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Book Summary: “The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s” by William Hitchcock
Eisenhower got short shrift in his time - beloved by American Joe Normals but largely underappreciated by community leaders, historians, and other politicians, who bought into an image of him as basically asleep at the wheel, golfing while the Soviet Union launched sputnik. More careful history, coupled with recently released archival information, has revealed a portrait of an astute leader constantly manipulating massive operations behind the scenes. I’ll break things down roughly by domain:
Foreign Policy:
Despite being a Cold Warrior who castigated Truman for losing China and bungling the Korean War, Eisenhower mostly managed to steer clear of direct conflict himself. He immediately negotiated a detente in the Korean War, deftly resisted the surge of warhawk voices trying to get him to commit to war in Vietnam, and backed off China and the USSR from Taiwan and West Berlin.
In all of these conflicts Eisenhower often got buffeted from both sides by warhawks who thought he was playing nice with communists and by peace seekers who thought he was recklessly risking American engagement, but in each instance he protected American interests and diffused the situation without escalating to an actual war.
To highlight a case study of this approach, in the Suez Crisis of 1956 Eisenhower found both France and England had lied to his diplomats' faces and brazenly violated international law by invading Egypt. Much hung in the balance: the international order of “rule of law” that Eisenhower had worked so hard to create post-World War 2, the opinion of the Global Third World whose alliances would be so crucial in the Cold World, and the relationship between America and its allies, whether they would be allowed to betray America and still be supported or whether the US would assert itself as leader of the western world.
And nuclear war. This was a more real possibility than I think most realize - the Soviet Union was threatening to do anything necessary, and moreover was desperate to reestablish their credentials as an anticolonialst power a week after rolling tanks into Hungary. While the fact that Nasser later became opposed to America has caused many to criticize his move, in the context of the moment Eisenhower’s handling of the situation seems deft and reasonable. His decision to choke off Britain’s financing both legitimized the rules-based international order, established America as the post-war hegemon, and prevented a direct conflict between the four great powers with worldwide implications.
The Modern Warfare State:
The President who warned us about the Military Industrial Complex was well qualified to do so, seeing as he built it. Between World Wars 1 and 2 Eisenhower had been perpetually frustrated that America let its defenses atrophy during peacetime then rapidly scrambled to put it all together when a conflict emerged. His novel policy was for the first time to emphasize massive defense spending during peacetime to prepare for eventual conflict, and indeed he spent half the budget on defense, or roughly 10% of GDP:
The darker side of this is that Eisenhower also presided over the creation of the modern Intelligence Community, which under him led coups in Iran and Guatemala and prepared regime change for the DRC and Cuba. This set off a trend of replacing democratically elected leaders with brutal dictators that terribly damaged American prestige in the eyes of the Third World.
For a poignant example of the immediate backlash of this kind of spycraft, the CIA pressured Eisenhower relentlessly to approve the U-2 plane flights over the Soviet Union despite Eisenhower’s fears that it would jeopardize his attempt at detente. Indeed, on the eve of a joint conference between the two powers, a U-2 plane was downed. Kruschev initially assumed that Eisenhower wasn’t responsible, but instead of blaming CIA Chief Dulles for misleading him about the operation, Eisenhower took full blame for the decision. It was probably the responsible thing to do as a leader but it ruined any chance at a thaw in the Cold War.
A further irony is that a large reason for the perception of Eisenhower as an absentee President, golfing instead of governing, was that Americans had no idea these massive operations were happening behind the scenes. When talk started to emerge of a “missile gap,” no one knew that Eisenhower’s spies had been taking photos of Soviet missile sites for years and knew that those fears were overplayed; when events happened in far away corners of the world and Eisenhower seemed not to be acting at all, no one knew that his spies had already infiltrated the government and were busy at work.
Governing to the Center
In this commitment to “not burdening the Treasury,” in almost each year Eisenhower fully balanced the budget. He did this by keeping Truman’s wartime high taxes in place, including a top marginal tax rate of 90% (on a tiny sliver of the population). In this he was castigated by the right flank of his party, but he kept the nation’s fiscal health in check while also building the most powerful military on the planet, millions of homes, and the modern highway system. Arguably he kept the pursestrings a little too tight, as his reductions in federal spending are partially credited with the recession of 1957, but he managed to hold the US off its present path of endless debt.
In other ways his centrism can look bold or cowardly, depending on your perspective. His coddling of McCarthy is hard to justify and his lukewarm handling of civil rights is a challenge as well. He desegregated military schools, and passed a toothless civil rights bill, but he refused to lead on the issue. Even his boldest action of all, sending in the troops to desegregate Arkansas, he framed squarely as enforcing rule of law - he didn’t even mention civil rights.
Leadership:
In many of Eisenhower’s addresses, on his high taxes, or his military readiness programs, he again and again urges Americans that they will need to sacrifice for the security and health of the nation. Actually, he doesn’t really urge per se, he basically just says sacrifice is what a good American knows is his responsibility and when he said it, everyone agreed. I can’t fully imagine a president now framing things like this without being castigated for it but Eisenhower enjoyed a whopping average popularity rating of 65%. Americans liked Ike. His star power, however, did not translate into broader success for his party, who lost successively more seats with each Congressional election. This is partially because Eisenhower himself wasn’t really convincingly a Republican and partially because he thought the President was supposed to be a national leader above the fray of partisan politics. When it came to likely his most important role of grooming a successor, he dropped the ball in amazing fashion; when asked by a reporter to name a major decision made by Nixon during their two terms Eisenhower responded “if you give me a week I might think of one.”
However, the strength of Eisenhower’s legacy was such that even without grooming a successor, his successors still largely found their time in office governed by the mold he had cast, in terms of national defense priorities, relatively centrist government activity, and confronting the rising currents of the third world. JFK considered himself in major contrast to Eisenhower’s doddling, asleep-at-the-wheel presidency, only for him to remark how much he ended up “behaving exactly as the Eisenhower administration would have behaved” (nowhere is this more stark than the inherited Bay of Pigs operation).
As for whether Eisenhower’s legacy was positive or negative, I’ll let you be the judge.
The US national-security establishment, more specifically, the Joint Chiefs of Staff first spied on the president, which he eventually figured out and covered up, and then probably also carried out a coup in the United States itself, mind you.
I knew about Nixon's later break with the FBI, not as much about the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I find the internal spying interesting but not really the palace coup theory; I've always assumed something like that was probably true, but nobody denies that Nixon broke federal laws (and his use of the FBI, while not directly relevant to his downfall, was also frequently and fragrantly illegal). I don't have very set opinions about his presidency in one direction or the other, but if he's a crook then it's hard for me to feel that bad for him getting ousted; I'd rather a world where more of our Presidents were held accountable for their crimes than less.
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