Dwight D. Eisenhower

Fred I. Greenstein

DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER, the thirty-fourth president of the United States, was uniquely popular among post-World War II American presidents. As of 2002, only two other chief executives of that period, had been elected to and completed two terms in office. Apart from John F. Kennedy, who did not live to face the consequences of his policy of increasing military involvement in Vietnam, Eisenhower was the only postwar president who received more positive than negative ratings for his entire time in office.

In spite of Eisenhower's impressive ability to maintain the support of the American people, for roughly the decade and a half after he left the White House most scholars and other writers on the presidency judged him to have been a lackluster leader. In 1962, for example, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., asked seventy-five leading authorities on the American presidency to rank the chief executives in order of greatness. Eisenhower placed twenty-first, tied with Chester Arthur. The scholars' views of Eisenhower and his leadership fundamentally echoed the 1950s partisan rhetoric of liberal Democrats, who viewed Eisenhower as bland, good-natured, and well intentioned, but politically inept and passive. He seemed to hold a minimalist view of the leadership responsibilities of the chief executive. His success in achieving the potentially valuable political resource of popular support was inescapable. But this support was judged to be based merely on the legacy of acclaim he inherited from his World War II leadership as supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, reinforced by the appeal of his broad grin and benign countenance to the politically inattentive bulk of the electorate.

By the mid-1970s, a reappraisal of Eisenhower and his leadership was well under way. Interest in reexamining Eisenhower's presidency was spurred in part by the difficulties encountered by his successors and in part by retrospective assessments of the events that occurred while he was in office. Lyndon B. Johnson had felt obliged not to run again because his backing was so weak; Richard M. Nixon had resigned in the face of certain impeachment and conviction; Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter had been defeated at the polls. Eisenhower's ability to serve two full terms while maintaining his popularity seemed to call for study and analysis. Moreover, his period in office now seemed to have been one of accomplishment rather than drift. By the summer of 1953 his administration had negotiated an armistice that ended the bloody, stalemated Korean War. Peace prevailed throughout the remainder of his presidency, in spite of major episodes that could have led to East-West military conflict. The divisive internal debate over whether the nation was endangered by Communist subversion from within had ended. Inflation rates were low, and, in general, the economy was performing well.

Other of Eisenhower's actions appeared in retrospect to be highly questionable, perhaps most notably his covert use of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to help overthrow the nationalistic Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953 and the left-leaning Ar-benz government in Guatemala in 1954. But the very fact that Eisenhower had policies worthy of attention (whatever their merit), like the fact of his popularity, seemed by the 1970s to make it necessary to reconsider the notion that his presidency was simply a time of leaderless inaction.

Fortunately such reconsideration was by then possible. In the archives of the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas, and in other repositories, enormous bodies of primary source records on Eisenhower and his conduct of the presidency began to be released, many of them in successive volumes of the Department of State's invaluable documentary volumes entitled The Foreign Relations of the United States. These records constitute a window through which to view the unpublicized aspects of a president and presidency whose public and private sides were near antitheses. It is now possible to read private diary notes in which Eisenhower recorded his experiences and clarified his thinking and feelings, as well as similar records by some of his close associates, and it is possible for nonspecialists to explore such matters through a burgeoning scholarly literature on the Eisenhower years.

Eisenhower was a prolific and fluent writer of off-the-record correspondence, which provides important insights into his views and actions. His leadership also is well documented in records of his official and unofficial meetings, phone conversations, and even transcripts of his remarks in pre-press conference briefings on what information he did, and did not, choose to make public and what impressions he sought to create. From this evidence and the testimony of people who were closely associated with him, it has become clear that Eisenhower in fact was a presidential activist, but that his activism, which was grounded in a consciously articulated view of how to exercise leadership, took a distinctive and unconventional form.

The Eisenhower Approach to Leadership

Although Eisenhower resented claims that he was a weak leader, his very approach to leadership furthered this impression, at least on the part of those who had access only to the contemporary public record. The impression that he was a passive chief executive president who reigned rather than ruled was engendered both by his approach to organizing the presidency and by the tactics he used to resolve the built-in conflict between what Americans expect from their president in his dual capacity as head of state and principal national political leader.

As head of state, the American president is a symbol of unity. Like a constitutional monarch, he is expected to be an uncontroversial representative of the entire nation. As the nation's chief political leader, however, he must engage in the intrinsically divisive prime-ministerial task of political problem solving. The seeming impossibility of resolving the tension between these contradictory expectations undoubtedly has contributed to the regularity with which Americans become disillusioned with the performance of their presidents.

Eisenhower resolved this contradiction by maintaining the public stance of an uncontroversial chief of state, while concealing or playing down his political leadership, especially those machinations that are essential to effective leadership but that foster animosities and lead the president to be viewed as "just another politician." He carried out this leadership strategy through a number of tactics:

1. In seeking to downplay the political side of his role, he frequently exercised political influence through intermediaries rather than directly or otherwise concealed his part in the cut and thrust of leadership.
2. Similarly, he was studiously artful in employing language. His private communications to close associates are models of analytic clarity and contain informed, realistic accounts of his political strategies. But in press conferences he often was evasive or professed ignorance of matters that he felt were best not discussed, doing so in a homely, idiomatic way that enhanced public affection for and confidence in him. And in his public addresses, he worked with his speechwriters seeking to find language that was dignified yet, as he once put it, simple enough "to sound good to the fellow digging a ditch in Kansas."
3. Eisenhower also took pains never to criticize an adversary by name, lest he demean his own role and arouse underdog sympathies for the opponent. By refusing to (as he put it) "engage in personalities," he also acted on the premise that impugning the motives of others engenders ill feeling that undermines the basic leadership task of welding political cooperation.
4. Although he did not discuss personality publicly, much of his private reasoning and discourse involved sizing up what he called the "personal equation" of other political actors. He did this in order to use aides where they would be most effective and to anticipate how best to exercise influence. His preoccupation with personality analysis helped him to keep the political side of his leadership inconspicuous.
5. He was a vocal proponent of generous delegation of authority, but he varied the magnitude of delegation according to his sense of his associates' capacities and of the likelihood that their actions would be consistent with his desires. Thus, his much publicized commitment to delegation did not lead to abdicating presidential power to subordinates. Nevertheless, by emphasizing this commitment he was able to reward associates by giving them credit for popular administration politics and, more important in terms of protecting himself from controversy, to allow them to take the blame for unpopular administration policies.

For scholars, most of whom equated effective political leadership with the visible displays of political pulling and hauling of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, the apolitical public persona that Eisenhower cultivated seemed evidence of his shortcomings as a chief executive. For most citizens, however, a president who seemed untarnished by politicking was worthy of approval—unless, of course, his remoteness from politics was associated with indications that the nation was being poorly managed. One reason why the public did not become discontented was that Eisenhower used his indirect leadership techniques to defuse potential sources of discontent, quietly resolving matters that, if left unsettled, would have made him vulnerable to criticism.

Just as Eisenhower worked hard at exercising political leadership inconspicuously, he expended much energy in maintaining public confidence in his performance as chief of state. Rather than resting on his prepresidential popularity with a broad spectrum of Americans (including many Democrats), he built on his acclaim as a wartime leader. A striking example of the importance he placed on winning public approval was his insistence on standing in an open car, beaming broadly, and waving to the cheering crowds when he was arriving at, or leaving, a public appearance. This was a bone-crunching physical ordeal for Eisenhower, who was the oldest man to have served in the White House at the time he left office. But he considered it essential to his leadership. More generally, he acted on the premise that in order to carry out his responsibilities with good effect he needed to win the widest possible support for his office and powers.

Eisenhower's tactics for reconciling the political with the chief-of-state aspects of the presidency were complemented by his systematic attention to organizing his presidential leadership. He increased the size of the White House staff, introducing a staff position that was controversial in the 1950s but had become traditional by the 1970s—that of the White House chief of staff. This was the position he assigned to the acerbic former New Hampshire governor Sherman Adams, labeling Adams The Assistant to the President, in contrast to other assistants whose titles lacked the initial article. He also was the first president to employ professional legislative liaison personnel, and he introduced the position of assistant


to the president for national security affairs, now popularly known as the president's national security adviser.

