“His love was not for power but for duty.”
—Presidential scholar Richard Neustadt on Eisenhower
Eisenhower’s apparent incoherence at press conferences was a deliberate device to mislead his antagonists, both foreign and domestic
Ike was the only modern president whose popularity never dropped below 50 percent
He kept TV appearances to a minimum because he didn’t want to bore the American people
Eisenhower said his two biggest mistakes as president “were both sitting on the Supreme Court”
The trajectory of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential reputation is a case study in the wrongheadedness of the dominant modern liberal view of the presidency. During Eisenhower’s tenure in office, both intellectuals and the media were nearly unanimous that he was a mediocre president. A 1961 survey of historians ranked Eisenhower below such forgotten nineteenth-century chief executives as Chester Arthur. Eisenhower’s towering reputation as commander of the Allied forces that invaded France on D-Day and rolled on to victory over Nazi Germany in World War II did not insulate him from the most contemptuous jokes. He was said to be inarticulate, even though he was known to be a graceful and competent writer. His fondness for golf and backyard barbecue was thought to show a lack of worldly sophistication, despite the fact that he had liberated Europe in the most ambitious military action since Hannibal—one involving extensive delicate political considerations.
Humorists of the time, presidential historian Al Felzenberg reminds us, said that Eisenhower proved that the United States didn’t need a president. Then there was the “Eisenhower Doll”—wind it up and it stood there for eight years. Above all, the intellectuals said, Ike was “dumb.” (“If he’s so dumb,” a few unbiased observers replied, “why is he such a good bridge player?”) He was thought to be a creature of his staff; one joke went that while it would be bad if Eisenhower died and Vice President Richard Nixon became president, it would be even worse if Ike’s chief of staff Sherman Adams died and Eisenhower became president. That Eisenhower was consistently popular with the American people throughout his two terms (his average Gallup Poll approval rating was an astounding 64 percent) was an additional insult to elite opinion, and was among the reasons for the contempt for middle class America that intellectuals were expressing ever more openly. The 1950s were gray, conformist, uncreative, stifling. And it was all somehow Ike’s fault. They were “the yawning years of Eisenhower,” as liberal writer Gary Wills put it.
The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader by Fred I. Greenstein (HarperCollins, 1982).
But in the decades since Eisenhower completed his two full terms in office, his presidential reputation has soared, even among many liberals. Starting in the late 1960s, scholars began reviewing the papers and documents from Ike’s White House and were struck by the revelation that this supposedly simple-minded and bumbling man was in fact highly capable—even “cunning”—and was fully in charge behind the scenes. His supposedly inarticulate remarks at press conferences were revealed to have been deliberate devices to mislead the media and his opponents, both foreign and domestic. Derek Leebaert notes that Eisenhower was “one of the few national leaders in the electronic age who seems to have taken a close to malicious delight in his capacity for incoherence.”
He has become, in the most famous formulation, the “hidden-hand president.” Princeton University’s Fred Greenstein, the scholar who came up with that handle, said he had always thought Eisenhower “to be the epitome of a nonleader,” but was astonished to discover that Eisenhower was “alert, politically astute,” engaged, and innovative. Ike’s thought process, Greenstein concluded, “was hard-headed, rigorous, and well-informed,” supplemented by “an impressively coherent advisory process that augmented his own thought and action.”
Greenstein, who admits that he doesn’t sympathize or agree with many of Eisenhower’s policies and decisions, is an excellent case study in the academic cluelessness of liberals. His bias makes him incapable of answering his own excellent question: “How and why could a president who was as politically alert and engaged as Eisenhower was have been judged by his contemporaries to be the opposite?”
“Not shackled to a one-track mind, he always applied two, three, or four lines of reasoning to a single problem and he usually preferred the indirect approach where it would serve him better than the direct attack on a problem. His mind was quick and facile. His thoughts far outraced his speech and this gave rise to his frequent ‘scrambled syntax’ which more perceptive critics should have recognized as the mark of a far-ranging and versatile mind rather than an indication of poor training in grammar.”
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Richard Nixon, who served as Eisenhower’s vice president
The answer is simple: Eisenhower didn’t conform to the post-Wilson, post-FDR liberal model of ideal presidents as miracle workers, relentlessly “leading” the American people into a bold new future according to some abstract and ambitious “vision.” In style and conduct (though not so much in policy), Ike was the anti-FDR. Eisenhower conducted the presidency much more like a nineteenth-century president, that is to say, more as the Founders intended the office to be conducted. He saw himself as the “presiding” officer, taking care that the laws were faithfully executed. In fact Eisenhower was utterly unique among modern presidents in offering no legislative program at all to Congress in his first year in office, even though the Republican Party had just won a majority in Congress in the 1952 election. Eisenhower said at the time that he wanted to “restore the balance” between the branches—flying in the face of the received liberal wisdom that the president, rather than Congress (as intended by the Founders), should be the center of gravity in our political system.
