judge Davies said the hearing would continue without them.

The Justice Department lawyers presented a convincing case. The mayor of Little Rock, the chief of police, and members of the school board presented unchallenged testimony concerning Little Rock’s history of peaceful race relations for the past twenty-five years. “Jim Crow” seating on the city’s buses had been discontinued in January without incident. The witnesses were unanimous that there had been no evidence that the desegregation of Central High would produce disorder. The mayor and the chief of police also testified that Faubus had not asked for a police report on the possibility of danger before he mobilized the Guard. It was also their view that the Little Rock police department had been fully capable of maintaining order.

When the government concluded its case, Judge Davies spoke in measured tones. “It is very clear to this court,” said the judge, “that the plan of integration adopted by the Little Rock school board and approved by this court and the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has been thwarted by the Governor of Arkansas. It is equally demonstrable from the testimony here today that there would have been no violence in carrying out the plan of integration and that there has been no violence.” Judge Davies thereupon granted the injunction and ordered Faubus and the commander of the Arkansas National Guard to cease further interference with the court’s orders.⁴⁰

Three hours after receiving the court’s ruling, Faubus removed the National Guard from Central High. That evening he went on statewide television to announce his compliance with the injunction. He said the court’s order would be appealed with the Eighth Circuit, and in the meantime he asked black parents not to send their children to the high school until tempers cooled. Faubus thereupon departed Little Rock for the Southern Governors’ Conference in Sea Island, Georgia. Aprés moi le déluge.

On Saturday, September 21, Eisenhower issued a brief statement announcing that Faubus had withdrawn the Arkansas National Guard from Central High. He did not praise Faubus’s action, he simply announced it. But he did praise the nine black children who had been denied admission by the Guard. “They and their parents have conducted themselves with dignity and restraint. I am confident that the citizens of the City of Little Rock and the State of Arkansas will welcome this opportunity to demonstrate that in their city and in their state proper orders of a United States Court will be executed promptly and without disorder.”⁴¹

But that did not happen. When school opened on Monday, Central High was ringed by a mob of well over a thousand angry white protestors determined to prevent the black students from entering. Police barricades initially kept the crowd at bay, and the black students entered unseen through a side door. But the crowd continued to grow and was in an ugly mood. Out-of-state newsmen were assaulted, and by eleven-thirty the police lines had been breached. Demonstrators stormed into the school, and Gene Smith, Little Rock’s deputy police chief, decided to remove the black students for their own protection. They left the school under police escort, were placed in police cars, and driven home. The rioting continued. Virgil Blossom, the superintendent of schools, called the Department of Justice to request federal assistance. The crowd had grown to more than fifteen hundred, said Blossom, and local authorities could no longer contain it. An hour later, Mayor Woodrow Wilson Mann sent an urgent telegram to Eisenhower in Newport. “The mob that gathered was no spontaneous assembly,” Mann told the president. “It was agitated, aroused, and assembled by a concerted plan of action.” Mann said that allies of Faubus had organized the mob, and that “Governor Faubus was at least cognizant of what was going to take place.”⁴²

Eisenhower, who had been apprised of the situation by Brownell, acted promptly. Secretary of the Army Wilbur Brucker was alerted that military force might be required in Little Rock, and at Eisenhower’s direction, Army chief of staff Maxwell Taylor was ordered to prepare the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, for possible movement. “In my career I have learned,” the president told Brownell, “that if you have to use force, use overwhelming force and save lives thereby.”⁴³

At 4:45 p.m. Eisenhower assumed direct command of the situation in Little Rock with a formal statement putting the demonstrators on notice. “The Federal law and the orders of a United States District Court implementing that law cannot be flouted with impunity by any individual or any mob of extremists. I will use the full power of the United States including whatever force may be necessary to prevent any obstruction of the law and to carry out the orders of the Federal Court.” There were no weasel words or conditional offers in Ike’s statement.⁴⁴ Judge Davies’s order would be enforced and the black students would be admitted to Central High using whatever force might be necessary. An hour later the White House issued an official proclamation signed by the president calling on the demonstrators to disperse. After briefly detailing the obstruction of justice in Little Rock, and citing the relevant legal authority, the key sentence read:

