The Age of Eisenhower

America and the World in the 1950s

William I Hitchcock

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781451698435
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politische Biographien

A New York Times bestseller, this is the "outstanding" ( The Atlantic ), insightful, and authoritative account of Dwight Eisenhower's presidency. Drawing on newly declassified documents and thousands of pages of unpublished material, The Age of Eisenhower tells the story of a masterful president guiding the nation through the great crises of the 1950s, from McCarthyism and the Korean War through civil rights turmoil and Cold War conflicts. This is a portrait of a skilled leader who, despite his conservative inclinations, found a middle path through the bitter partisanship of his era. At home, Eisenhower affirmed the central elements of the New Deal, such as Social Security; fought the demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy; and advanced the agenda of civil rights for African-Americans. Abroad, he ended the Korean War and avoided a new quagmire in Vietnam. Yet he also charted a significant expansion of America's missile technology and deployed a vast array of covert operations around the world to confront the challenge of communism. As he left office, he cautioned Americans to remain alert to the dangers of a powerful military-industrial complex that could threaten their liberties.Today, presidential historians rank Eisenhower fifth on the list of great presidents, and William Hitchcock's "rich narrative" ( The Wall Street Journal ) shows us why Ike's stock has risen so high. He was a gifted leader, a decent man of humble origins who used his powers to advance the welfare of all Americans. Now more than ever, with this "complete and persuasive assessment" ( Booklist, starred review), Americans have much to learn from Dwight Eisenhower.

PART I

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DUTY

CHAPTER 1

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Ascent

“The homely old saw had proved to be true: in the United States, any boy can grow up to be president.”

I

“NO PRESIDENT HAD EVER HAD so little experience of politics and so little firsthand experience of American life” as Dwight D. Eisenhower, asserted the veteran political journalist Marquis Childs in his 1958 book, The Captive Hero. And many critics echoed this claim: after a long career in the protective, isolated world of the American military, including lengthy postings overseas in Panama, the Philippines, and Europe, Eisenhower, upon taking office as president, knew little about the basic rhythms of ordinary American life and was unschooled in the ways of politics.¹

True, Eisenhower had spent his adult life in the hierarchical, rule-bound world of the army, and he’d never been elected to anything in his life. But Childs was doubly wrong. Eisenhower was intimately familiar with the nature of rural American life, having been raised by God-fearing, dutiful, and frugal parents in the Kansas farmlands, and he left Kansas at the age of 20 to enter upon a career in the most political of institutions, the U.S. Army, in which he rose, over many years of patient labor, to a position of preeminence.

His humble origins and his extensive leadership experience were the twin sources of Eisenhower’s popular appeal and his political success. He had deep roots in Middle America, of which he remained proud and by which he set his moral compass. At the same time he learned how to operate in, and finally dominate, a massive bureaucracy filled with ambitious egos hungry for glory. As Garry Wills memorably wrote, Eisenhower made his ascent to power by climbing “a slippery ladder of bayonets.”²

Not only did he achieve greatness in the American armed services; during the Second World War he asserted control over the British Army as well, forging its fractious, skeptical generals into a cohesive fighting force alongside the Americans. Together—and under his command—they defeated the Germans. His leadership of the combined Allied armies in Western Europe required vision, patience, compromise, goodwill, and inexhaustible persistence: precisely the skills that prepared him for the White House. As chief of staff of the U.S. Army just after the war, he faced huge problems of winding down the national military establishment while retooling for a global cold war. For four years he was president of Columbia University, where he navigated the complexities of academia. And in his final post before winning the presidency, as supreme commander of NATO, he directed 12 nations toward the common goal of mutual defense and rearmament.

