President Eisenhower looked directly into the television camera and thanked the networks for giving him time to speak to the American people. Back straight, owlish glasses fixed firmly across his broad face, notes before him because he still did not quite trust the teleprompters, Eisenhower began his “message of leave-taking and farewell.”
He had considered this moment for many months. Indeed, his whole adult life had built toward it. Ike had served his nation since 1911, when he left his mother crying in Abilene as he departed for West Point and commenced a military career sprung from the unlikely bosom of the River Brethren. In the decades since, he had borne arms for his nation and secured a victory for American liberty unlike any other in history. As president, he had presided over a perilous peace, eight years of continuous threat, of nuclear arsenals and legions of armed men, of rising aspirations and mounting fears, of unrelenting ideological contest, of galloping technological progress and yawing uncertainty about where that progress would lead.
In the years since the end of the Korean War, annihilation still loomed, yet precisely one American died in combat, killed by a sniper in Lebanon. No American president of modern times had brought to the office greater skill as a soldier, yet none had done more to preserve the peace. Eisenhower, America’s warrior-president, had much upon which to reflect, and he looked forward to sharing some final thoughts with his countrymen.
As far back as 1959, with the midterm elections behind him and the end of his presidency within sight, Eisenhower had begun to think about his farewell. “I want to have something to say when I leave here,” Ike told his lead speechwriter, Malcolm Moos, adding that he was not interested in making a speech that was merely headline grabbing, but rather hoped to use the occasion of his farewell to say something meaningful. He imagined giving a ten-minute “farewell address” to the Congress and the American people.
Moos began to collect thoughts from stray sources—news clippings, books, suggestions. One of those suggestions came to him in 1960 and recommended that he and Ike consider the example of George Washington, another great soldier and the American leader whom Eisenhower’s career most resembled. Moos was intrigued.
With Washington’s second term drawing to a close, his heirs and rivals were fixated on the question of whether he would seek the presidency a third time. Exhausted by his long service, infuriated by the intrigues of politics and the stresses of nation building, Washington resolved to retire and to leave the nation with his reflections. Initially, he was inclined to deliver a defensive statement, but he was saved by a formidable speechwriter of his own, Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton at first tried to edit Washington’s draft but ultimately tossed it out and started over. Together, they produced a message that would echo across the ages and find new expression in the statement Eisenhower now set out to draft.
In Washington’s Farewell Address—inaptly named, as it was never delivered orally but rather distributed as a letter to American newspapers—the former general warned of the dangers of party and imagined a day when sectionalism would yield to a unified nation. He briefly decried the threat of large standing armies, though he did not reject a permanent military force altogether. Ever balanced, ever conscious of his position as a transcendent figure in early American life, Washington (with Hamilton) wrote that wise American leaders “will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
Washington’s address is often remembered for its perceptive foreign policy prescriptions, though the larger part of his farewell was devoted to the exhortation to unify the nation across its regional and party differences, a passage so prescient it no longer seems visionary. Washington’s proposal for his nation’s foreign policy, by contrast, has been cited time and again as the country repeatedly confronted the issues of entanglement in European affairs:
The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
At first interpretation, Washington’s observations seem diametrically opposed to Eisenhower’s. Washington left office embroiled in controversy over the Jay Treaty, which posed fundamental questions about the power of the central government and its authority to make binding deals with foreign powers. Washington believed in the Jay Treaty but warned of ill-considered entanglement. Eisenhower, by contrast, saw entanglement as a virtue of modern diplomacy. As NATO commander and president, he had painstakingly woven a web of alliances as a common defense against the encroachment of Communism. But Washington’s warning was not a command toward isolationism but rather an argument for limited, rational engagement in order to advance America’s standing and protect it from harm. With that, Eisenhower had no quarrel. His presidency was rooted in Washington’s example: so, too, would be his farewell.
When it came time to begin drafting his Farewell Address in the fall of 1960, Ike was still hurt by the embarrassment of the failed summit and despondent over John Kennedy’s attack on his record as well as Richard Nixon’s failure to defend it. It was a wounded Eisenhower who prepared to leave, just as it had been a troubled Washington who laid down the burden of leadership.