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States, under and by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution … do command all persons engaged in such obstruction of justice to cease and desist therefrom, and to disperse forthwith.⁴⁵

Under the relevant federal statutes, issuance of the proclamation was a prerequisite before the president could employ military force to suppress domestic violence.⁴⁶ When Ike signed the proclamation, the deck was cleared for action. And to be sure the import of the proclamation registered in Little Rock, the document noted President Washington’s use of federal troops to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, and President Cleveland’s similar action to enforce a federal court injunction during the Pullman strike in 1894.^j

Despite the deliberate effort of the White House to telegraph its intention to intervene, the situation in Little Rock continued to deteriorate. Racial fighting broke out on Main Street, bricks and bottles were hurled through shop windows, and hundreds of cars packed with gun-toting hoodlums cruised ominously through black neighborhoods.

By Tuesday morning it was evident that federal troops would be required. The question was no longer whether to intervene, wrote Eisenhower, “but what force I should use to insure execution of the court’s order.”⁴⁷ Ike placed a call to Maxwell Taylor at the Pentagon. Taylor suggested using the Arkansas National Guard before ordering federal troops to the scene. Eisenhower was dubious. He told Taylor he was concerned about pitting “brother against brother.” If they used the Guard, said the president, the units should come from elsewhere in the state, not from Little Rock.

Before a decision was reached, another emergency telegram arrived in Newport from Mayor Mann. “The immediate need for federal troops is urgent,” said the mayor. “The mob is much larger in number at 8 AM than at any time yesterday. People are converging on the scene from all directions. Mob is armed and engaging in fisticuffs and other acts of violence. Situation is out of control and police cannot dispense the mob.” Mann asked the president to send the necessary troops as soon as possible.⁴⁸

Eisenhower placed another call to Taylor in Washington. The Arkansas Guard, he told the Army’s chief of staff, could not muster soon enough to defuse the crisis. The 101st Airborne Division, which had already been alerted, was ready for action. Eisenhower instructed Taylor to send the 101st to Little Rock immediately. He also said he was issuing an Executive Order (no. 10730) calling the Arkansas National Guard into federal service. That would deprive Faubus of their use. Taylor put the wheels in motion. By midafternoon on Tuesday, an armada of C-130s was carrying the troops from Fort Campbell to Little Rock.^k John Chancellor of NBC News was on the scene when the first contingent of five hundred men of the 101st Airborne arrived. “As they marched in, the clean, sharp sound of their boots clacking on the street was a reminder of their professionalism,” Chancellor recalled. The young journalist (Chancellor was thirty at the time) said he’d never thought much about the Constitution before, but he realized that day he was watching the Constitution in action. “There was something majestic about the scene: it was a moment at once thrilling and somehow frightening as well.”⁴⁹

As soon as the 101st was aloft, Eisenhower left Newport for Washington. “Meet me at the White House,” he instructed Brownell. “I am going to address the nation on TV.”⁵⁰ Eisenhower chose to return to Washington to emphasize the gravity of the situation in Little Rock. He drafted his remarks on the flight from Newport, and worked over them with Brownell in the Oval Office. At 9 p.m. he faced the nation. Ike wore a somber three-piece gray suit, and spoke directly into the camera. He did not use a teleprompter, and only rarely consulted the text in front of him. “For a few minutes this evening I want to speak to you about the serious situation that has arisen in Little Rock,” said the president. “In that city, under the leadership of demagogic extremists, disorderly mobs have deliberately prevented the carrying out of proper orders from a Federal Court.”

Eisenhower recounted the events in Little Rock leading up to his decision to send troops to the scene. “The very basis of our individual rights and freedoms depends upon the certainty that the President will enforce the decisions of the courts,” said Ike. “Unless the President did so, anarchy would result.… Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.… A foundation of our American way of life is our national respect for the law.” Eisenhower emphasized that the Army was not in Little Rock to take over the school system or to supplant local authority. “The troops are there solely for the purpose of preventing interference with the orders of the Court.”