Nor did Eisenhower, who was really the first president of the television age, think it advisable to be on TV frequently, or to make continual speeches to the American people. In fact, when pressed by his advisers to make more TV or public speeches, Eisenhower shot back, “I keep telling you fellows I don’t like to do this sort of thing. I can think of nothing more boring, for the American public, than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens. . . . I don’t think the people want to be listening to a Roosevelt, sounding as if he were one of the Apostles, or the partisan yipping of a Truman.” On another occasion he remarked, “What is it that needs to be said? I’m not going out there just to listen to my tongue clatter!” Often, if he relented and agreed to speak, he’d say, “All right, but not over 20 minutes.” Eisenhower also had a proper disdain for the news media. “Listen,” he once told his staff, “anyone who has time to listen to commentators or read columnists obviously doesn’t have enough work to do.”
While Eisenhower conducted himself in public as a pre-modern president, in one other very important respect—actual management of the executive branch—he modernized the presidency more than anyone else. He explained to a journalist, “With my training in problems involving organization it was inconceivable to me that the work of the White House could not be better systematized than it had been during the years I had observed it.” Eisenhower was the first president to have a formal chief of staff, and he instituted the first White House office of congressional relations. Next to Harding’s innovation of the Bureau of the Budget, Eisenhower is responsible for the most consequential innovation in presidential management in modern times: the formal appointment of a national security adviser, along with a regular consultative process involving the National Security Council (NSC) that has been used by every subsequent president. Truman had actually established the National Security Council, but it was Eisenhower, probably owing to his military career, who made it run smoothly as an important instrument of presidential decision-making. Eisenhower instituted weekly meetings of the council, one of the most important presidential institutions during the Cold War. Over his two terms, Ike presided over 329 of the NSC’s 366 meetings.
As Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs, “Organization cannot make a genius out of an incompetent. . . . On the other hand, disorganization can scarcely fail to result in inefficiency and can easily lead to disaster.” Eisenhower believed in a principle that was also central to Ronald Reagan’s presidency—delegation: “A President who doesn’t know how to decentralize,” Ike wrote, “will be weighed down with details and won’t have time to deal with the big issues.” It is not coincidence that Reagan would receive the exact same misguided criticism—that he was “detached” and “aloof”—that was leveled at Eisenhower.
“But Eisenhower had the true professional’s instinct for making things look easy. He appeared to be performing less work than he actually did. And he wanted it that way. An air of ease inspires confidence. The singer’s hard work on scales should be done at home. On stage, the voice should soar as by natural gift . . . .
“Ike’s lack of pretense, his easy charm, made him seem the fulfillment of America’s ideal—Everyman suddenly put in charge of the nation’s destiny, the good-hearted non-professional with ‘common sense.’”
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Liberal author Garry Wills
Eisenhower’s deliberate management process may have played a role in one of his most sagacious decisions—the decision in 1954 not to intervene in Vietnam when the French were about to be defeated by the Communist Vietcong. The French collapse, coming only a year after Eisenhower had finally brought the Korean War to an inconclusive end, put enormous pressure on the U.S. to intervene directly, or at least to start an aerial bombing campaign to support a last-gasp French effort. A few advisers recommended using nuclear weapons. In rejecting intervention, Eisenhower showed judgment that eluded his successors in the 1960s, noting that “this war in Indochina would absorb our troops by the divisions.”
One of Eisenhower’s major foreign policy mistakes, however, shows the limitations of process-oriented structures like the NSC: Eisenhower’s decision in 1956 to force the British and French to abandon their military operation to reclaim control of the Suez Canal after Egypt’s radical leader Gamal Nasser had seized it. Wanting the U.S. to serve as a neutral “honest broker” in the Middle East, and also wanting America to be popular with Arab nations, Eisenhower demanded that Britain and France withdraw, a demand which had the terrible effects of weakening our closest ally, toppling the conservative British government of Anthony Eden, and strengthening Arab radicalism. Years later Eisenhower told at least two people that he had changed his mind and come to regard Suez as his biggest foreign policy mistake.
The irony is that Eisenhower, a relative anti-interventionist, decided to run for president in the first place at least partly to ensure that the Republican Party would remain committed to internationalism, and the NATO alliance in particular. The leading Republican of the time, Ohio Senator Robert Taft, had expressed isolationist sentiments and was skeptical of NATO. Taft’s warnings that U.S. troops would be stationed in Europe for years to come were dismissed as so much alarmism. Eisenhower, on the other hand, had come out of retirement to become the first commander of NATO. He decided to run for president after concluding that only he could defeat Taft for the 1952 GOP nomination and solidify the Republican Party’s support for international alliances.
As was the case with Herbert Hoover after World War I, both parties had hoped Eisenhower would be their presidential standard bearer. Truman asked Eisenhower directly about replacing him (Truman) on the Democratic ticket in 1948. (James Roosevelt, FDR’s eldest son, also lobbied Ike on behalf of the Democrats.) As late as 1951, Truman was still saying, “My faith in him has never wavered nor ever will,” though Truman was bitterly disappointed when Ike declared himself a Republican a few months later. Eisenhower decided to become a Republican in part because of what he saw as the excesses of the previous twenty years under Democratic Party rule, and the corruption of the Truman administration. Eisenhower was perhaps the first candidate to make his central campaign theme a “Crusade to Clean Up the Mess in Washington.”