Eisenhower’s speechwriters reflected on the themes of his presidency and the world he had helped to fashion. For eight years, he had steadfastly fended off those to his left who would risk the nation’s private economy by ignoring deficits and spending government money at will, and those to his right who would do the same by cutting taxes and demanding unsustainable defense expenditures. He held off generals eager to wage war against China or the Soviet Union and rejected those who imagined that Khrushchev, Mao, and Castro were sincere in their embrace of a durable international peace. He believed he represented a center point between those who demanded immediate racial equality and those determined to sustain discrimination. His middle way, as much a part of his character as of his politics, had sustained Ike in his confrontation with McCarthy, in his restrained budgets, and in his defense programs. He was as committed to balance at the end of his presidency as he was at the beginning.
But there was more to say than merely to rehash old arguments, no matter how salient. Castro had seized power in Cuba, China and the Soviet Union eyed Laos, the Congo was riotous, American politics was restless. Troubled by those threats to order, Eisenhower’s aides contemplated a paean to “constructive change,” a reminder that progress is generally the result of long and sustained work, not sharp breaks or impulsive leaps. Those thoughts captured Eisenhower’s deep sense of order and control.
Those were natural topics for Eisenhower, familiar themes of his presidency, and expressions of his character. So too was another gnawing concern, made fresh by recent events. From the earliest weeks of his presidency, his 1953 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Ike had warned of the grave costs of maintaining a permanent war footing. In that first speech, he enumerated the real sacrifices extracted not merely by war but even by the threat of it. One bomber, he warned in 1953, represented the forfeit of “a modern brick school in more than 30 cities” or two electric power plants or two “fine, fully equipped hospitals” or fifty miles of concrete pavement. In that address, Ike had described the future as a choice: Vast expenditures on military might were “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Or the world could opt for war and, with it, the end of civilization in any recognizable form.
Eisenhower could take deep satisfaction in having preserved that civilization, often against great odds and pressures, but his anxiety about a militarized nation had only deepened. He witnessed the national hysteria over Sputnik and the quick response of the defense industry to capitalize on it; 1960, one missile maker happily pronounced, was the “best year we’ve had in the missile business.” And he had angrily seen the American people accept Kennedy’s false charge that the Soviets had opened up a “missile gap.”
Consequently, Eisenhower’s advisers suggested a second theme for his farewell speech. The emergence of a “permanent arms industry” could not be helped. In a nuclear era, the United States could no longer take the time to convert peacetime industries into war production once hostilities had begun. War between the United States and the Soviet Union, should it come, would be sharp and instant, overwhelmingly devastating, and over before the makers of cars or steel or appliances could convert their factories to the production of guns and tanks and other matériel. Instead, missiles needed to be at the ready, and the companies that produced them understood that their livelihoods depended on a threat of war that was both constant and intense. Moreover, those companies depended on relationships with the government in order to secure contracts and business; fortunately for them, retiring military officers brought such knowledge and connections as they left their services for work in this “military-industrial complex.” This new phenomenon, an alliance between the military and its suppliers, created new perils. “Billions of dollars in purchasing power, and the livelihood of millions of people, are directly involved.”
The task of marshaling those themes fell principally to Moos, a tiny, brilliant academic who had joined the administration in 1958. He took his job on the same day that Sherman Adams finally left the White House (one of Adams’s last acts had been to swear him in). Moos had not immediately impressed Eisenhower. An early speech annoyed the president, who complained to Jerry Persons that he “did not think that Dr. Moos would do.” Happily, however, that impression changed as Moos became familiar with Eisenhower’s style. Within a few months, he had helped infuse Ike’s rhetoric with a new vigor. Indeed, some of the press appraisal of the “new” Eisenhower derived from Moos’s writing, and reporters openly, if somewhat misguidedly, wondered about Moos’s influence.
As they honed their collaboration, Moos grew accustomed to Eisenhower’s bursts of temper—so furious that Moos “sometimes thought the varnish was going to peel off the desk.” And he adapted to Ike’s system for preparing a draft. The president would weigh in at the outset on broad themes, then send his writers off to draft language, usually with an admonition to keep it short. “Ten minutes, no more,” he often said. “You lose an audience after 10 minutes.” His two main writers, Moos and Ralph Williams, would then return with their pages, at which point Ike would “lock in like a target-acquisition radar, throwing out paragraphs, changing sentences, fiddling with words, re-writing whole pages, until by the tenth draft he’d probably put more time into it than both of us combined.”
Eisenhower got his first look at the draft of his Farewell Address in the fall of 1960 and, true to form, began to work it over in excruciating detail. He wrote the opening section himself and asked Milton to edit a full draft, which his brother did extensively. Over the course of twenty-nine drafts, the essential elements remained: Eisenhower wished his successor, whom he did not name, “Godspeed.” He recounted his long service, called for “balance” in national affairs—a section that expanded significantly through the drafting—warned of the “hostile ideology” that confronted the United States and its allies, and identified new dangers facing America.
