Eisenhower and the American Crusades

Herbert S. Parmet, Herbert Parmet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138522732
• eBook ISBN: 9781351312028
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Herbert S. Parmet's Eisenhower and the American Crusades is a major assessment of the American presidency during the critical period of America at mid-century. The book follows the career of General Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1952, when he decided to leave his NATO command to campaign for the presidency, to his retirement at Gettysburg nearly nine years later. His entry into politics was well-timed. A mood of conservatism was sweeping the country; surveys indicated that the majority of Americans felt it was time for a change from two decades of executive control 'by those who had permitted events to get out of hand.'Parmet based his study of the Eisenhower years on massive research, conversations with leading figures of the era, and previously unreleased documents. This wealth of material has enabled him to provide answers to questions frequently asked about the thirty-fourth president: Was Eisenhower the kind, fatherly man millions grew up to love on their television or was this an image created by a shrewd politician who knew what the country needed in a trying time?Did he choose Richard Nixon as a running mate or was Nixon forced upon him by political necessities? Was the president intimidated by the appearance of power of Joseph McCarthy, and did the Army-McCarthy hearings influence Eisenhower's decision to involve the United States in Vietnam? Was Eisenhower concerned with the lack of progress in civil rights? Was he the right man for the right time in history or was he merely postponing the major crises of the 1960s?Parmet offers a convincing refutation of the idea of the Eisenhower years as being placid or boring. 'No years that contained McCarthy and McCarthyism, a war in Korea, constant fears of nuclear annihilation, and spreading racial violence, could be so described.' For Parmet, Eisenhower was a stabilizing force in a time of conflict. He may not have been a political genius, but he knew perhaps better than anyone else around him exactly what the people wanted and how they wanted it.

PART ONE

“A New Kind of Candidate”

CHAPTER 1

Abilene, June 4, 1952

ONCE WEST OF Topeka the trees gradually disappear, and motorists along Interstate 70 can see rolling plains as far as the horizon on all sides. Even the distant farmhouses become fewer, the fields drier and somewhat flatter, and the great road across Kansas simulates an orbital track carrying speeding cars through space. About one-third of the way across the state, some forty-five miles past the university town of Manhattan, white grain elevators and the towering old Sunflower Hotel, visible for many miles around, mark the village of Abilene; and, seconds later, large and very modern neon motel signs appear alongside the road. Abilene, the oasis on the plains that was once the Chisholm Trail’s northern terminus, now gets a steady flow of visitors seeking nostalgia about its most famous name, Dwight D. Eisenhower. On their way across the empty stretches of the Midwest, between the Mississippi and the Rockies, the boyhood home, gravesite, museum and library become to them more than a convenient pause from monotony. The hour or two spent with the memory of Eisenhower provides the regeneration to sustain their image of America.

After the White House years, Ike and Mamie Eisenhower had also crossed the nation many times. Usually, because of Mamie’s adverse reaction to heights, they traveled by train. Viewing the countryside, they could see evidence that the General’s optimism and ideas of progress were not shared by many Americans. Great billboards, particularly numerous in the South and Midwest, carried a simple slogan: “Impeach Earl Warren!” Such symbols of protest recalled the domestic part of his containment policies; and by the time he died on March 28, 1969, millions who had had complete faith in his patriotism and honor were displaying the stars and stripes, in almost any form, as though the flag were a hex sign to frighten off mysterious evils. Had he been presented to them as a candidate, once again, there would have been less insecurity. Only three months before his death and shortly after Richard Nixon was elected to the Presidency, Americans asked to list the ten men they admired most still placed Eisenhower first.¹

Less than two months after the end of the European war he had been honored by Abilene as tumultuously as a village of less than six thousand can muster. Americans had spent the preceding years with countless photographs of the General that revealed the smiles and the expressions that had become inseparable from the man. Repeatedly they had read about his boyhood nickname of Ike; and Ike was Ike Eisenhower and nobody else. General Douglas MacArthur, that brilliant soldier with aristocratic ways, had inspired many nasty stories, jibes, allegations, rumors of pernicious self-interest. But Ike was what an American general should be: a humane battler for virtue and freedom, a leader desiring above all the restoration and maintenance of peace, a man who truly was a “soldier of democracy.” That all those things applied to Eisenhower few Americans doubted. And, standing on the speaker’s platform in little Eisenhower Park, which was a short distance northwest of his boyhood home on Southeast Fourth Street, he addressed the admiring crowd.

Among those hearing his words of appreciation for Abilene and America, few were aware of what he had told another audience, in London’s Guild Hall, only two weeks earlier. “I am not a native of this land,” he had said. “I come from the very heart of America.” And then he had gone on to say: “To preserve his freedom of worship, his equality before law, his liberty to speak and act as he sees fit, subject only to provisions that he trespass not upon similar rights of others—a Londoner will fight. So will a citizen of Abilene. When we consider these things, then the valley of the Thames draws closer to the farms of Kansas and the plains of Texas. . . . No petty differences in the world of trade, traditions or national pride should ever blind us to our identities in priceless values.”² Whether he spoke such words in Abilene, London, Paris, New York or Washington, few doubted the sincerity of the most unwarriorlike man in uniform.