Eisenhower's organizational leadership was also marked by his extensive reliance on the cabinet and the National Security Council as forums within which he and his aides debated policy. Both bodies normally met weekly. In the case of the cabinet he instituted a planning staff that was responsible for ensuring that items worthy of serious discussion were on the agenda for discussion. He instituted an even more structured forum for foreign affairs discussion in the form of an expanded National Security Council (NSC), with which he also met regularly. An elaborate committee structure ensured that alternative foreign policy options were clearly explicated for council debate, and that once policies were set, plans for implementing them were made.

At the time many political observers took Eisenhower's seeming departure from the far more informal operating procedures of Roosevelt and Truman as further evidence that he had turned leadership over to a bureaucracy. We now know that Eisenhower's formal committee meetings were supplemented by his extensive informal consultations with a wide range of figures in and out of the government. Further, his cabinet and NSC meetings were as much a means of consolidating his associates around his policies as they were forums for decisive policy discussions. He himself set policy, often in unofficial meetings in the Oval Office before or after cabinet and NSC sessions. The archival record released in the 1970s makes this clear, but when he was in office many of his policies were commonly thought to have been made by committees, or by Sherman Adams, or by Eisenhower's sternly anti-Communist secretary of state, John Foster Dulles.

Antecedents of Eisenhower's Leadership

Eisenhower's approach to leadership was shaped by his military career, much of which had been closely tied to participation in civil government and public affairs for the three decades before he became president. Born in Denison, Texas, on 14 October 1890 and raised in rural Kansas, Eisenhower attended the United States Military Academy in order to get a free education. He was more interested in athletics than studies, graduating sixty-first in a class of 164. He was awakened intellectually and became a keen student of military strategy somewhat belatedly, between 1922 and 1924, when he served in the Panama Canal Zone under the gifted and inspirational General Fox Connor.

Through Connor's intervention Eisenhower was chosen to attend the elite Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. After graduating first in a class of 275, he promptly was selected by the War Department for special opportunities. These included a stint in France writing a guidebook to World War I battlefields, attendance at the Army War College, and, in 1929, assignment as deputy to the assistant secretary of war.

In 1933 Eisenhower became the principal aide to the intensely politicized army chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur. From 1935 to 1940 he accompanied MacArthur to the Philippines, where they advised the Philippine president and legislature on defense policy, returning to the United States the year before America entered World War II. Just a few days after Pearl Harbor, his meteoric ascent to national and international prominence began. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall assigned him to the planning division of the War Department in December 1941. By June 1942 he had so impressed not only Marshall but also Roosevelt and Churchill that he was dispatched to England to head American troops in Europe. In November of that year he commanded the American invasion of North Africa, and by late 1943 he had been advanced to supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe. After leading the Allied invasion of Western Europe and achieving victory in the spring of 1945, he returned home to a hero's welcome.

As supreme commander Eisenhower demonstrated a remarkable capacity both to rally the troops in his command and to bring together larger numbers of civilian and military leaders with widely diverse personalities. This made him a logical prospect for public office. By the end of the war, Gallup polls showed that voters in both parties thought he would make a good president. Immediately after the war ended, President Truman offered to support him for the presidency. In 1948 there was a move by liberal Democrats (squelched by Eisenhower) to draft him for the Democratic presidential nomination.

During the war and in his postwar service—first as chief of staff, next as president of Columbia University (but on leave much of the time to help lead the newly formed Department of Defense), and then as first military commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—Eisenhower exhibited the same dualism that was to mark his approach to presidential leadership. The tasks he had to perform made it necessary for him to be closely involved in national and international political maneuvers, but he succeeded in defining them in neutral terms, stressing that all of his actions were based on his official responsibility to serve the wartime and postwar alliances he led and the American national interest. He displayed his buoyant personality in rallying the public, but his private propensity continued to be to act on the basis of cool logic and carefully calculated strategic planning. In short, he did not directly transfer his methods of military leadership to the presidency, but the former provided the template for much of the latter, and neither was politically innocent.

From NATO to the Presidency

Throughout 1951 and the first months of 1952, Eisenhower's base of operations was France and his principal task was establishing working relations among the NATO powers. During this period the press had regular accounts of the campaign to draft him for the presidential nomination. Meanwhile, he was persistently visited by moderate and liberal inter-nationalist politicians and businessmen who urged him to run for president, some of them Democrats but the bulk Republicans.

There is good reason to believe that he could have been elected as a candidate of either party, although the conservative economic views he publicly expressed in 1949 and 1950, when he was not on active military duty, clearly implied what he did not make explicit until early in 1952—that he had been a lifelong Republican in his sympathies. The politicians who were most persistent and influential in pressing Eisenhower to become a candidate were moderates in domestic policy and internationalists in foreign policy. They, like other Republicans, were acutely aware that Democrats had controlled the White House for five terms and that President Truman's unpopularity made it possible to reverse that state of affairs. The Republicans who sought to draft Eisenhower recognized also that the overwhelming favorite among the small-town and rural Republican political leaders who could be expected to dominate the 1952 presidential nominating convention would be a dour, conservative, and distinctly uncharismatic symbol of Republican orthodoxy, Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio. They were certain that Taft would not win in their own constituencies and probably would not win nationally.

Privately, Eisenhower's domestic policy views were even more conservative than Taft's. Having seen inflation cut deeply into postwar defense budgets, he was a convinced fiscal conservative. He also was skeptical about many welfare policies, but electoral realism led him to insist that his party make clear its commitment to preserve and even incrementally expand the basic New Deal welfare reforms.

Eisenhower's reflections in his private diary make it clear that he did not want to become a candidate and would not have become one simply out of disagreement with Taft's domestic policy positions. But he was deeply concerned that Taft, if elected, would undermine the internationalist foreign and national security policies he had devoted himself to shaping. Early in 1952, Eisenhower cast the die, allowing Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts to enter him in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary.

This made him a tacit candidate, but as long as he held his NATO office he refused to campaign or make campaign statements. He won the New Hampshire primary, producing clear evidence of his vote-getting power. Then he beat Minnesota's incumbent governor, Harold Stassen, as a write-in candidate in that state's primary. Thereafter he and Taft both won primaries, but the majority of the delegates were selected by party machinery, and a near majority of them were committed to Taft.

Eisenhower turned the tide when he returned to the United States, resigned his commission, and commenced an increasingly persuasive last-minute campaign just before and during the convention. Taft's majority depended on the votes of delegations from southern states, in which the Ohio senator's supporters were being challenged by Eisenhower supporters, who claimed that they had been improperly barred from delegate-selection caucuses. When procedural votes designed to bar the seating of Taft's contested southern delegates succeeded, the convention shifted in Eisenhower's direction. He was nominated by a slim majority on the first ballot, but his victory left Taft supporters embittered.

Eisenhower's campaign strategy and his handling of the period between his election and nomination reflect his preoccupation with consolidating his own forces and reaching out to broaden his strength. He immediately sought to bring his party together, most dramatically by signing a statement of Republican principles that Taft had drafted. His choice of Richard Nixon as the vice presidential nominee also was agreeable to the Taft forces. Nixon, because of the part he played in identifying the New Deal lawyer and foreign service officer Alger Hiss as an alleged Communist agent, personified the right-wing premise that the Democrats had been "soft on Communism."

Eisenhower threw himself into campaigning, traveling more than 50,000 miles by rail and air. The campaign was not without problems. He angered moderate supporters when he gave the appearance of having been conciliatory in Wisconsin to Senator Joseph McCarthy. At one point it became necessary for his running mate, Richard Nixon, to refute the accusation that as a senator he had unethically accepted financial support from a group of California businessmen. In spite of the campaign snags, Eisenhower's powerful public appeal was evident. Unlike his opponent, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, he did not speak over the heads of his audience. When, late in the campaign, he promised to "go to Korea" if elected, implying that his military expertise would enable him to end the war, political observers correctly judged his victory to be a foregone conclusion. He garnered 55 percent of the popular vote (34 million to 27.3 million) and defeated Stevenson by a 442-to-89 electoral vote margin. He brought into office with him the first Republican Congress since 1947 and the only Republican-controlled Congress until 1995.