His changes were significant and telling: Moos described America’s obligation to “enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among nations” as the obligation of “a free and Christian people.” Eisenhower smartly changed that to “a free and religious people.” Failure to achieve those obligations, an early draft noted, would constitute a “grievous hurt” and could be the result of “lack of effort, comprehension or readiness to sacrifice”; Ike amplified and rewrote that sentence so that it read: “Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.” In a section of the address devoted to the importance of international diplomacy, Eisenhower added sentences to emphasize that international relations must be based on mutual respect, a relationship of “equals.” “The weakest,” Ike wrote, “must come to the conference table with the same confidence as we.” He moved paragraphs for emphasis, elevated language, and trimmed references to himself in the first person. The Eisenhower-edited drafts were loftier, more powerful, more nuanced, and notably more modest.
The address was initially contemplated as Eisenhower’s final State of the Union speech, but as that date drew closer, he became uncomfortable with a formal talk to Congress as Kennedy prepared to take office. On December 14, Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review, called to suggest that Ike deliver a farewell address from the Oval Office and to offer his help in putting together a draft. Eisenhower liked the idea of speaking directly to the American people but rebuffed Cousins’s offer of assistance. “The idea of trying to get anyone like Norman Cousins working on it would be dreadful,” Whitman wrote to Moos. “How in the world do we diplomatically thank him, but say No[?]”
Through early January, Ike continued to tinker; Moos and Williams incorporated their ideas and fine-tuned passages and language. The final speech was fuller and more balanced than the early drafts, but the essential thoughts and structure remained intact.
On January 17, 1961, with Washington braced for snow, Eisenhower sat before the camera. More than seventy million Americans tuned in at 8:30 p.m. Washington time to hear the president’s parting thoughts.
He spoke for sixteen minutes. His delivery was not flawless. He stumbled over a word here and there, once saying “disarmament” rather than “battlefield” before correcting himself. He mispronounced “insidious.” Much of what he said was familiar. His message of balance was hardly news as he argued one last time for a government that deferred immediate reward for long-term stability. His description of Communism—“a hostile ideology, global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose and insidious in method”—was uncommonly direct but hardly a departure from earlier speeches. Near his conclusion, however, were two remarks that were attention grabbing, one for its candor, the other for its subtle humor. Eisenhower acknowledged that he failed in his laborious efforts to bring about a lasting peace with the Soviet Union and thus left office with a “definite sense of disappointment,” a surprising admission from a departing president. On a lighter note, he summed up his long service by presuming to “trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.” He ended his address, as he had commenced his presidency, with a prayer:
We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.
But the speech’s most enduring and provocative passages were tucked in its center. There, Ike and Moos had honed Eisenhower’s foreboding about modern militarism into a sharp warning:
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well.
But we can no longer risk emergency improvisations of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
That was, as Eisenhower later wrote, “the most challenging message I could have left with the people of this country.” But it was only one of two related passages; the second contained an equally disturbing insight:
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields.
In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountain-head of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new, electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations and the power of money is ever-present—and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Those notions sprang from the exhaustive drafting and editing of this speech. At one point, the writers considered fusing the two, related phenomena within a single phrase, the “military-industrial-scientific complex.” But that was imprecise. The danger of military influence over public policy was that it would drive spending and encourage fear and even war. The peril in the area of science was in one sense the opposite: federal domination of research would tend to push out other innovation and direct too much intellectual capacity to government needs rather than to the breadth of human possibility. The military-industrial complex is measured by its achievements: when it prevails, government overspends on defense. The technological-scientific elite is judged by a negative; its danger is in research unperformed, in the great insights or innovations undiscovered, crowded out by government-funded projects. Smartly, Eisenhower split the two notions, giving each its singular emphasis.
A telling review of those passages came later. Moos had weighed describing the union of military interest and government power as the “military-industrial-congressional complex,” a description that might have tempted Eisenhower after eight years of wrestling with his congressional colleagues. But Ike had opened his speech with his reflection on his long relationship with Congress and his satisfaction with its cooperation with his administration. To then shift and accuse Congress of being a participant in a dangerous network would have seemed jarring and accusatory. The idea was dropped, having never been included in a formal draft.
