The 1950s sit nestled between two much-examined decades—the 1940s, with its great war, and the 1960s, with its cultural upheaval. One result has been to overlook the complexity of those deceptively eventful, tumultuous years, as well as that of the man who governed through them. Far from an era of consensus, the 1950s featured the rise and fall of McCarthyism and the early struggles for civil rights, sexual liberation, and feminism. The decade had bobby socks and backyard barbecues, but it also gave Americans The Old Man and the Sea, The Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man, “Howl,” On the Waterfront, and Rebel Without a Cause. It was jazz and Elvis, Playboy magazine and the Pill. Marilyn Monroe blossomed in the 1950s and barely outlived them; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed as the nation fought through subversion, real and imagined, and the unsettling struggle of the Korean War. It was an age of the Red Scare, and also Castro, Che Guevara, C. Wright Mills, and Martin Luther King. And it was an epoch of perpetual danger, as two superpowers wrestled with the sudden acquisition of unimaginably destructive power, intent on burying each other but uncertain of how to win without dying.
President Eisenhower was determined that Americans should enjoy the fruits of their freedom, and he set out to wean the nation from its addiction to crisis. Americans, he believed, would only fully secure the blessings of their liberty if allowed to pursue it with tranquility. More than any man of his era, Ike gave Americans that chance. He won the future of the West on the battlefields of Europe and then nurtured it as president, patiently marking progress, steadfastly confronting the great menace of his era—Soviet Communism—without resort to global confrontation.
Eisenhower was the first American president to have access to atomic weapons and not use them. He refrained when they might have ended the Korean War, when they might have saved the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, when they might have repelled Chinese aggression against Taiwan or Soviet threats to Berlin. He refused when his advisers begged him to use those weapons and when they urged him to develop plans for fighting smaller nuclear wars in remote areas of the world. We can only wonder how humanity’s course might have been different had Eisenhower acceded to those who believed America would have been best served by use of the weapons under his control.
He was a good man, one of integrity and decency. But he was not always right. He was too enamored of covert action, and he did not fully apprehend the moral imperatives of civil rights, where his belief in measured progress, the middle way, impeded his sympathy for those who demanded their constitutional rights immediately. There, however, his record was better than his instincts. Guided by a style of leadership gleaned from his long military career—from emulation of Fox Conner and George Marshall and from rejection of Douglas MacArthur—Eisenhower knew that capable subordinates required the support of their boss. In this case, President Eisenhower relied on the leadership of Herbert Brownell and, because of it, registered the nation’s most significant progress toward racial equality since the end of the Civil War. Brownell picked judges and justices, advanced programs and policies; Eisenhower, despite his limitations, knew well enough that progress required him to go along. If Earl Warren and the Supreme Court sometimes baffled or annoyed him, Eisenhower nevertheless followed their commands. And when the South threatened to defy the Court, Ike restored order and supremacy by force, as only he could.
Eisenhower was a conservative man, raised to believe in industry and thrift. He did not believe that government could or should substitute for individual initiative, and he adhered to Republican notions of private enterprise. He was, however, refreshingly unbound by partisanship. He won approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 with Democratic and Republican support; he championed the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Interstate Highway System even when his brother grumbled about his tolerance for socialism. When President Eisenhower was frustrated by Congress, it was more often McCarthy or Knowland who bedeviled him than liberal Democrats.
His legacy at the U.S. Supreme Court suggests Ike’s lack of concern for ideological or partisan orthodoxy. Of his five appointees, one, Charles Whittaker, can be regarded as unsuited to the position, and he did not last long. Of the others, Potter Stewart and John Harlan were conservative Republicans, Warren was a liberal Republican, and William Brennan was a liberal Democrat. Few presidents can point to a broader or more consequential range of appointees to that bench. They unanimously advanced the cause of social justice, and they did so because Ike put them there to do it.
Ike’s patient pursuit of progress, his faith in his subordinates, and his rejection of doctrinaire partisanship combined to produce an American triumph in the two great challenges of his epoch: black Americans secured the right to join the society that once enslaved them, and all Americans outlasted Soviet Communism without a war of annihilation to defeat it. As Ike understood better than those around him, peace gave America time. In the fullness of that time, America fulfilled the destiny its founders imagined for it.
Dwight Eisenhower left his nation freer, more prosperous, and more fair. Peace was not given to him; he won it.