The wonder was that, seven years later, on June 4, 1952, when once again he returned to Eisenhower Park a hero, the reverence was still there. That day’s festivities had followed a long and astonishingly persistent effort to make him a Presidential candidate, a movement that had begun while the Nazis were still fighting. Even during his first visit to Abilene he had had to deny any political ambitions. But on that June 4, 1952, while millions watched on television, the planning, the desperate dreams of political salvation, the expected restoration of confidence, all threatened to collapse.

The General was no longer in his famous uniform. In fact, he had left the military payroll, having forfeited over $19,000 a year in salary and allowances to become a political candidate. Standing in heavy rain, he did not resemble the legendary Ike. His raincoat and gray suit were pedestrian substitutes for his famous khaki jacket. He looked his sixty-one years, even to people who never thought about his age before. He carried a straw hat and had rolled both trouser legs up several inches above the mudline. Not until five o’clock airtime did he mount the speaker’s platform. Just then, providentially, the rain stopped, and the umbrella that had been installed was no longer necessary. The General wiped his glasses and began to read the prepared speech before the weather-limited crowd in the 2,800 seat stadium.

It was then that the TV viewers, perhaps more so than those present that day in Abilene, could see, instead of the much-loved radiant image that had given credence to the inevitability of virtue triumphing over evil, the picture of a grayish-looking, somewhat bewildered and troubled, rather ordinary man speaking with difficulty in a very uninspiring setting. As he wrote a decade later, “Probably no televised speech up to that moment was ever delivered under greater difficulties and more uncomfortable circumstances.”³

The speech equaled the drabness of the image that reached the TV screens. All the familiar orthodoxies were repeated: communism was bad, of course, but, even worse, foreign Red dictatorships were ready to exploit the first sign of American weakness; contributing to the destruction of supremacy and thus endangering national security were the free-spending bureaucrats who did not seem to care or understand that “a bankrupt America would mean the loss of all we hold dear and would leave much of the world almost naked before the Kremlin menace.” He stressed that we must “hold fast to our faith and ideals, which are fundamental to the free system. We must work together in an atmosphere of good will and confidence.”⁴ At best, millions were hearing confirmation of their fears spoken by one of undisputed integrity. But, to others, his remonstrations about the preservation of the “American way of life” and the lethargic delivery recalled the shallow heroism of Hawthorne’s general, also returning to address his old neighbors, in the shadow of the Great Stone Face.

Political scientists will, of course, always debate the importance of a candidate’s ideology and charisma to his voter appeal. However they may assess that relationship, Eisenhower’s words were incapable of salvaging the event. For the message to be prosaic was one thing, but for the famous soldier to look so unlike a sure winner was much more important.

For the Old Guard in the GOP, that performance almost induced complacency and dissipated fears that the General’s return would launch an irresistible crusade. One prominent Taft supporter, Representative Carroll Reece of Tennessee, was quick to call the speech “pretty much for home, mother and heaven.”⁵ Marquis Childs has noted that, on the TV screens, Ike “looked like an old man who read from his manuscript in a halting and uncertain fashion.”⁶ James Reston of the New York Times, after acknowledging that Eisenhower had done better during an earlier, untelevised talk that day, explained that the soldier had “staked out a compromise position between those who are urging him to attack Mr. Truman openly and those who are urging him to attack Mr. Taft openly.”⁷

CHAPTER 2

The General’s Constituency

NO PARTICULAR EVENT, no specific political consideration (except winning elections), no cause was necessary to get the American public excited about a possible Eisenhower candidacy. Sufficiently vague was the notion that, somehow, he had those qualities that were desirable for the White House, or, at least, that such assets would make him a deserving and trustworthy occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Consequently, the years before 1952 had been marked by the longest continuous non-partisan Presidential boom in American history.

It was made possible by the phenomena of what appeared to be the General’s simultaneous appeal to a great array of interests, all of whom were convinced that he was their man. Their desire to have Eisehhower as President was the clearest solution for the plague of corruption, limited wars, twenty years of Democratic rule, communism and greedy labor unions.¹ His victory in 1952 was the direct result of circumstances favorable to the man whose ascent had been anticipated by millions.