Mindful of the need to tamp down the crisis, Ike reached out for southern support. The Supreme Court had decided that separate educational facilities based on race are inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional, said the president. “Our personal opinions about the decision have no bearing on the matter of enforcement; the responsibility and authority of the Supreme Court are very clear.” Eisenhower said he knew the South and had many friends there. “I know that the overwhelming majority of the people of the South—including those of Arkansas and of Little Rock—are of good will, united in their efforts to preserve and respect the law even when they disagree with it.” Liberal commentators have often criticized Eisenhower for these remarks, but the president was on firm ground. He wanted to defuse the crisis and pave the way for integration with as few side effects as possible. His conciliatory tone went a long way in doing so.

Soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division escorting members of the Little Rock Nine into Central High School, September 24, 1957. (illustration credit 26.1)

At Dulles’s suggestion, Eisenhower spoke about the pernicious impact of the situation in Little Rock on American foreign relations. “Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation.” The president made it clear that the law would be enforced and called upon the people of Arkansas to assist. “Thus will be restored the image of America and of all its parts as one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”⁵¹

It was a powerful speech, powerfully delivered. The next morning in Little Rock the mob again tried to assemble at Central High only to find the way blocked by the soldiers of the 101st Airborne. The troops had established barriers a block away from the school, and systematically dispersed the crowd. When scattered bands of protestors persisted, the troops moved forward, elbow to elbow, bayonets fixed. A scuffle or two ensued, but by 9 a.m. the area had been cleared. The nine black children assembled, as they habitually did, at the home of Daisy Bates, the local head of the NAACP, waiting for instructions. An Army officer appeared at the door and saluted. “Mrs. Bates, we’re ready for the children,” he said. “We will return them to your home at three-thirty.” It was, said Minniejean Brown, one of the black students, an exhilarating experience. “For the first time in my life I felt like an American citizen.”⁵²

Eisenhower returned to Newport that same day. As he often did, he gave a ride on Columbine II to a member of the White House press pool, this time John L. Steele of Time magazine. Sitting next to the president, Steele coaxed Ike into a candid off-the-record discussion about his decision to intervene.^l Sending in the troops, said Eisenhower, was the hardest decision he’d ever had to make, save possibly for D-Day. “But Goddamn it, it was the only thing I could do.” Eisenhower emphasized that the issue as he saw it was not segregation. “It isn’t even the maintenance of public order. It is a question of upholding the law—otherwise you have people shooting people.” Simply put, said Ike, it was to enforce the law of the land. “This thing is going to go on and on and on in other places. These damned hooligans … I was trying to speak last night to the reasonable people, the decent people of the South.” Eisenhower told Steele he thought his speech might have struck the right tone. But the ordeal had taken a toll. “It has been nagging me day and night.”⁵³

Public reaction to Eisenhower’s speech was overwhelmingly favorable. A Trendex poll published on September 26 indicated 68.4 percent of the country (77.5 percent outside the South) approved the president’s decision to send troops to Little Rock. The following week, the Gallup poll showed two-thirds of the public believed Ike had done the “right thing.”⁵⁴

A flood of responses rolled into the White House. “Thank you for your masterful statement,” wired Harry Ashmore, editor of The Arkansas Gazette.⁵⁵ Jazz legend Louis Armstrong telegraphed the president, “Daddy, if and when you decide to take those little Negro children personally into Central High School along with your marvelous troops, take me along.… You have a good heart.”⁵⁶

“Please accept my congratulations,” Jackie Robinson wired. “I should have known you would do the right thing at the crucial time.”⁵⁷ Texas oil barons Sid Richardson and Monty Moncrief telegraphed their support. “The overwhelming majority of the American people are in full accord with the determined action you have taken,” said Moncrief.⁵⁸

Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been critical of Eisenhower earlier, wrote, “The overwhelming majority of southerners, Negro and white, stand firmly behind your resolute action to restore law and order in Little Rock.”⁵⁹ In Little Rock itself, the Reverend Robert Raymond Brown, the Episcopal bishop of Arkansas, telephoned to say that the church leaders of the city supported the president’s action and offered to do anything they could to ameliorate the crisis.⁶⁰ Leading business and civic leaders in Little Rock signed a petition to urge their fellow citizens to remain calm and show respect for the tradition of law and order. “I think your action to be in the finest tradition of American citizenship,” Eisenhower replied. “I cannot help but believe that under this kind of leadership, the City of Little Rock may rapidly return to normal patterns of peaceful living.”⁶¹

Southern officeholders, elected by an all-white electorate, were not so kind. Congressman Carl Elliott of Alabama called Eisenhower’s action illegal, unwarranted, and unwise. “There are not enough troops to occupy every high school campus in the South,” said Elliott.⁶² The hardest blow was delivered by Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, chairman of the Armed Forces Committee and normally a supporter of Ike’s policies. Russell protested what he called “the high-handed and illegal methods being employed by the armed forces of the United States under your command who are carrying out your orders to mix the races in the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas.” Russell described incidents of alleged brutality, and accused the Army of “disregarding and overriding the elementary rights of American citizens by applying tactics which must have been copied from the manual issued [to] the officers of Hitler’s storm troopers.”⁶³

According to Sherman Adams, Eisenhower hit the roof when he read Russell’s telegram. The fact that Russell released it to the press before the White House received it made Ike furious. He wrote out a reply in longhand. “I must say that I completely fail to comprehend your comparison of our troops to Hitler’s storm troopers,” said the president. “In one case military power was used to further the ambitious and purposes of a ruthless dictator, in the other to preserve the institutions of free government.” The action was necessary, Eisenhower told Russell, because the state of Arkansas had misused the National Guard, encouraged “mobs of extremists to flout the orders of a Federal Court,” and had failed to protect “persons who are peaceably exercising their right under the Constitution.” Eisenhower said that “failure to act in such a case would be tantamount to acquiescence in anarchy and the dissolution of the union.”⁶⁴

Elements of the 101st Airborne remained in Little Rock until Thanksgiving, and were gradually replaced by units from the Arkansas National Guard. On May 8, 1958, Eisenhower announced that he would release the Guard at the end of the school year. Of the original nine black students, eight went on to graduate from Central High and one, Ernest Green, became an assistant secretary of labor in the cabinet of Jimmy Carter. Orval Faubus gained what he wanted from the showdown in Little Rock. He portrayed himself as the champion of states’ rights, overwhelmed by massive federal power. For many white citizens of Arkansas, Faubus symbolized resistance to racial integration. His reelection to a third term in 1958—which had seemed unlikely before Little Rock—was guaranteed. Faubus won the Democratic primary (equivalent to election in Arkansas at the time) with twice as many votes as his opponents combined. Faubus easily won a fourth term, then a fifth, and finally a sixth. His twelve years as governor of Arkansas stands as a record in the Razorback State.

Eisenhower’s moderation in the crisis has often been misunderstood. He was determined to enforce the court order, but with as little bluster as possible. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Ike preferred to walk softly and carry a big stick. Rather than emphasize integration, Eisenhower preferred to stress the rule of law. His deployment of the 101st Airborne Division—one of the legendary units in the United States Army—sent an unmistakable message to the South: The decision of the Supreme Court that segregation was unconstitutional was the law of the land. Desegregation would proceed at the local level with all deliberate speed, as determined by local school boards under the supervision of the United States District Courts. But it would proceed. And the full force of the federal government stood ready to enforce it.^m Eisenhower took the most divisive issue to confront American society since the Civil War and moved it toward a solution with as little rancor as possible. At the time, that satisfied neither those who sought immediate integration everywhere, nor those rabid segregationists who opposed any change anywhere. In the long run, Ike’s course proved correct. His moderation carried the day. Had he not acted, had he not sent the 101st to Little Rock, every white racist from Manassas to Vicksburg would have understood: The way to block integration is to take to the streets. Appear in sufficient numbers, and be sufficiently menacing, and desegregation will not happen. It is thanks to Eisenhower that integration proceeded and the rule of law prevailed.