There was something tender, even grandfatherly, beneath the import of Eisenhower’s warnings. He spoke nostalgically of a blackboard replaced by “new, electronic computers.” And he acknowledged that the growth of an armaments industry was as inevitable as it was pernicious. His remedy for these threats was neither legislation nor specific government action but rather a call to public vigilance. In his final hours as president, as in his early days as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, Eisenhower maintained a deep, even naive, confidence in the good sense of the American people.
Eisenhower delivered a message of stunning prescience, but it took some time for its full weight to impress itself on the American public. Just as with Washington, some of Eisenhower’s message was lost, distorted, or selectively read in ways that tell more about the interpreter than about the message.
Ike had not set out to grab headlines, but most major newspapers extensively covered the speech the next day. “Eisenhower’s Farewell Sees Threat to Liberties in Vast Defense Machine,” the New York Times headline read. “Ike Warns of Danger in Massive Defense,” summarized the Los Angeles Times. The Wall Street Journal focused on Eisenhower’s budget but briefly reported on his address on its front page. Many papers published the full text of the address, and the New York Times even reprinted Ike’s closing prayer on its front page.
But the first wave of editorials hinted at the degree to which some misunderstood Ike’s message or underestimated its significance. The New York Times declined to editorialize on the speech, opting instead for a critical reprise of his presidency and concluding on a general note of appreciation: “Dwight Eisenhower will retire from office with the respect and goodwill of his countrymen. Few Presidents in the history of the United States have had a more secure hold on the affections of the American people.” The Los Angeles Times quoted the passage on the military-industrial complex and rightly noted that it reflected a president who spent his time in office “striving for the balance that it was his chief concern to maintain.” Rather than explore the implications of Eisenhower’s warning, however, that editorial concluded: “Surely the people are proud of this man and proud of themselves for electing him while he was available.” Overridingly, the reaction was to regard the address with nostalgia for the presidency and appreciation for the president, to wish him well, and to move on rather than to dissect the import of the threats he identified to political integrity, the nation’s safety, and the future of the country’s intellectual life.
That would change over time as the Kennedy administration abandoned Eisenhower’s defense strategy, exchanging its heavy reliance on the threat of nuclear retaliation for a more flexible ability to confront Communism around the world, first at the Bay of Pigs and then in Vietnam. Vast American resources and many American lives were sacrificed in that struggle, and Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex seemed culpable to many. Critics of the Vietnam War imagined Eisenhower’s prophecy to be part of their rhetorical heritage, though they often misconstrued his deliberately chosen words. Ike had not blamed the military-industrial complex for corrupting American life, had not suggested that it should be denied all influence. The need for a permanent armaments industry, he recognized, was “imperative,” even if its implications were grave. But Ike’s words captured an essential element of American militarism: some interests depended on an armed and frightened nation; they would consistently urge action where prudence might have suggested otherwise.
Meanwhile, Eisenhower’s equally incisive critique of the power of government to direct research went largely unremarked, perhaps because the “scientific-technological elite” seemed less dangerous, less frightening. And yet just as Eisenhower was right to warn of unwarranted influence by those who depended upon war and the threat of war, so, too, was he correct to wonder at the substitution of government research for individual innovation. We can witness the new technologies unveiled in the service of defense or oil exploration; we can only wonder at the breakthroughs undiscovered. Universities, heavily dependent on government contracts, produced what they did in the late twentieth century; we can never know what they did not.
By the twenty-first century, few could doubt the enduring place of the military-industrial complex in American life. The defense establishment came to absorb private industry increasingly into its own ranks. Support services for American troops in Ike’s day were the province of the Pentagon; Eisenhower’s invasion force was fed, clothed, and supplied with fuel by military men and women.
In the Iraq wars, food, communications, and even security for American troops and civilians were largely the province of contractors. Those contractors depended on government payments, and they sought influence over the government at all levels. Boeing, Blackwater, Halliburton—these became the point of the spear of the military-industrial complex, the recipients of government largesse, and the suppliers of American logistics and power. In 2001, after a closely divided American election, George Bush became president. Seated beside him was Vice President Dick Cheney, the former chief executive officer of Halliburton. The military-industrial complex now had an elected representative in the White House. On March 19, 2003, America went to war for a second time in Iraq, a conflict initially estimated to cost the American people $50 billion. (When one White House aide suggested it could reach $100 to $200 billion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called it “baloney.” The official who argued otherwise was fired.) Instead, Iraq ballooned into a war longer and costlier than World War II; by the time the last combat brigade had departed Iraq in 2010, the war had killed more than forty-four hundred soldiers and drained the national treasury of more than $750 billion, much of it spent on private contractors—one Halliburton division alone, KBR, was paid more than $11 billion for its work from 2002 to 2004; overall, private contractors received as much government money as the initial estimates for fighting the entire war. Against such facts, Ike’s warnings seemed profoundly true.