Even before the returns were in, Eisenhower exhibited the knowledge of government he had acquired over the years and his predilection for organizing his leadership systematically. On election eve he persuaded a Detroit banker, Joseph Dodge, to become his first director of the key planning organ of the presidency, the Bureau of the Budget. During the time between election and inauguration, it was Dodge's task to act as an observer from within the bureau while Truman's final budget was being prepared and to identify ways it could be cut to Republican dimensions. Eisenhower simultaneously announced the appointments of cabinet members and White House aides, including the aides who were to fill the new staff positions he had devised, such as a White House chief of staff, a presidential national security assistant, and a head of congressional liaison. A little-noted appointment to an unpaid but important position—a body for proposing the reorganization of government agencies—went to his brother and closest confidant, Milton Eisenhower, whose Washington experience had begun in the Coolidge administration.

Several of the announcements of cabinet appointments were delayed and made from his residence between 29 November and 5 December, when (for security reasons) Eisenhower secretly made his inspection trip to Korea. The procession of appointees leaving his home during this period provided his cover story—that he was at his home selecting appointees. Eisenhower arranged for the people he had selected for his cabinet to be flown to Wake Island in the mid-Pacific. Returning to the United States from Korea by ship, he met with this group, beginning his efforts to encourage solidarity and a common sense of purpose among his principal associates.

A Republican Presidency Takes Hold: 1953–1955

In January 1953, when Eisenhower took office, not a single Republican member of the Eighty-third Congress had ever served with a Republican president. To Eisenhower it was as important to build solid links to Capitol Hill as to create a spirit of cooperation among his cabinet and staff. In particular, he cultivated Taft, who was an effective and loyal, if sometimes contentious, administration supporter, serving as Senate majority leader until shortly before his death in the summer of 1953.

The channels from president to Congress had to be numerous in the Eighty-third Congress and the three Democratic-controlled Congresses that followed. The close balance between the parties and the divisions within them made it necessary for bipartisan coalitions to be shaped to advance Eisenhower's legislative goals. His conservative economic policies received the backing of Taft Republicans and southern Democrats. In seeking to introduce moderate welfare reforms, he relied on the more liberal, mostly eastern members of his own party and on northern Democrats. His internationalist foreign policy programs—for example, extension of the reciprocal trade program and appropriation of foreign aid funds—drew support from the internationalist Republicans, who had been at the forefront in seeking his nomination, but they received more backing from Democrats than from members of their own party.

After Taft's death, Eisenhower developed a working relationship, but one that was less than reliable, with the next Senate Republican leader, the bellicose and politically inept William Knowland. Eisenhower worked officially with Knowland, but following his regular practice of carefully supplementing formal with informal organization, he found a variety of allies who unofficially made up for Know-land's shortcomings. Because bipartisanship was necessary to pass legislation but was controversial to supporters of each party, Eisenhower often met without public announcement in the residential quarters of the White House with the two pragmatic southerners who led the congressional Democrats, Senator Lyndon Johnson and Congressman Sam Rayburn, both of Texas.

Two of Eisenhower's initial policy efforts were in the area of national security. One was the short-run effort to bring the lingering Korean conflict to a close and the other the long-run aim of reconfiguring the nation's general national security posture. Ending the fighting in Korea was by no means simple. The truce talks had long been stalled, and the Chinese Communists and North Koreans were so well entrenched that even if pushing them back had been militarily and politically feasible, it would have been too costly in lives and money to contemplate. Hiding his hand from the American people and the Western allies, who would have undermined his actions by public protest, he leaked through channels friendly to the Chinese the message that he was prepared to use extreme measures (by implication, nuclear strikes) if a truce were not concluded. Since talks promptly resumed and a settlement was reached by July, Eisenhower felt his implied threat had worked; others have speculated that the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in March may have set the process of accommodation in motion.

Eisenhower's more long-range efforts were to implement Joseph Dodge's efforts to reduce Truman's requests for the fiscal year beginning in June 1953 by $7.2 billion in expected expenditures. The major source of reduction was military spending. The strategy underlying Eisenhower's cut in defense spending came to be known as his administration's "New Look" defense policy. In contrast to the defense intellectuals who dominated strategic planning in the final years of the Truman administration, Eisenhower insisted that national security costs be systematically weighed against their economic effects on the nation. (For this reason, he made his secretary of the treasury and his budget director members of the National Security Council.) Overspending, Eisenhower maintained, was not an effective way of ensuring the nation's defense capacity. Rather, it was an unproductive waste and a self-defeating stimulus to inflation. But how could the government reduce its expenditures and maintain its commitment to contain Communism? (Much less, in the rhetoric Dulles used but never acted upon, rolling it back.) The answer was provided in the ominous-sounding phrase "massive retaliation." The United States would not commit itself to meet Communist expansion at every point where it occurred but rather would respond on its own terms, if necessary with "massive retaliatory power." An attack in an area where American and allied forces could not effectively be used might be responded to elsewhere. And the military could make up for its decreased military manpower by employing low-yield tactical nuclear weapons if necessary or, in dire circumstances, by striking the Soviet heart-land.

As a strategist—in the game of bridge as well as in military and political affairs—Eisenhower was aware of the dangers of bluffing. The nuclear component of the New Look was meant to be a deterrent to the adversary, not a response that would readily have been made. Eisenhower's congenital proclivity to play his cards close to his vest makes it impossible to say whether under any circumstance short of a total war he would in fact have used nuclear weapons if circumstances seemed to make that advantageous. His private communications, however, show that he was profoundly aware of the devastating consequences a nuclear war would bring, and he always left tactical ambiguities in those of his statements which implied the possibility of using nuclear weapons.

Typically the hard-line anti-Communist pronouncements of the Eisenhower presidency were made by Secretary of State Dulles, sometimes using phrases Eisenhower himself had drafted. Eisenhower concentrated on playing the contrasting role of peacemaker and seeker of East-West rapprochement. In December 1953 he received accolades for one such effort—a speech at the United Nations proposing that the nuclear powers make available raw materials for research on peaceful applications of atomic energy ("Atoms for Peace"). At still another level, fully concealed from public visibility, Eisenhower and his foreign policy associates periodically employed the CIA in covert Cold War operations, including another 1953 action, the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh's government in Iran, and the overthrow of the left-leaning government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954.

In December 1953, Eisenhower called a three-day White House conclave of Republican congressmen, at which he set forth and won agreement to a carefully worked out domestic program that the administration was to submit to the second session of the Eighty-third Congress. His first year had been one of consolidation, adjustment to power, and response to immediately pressing problems. But his second year in office, leading up to the midterm election, was slated as a time for policy making and the building of a Republican record.

By the midterm elections, Eisenhower, whose active campaigning appears to have held down the normal seat loss of an incumbent party in an off-year election, was in fact able to point to such legislative accomplishments as extension of the coverage of Social Security to a number of categories of citizens who did not have retirement benefits and authorization of construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. He could also take credit for the Atoms for Peace proposal and the Korean settlement. But the year was punctuated by major activities that had not been on his agenda in December 1953, including the matters of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and the Indochina crisis of 1954.

McCarthy, a political nonentity until 1950, had become almost instantaneously visible in February of that year, when he made the unfounded charge that he had a list of Communists who were presently on the State Department payroll, busily subverting the nation. In that period of preoccupation with internal subversion and with such international events as the Communist victory in China, the very extravagance of his rhetoric—made more newsworthy because President Truman was goaded into replying to him—earned the Wisconsin Republican substantial media attention. On this McCarthy built a grassroots following and became recognized within the Republican party as a figure who, if deeply irresponsible, was nevertheless a political asset.

McCarthy had felt free to allege that the Truman administration was permeated with Communists, oblivious to the negative effects of his unsubstantiated charges on the morale of the executive branch and the perception of the United States by other nations. But what would he do once his own party was in power? Eisenhower sought, with some initial success, to check McCarthy's freewheeling assaults on the loyalty of public servants—for example, by enlisting Taft to certify that McCarthy's claim that career foreign service officer Charles Bohlen was unsuited to be ambassador to the Soviet Union was groundless. Eisenhower also acted to remedy what he himself thought were failures in the government's procedures for screening employees, instituting a program that by extending the reasons for which civil servants could be discharged as security risks took its own toll on morale in the executive branch.