Ike said it best in a letter to Swede Hazlett when the crisis in Little Rock began.

The plan of the Supreme Court to accomplish integration gradually and sensibly seems to me to provide the only possible answer if we are to consider on the one hand the customs and fears of a great section of our population, and on the other the binding effect that Supreme Court decisions must have on all of us if our form of government is to survive and prosper.… ⁶⁵

There must be respect for the Constitution—which means the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution—or we shall have chaos. We cannot possibly imagine a successful form of government in which every individual citizen would have the right to interpret the Constitution according to his own convictions, beliefs, and prejudices. Chaos would develop. This I believe with all my heart—and shall always act accordingly.^{66 n}

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^a The term “grandfather clause” arises out of the Black Codes enacted after Reconstruction. A would-be voter had to prove he could read and write, “unless his grandfather had voted.” Since the grandfathers of African Americans had been slaves, they had not voted and so the literacy requirement was applied to them. It was assumed that the grandfathers of white folks had voted and so they were exempt. Not until 1915 were grandfather clauses intended to keep blacks from voting declared unconstitutional. Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347 (1915).

^b The term “Jim Crow” derives from a pre–Civil War minstrel song sung by Thomas D. “Daddy” Rice, a white actor in blackface. Rice ended every performance with his trademark song and dance:

Wheel about and turn about and do just so. Ev’vy time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.

By the late 1830s, “Jim Crow” had become a pejorative term to describe African Americans.

^c The lone dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson was Justice John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky—who knew firsthand the pernicious effects of racial segregation and whose dissent is perhaps the most memorable in the long history of the Supreme Court. “But in the view of the Constitution, in the eyes of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here,” said Harlan. “Our Constitution is color blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.” Justice Harlan went on to predict that the court’s decision in Plessy would “prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case” just prior to the Civil War. 163 U.S. 537 (1896) at 544.

^d It may be difficult for a contemporary audience to realize that Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, was still a segregated city in the 1950s. Public transportation was not segregated in Washington, but schools, hotels, restaurants, and movie theaters were.

^e I attended an inner-city white high school in Washington, McKinley Tech, that was located adjacent to a large black community. Under the leadership of its principal, Dr. Charles E. Bish, McKinley became a model for desegregation. Within a year of the president’s order, McKinley was almost half black and half white, and integration proceeded without incident. It was the first white high school in Washington to enroll black students, and one of the first in the country. As a white high school, McKinley was always a contender for the city championship (white) in football and basketball. As an integrated high school, McKinley continued to be a contender for the city’s premier athletic championships. Today, McKinley Technological High School is still an inner-city school but with a largely black enrollment. As a charter school, it is ranked among the best in the nation and sends 94 percent of its graduates on to college.

^f The phrase “with all deliberate speed” originated with Eisenhower. While reviewing the government’s brief in Brown II, Ike penciled the phrase in the margin. It was incorporated into the brief, Solicitor General J. Lee Rankin used it in oral argument, and Chief Justice Warren carried it over into his decision of the court. Herbert Brownell interview, cited in David Eisenhower and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Going Home to Glory 104 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

^g “Those four judges, I think, have made as much of an imprint on American society and American law as any four judges below the Supreme Court have ever done on any court,” said Burke Marshall, assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Kennedy administration. “If it had not been for judges like that on the Fifth Circuit, I think Brown would have failed in the end.” David A. Nichols, A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution 84 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).

^h Governor Faubus’s order to General Sherman T. Clinger, the commander of the Arkansas National Guard, stated: “You are directed to place off limits to white students those schools for colored students and to place off limits to colored students those schools heretofore operated and recently set up for white students. This order will remain in effect until the demobilization of the Guard or until further orders.” Opinion of the Attorney General [Brownell] to the President on Little Rock School Desegregation, in Brownell, Advising Ike: The Memoirs of Herbert Brownell 368 [Appendix I] (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993).