Moreover, the corrupting and interlocking relationship that Eisenhower described in 1961 would find expression in other walks of American life. Pharmaceutical companies and prison guards, public employee unions and major construction concerns, automakers, energy firms, and agricultural enterprises all were among the interests that had come to depend on government support—in the form of either contracts or regulatory consideration—leading them to cultivate influence in Washington. The result was a culture of lobbying, campaign contributions, and corporate influence that amplified Eisenhower’s original warning and sapped public confidence in the integrity of government. That sobering trend reached its apotheosis in 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations possess free-speech rights that entitle them to full participation in politics. With that, the military-industrial complex and its many descendants secured not just power but constitutional protection.
Those were the proof of Eisenhower’s prescience. But they were generations away when he delivered his warnings. In the meantime, Ike quietly concluded his presidency and prepared to retire to the edge of the Gettysburg battlefield, to end his days as a philosopher-farmer in the tradition of Washington himself. On the morning after his speech, Ike awoke to the appreciative reflections on his presidency. He sparred with reporters at a friendly, final news conference and then met with Nixon. In the afternoon, he presented medals to a few of his most trusted aides, their families proudly looking on. Half a world away, Patrice Lumumba paid the heavier price in the struggle for power in the Congo. Captured by his rivals, bound, and badly beaten, Lumumba and other government foes were lined up before a tree and shot at almost precisely the moment that Eisenhower delivered his farewell. Lumumba was thirty-five years old.
Promptly at 9:00 a.m. on January 19, Kennedy arrived with his senior cabinet designees; he and Ike met privately for a few minutes, then with Christian Herter and Dean Rusk, the outgoing and incoming secretaries of state; Thomas Gates and Robert McNamara, the outgoing and incoming secretaries of defense; and Bob Anderson, the departing secretary of the Treasury, and his designated successor, Douglas Dillon, one of the few Ike aides whom Kennedy retained. Jerry Persons and Clark Clifford, personal aides to the two presidents, attended as well.
Kennedy began by asking about Laos, and Eisenhower warned him of the complexities there. The loss of that country to Communism, he said, would open the “cork in the bottle,” and the rest of the Far East might collapse. Kennedy had been elected on a promise to act, had campaigned on the argument that Eisenhower had been too willing to allow Communism to gain ground. He probed his predecessor for some way to halt another loss of territory, in this case to keep the Chinese at bay. Ike offered little. It was, he said, like playing poker with tough stakes. His commitment to massive retaliation—and his refusal to countenance the use of nuclear weapons to decide limited wars—persisted to his final moments in office.
Many members of Ike’s staff, trapped by the snow overnight in Washington, spent a final night at the White House, bunked in meeting rooms. Bleary the next day, they bade Eisenhower farewell, many with tears in their eyes. Eisenhower shook their hands, praised their service, acknowledged their devotion. Then he joined Kennedy on the Capitol steps to complete the transfer of power that has been an essential symbol of American democracy since Washington handed authority to John Adams. Eisenhower listened as Kennedy delivered an address that was stirring, youthful, and poetic—and unmistakably laced with rejection of his predecessor. “Let the word go forth from this time and place,” Kennedy proclaimed, a sour-faced Eisenhower behind him, “to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”
The passage that signaled a more profound reassessment of America’s role in the world was not found in the speech’s triumphalism. Nor was it found in Kennedy’s historic call to service: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Rather, it was in Kennedy’s pledge to all the countries of the world. “Let every nation know,” he said, “whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
For eight years, Eisenhower had fought such grandiosity, had specifically hedged America’s promises and insisted that balance was the linchpin of liberty. Now Kennedy reimagined America as limitlessly in pursuit of that ambition. Henceforth, he argued, the nation would “bear any burden” in defense of American values. Soon enough, Kennedy would learn the full measure of that burden.