On that day in Abilene in 1945 when reporters had inquired about the Presidency, the General heard a suggestion that was no longer new. Eisenhower himself reported that, in 1943, Virgil Pinkley, a West Coast journalist, had been the first to discuss the idea with him seriously. The General’s comment, according to his own account, was “Virgil, you’ve been standing out in the sun too long.”² Also in 1943 the World War Tank Corps Association, headed by a former corporal in Eisenhower’s command at Camp Gettysburg adopted a resolution that, although lacking any knowledge of his political convictions, declared that Ike was fit for the Presidency because of his “leadership qualities.” Eisenhower, concerned that suspicions that he sought a political career “will promote disunity at a time when our whole future as a nation demands complete unity among us all,” felt that a public denial would appear ridiculous or might give credence to thoughts that he was guilty of disloyalty to his civilian chiefs in Washington.³ But to a friend he wrote: “And I furiously object to the word ‘candidate’—I ain’t and I won’t.”⁴ When Republican Senator Arthur Capper of Kansas wanted his party to nominate the General for the 1944 campaign, Eisenhower dismissed the suggestion privately with the thought that ending the war must remain his only ambition.⁵ Informed that same autumn that professional sensationalist Walter Winchell had said that FDR was ready to have Eisenhower as his running mate if the Republicans ran MacArthur, Ike called the gossip “badly misinformed.” Furthermore, he added, “I can scarcely imagine anyone in the United States less qualified than I for any type of political work.”⁶ All denials were consistent with his comments in personal letters, such as one to “Swede” Hazlett. Ike had told his boyhood friend that he hoped to “never again hear the word ‘politics’” once the war had ended, and then he commented: “But I do have the feeling of a crusader in this war and every time I write a letter or open my mouth, I preach the doctrine that I have so inadequately expressed above.”⁷ Nevertheless, in their first meeting after the end of hostilities in the European Theater of Operations, in Potsdam during July 1945, President Harry S Truman turned to the General in the back of a car in which they were riding and said, “General, there is nothing that you may want that I won’t try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the Presidency in 1948.”⁸

All overtures, from ordinary veterans to the President of the United States, came without any evidence of the General’s party preference. More than rhetoric, however, events had created a political category, so the suggestion that he was backed without regard to ideology has been greatly exaggerated.

There can be no doubt that the absence of direct political verbiage did little to dissuade those who liked Ike that they might not like Ike politically. What fostered the appearance that his appeal was entirely apolitical was the General’s ready acceptance by the majority of Americans who generally remain within an ideological range that spans little more than moderate liberal to moderate conservative—in short, the great field that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has called the “vital center.” There was, then, much less mystery about his basic attitudes than his opponents later charged, and that intelligence was communicated to the American people in a number of ways.

Victory and a friendly press had played significant roles. Probably no commander was more cognizant of the press and its fickleness. “Almost without exception,” he wrote to his brother Edgar, “the 500 newspaper and radio men accredited to this organization are my friends.”⁹ Of the visible high-ranking war heroes—MacArthur, General Jonathan Wain-wright, General George S. Patton, etc.—Eisenhower received the most consistently favorable press, which presented him as the antithesis of stuffed shirts or martinets.

Eisenhower also had two distinct advantages that enhanced his attractions. The most obvious one, to the general public, was his direct leadership in the European theater of war as the Commander of Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces. Such dramatic events as operations TORCH, the invasion of North Africa, and OVERLORD, the June 6, 1944, opening of a so-called Second Front in France, shattered the forces responsible for the mass slaughters.

Those with a more sophisticated knowledge of the war could also appreciate the diplomatic skills and political perceptions that had gone into what was the most astonishingly successful joint command of combined military forces in history. Any man who could hold together such disparate personalities as Roosevelt, Churchill and De Gaulle and, at the same time, deal with matters involving such controversial and even sordid individuals as Admiral Darían and General Giraud, while never veering from the requirements of the joint Anglo-American, French and Russian mission, must, inevitably, they reasoned, have the talents necessary for the Presidency. The superficial alliance of the major powers, the attempted fulfillment of military roles while keeping watch on nationalistic political ends had required leadership at the very top command that was more political than military. It was Eisenhower to whom most of the credit must be given for making it work. His personality had been generally recognized as having lubricated the sources of friction. Thus, both the political and the sophisticated could find that Ike was indeed the sort of man to occupy the White House.

Nor were there many hints about his probable political position if he did seek public office. Liberals were romanced by the General’s obvious humanity and his “Crusade in Europe” into assuming he was one of their own. Conservatives, normally more congenial to the military, immediately identified the General of Denison, Texas, birth and Abilene, Kansas, boyhood as a characteristically American type who could be trusted to preserve the traditional virtues. Nevertheless, it was not that simple.

Even at the outset, reasonably accurate political identifications were made. Left-wingers had been distressed by Eisenhower’s expedient deal with Admiral Jean Darían in North Africa. The arrangement to confirm as the chief French power in Algeria an ex-Nazi collaborator to save the fleet at Toulon and help make Tunisia more vulnerable before the invading Allies brought sharp criticism at home. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., was a strong opponent within the Roosevelt Cabinet of the deal with the pro-Fascist French militarist.¹⁰ The 1940 Presidential candidate of the Republican party, Wendell Willkie, complained that the “moral losses of expediency always fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Part One “A New Kind of Candidate”
• Part Two Launching the Crusade
• Part Three “Modern Republicanism”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index