ⁱ Eisenhower also told Faubus, “There is no basis of fact to the statements you made in your telegram that Federal authorities have been considering taking you into custody or that telephone lines to your Executive Mansion have been tapped by any agency of the Federal Government.” DDE to Faubus, September 5, 1957, EL.

^j In upholding President Cleveland’s action, the Supreme Court stated, “The entire strength of the nation may be used to enforce in any part of the land the full and free exercise of all national powers and the security of all rights entrusted by the Constitution to its care.… If the emergency arises, the army of the Nation, and all its militia, are at the service of the Nation to compel obedience to its laws.” In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564 (1895).

^k At the insistence of the Department of Justice, Major General Thomas L. Sherburne, commanding the 101st Airborne, was instructed to prune the units going into Little Rock of all black soldiers. The division chain of command was surprised, but complied. Not until a month later were the black soldiers of the 101st integrated back into their units in Little Rock, and it occurred without incident.

I am indebted to my classmate Martin Hoffmann, former secretary of the Army, for this information. In 1957, Hoffmann was an aide to General Sherburne, and in that capacity organized the division’s compliance.

^l Steele did not publish the interview, but prepared a confidential memorandum dated September 25, 1957, which is on file at the Eisenhower Library.

^m In 1958, General Alfred Gruenther, then head of the American Red Cross, informed Eisenhower of the Red Cross’s problem of supplying blood to the South. The state of Louisiana had a statute requiring that blood from black donors and white donors be segregated. Eisenhower told him to ignore it—that he should make no differentiation between blood. Ike told Gruenther that in early 1942 when he had been chief of operations in the War Department, Australia needed troops desperately and he assigned three divisions to go there. He was immediately visited by the Australian ambassador, who said there was a law in Australia prohibiting blacks from entering the country. Eisenhower said he told the ambassador, “All right. No troops.” The next morning Ike said he had a flood of cables from Australia saying everything would be all right. Ike told Gruenther to stand his ground in Louisiana. Ann Whitman diary, November 23, 1958, EL.

ⁿ In 1984, Stephen Ambrose published the first of several biographies of Eisenhower. In it he stated that “Eisenhower personally wished that the Court had upheld Plessy v. Ferguson.” The allegation is repeated by Ambrose in his subsequent works. Because of Ambrose’s position as an associate editor of the Eisenhower Papers, a generation of historians have accepted his version of Ike’s views. Ambrose provides no documentation, no references, and cites only “private” conversations. The fact is Ambrose cut the allegation from whole cloth. There is no evidence whatsoever to sustain Ambrose’s claim. David A. Nichols, in his definitive study of Eisenhower and civil rights, writes that “there is no credible evidence” for Ambrose’s assertion; Blanche Wiesen Cook, one of the earliest researchers in the archives of the Eisenhower Library, found none, nor have I. In the April 26, 2010, issue of The New Yorker magazine, Richard Rayner reports that Ambrose’s alleged interviews with Eisenhower never took place. The record does not sustain that he ever met privately with Ike. Timothy D. Rives, deputy director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library, provided chapter and verse sustaining Rayner’s conclusions in a subsequent article appearing online on George Mason University’s History News Network, May 17, 2010.

Ambrose sometimes twisted the facts to fit his portrait of Ike, but never with such pernicious effect as in Eisenhower’s views of civil rights. I did not know Ambrose, and I have no personal animosity toward him. To the contrary, I have always felt indebted to him for his very generous review of my biography of Lucius Clay in The New York Times Book Review in 1990.

Ambrose, 2 Eisenhower 190; Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President 367; Nichols, Matter of Justice 279; Rayner, “Channeling Ike,” 20–21; Timothy D. Rives, “Ambrose and Eisenhower: A View from the Stacks,” HNN, May 17, 2010.