In short order, it became clear that McCarthy was not going to cease his assaults on the loyalty of federal employees and, by implication, on Eisenhower's stewardship of the government. There were widespread demands that Eisenhower reply to McCarthy, some of them from his close supporters. Eisenhower's view was that public mention of a demagogic politician by the president simply enhanced that politician's support. Instead, Eisenhower periodically criticized the kinds of tactics McCarthy employed, leaving it to the press to infer that he was alluding to the Wisconsin senator. Then, in the spring of 1954, when McCarthy overreached himself and allowed his aides to seek favors for a former staff member who had been inducted into the army, the Eisenhower administration orchestrated an oblique campaign against him.

Acting on the premise that presidential efforts to purge a legislator would backfire, Eisenhower worked behind the scenes to encourage the Senate itself to conduct hearings on McCarthy's actions. Carried live on television, the Army-McCarthy hearings contributed to McCarthy's decline in public support and his subsequent formal condemnation by the Senate. His colleagues began to ostracize him, and he soon became politically impotent. Because Eisenhower's contribution to McCarthy's demise was largely indirect and behind the scenes, his seeming inaction with respect to McCarthy helped reinforce the contemporary impression of Eisenhower's political passivity.

In 1954, Eisenhower circumvented a probable foreign affairs debacle through actions that did not become known in their full dimensions until the 1980s, when the relevant classified documents became available for analysis. In the first months of that year a debate raged within the Eisenhower administration about whether to use American military force to prevent the defeat of the French forces that were at war with the indigenous Communists in Indochina. By January 1954 the Communists had trapped the cream of the French defenders at an isolated military outpost in the hamlet of Dien Bien Phu. Eisenhower feared that a Communist victory would lead to Communist triumphs in neighboring countries, which would succumb, as he put it, like a row of falling dominoes.

He recognized, nevertheless, that there were profound reasons why it would be perilous to use American military force in such an inhospitable environment, a course of action that was favored by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Arthur Radford, and by Vice President Nixon. In extensive meetings with his associates and members of Congress, Eisenhower established strict preconditions for intervention, including formation of a multinational coalition and a grant of immediate independence to the French colonies. When the preconditions could not be met, he concluded that direct American involvement in the Indochinese conflict would not be politically feasible. Rather than fight, he supported the partition of Vietnam into a Communist North and a non-Communist South Vietnam and provided foreign aid to the latter. He also fostered formation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), designed to limit the expansion of Communist North Vietnam and China.

The year 1954 also saw Eisenhower win a major legislative struggle to prevent ratification of a constitutional amendment proposed by Senator John Bricker of Ohio that was designed to limit the president's powers in making international agreements. Success required great political skill, since Bricker had won over sixty-two senators as cosponsors— more than the necessary two-thirds of the Senate votes required for approval. Eisenhower's strategy was to refuse to acknowledge that his basic desires differed from Bricker's but to object persistently to any wording of the amendment that did not simply make the empty statement that no treaty could violate the Constitution. By converting the issue to one of semantics, he gave sponsors of the amendment a face-saving way to change their votes and cooperate with the extensive lobbying campaign his liaison staff conducted.

From Midterm to Second Term: 1955–1956

The Democratic-controlled Eighty-fourth Congress had barely convened in January 1955 when Eisenhower requested and, after sharp debate, received overwhelming support for a resolution according him power to employ military force in the strait between the Communist-controlled mainland of China and the Nationalist Chinese refuge on Formosa (now Taiwan), one hundred miles from the mainland. When the Nationalists were defeated on the mainland in 1949 and retreated to Formosa, they also maintained control of a number of small islands virtually within sight of the mainland. Late in 1954 the Communists had begun to shell the offshore islands in a seeming prelude to taking possession of them and eventually of Formosa.

Eisenhower viewed a Nationalist-held Formosa as essential to maintaining non-Communist governments on the Pacific "island barrier" running from Japan through the Philippines to Indonesia. In his view the offshore islands were militarily dispensable but politically important for maintaining the morale of the Nationalists, who hoped someday to use them to return to the mainland. The Nationalists had powerful support in the Republican party, including the zealous backing of Senate Republican leader Know-land. Knowland and the Nationalists urged American protection of the offshore islands. Congressional liberals and the British, on the other hand, urged that these vulnerable flyspecks be abandoned.

Eisenhower made certain that the "Formosa Resolution" that authorized him to use American military force to defend Formosa and areas necessary to its defense was vague with respect to those islands. It approved the defense of Formosa, but then added cryptically that the president also was authorized to use American force to defend "such related positions . . . now in friendly hands . . . required or appropriate in assuring the defense of Formosa." The offshore islands crisis subsided in April 1955, when the Chinese Communists announced at the Bandung, Indonesia, conference of African and Asian nations that as evidence of their commitment to peace they would not seek to gain control of islands in the Formosa Strait by military means.

Shortly after the Chinese action at Bandung, the Soviet Union took a step toward decreasing Cold War tensions, declaring that it was prepared to withdraw from its postwar occupation of Austria and to join the West in signing a peace treaty with that nation. Eisenhower and Dulles, who had resisted calls for a summit meeting, concluded that circumstances now permitted one, for it could be portrayed as a response to Soviet accommodation and might, without excessive danger of raising false expectations, test the Soviet willingness to advance further toward East-West agreement.

The ensuing meeting in Geneva between 18 an 23 July 1955 provided Eisenhower with an opportunity to make a widely acclaimed proposal that was even more dramatic than the Atoms for Peace speech. He called for the United States and the Soviet Union to exchange blueprints of their military establishments and for inspection flights by each nation over the other to eliminate the fear of surprise attack. His speech received widespread accolades in the press, and the conference ended with journalists writing of the promising "Spirit of Geneva." Nikita Khrushchev, whose demeanor at the conference made it clear that he was now top man in the post-Stalin "collective leadership" of the Soviet Union, broadly hinted in conversation with Eisenhower that he considered the proposal no more than a means of spying on the Soviet Union. Apart from being a propaganda coup for the United States, the "open skies" proposal anticipated the later practice, which both nations later came to take for granted, of mutual aerial surveillance by orbiting satellites. Eisenhower was well aware of the potential usefulness of surveillance; in fact, at the time he was setting in motion a highly classified program of overflying the Soviet Union with high-attitude U-2 reconnaissance planes, a program that was to have unhappy consequences in his second term.

Between the Geneva conference and the October foreign ministers' conference at which it became certain that there would be no Soviet acceptance of his program, Eisenhower suffered a major heart attack. He was stricken on 24 September 1955, in Denver, Colorado. Fortunately no international crises or immediate domestic issues required immediate presidential attention. The first session of the Eighty-fourth Congress had adjourned, having enacted a three-year extension of tariff-cutting powers that Eisenhower requested, but not much else of his legislative program.

Eisenhower was soon able to make himself understood and within weeks was conducting rudimentary public business from his bed, using Sherman Adams as his intermediary. He encouraged the cabinet and National Security Council to hold regular meetings. These sessions were presided over by Vice President Nixon, who took pains to make clear that he was serving as a mere stand-in during Eisenhower's absence, but the meetings did serve as a symbol that the government was continuing to function. Meanwhile, the list of Eisenhower's bedside visitors gradually increased, and he even held brief meetings with visiting foreign leaders.

Nevertheless, national and international affairs were bound to be in a state of uncertainty during a period when the president of the United States was hospitalized and the extent of his illness was uncertain. Republican party leaders were distressed with the prospect that their one surefire winning candidate for 1956 might not be fit to run. Individual party members who were prominent enough to seek the nomination—most conspicuously, Knowland—began to jockey for position. Paradoxically, and in spite of the fears of the bulk of Republicans that Eisenhower would not be able to run again, his heart attack had the effect of making him feel obliged to seek a second term.

Just as Eisenhower had originally hoped not to have to cap his military career by serving as president, he had throughout his first term considered it likely that he would serve only a single term. The fall of 1955 was the period when he could have helped enhance the stature of whoever seemed most appropriate as his successor or could have sent out signals that would encourage a field of Republican competitors to emerge. During this period, as he gradually increased his governmental activities, he had to await a medical judgment on his own health, which could not be made until early February. By the time his heart specialist reported him fit for a second term, no other Republican was available who seemed likely to win in 1956, and it was manifest that much of what he hoped to attain as president remained unaccomplished. He announced that he was willing to run again.