Far from being inexperienced upon taking office in 1952, Eisenhower could reasonably look upon the presidency as a job for which he was extraordinarily well prepared—far more so certainly than his predecessor, Harry S. Truman, had been upon taking office after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sudden death, and certainly more than his 43-year-old successor, John F. Kennedy, the junior senator from Massachusetts. Expressing supreme confidence in himself, Eisenhower jotted down this remarkable observation at the end of his first day in the Oval Office: “Plenty of worries and difficult problems. But such has been my portion for a long time—the result is that this just seems (today) like a continuation of all I’ve been doing since July 1941—even before that.”³

It is hard to imagine a man with a stronger sense of himself and his origins and a man as tested by war, the burdens of command, and the politics of world leadership as was Dwight D. Eisenhower on the day he took office as the 34th president of the United States.

II

There was nothing inevitable in this ascent. Eisenhower’s forebears had emigrated from the Susquehanna Valley of Pennsylvania to Abilene, Kansas, in 1878. They formed part of a colony of prosperous Mennonites who were searching for a new start in the wide-open plains of the West. The family patriarch, Jacob Eisenhower, a minister of the River Brethren Church, saw opportunity in Kansas and desired greater distance from the influence of modernity that was starting to encroach upon the Plain People of south-central Pennsylvania. In Abilene, Jacob bought hundreds of acres of rich farmland, built a large homestead with ample room for gatherings of his church flock, and settled into a life of farming and worship.

Jacob’s son David Eisenhower, not drawn to the rigors of a life on the land, hoped to establish himself in business. He spent a year at Lane University in Lecompton, Kansas, improving himself, learning Greek, and studying mechanics. At Lane he also met a pretty young woman whose family hailed from Virginia, Ida Elizabeth Stover. The two were married in the Lane University chapel in September 1885. David went into the dry-goods business in the nearby town of Hope. For two years the store succeeded, and David and Ida began to raise a family. But David lost interest in the store and moved his family to Texas in search of a new start. He found work in the small town of Denison. Just south of the Red River and the Oklahoma state line, Denison had been established only 20 years earlier and was little more than a huddle of buildings surrounding the intersection of rail lines on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad. Far from home and penniless, David and Ida had a third son, born on October 14, 1890. They named him David Dwight, and he was brought into the world in a rented home facing the railroad tracks in an isolated, rural Texas town, as far from the halls of power as an American could be at the turn of the century.⁴

David, Ida, and their three boys could endure the heat and the limited prospects of Denison for only two years. In early 1891 they moved back to Abilene, where David was embraced by the extended Eisenhower clan and employed as a mechanic by the large Belle Springs Creamery, a dairy-processing plant owned and operated by members of the Brethren Church community. Cautious about spending money, David raised his family in modest and at times difficult circumstances. Combining hard work with a devout faith, he and Ida built a stable and happy life, though they always lived close to the margins and never knew financial security.⁵

Abilene was a small frontier town with a population in 1892 of about 5,000. It had been settled by cattlemen in the 1850s to serve as the end point of the Chisholm Trail, along which millions of cattle were driven from ranches in Texas to stockyards and railheads in the heart of the country. Despite an early reputation as a town of loose morals and dangerous gunslingers (Wild Bill Hickok served as the sheriff in 1871), Abilene by the turn of the century had settled down to become a quiet mid-American small town, with a main street of handsome Victorian homes and a downtown of a few dozen brick buildings running north from the train depot and stockyards. No longer a rough outpost, Abilene then had 14 churches, four schools, paved main streets, a theater, two daily and four weekly newspapers, and was home to the Dickinson County Courthouse. The community valued modesty, piety, plain speaking, and family. Townspeople shared the view that hard work was a duty as well as proof of a person’s worth.

The Eisenhowers lived in a small, white clapboard two-story home at 201 Southeast 4th Street, with tall narrow windows and a slender ribbon of porch running along the front. The home sat on a three-acre parcel just a block south of the main rail line that marked a frontier of sorts: Eisenhower’s family lived on the wrong side of the tracks and would have had limited social interaction with the more affluent families. David’s job at the creamery demanded long hours, six days a week. Stern, religious, and diffident, David was “the breadwinner, Supreme Court and Lord High Executioner” of the family, his son later recalled. Ida provided quite a contrast. Vivacious, intellectually curious, and clever, her one year of college at Lane—almost unheard of among women in Kansas in the late 19th century—revealed her passion for learning. This she passed on to her six boys, to whom she dedicated her life.