Once Kennedy was sworn in, Ike and Mamie attended a lunch in their honor, then quietly slipped away. John was at the wheel. As they approached Gettysburg, students from two nearby schools—the same ones whose youngsters had welcomed him home after his heart attack in 1955—lined the road to wave. The Eisenhowers arrived at the gate, and the Secret Service escort turned around and headed back to Washington. Ike and Mamie dined that night with John and Barbara and their children at the schoolhouse on the edge of the Gettysburg farm. As they sat, John raised his glass in a toast to his father. “I suppose that tonight we welcome back a member of this clan who has done us proud,” he said. Ike was too choked up to speak, joining only as his family sounded “hear, hear.”
After forty-six years of service, President Eisenhower was again Ike. He was a private citizen at last.
Dwight and Mamie retired to Gettysburg, to the home they had rebuilt and the life they had long postponed. They were accompanied by John and Delores Moaney, a congenial black couple who worked as valet and cook. Ike painted and golfed; Mamie enjoyed her soap operas and the sunroom of the Gettysburg porch. Friends arranged for them to have a second place in Palm Desert, California, and thereafter they split their year.
Ike had always enjoyed play—he bounded from his car at Augusta to get to the links—but now that he had time for leisure, he missed work. “Dad was not a happy ex-president,” John recalled. He felt rejected by Nixon’s defeat, and his concern for the direction of the country was exacerbated by Kennedy’s deliberate and sustained repudiation of his presidency. The old had given way to the new, and Eisenhower understood where that placed him.
Nixon’s bitter loss, combined with the party’s exasperating inability to produce a quality leadership core, left the GOP once again without an identifiable leader, so that mantle fell back on Ike. “Damn, they’ve had me busy,” he grumbled to his son after one particularly eventful stretch. “I had more time in the White House to paint than I do now.”
It was mostly time spent in the wilderness, shunned by Kennedy and his new generation of leadership. Maxwell Taylor, whose Uncertain Trumpet was devoted to rebutting Eisenhower’s defense strategy in favor of “flexible response,” was much admired by Kennedy, and Taylor’s return to influence underscored the sharp rejection of Eisenhower’s most considered strategic wisdom. More stinging was Kennedy’s deliberate use of Eisenhower’s leadership as a foil; just as he had during the campaign, Kennedy positioned himself as an emblem of energy and change, devoted to invigorating a Washington that had grown stale under Ike’s aging, inattentive reign. Eisenhower understood the strategy—to friends, he compared it to FDR’s vilification of Hoover—but he was not immune to it. Even the administration’s belated acknowledgment that there was, in fact, no “missile gap” was admitted without apology to Eisenhower.
Eisenhower was wounded, naturally. His views of the “Washington scene,” he confided to an old friend in 1961, “are not particularly flattering.” Kennedy, he said to another, surrounded himself with “men who confuse ‘smartness’ with wisdom.” (In that same note, Eisenhower hinted at his deeper contempt, referring to his successor as “young President Kennedy.”) Still, he remained dutifully at the president’s call, and Kennedy reciprocated with courtesies. When friends of Eisenhower’s secured a bill to restore his rank as a general—a position that gave him back the title he had spent most of his life pursuing and allowed him to maintain a military aide—Kennedy was puzzled but happy to go along. He signed the legislation. Thereafter, President Eisenhower was addressed as “General.”
More substantively, Kennedy sought out Ike in the aftermath of the administration’s first significant blunder, the catastrophe at the Bay of Pigs. The invasion, of course, had long been contemplated by Eisenhower, who had authorized planning for it more than a year earlier. When Kennedy approved the assault, however, he botched the execution: the first strike on the Cuban air force was unsuccessful, and a second was called off when Kennedy feared American involvement would be detected; the landing spot was ill chosen; and the entire enterprise depended on an intelligence assumption that proved false, namely, that the Cuban people would greet the invasion force as liberators and turn against Castro. Instead, the fourteen hundred invaders were easily repelled, all but a few killed or captured. Chagrined, Kennedy sought out Eisenhower. He sent a helicopter to Gettysburg, which picked up Ike and shuttled him to Camp David.
“No one knows how tough this job is until after he has been in it a few months,” Kennedy lamented to Eisenhower.
“Mr. President,” Ike responded, “if you’ll forgive me, I think I mentioned that to you three months ago.”
“I certainly have learned a lot since,” Kennedy conceded.
Kennedy reviewed the planning and execution of the invasion, and Eisenhower gently corrected the flaws in his approach. They parted respectfully, some of the campaign and early administration rancor behind them, but wary of each other still.