Although anticipation of the fall election led to a partisan impasse on many of the issues before the second session of the Eighty-fourth Congress, three administration measures of consequence passed. Each initiated the kind of change that, unlike welfare-state policies, Eisenhower unambiguously favored—investment in natural resources and improvements in the nation's material base. In agricultural policy, the farm subsidy program was adjusted to include a "soil bank," whereby farmers, rather than being paid for growing foods that later would be stored as surplus, were given incentives to take unprofitable land out of cultivation in order to conserve and improve its topsoil. A multiyear program to improve national parks was also approved. Finally, the largest public works bill in American history was passed, creating the interstate highway program, which was to transform the country by constructing a network of limited-access, high-speed roads.

Eisenhower again ran with Nixon as the vice presidential candidate. He had attempted to persuade Nixon to step down, arguing unconvincingly that Nixon's career would be helped by serving as secretary of defense rather than seeming to be second man to the president. Unprepared to split the party by dropping Nixon, he did not achieve his aim of substituting a candidate who might be a better vote getter and more to his liking as the 1960 Republican candidate. The Democrats renominated Stevenson, pairing him with the popular Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee as vice presidential candidate. Eisenhower won handily (35.5 million votes to 26 million), increasing his share of the popular vote from 55 percent to almost 58 percent, in what clearly was a personal, not a party, victory. For the first time since early in the nineteenth century, a president was elected without control of Congress by his party.

During the final weeks of the presidential campaign two of the major foreign policy crises of Eisenhower's presidency erupted. The first was the Hungarian uprising. Since Stalin's death in 1953, there had been a series of protests of varying degrees of intensity against Soviet control in Eastern European nations. On 22 October 1956, inspired by concessions won by Polish insurgents, Hungarian students and workers began engaging in protests, seeking to broaden the base of the government and to have Soviet troops removed from their nation. After Soviet forces fired on protesters, a revolt broke out. Fighting with primitive weapons, Hungarian rebels called on the United States to help. As in other instances of Eastern European unrest, Eisenhower was unwilling to act on his administration's rhetorical stance that the Soviet Union should not just be contained but be pushed back. He lodged diplomatic protests, offered food and medical aid, and fostered immigration by Hungarians who escaped to the West before the Soviet Union crushed the rebellion on 4 November. But he would not risk general war or fight a limited war in an area in which the Soviet Union had the advantage and which was not vital to American security.

The other crisis, one that blunted the capacity of the West to brand the Soviet Union as a distinctly aggressive nation, resulted from the coordinated attacks on Egypt by two nations directly allied with the United States—France and Great Britain. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had acted to nationalize the Suez Canal in the summer of 1956. Long controlled by the British, the waterway was viewed by the British and French leaders as necessary for their nations' economic survival. The two Western nations provided Israel with the military aid to make an ostensible retaliatory attack on Egypt, which had been the base for commando raids on Israel. On 31 October, on the pretext of protecting the canal, the British and French bombed Egypt and dropped paratroopers in Egypt, and Israeli troops entered the Sinai.

By 1956, Eisenhower was far from enthusiastic about the Nasser regime. The previous year he had been disposed to support Egypt's request for American aid for a major irrigation project—the Aswan High Dam—but Nasser's policies then took an anti-Western tack. Nasser purchased large supplies of arms from the Eastern bloc, recognized Communist China, and berated the West. As a consequence, the United States withheld support for the Aswan Dam, an action that immediately preceded Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal.

In spite of his aversion to Nasser, Eisenhower was convinced that open military action against Egypt on a patently hypocritical pretext would infuriate Arab and other Third World nations and would not even accomplish its immediate geopolitical purposes of securing the canal and keeping oil flowing to the West. Rather than allow the Soviet Union to take credit for condemning the Anglo-French-Israeli action, the United States introduced a cease-fire resolution in the United Nations. As a result, the United States ironically found itself voting with the Soviet Union on the same side of a resolution directed against a military intervention by its own allies at the very time it was attempting to muster world condemnation of Soviet action in Hungary. One unintended consequence of the Suez episode that would undermine Eisenhower's long-term goals was British withdrawal from an international role in the Middle East.

The 1956 election victory, as resounding as it was, left Eisenhower with major international problems. Relations with the Soviet Union were less satisfactory than they had been a year earlier and the Western alliance needed mending. His problems in the initial period of his second term, moreover, were not only in foreign policy.

Eisenhower as a Lame-Duck President: 1957–1958

Eisenhower was the first president who was constitutionally limited to two terms under the Twenty-second Amendment. Thus, he took office as an official lame duck. Conventional wisdom is that other leaders will take such an official less seriously, on the assumption they can wait him out rather than reach accommodations with him in order to bring about policy outcomes. Resolving to turn his status as a president who could not run again to his purposes, Eisenhower made it clear that precisely because he did not have to think about reelection, he would feel free to take politically unpopular or unconventional actions.

He began the first session of the Eighty-fifth Congress with an unconventional action, one that, like much that occurs in politics, had unanticipated effects. The budget he was presenting to Congress had been shaped in the latter part of 1956, when he was unable to concentrate single-mindedly on making certain that proposed expenditures were kept to a minimum. Wanting to make clear that budgets of the magnitude of his 1957 recommendation for the 1958 fiscal year should not be viewed as a precedent and evidently also interested in cutting back from his present requests, he took the unprecedented step of having his treasury secretary, George Humphrey, release a statement stressing the importance of holding down spending on the same day the budget went to Congress.

Humphrey's statement was carefully worded so that it did not contradict Eisenhower by criticizing the present budget request, but in the final minutes of the press conference that followed his statement, Humphrey made headlines by using the colorful phrase "a depression that will curl your hair" to refer to the likely consequence of continued large budgets. The press and, more provocatively, Democrats smarting from the recent election defeat took Humphrey's statement to be a revolt against Eisenhower's message of the same day. In subsequent months Humphrey's statement was frequently mentioned by budget-cutting congressmen, who in particular attacked the foreign-aid and overseas-information programs that were central to Eisenhower's program but politically vulnerable. Most of the proposed cuts were restored, but only after special messages to Congress on Eisenhower's part.

While no debacle, Eisenhower's foray into unconventional lame-duck politics led to the kind of polemics and political gamesmanship he deplored and was not an effective maneuver. Indeed, Eisenhower's recollection in his memoirs was that the first session of the Eighty-fifth Congress was the low point of his presidency in executive-legislative relations. The session did, he granted, yield one major enactment—the first national civil rights law since Reconstruction.

Eisenhower held the traditional conservative view that changes in deeply held beliefs and traditions cannot be legislated, but rather must evolve from education and changing social conditions. In 1954, when the Supreme Court reversed its 1896 decision allowing racially segregated schools, Eisenhower was quick to point out that since school segregation had been legal for the past half century, it was understandable that southern whites would initially resist the Court's new reading of the Constitution. He consistently refused to express an opinion about the desegregation decision, arguing that it was improper for a president to enter the judicial domain and pronounce on Court actions. Undoubtedly he also was influenced by his personal background and political base. A number of his prewar army duty stations had been in the South, and some of his strongest supporters were white southerners.

During his first term he had kept his 1952 campaign commitment to take those actions on behalf of civil rights that were clearly within his administrative power as chief executive. These included enforcing desegregation in the District of Columbia and in federal shipyards in the South. The steps taken in desegregating the shipyards typify the kind of nonconfrontational resolution of heated issues that Eisenhower favored. No announcement was made that desegregation was taking place. Instead, teams of maintenance workers were brought in on weekends, when the yards were closed, and instructed to paint out the signs designating race on rest rooms, drinking fountains, and eating places. The employees were quietly encouraged to use any facilities they chose, and the supervisory personnel were instructed not to interfere. Desegregation occurred without conflict. Only after the fact was it made public that Eisenhower had acted on his campaign promise.

A new bill designed to proceed in one of the less deeply emotional, but nevertheless important, areas of racial discrimination—voting rights—was drafted by the Justice Department early in Eisenhower's second term. Eisenhower's reasoning in proceeding in the area of voting was that if southern blacks had the vote, their power at the polls would enable them win other rights. The law that eventually emerged from Congress—the Civil Rights Act of 1957—did not have effective enforcement provisions. Its major accomplishment was the creation of the federal Civil Rights Commission, which through its regular reports focused attention on rights abuses, as well as the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

School desegregation was a far more explosive issue in the 1950s than voting rights. Many southern white parents were determined at all costs, including use of violence, to ensure that their children were not "mixed" with black children in the schools. Southern political leaders were prepared to back them up. One such leader, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas, initiated the kind of direct federal-state confrontation over a racial issue that Eisenhower had been striving to avoid.