But the Eisenhower household was no bevy of free-thinkers: as parents, David and Ida were disciplinarians, and family life revolved around work and Bible study. “Everybody I knew went to church,” Eisenhower remembered. “Social life was centered around the churches,” and in the Eisenhower family that meant close association with the Mennonite River Brethren community and its intense devotions. Every evening the family gathered in the small living room to listen as David read out loud from the family Bible. Later in life Ida and David both became Jehovah’s Witnesses, a sect devoted to Bible study, evangelism, and pacifism. Eisenhower knew his Scripture, yet it is noteworthy that after leaving home for the army, he did not attend church until 1953, when he joined the National Presbyterian Church in Washington and was baptized there at the age of 62.⁶

Eisenhower was the third son and known affectionately as “Little Ike.” His larger, older brother Edgar was “Big Ike.” Arthur, Edgar, Dwight, Roy, Earl, and Milton (another brother, Paul, died in infancy) shared two bedrooms; Eisenhower shared a bed with Roy. They all became successful in their chosen fields, the youngest, Milton, becoming one of the country’s leading academic administrators. A president of Kansas State University, Penn State, and Johns Hopkins, Milton served as Eisenhower’s closest and most intimate personal adviser for the duration of his presidency. The boys shared in the manual labor of the household, whether working in the vegetable gardens, doing chores, or attending to the animals the family kept in a barn. Eisenhower spent summer weekends selling home-grown vegetables from a cart he pulled up and down the residential streets, earning the family a few additional cents.

In these early years Eisenhower turned in an average performance in school. Intensely competitive and a gifted athlete—strong, agile, and quick—he ran with a group of South Side boys, defending the honor of his neighborhood against the wealthier and socially more prominent lads from north of the tracks. He bloodied a few noses in frequent scraps and developed prowess in boxing. He grew to a height of 5'10", tall for the time, and sported a shock of blond hair. Throughout his life he loved to be outdoors. His relationship with nature had nothing of the masculine, self-improvement hyperbole of Theodore Roosevelt or Robert Baden-Powell, two leading figures of the day then urging teenage boys to pursue the strenuous life as a way to build character. Eisenhower was simply a country boy who, when not working or in school, spent the happiest moments of his youth fishing, hunting, camping, or playing in the breezy vastness of the plains or along the banks of the shallow Smoky Hill River.

Like any boy who has grown up in the country, he always felt cooped up inside, and as president he yearned to get into the open air, whether on the golf course or on occasional fishing and hunting trips with friends. Eisenhower never tried to hide his humble country origins behind the accumulated honors of his stunningly successful career. “The life we had together,” he wrote, “had been complete, stimulating, and informative, with opportunity available to us for the asking. We had been poor, but one of the glories of America, at the time, was that we didn’t know it. It was a good, secure small-town life, and that we wanted for luxuries didn’t occur to any of us.”⁷

After he finished high school, Eisenhower went to work in the creamery alongside his father, a job he held for nearly two years. But this was not a fulfilling life for a smart, quietly ambitious young man. He wanted to go to college, inspired by his brother Edgar, who matriculated at the University of Michigan in 1909. Edgar’s tuition was paid for in part by Eisenhower’s wages at the creamery. The boys agreed that after a year they would switch places, with the older boy working to put the younger through a year at Ann Arbor. But Eisenhower was too impatient to wait for this long-term plan to unfold. In his 20th year, urged on by his friend Edward Everett “Swede” Hazlett Jr., who was planning to attend the Naval Academy, Eisenhower sought and gained admission to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; he enrolled in June 1911, age 20 years and eight months. Here was his ticket out and up, into a world he could never have glimpsed from Abilene.⁸

III

He could not have known it at the time, but Eisenhower entered West Point at a propitious moment. In the coming three decades his class of 1915 provided many of the general officers for a rapidly expanding U.S. Army that would wage two world wars and grow into the most powerful military the world had ever seen. Of the 164 men who graduated in his class, 59 would rise to the rank of brigadier general or higher. Eisenhower and his friend and classmate Omar Bradley both attained the exalted rank of general of the army, a five-star general. In time their class was aptly named “the class the stars fell on.”