Mindful that his legacy was under attack in Washington, Eisenhower devoted substantial energy in retirement to construction of his own place in history. The mainstay of that effort was his memoirs—two volumes devoted to the presidency, with each roughly tracking his terms. Unlike the hell-bent effort that produced Crusade in Europe in just a few months, Mandate for Change and Waging Peace were constructed more methodically, and Ike’s participation was more supervisory, as he delegated most of the writing to Bill Ewald, who researched domestic issues, and his son, John, who handled national security and international relations. The work began immediately after Ike left office—John and Ewald set up an office at Gettysburg the Monday after Kennedy’s inauguration—and stretched over years.
Although Ewald and John Eisenhower played the dominant role in those works, both had mastered Ike’s writing style, and the books capture both his tone and his approach: dignified and painstaking, if somewhat guarded and occasionally defensive. They admit few errors—never a strong suit for presidential memoirs—but diligently and accurately record Eisenhower’s active management of his own administration, and thus form a persuasive counterweight to the misimpression fostered by Kennedy that Ike was disengaged from his presidency.
At the same time, Eisenhower quietly worked to burnish his reputation in other ways. He rationed interviews, granting them only to those writers in whom he and John saw the promise of careful and favorable treatment. When, for instance, the Associated Press reporter Pat Morin contacted Ike about the possibility of writing a biography, John screened Morin’s work and found it worthy. “I feel sure that the book will be friendly,” he wrote to his father, “since it is being done in the same vein as the Associated Press book on Churchill.” Morin was given access to Eisenhower’s papers and allowed to interview the former president on several occasions.
In addition, Milton urged his brother to organize and quickly make available his presidential papers, which, like his memoirs, would record his active role in his presidency. Milton put the idea to Ike in March 1962. Once he had his brother’s approval, the ten-year project was launched, and a conservative curator, Alfred DuPont Chandler Jr., was hired to manage it. He in turn brought a promising young historian, Stephen Ambrose, to assist. Although Ambrose would later wildly exaggerate his access to Eisenhower, Ike used the historian effectively, dispatching him to contest work critical of his war and presidential records.
Despite their differences, Eisenhower and Kennedy kept up courtesies. In August 1963, Ike and Mamie wrote to express their “profound sympathy” when Patrick Kennedy, born on August 7, died two days later. President Kennedy wrote back for himself and his wife. “Your message,” he said, “was a comfort to me and my family.”
Eisenhower was in New York on November 22, when he was pulled from a meeting that afternoon and told that Kennedy had been shot. He returned to his room at the Waldorf Astoria and headed home to Gettysburg that night.
In the national mourning that followed, Eisenhower was affected, of course. He and Mamie felt for young Jackie and her children. Eisenhower expressed his “sense of shock and dismay” at the “despicable act” and urged Americans to “join as one man in expressing not only their grief but indignation at this act.” And yet Eisenhower also was a bit mystified at the grief that followed President Kennedy’s death. Ike had sent many men to die. He understood sacrifice, demanded it of others, offered it himself. The convulsions that gripped America in those weeks seemed extravagant to a man so deeply imbued with duty to country. He was, his son reflected decades later, “a little bit bewildered as to why all the fuss.”
Johnson was far more solicitous of Ike, and the general now found more enemies within his own party. Barry Goldwater, Arizona’s cantankerous conservative senator, claimed the spiritual leadership of Ike’s party in the aftermath of Nixon’s defeat. Goldwater’s candidacy was explicitly a rejection of Eisenhower’s moderation. Ike spent eight years fending off the forces of extremism. To Goldwater, extremism was no vice.
Ike tried to head off Goldwater during the Republican primaries in 1964, then tepidly supported him once he was the Republican nominee. But he made little secret of his unhappiness. Privately, he was astounded. Goldwater, he confided to his grandson, “is just plain dumb.”
Eisenhower was seventy-four when Johnson won his election, and Ike’s health began to ebb. Visiting Augusta in November 1965, he had his second heart attack, then a third two days later. From that point on, Eisenhower’s retreat from public life accelerated. Still, he stayed active enough to be afraid for his country. Johnson’s halfhearted approach to the war in Vietnam frustrated Eisenhower, who argued that if the United States were to wage a war, it should do so with overwhelming force. Torn by his affection for Johnson and his displeasure over the dominant national security issue of the Johnson years, Ike became cranky and fulminated about “kooks” and “hippies.”
Even Eisenhower’s fabled Farewell Address, by this point claiming the attention it deserved, conflicted its author, especially as it was invoked to denigrate the American war in Vietnam. To former military and business friends, Ike downplayed the significance of the speech, offering that perhaps he had overstated his case or that it would have been more appropriate from another source; to others, he continued to profess pride in his prescient warning.