In compliance with the Supreme Court ruling that desegregation of schools should proceed with "deliberate speed," the city of Little Rock had instituted a program in which desegregation would begin at the high school level in September 1957 and in later years work down to lower grades. Faubus employed the National Guard to bar black students from entering Little Rock's Central High School, ostensibly to prevent civil disorder. Eisenhower requested Faubus to meet with him and thought he had won Faubus' agreement not to interfere with desegregation. Faubus then withdrew the National Guard and stood aside while a massive mob of anti-integrationists descended on Little Rock, ready to do violence to any black students who entered the high school.

Faced with a blatant disruption of the constitutional order, Eisenhower acted decisively by calling the Arkansas National Guard into federal service so that Faubus could no longer command it and by sending regular army troops into Little Rock to disperse the mob and maintain the peace while black students proceeded to attend the high school. The episode was forced on Eisenhower, but when it became necessary for him to take action, he did so effectively, using a military contingent so large that there was no danger of resistance. He explained to associates that he had substituted federal troops for the National Guard in order not to pit Arkansan against Arkansan.

Eisenhower turned to Congress for foreign policy support early in the Eighty-fifth Congress, as well as for backing on his budget and civil rights proposals. In the aftermath of Suez, Egypt became increasingly tied to the Soviet Union, and the Soviet influence in the area increased more broadly. In addition the Middle East was marked by continuing rivalries between the Arab states and exacerbated Arab-Israeli tensions. Eisenhower met in January 1957 with leading congressmen of both parties to discuss the Near Eastern power vacuum and the danger that the Soviet Union might succeed in establishing itself in that strategically vital area. He requested that Congress pass a resolution, similar to the Formosa Resolution, authorizing a United States commitment of troops to the area if any of the governments requested assistance. It was an indication of the decline in Eisenhower's influence with Congress that the resolution was more hotly debated and approved by a smaller margin than the Formosa Resolution had been.

The most dramatic and politically consequential challenge to Eisenhower's leadership in 1957 was not the budget, civil rights, Little Rock, or the passage by Congress of the Eisenhower Doctrine, as the resolution on the Middle East came to be called. Rather it was an ostensibly scientific event—the launching by the Soviet Union on 4 October of Sputnik, the first space satellite. By making it obvious that the Soviet Union had achieved the capacity to produce rockets of sufficient power to propel an object into outer space, Sputnik had obvious implications about the respective military strengths of the two superpowers.

In the months before the Sputnik launching, the Soviet Union claimed to have rockets capable of propelling intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to the United States. The Soviet success in putting a satellite in orbit (and soon after a much larger one) was not matched by the United States until January 1958.

By then, Lyndon Johnson had initiated hearings examining the entire question of American versus Soviet military strength. For the remainder of Eisenhower's time in office, a "missile gap" was alleged to exist by major forces within the Democratic party, led by Johnson, Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, and the man who was to win the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

The missile-gap controversy continued through the 1960 presidential campaign and contributed to the strategic point of view that led the Kennedy administration to engage in a massive escalation of missile production between 1961 and 1963. In fact, Eisenhower and a handful of his closest associates were well aware that the Soviet Union had virtually no ICBM production under way. Their information came from the highly declassified aerial photographs of the Soviet Union obtained on high-altitude U-2 plane flights that the Soviet leaders privately protested but did not refer to in public, lest they acknowledge an area in which they were vulnerable to the United States.

Eisenhower sought to reassure Americans and their allies that although the Soviet Union might for the moment have greater capacity to produce long-range rockets, in toto the West was well defended, since it could retaliate against a Soviet attack with bombers and with intermediate-range ballistic missiles based in allied nations. Resisting crash increases in spending for missile development programs, Eisenhower took a number of other steps to enhance and highlight the American commitment to retain sufficient military strength to deter a Soviet attack.

In the immediate aftermath of Sputnik, Eisenhower set up a presidential science advisory council and installed a full-time science adviser in the White House. In the 1958 legislative session he proposed, and succeeded in having enacted, the National Defense Education Act, which made available college scholarships for students specializing in the sciences, mathematics, and foreign languages. He also used the new atmosphere of national emergency to achieve legislative changes in the organization of the Defense Department that he had been seeking since he was army chief of staff. These changes increased the influence of the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff over the individual military services and ostensibly reduced the capacity of the military services to vie with one another for appropriations and duplicate one another's programs.

The American space program was visibly under way by the 1958 midterm election. In addition, two Cold War episodes that, if they had been differently handled, might have caused voter disaffection had been resolved or had subsided. On 15 July, acting consistently with the Middle East resolution, Eisenhower dispatched a force of United States Marines to Lebanon at the request of its president, Camille Chamoun. The Western-oriented Lebanese government seemed to be threatened by the aftereffects of a proNasser coup in Iraq. By 25 October the situation had fully stabilized and American troops were withdrawn. Meanwhile, in August, on the other side of the world, mainland China resumed shelling the anti-Communist forces on the offshore islands. Armed with superior aircraft weaponry by the United States and provided with a technology for supplying the islands, the besieged Nationalists held. By October, shelling from the mainland was reduced to an alternate-day ritual that permitted supply of the islands. The conflict eventually vanished from the headlines.

Although the Eisenhower administration seemed by election time to have allayed the foreign policy concerns of most members of the general public (though not of its Democratic critics), the 1958 off-year voting saw a major Democratic surge in congressional strength. In the House of Representatives, the Democrats' strength increased to 282–154, their greatest margin since 1938. In the Senate the increase from 49 to 64 brought the Democrats to their highest level since 1940. Thus, Eisenhower was fated to spend his final two years with a Congress in which a strong bloc of liberal Democrats would be pressing for social legislation that he found unacceptably liberal and for a more costly military commitment than he was prepared to countenance.

The Democratic gains appear mainly to have had economic causes. Late in 1957 the economy slipped into a major recession. By the middle of 1958 the recession was over, but the experience of a significant economic downturn reinforced the long-standing tendency of voters to associate the Republican party with economic hard times. An undoubted further contribution to the 1958 Republican losses and the election of the liberal Eighty-sixth Congress was the controversy in the months immediately before the election that led to the resignation of the chief White House staff aide, Sherman Adams. When he was governor of New Hampshire, Adams and his family had formed a friendship with the family of the New England textile manufacturer Bernard Goldfine. Early in 1958, congressional investigations of federal regulatory commissions revealed that Adams had telephoned the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to inquire about cases then pending that had a bearing on whether Goldfine's company was labeling its products in a manner consistent with federal regulations. Further, it came out that Adams had received gifts from Goldfine—a vicuna coat, free use of a hotel suite in Boston, and a Persian rug.

Adams explained that the gifts were part of a pattern of gift giving between his family and Goldfine's, a result of their long friendship. He had intended his phone calls to the FTC as no more than a normal White House service request for information, he maintained, although he now recognized that he had been indiscreet. Eisenhower promptly announced that having acknowledged his error, Adams was to return to his duties as a valued White House aide. No sooner had Eisenhower taken this step than further hearings showed Goldfine to be an entrepreneur who habitually made gifts to public officials and declared them as business expenses. The gifts to Adams took on a new and more questionable meaning.

The recession-beleaguered Republican candidates for reelection were uniform in urging Adams to resign. Eisenhower also was quickly made aware by many of his closest supporters in the Republican party that Adams had become a liability. Evidently this became Eisenhower's own view. Nevertheless, having put himself behind Adams, he did not fire him; rather, he tried indirection, commissioning Vice President Nixon to have an "objective" conversation with Adams that was heavily stacked with arguments for resignation.

Adams declared that he would follow any orders he received from the president, but that he would not resign on his own in the face of unfair charges. Rather than personally order Adams to resign, Eisenhower commissioned Meade Alcorn, the Republican national chairman, to inform him that he was damaging the party's electoral chances and that Eisenhower knew this to be the case but refused personally to fire Adams. With so blunt a message Adams resigned, but so late that questions about the propriety of his performance were grist for the midterm campaign.