This rise to stardom, however, took a long time. For all his later glory, Eisenhower did not distinguish himself at West Point. He struggled with the Academy’s obsessive attitude toward discipline and rules, though he persevered. His years of manual labor in Abilene prepared him for the rigors of cadet training. Life at West Point, Eisenhower thought, “was hardest on those who were not used to exercise or who had been overindulged.” But he confessed to “a lack of motivation in almost everything other than athletics.” His one true passion, football, occupied most of his time. “It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance that I attached to participation in sports,” he later wrote, and yet this was a pleasure denied to him after suffering a knee injury in 1912, his second year at the Academy.

Though his playing days were over, he became a cheerleader for the football team, then the coach of the junior varsity squad. He showed great talent as a motivator and student of the game. He was inclined later in life to see football as a great school for leadership: “Perhaps more than any other sport, [football] tends to instill in men the feeling that victory comes through hard—almost slavish—work, team play, self-confidence.” His knee injury nearly cost him a commission in the army, but he had gained a reputation as a natural leader, despite his average academic performance. He graduated 61st in his class in June 1915 and in September received a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, along with three months’ back pay and orders to report to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas.⁹

The fates now conspired to deny Eisenhower the one thing that every officer silently yearns for to spur his advancement up the ranks: war. When he left West Point, his timing seemed perfect for a combat command. In 1915, the year Eisenhower received his commission, a German submarine sank the British passenger liner Lusitania, killing 128 Americans and putting America and Germany on course toward war. After further provocations from Germany, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war in April 1917—the start of America’s 30-year confrontation with German militarism.

For Eisenhower, the outbreak of war promised action, combat, and promotion. But when war came, he did not go to France; he went to Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia, to train officer candidates. He yearned for orders that would get him into the war, and they seemed in the offing when he was posted to Camp Meade in Maryland, there to train an engineering battalion. But Eisenhower’s organizational abilities had been noted, and instead of being shipped to Europe he went to Camp Colt in Gettysburg in the spring of 1918, where he was tasked with building a new Tank Corps. Rather than face the trials of the battlefield, he confronted the arduous duty of transforming a derelict outpost in the Pennsylvania countryside into a major training ground for men destined to be shipped to France.

“Now I really began to learn about responsibility,” he recalled. He had to find tents for his men; equip these rudimentary quarters with stoves, fuel, bedding, and food; and develop a training regimen for a Tank Corps that as yet did not even have tanks. In midsummer the camp received its first shipment of the new wonder weapons: three French-built Renaults, about seven tons in weight, without guns. To train the men, Eisenhower laconically wrote, “we improvised.” He became known as a rigid disciplinarian, but one who was fair and consistent. When he caught an officer cheating at cards, he had no doubts about what to do: the man was given a choice of immediate resignation or court-martial. More serious challenges came in September 1918, when Spanish influenza swept through the camp, leaving 175 men dead in just a week. Eisenhower now had to organize isolation tents, a hospital, a rotation of doctors, and a morgue.

On his 28th birthday Eisenhower was promoted to temporary lieutenant colonel, but his real present came the following month, in orders to ship out to France. Too late: the German Army was close to collapse, and on November 11 the war came to an end. It was a bitter disappointment to him. “I had missed the boat in the war we had been told would end all wars. . . . I was mad, disappointed, and resented the fact that the war had passed me by.”¹⁰

What was to become of an army major, the rank to which he now reverted, without combat exp...