One exchange in particular captures Eisenhower’s mixed feelings about the most quoted words of his presidency. In 1966, Stanley Karson, a representative of a group called the American Veterans Committee, wrote to Eisenhower to solicit a letter from him on the fifth anniversary of the speech. Ike drafted one in response, thanking Karson for his interest in the speech and describing weapons expenditures as “in essence, futile, costly and deadening so far as constructive progress is concerned.” Before sending the reply, however, Eisenhower shared it with Bryce Harlow, his former aide then working for Procter & Gamble. Harlow warned that the group was “way out” and cautioned against giving aid to its cause. Ike deleted the revealing sentence.
By 1968, Eisenhower had known Richard Nixon for sixteen years, since they formed the Republican ticket in Ike’s first campaign for public office. They had been through travails and misunderstandings. Eisenhower would never quite understand why Nixon had so much trouble connecting with those around him or impressing voters, but he appreciated him. Moreover, Ike saw growth. “He is now even more mature and well-informed than when he was Vice President,” Eisenhower wrote to George Humphrey in 1967.
Now, as Eisenhower faded, Nixon returned, both to the apex of American politics and to Ike’s personal fold. Over Thanksgiving weekend of 1967, David Eisenhower and Julie Nixon announced to their families that they intended to marry (David, afraid that Ike would disapprove of his marrying so young, avoided telling him directly). Eisenhower was delighted at his grandson’s good fortune, and he adored Julie Nixon. But he had vowed to stay out of the Republican presidential campaign in 1968. He was close to Johnson and shadowed by the ugly Goldwater campaign of 1964. Now, as his grandson and Nixon’s daughter prepared to unite their families, Ike recognized that it would be especially difficult on Nixon if he remained neutral in this race. As he weighed whether to violate his self-prohibition on endorsing in the Republican primaries, Ike’s health intervened again.
On April 29, after a labored round of golf in Palm Springs, Eisenhower suffered another heart attack. He recuperated for a time in California and then was transferred to Walter Reed to take up his familiar suite. To the amazement of his doctors, he rebounded. “He is a man of great courage,” one said. “He is a man of great fortitude. He has a fine physical constitution. And he is a religious man.”
As he recuperated, Mamie urged him to make a statement for Nixon, as did John. Friends of both men lobbied, while Nixon himself held back, unwilling to be seen as seeking special treatment on the basis of their soon-to-be family connection. Finally, on July 18, Ike issued the endorsement that Nixon wanted but could not bring himself to solicit. Ike cited Nixon’s “intellect, acuity, decisiveness, warmth and above all his integrity … I feel that the security, prosperity and solvency of the United States and the cause of world peace will best be served by placing Dick Nixon in the White House in January 1969.”
Ike’s open support helped push Nixon through the final obstacles in the way of his nomination—talk of a Rockefeller-Reagan ticket was squelched—and Eisenhower, again from his hospital room, addressed the Republican National Convention, meeting that year in Miami Beach. On the evening of August 5, a gaunt Eisenhower was beamed into the convention, and he gave a short talk to the delegates. The following morning, he suffered yet another heart attack. Nixon accepted his party’s nomination later that week. “I say,” Nixon urged the delegates, “let’s win this one for Ike.”
Nixon’s victory delighted Eisenhower, and the president-elect did his old boss the courtesy of soliciting his views on forming a cabinet and a government. Barbara Anne was married in November, but Ike could not attend, nor was he able to leave the hospital for David and Julie’s wedding in December. He now was on a steeply downward slope. He still managed to flirt with the nurses, over whom Mamie kept a careful eye. (“He was an old man, but after all he’d survived, you never knew,” she remarked later.) But he tired of Walter Reed and sank further into quiet. An abdominal operation in March weakened him, and by month’s end he was despairing, the famous optimism slipping away.
Ike’s wife, son, and grandson were at his side on the morning of March 28 when Ike barked out an order: “Lower the shades!” He then commanded his doctor and his son, “Pull me up.” They lifted him partway, and he grumbled, “Two big men. Higher,” he added. They did.
Sitting as he wanted, Eisenhower turned to John and spoke softly. “I want to go,” he said. “God take me.” The doctor administered a sedative, and Ike fell back asleep. He never spoke again. Three hours later, at 12:35 p.m. on March 28, 1969, Dwight Eisenhower died.