"The New Eisenhower": 1959–1961

In January 1959, Eisenhower seemed to be entering his final two years in office as the lamest of lame ducks. The number of congressmen who were ideologically uncongenial to his policies had substantially increased. He had lost the services of Adams. In addition, Secretary of State Dulles was terminally ill with cancer. As it turned out, the period from 1959 to the end of his presidency came be viewed in the press and by many politicians as the period of "the new Eisenhower." Eisenhower was portrayed as a hitherto politically aloof president who had belatedly begun to employ the resources of his office in the political area with a vigor reminiscent of the combative styles of Roosevelt and Truman.

Eisenhower had, of course, not previously eschewed politics. He had been practicing a delicate approach of bargaining privately with congressional leaders, personally and through his personal emissaries, in order to weld legislative majorities in three closely divided Congresses. But during the period of the Eighty-sixth Congress he increasingly found it to his advantage to speak out boldly against and veto legislation that was plainly in conflict with his conception of good public policy.

Ironically, though he was less able to get policy results from the new Congress, his adversarial relationship with a major bloc in it made him seem more like an activist president. Eisenhower furthered this impression by taking highly visible steps to create a political climate that might foster an accommodation with the Soviet Union, though he took the first such step as a result of an error in communication. In the spring of 1959, he was privately urged by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to take part with the allied leaders and Soviet Premier Khrushchev in a summit conference on such points of contention as whether West Berlin was to remain under Western control. Meanwhile, Khrushchev, who also favored a summit, proposed publicly that he and Eisenhower exchange personal visits to each other's countries. Eisenhower's general view was that unless summit conferences and personal diplomacy by national leaders followed Soviet concessions or could otherwise be seen as likely to bring about change, they would create complacency in the West and provide the Soviet Union with propaganda forums.

Eisenhower instructed Under Secretary of State Robert Murphy to pass a message of qualified acceptance to the Soviet leader Frol Kozlov, who was then completing an official visit to the United States. In so doing, he meant to stipulate that if there were previous Soviet concessions, he would be open to a summit and an exchange of visits. His qualifications were lost in the transmission, and he discovered to his chagrin that he had conveyed an invitation that was not contingent on some initial act by Khrushchev, such as the withdrawal of the Soviet threat to West Berlin.

Making a tactical virtue of what had inadvertently become a necessity, Eisenhower told reporters that only his personal prestige was at risk in a meeting with Khrushchev and that the stakes were too great for him not to attempt an unorthodox approach to seeking a better understanding with the Soviet leadership. Before Khrushchev's ten-day tour of the United States in September 1959, Eisenhower visited Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of Germany and President Charles de Gaulle of France to stress that he would not make concessions to the Soviet leader without full consultation with them.

Khrushchev's lively ability to command press attention through his American trip persuaded Eisenhower that his own visit to the Soviet Union would at minimum have Cold War propaganda value, advertising to the world that his nation was deeply intent on settling East-West tensions. Even though foreign ministers' conferences were regularly stalemated, he also concluded that some progress in negotiation might be possible at another great-power summit meeting, since his private discussions with Khrushchev had led to a statement that the Soviet Union would not initiate unilateral action affecting West Berlin.

In the winter of 1959–1960, Eisenhower made two international goodwill trips, greeting foreign leaders and publics with a vigor that belied his age. In December 1959 he employed the new technology of the jet plane to visit eleven European, Asian, and North African countries on a nineteen-day trip, replete with enthusiastically cheering crowds as he traveled in motorcades, and earnestly spoke of his nation's desire for peace. His party flew to Rome and then visited the capitals of Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Iran, Greece, Tunisia, France, Spain, and Morocco.

Events in the Caribbean helped ensure that the other goodwill trip Eisenhower was able to take before the spring summit conference would be in Latin America. The Cuban government of Fidel Castro had seemed to be fundamentally nationalistic when it overthrew that nation's military dictatorship in January 1959, but the Eisenhower administration soon became persuaded that the Castro government was Communist-controlled and would provide the Soviet Union with a base for exercising influence in the western hemisphere. While seeking to destabilize Castro's government (for example, by barring sugar imports from Cuba and training Cuban émigrés for guerrilla war on the island), Eisenhower also worked to strengthen American ties to other Latin American countries. Choosing the four southernmost countries in the hemisphere for his next trip, in February 1960 he visited Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, coordinating these visits with announcements of increases in aid to Latin America. On these trips he also had overwhelming receptions.

Now Eisenhower, rather than Khrushchev, was making international headlines. He hoped his trips would contribute to an international climate in which the Soviet leaders would be more likely to agree to realistic steps to reduce international tensions, both at the summit conference that now had been scheduled and during his follow-up trip to the Soviet Union. Long-pending negotiations between American and Soviet diplomatic representatives and scientists had led to numerous proposals and counterproposals for arms control and nuclear test bans, and it was possible that in a changed international climate, firm agreements might be reached on these matters.

On 1 May 1960, two weeks before the summit meeting of the Western and Soviet leaders in Paris, the fateful U-2 episode occurred. Anticipating disarmament negotiations, Eisenhower had ordered a final surveillance flight over an area of the Soviet Union that he considered to have been inadequately examined for possible nuclear and missile sites. When the U-2 failed to return, a cover story was released that a plane on a meteorological expedition was lost and might have strayed over Soviet air space. Eisenhower had been authorizing overflights on the premise that if at any time the Soviet Union developed the capacity to shoot down a high-altitude "spy plane," the vehicle, including not only its film but also the pilot, would be destroyed, making proof of surveillance impossible.

As it turned out, the Soviet Union recovered the plane, film, and pilot, Francis Gary Powers, who admitted to his mission. The Soviet announcement was not made until after Eisenhower had personally denied that such flights occurred. Eisenhower immediately reversed himself and acknowledged that flights had taken place for five years under his direction and that they were necessary to provide the West with reliable information about Soviet military capabilities and intentions.

Under these unpropitious circumstances, Eisenhower traveled to Paris on 15 May to meet with the Soviet premier. He appropriately titled the chapter in his memoirs on the Paris meeting "The Summit That Never Was." Bringing with him the wreckage of the U-2 plane, Khrushchev insisted that Eisenhower apologize and punish those responsible for its flight—a responsibility Eisenhower already had personally assumed. The demand was couched in terms that left no room for Eisenhower to proceed and effectively terminated his presidential peace-making efforts, including his projected visit to the Soviet Union, although he did make a goodwill trip to Asia.

By early in 1960, Vice President Nixon had Succeeded in building up enough delegate support to ensure him the Republican nomination. Running to succeed a still extraordinarily popular president with whom he had been closely associated, Nixon was a more promising bet for election than Senator John F. Kennedy, the Democratic candidate. Although Nixon was better known and Kennedy's Catholicism cost him votes, the Massachusetts senator won in one of the closest elections in American history.

Eisenhower was deeply disappointed by the Republican defeat and the resulting likelihood that many of the policies to which he was committed would be reversed. He turned to preparing the Kennedy administration for its accession to power, personally briefing Kennedy and his associates on two occasions and ordering that all government agencies cooperate with Kennedy's appointees in easing the transition to the new administration.

Aftermath and Retrospect

A few months after Eisenhower left office, Congress restored to him the lifetime rank of General of the Army. His military service, which had begun at West Point in 1911 and continued until he resigned to run for office in 1952, resumed. As had been the case before 1952, Eisenhower assumed the nonpolitical status of a member of the military, although he now felt free to take a moderately active part in the Republican party and speak out for Republican domestic programs.

Behind the nonpolitical facade, he maintained the same private preoccupation with the detailed working of public affairs that had marked his pre-presidential career. Private diary entries show that Eisenhower was displeased with the statecraft of both Kennedy and Johnson. Nevertheless, he held it to be his responsibility to support them in public on matters affecting national security. Thus, he made a point of being photographed with Kennedy after his successor's efforts to launch an invasion of Cuba failed, and he met unofficially with Johnson, advising him at length on the conduct of the Vietnam conflict. By the time of Nixon's nomination in 1968, Eisenhower was bedridden after multiple heart attacks. He nevertheless broadcast a message to the Republican convention from his hospital bed and advised the Nixon administration until a few weeks before his death on 28 March 1969.