In some ways Eisenhower can be thought of as a small-“c” conservative, rather than an ideological conservative with fully formed views about limited government and the threats liberalism poses to free society. He described himself as a “moderate Republican,” and in office he proved that he had no intention of attempting to roll back any of the basic features of the New Deal. In fact Eisenhower expanded some New Deal programs, including Social Security, and he helped to create what became the single largest federal bureaucracy by establishing the cabinet-level Department of Health, Education and Welfare. On the whole, though, Eisenhower was a fiscal conservative. He once told his Cabinet that if he was able to do nothing as president except balance the budget, he would feel that his time in the White House was well spent. Unfortunately, he made no attempt to reduce the high marginal income tax rates (91 percent at the top) that had been adopted during World War II and kept through the Korean War, even though those punitive rates retarded economic growth. The economy grew slowly during the 1950s—about 2.5 percent a year—and suffered three recessions. Eisenhower’s greatest domestic legacy is probably the interstate highway system.
“The Eisenhower who emerges [in his memoirs] intermittently free from his habitual veils is the President most superbly equipped for truly consequential decisions we may ever have had, a mind neither rash nor hesitant, free of the slightest concern for how things might look, indifferent to any sentiment, as calm when he was demonstrating the wisdom of leaving a bad situation alone as when he was moving to meet it on those occasions when he absolutely had to.
“He was the great tortoise upon whose back the world sat for eight years. We laughed at him; we talked wistfully about moving; and all the while we never knew the cunning beneath the shell.”
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Liberal columnist Murray Kempton, writing in 1967
Another irony is that despite his foreign policy internationalism, and his own military background, Eisenhower wanted to reduce defense spending. Incredible as it may seem today, it was Democrats who criticized him for wanting to cut defense, and by the end of his presidency, John F. Kennedy was attacking Eisenhower for an entirely phony “missile gap.” Eisenhower’s famous farewell address warning of the dangers of a “military-industrial complex” later became a favorite quotation of the left, though in fact Eisenhower was partly trying to warn his young and inexperienced successor, John F. Kennedy, future hero of the left, away from the very adventurism that would lead to repeated disasters in the 1960s and 1970s. Even the far left writer Garry Wills retrospectively noted Eisenhower’s steady leadership in contrast to JFK’s: “[Eisenhower] took over a nation at war, a people fearful of atomic holocaust and poisoned milk. He left office to a man who cried for more missiles and for shock troops to fight guerrilla wars by helicopter.”
No aspect of Eisenhower’s presidency disappointed conservatives more than his record on Supreme Court appointments. By the time Eisenhower became president, FDR and Truman had appointed all nine members of the Court, and it was badly out of balance. Eisenhower was able to appoint five justices during his two terms, but he missed the opportunity to reshape the Court’s ideology. Three of his appointments—John Marshall Harlan II, Charles Whittaker, and Potter Stewart—were generally judicial moderates with little stomach for arguing for a more rigorous constitutional originalism, though Harlan and Stewart did often dissent from the worst liberal decisions of the Court.
And two of Eisenhower’s picks for the Court were complete disasters: Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1953, and Justice William Brennan in 1956. Warren, the former governor of California, led the Court sharply to the left especially in the 1960s, expanding the “equal protection” clause in the Fourteenth Amendment into an all-purpose grant of power for the judiciary to rectify perceived social injustice. Warren’s activism was too much even for some of the old FDR liberals on the Court, such as Felix Frankfurter.
Brennan leaned even more radically left than Warren, ruling for example that the death penalty is unconstitutional in all cases—even though the death penalty is specifically sanctioned in the Constitution. Warren actively collaborated with Brennan to bring about the most liberal possible result in Supreme Court decisions. Brennan is the author of the 1958 decision in Cooper v. Aaron, which declared that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the meaning of the Constitution—which would come as news to the Founders, who thought all three branches had equal claim to interpret the Constitution.
Eisenhower is said to have remarked that his two biggest mistakes as president “were both sitting on the Supreme Court,” but he also betrayed a superficial understanding of the Constitution at times. In a letter to his brother, Eisenhower displayed his confusion on this point: “You keep harping on the Constitution; I should like to point out that the meaning of the Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is. Consequently no powers are exercised by the Federal government except where such exercise is approved by the Supreme Court (lawyers) of the land.” This is not the view of Calvin Coolidge or Abraham Lincoln, let alone the Founders.
Eisenhower deserves high marks for general steady leadership in the uncertain postwar decade of the 1950s, for defending the nation ably (one of the most important constitutional responsibilities of the commander in chief), and for sensible modernizations of the office of the president. Above all, Eisenhower’s calm, steady leadership enabled America to settle in for the long haul of the Cold War. As the quiet and calm 1950s gave way to the tumultuous 1960s and demoralizing 1970s, Eisenhower’s presidency started to look pretty good in retrospect. But for his Supreme Court appointments—especially considering the harm Earl Warren and William Brennan did to constitutional government in America—his constitutional grade must be cut down to a C+.