In retrospect, many of Eisenhower's accomplishments seem to have been what from a latter-day perspective might be described as constructively negative. They were outcomes that did not occur, but that might have ensued were it not for his efforts to resolve conflicts and prevent potential catastrophes. The conflict in Korea was ended; further fighting in Indochina was avoided; McCarthy was defused; inflation rates were held down; the Western alliance held fast; and in spite of many circumstances that might have provoked war, the seven-and-a-half years after the Korean settlement saw no American troops in combat.

Eisenhower's dual policy of limiting the expansion of the welfare state and of curbing costly, potentially provocative military escalation was reversed by his successors. The Kennedy administration greatly expanded missile production. (In later years, opponents of an American weapons buildup often cited Eisenhower's warning in his farewell address against the influence of the "military-industrial complex.") And the Johnson administration expanded welfare programs massively. By the final decades of the twentieth century, however, there was renewed interest in curbing domestic expenditures and limiting weaponry. And there was a new fascination with the statecraft of a president who had succeeded in keeping the support of Americans for two full terms. Thus, the Eisenhower presidency seems both to have had important consequences during his time in office and to provide lessons for future presidencies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The most thorough account of Eisenhower's pre-presidential career is Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890–1952 (New York, 1983). Eisenhower provides a crisp, somewhat impersonal account of his wartime leadership in Crusade in Europe (Garden City, N.Y., 1948). For Eisenhower's memoir of his presidency, see his rather dry two-volume report in The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953–1956 and Waging Peace: 1956–1961 (Garden City, N.Y., 1963, 1965). More of a sense of the man is given in his anecdotal but shrewdly reasoned and wry At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends (Garden City, N.Y., 1967). The fullest picture of the private Eisenhower emerges in The Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower (Baltimore, Md., 1970–); close to thirty volumes are anticipated. See also Robert H. Ferrell, ed., The Eisenhower Diaries (New York, 1981).

The most comprehensive scholarly account of Eisenhower's presidency is Stephen A. Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President (New York, 1983). The specialized literature on Eisenhower in general and his presidency in particular is growing rapidly. Early contributions to what by the mid-1980s became a steady flow of contributions include Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (New York, 1982; rev. ed., Baltimore, 1994); Gary W. Reichard, The Reaffirmation of Republicanism: Eisenhower and the Eighty-third Congress (Knoxville, Tenn., 1975); and Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin, Tex., 1982). A good starting point for grasping Eisenhower's world outlook is H. W. Brandes, Jr. Cold Warriors: Eisenhower's Generation and American Foreign Policy (New York, 1988). On Eisenhower's role in sending the first troops to Vietnam see David L. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961 (New York, 1991).

A spate of recent scholarship has produced other specialized studies on details and significant issues of Eisenhower's time in office: Craig Allen, Eisenhower and the Mass Media: Peace, Prosperity, and Prime-Time TV (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993); Isaac Alteras, Eisenhower and Israel: United States—Israeli Relations, 1953–1960 (Gainesville, Fla., 1993); Michael R. Beschloss, MAYDAY: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair (New York, 1986); Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge (New York, 1993); Robert J. Donovan, Confidential Secretary: Ann Whitman's Twenty Years with Eisenhower and Rockefeller (New York, 1988); Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953–1961: Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission (Berkeley, Calif., 1989); R. Alton Lee, Eisenhower and Landrum-Griffin: A Study in Labor-Management Politics (Lexington, Ky., 1990); Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anti-Communism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988); Duane Tananbaum, The Bricker Amendment Controversy: A Test of Eisenhower's Political Leadership (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988); and Raymond J. Saul-nier, Constructive Years: The U.S. Economy Under Eisenhower (Lanham, Md., 1991).

For a valuable review of the growing body of Eisenhower scholarship see Chester J. Pach, Jr., and Elmo Richardson, The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, rev. ed. (Lawrence, Kans., 1991), pp. 263–272. For further sources consult R. Alton Lee, comp., Dwight D. Eisenhower: A Bibliography of His Times and Presidency (Wilmington, Del., 1991).

Recent works include Steve Neal, Harry and Ike: The Partnership That Remade the Postwar World (New York, 2001); Geoffrey Perret, Eisenhower (New York, 1999); William B. Pickett, Eisenhower Decides to Run: Presidential Politics and Cold War Strategy (Chicago, 2000); and Tom A. Wicker, Dwight D. Eisenhower (New York, 2002).

Dwight David Eisenhower

Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969) was leader of the Allied forces in Europe in World War II, commander of NATO, and thirty-fourth president of the United States.

Dwight Eisenhower was born in Denison, Tex., on Oct. 14, 1890, one of seven sons. The family soon moved to Abilene, Kansas. The family was poor, and Eisenhower early learned the virtue of hard work. He graduated from West Point Military Academy in 1915. He was remarkable for his buoyant temperament and his capacity to inspire affection.

Eisenhower married Mamie Doud in 1916. One of the couple's two sons died in infancy; the other, John, followed in his father's footsteps and went to West Point, later resigning from the Army to assist in preparing his father's memoirs.

Army Career

Eisenhower's career in the Army was marked by a slow rise to distinction. He graduated first in his class in 1926 from the Army's Command and General Staff School. Following graduation from the Army War College he served in the office of the chief of staff under Gen. Douglas MacArthur. He became MacArthur's distinguished aid in the Philippines. Returning to the United States in 1939, Eisenhower became chief of staff to the 3d Army. He attracted the attention of Gen. George C. Marshall, U.S. Chief of Staff, by his brilliant conduct of war operations in Louisiana in 1941. When World War II began, Eisenhower became assistant chief of the War Plans Division of the Army General Staff. He assisted in the preparations for carrying the war to Europe and in May of 1942 was made supreme commander of European operations, arriving in London in this capacity in June.

Supreme Commander in Europe

Eisenhower's personal qualities were precisely right for the situation in the months that followed. He had to deal with British generals whose war experience exceeded his own and with a prime minister, Winston Churchill, whose strength and determination were of the first order. Eisenhower's post called for a combination of tact and resolution, for an ability to get along with people and yet maintain his own position as the leader of the Allied forces. In addition to his capacity to command respect and affection, Eisenhower showed high executive quality in his selection of subordinates.

In London, Eisenhower paved the way for the November 1942 invasion of North Africa. Against powerful British reluctance he prepared for the June 1944 invasion of Europe. He chose precisely the day on which massive troop landings in Normandy were feasible, and once the bridgehead was established, he swept forward triumphantly— with one short interruption—to defeat the German armies. By spring 1945, with powerful support from the Russian forces advancing from the east, the war in Europe was ended. Eisenhower became one of the best known men in the United States, and there was talk of a possible political career.

Columbia University and NATO

Eisenhower disavowed any political ambitions, however, and in 1948 he retired from military service to become president of Columbia University. It cannot be said that he filled this role with distinction. Nothing in his training suggested a special capacity to deal with university problems. Yet it was only because of a strong sense of duty that he accepted President Harry Truman's appeal to become the first commander of the newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in December 1950. Here Eisenhower's truly remarkable gifts in dealing with men of various views and strong will were again fully exhibited.

Eisenhower's political views had never been clearly defined. But Republican leaders in the eastern United States found him a highly acceptable candidate for the presidency, perhaps all the more so because he was not identified with any particular wing of the party. After a bitter convention fight against Robert Taft, Eisenhower emerged victorious. In the election he defeated the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, by a tremendous margin.

Eisenhower repeated this achievement in 1956. In 1955 he had suffered a serious stroke, and in 1956 he underwent an operation for ileitis. Behaving with great dignity and making it clear that he would stand for a second term only if he felt he could perform his duties to the full, he accepted renomination and won the election with 477 of the 531 electoral votes and a popular majority of over 9 million.

The President

Eisenhower's strength as a political leader rested almost entirely upon his disinterestedness and his integrity. He had little taste for political maneuvers and was never a strong partisan. His party, which attained a majority in both houses of Congress in 1952, lost control in 1954, and for 6 of 8 years in office the President was compelled to rely upon both Democrats and Republicans. His personal qualities, however, made this easier than it might have been.

Eisenhower did not conceive of the presidency as a positive executiveship, as has been the view of most of the great U.S. presidents. His personal philosophy was never very clearly defined. He was not a dynamic leader; he took a position in the center and drew his strength from that. In domestic affairs he was influenced by his strong and able secretary of the Treasury, George Humphrey. In foreign affairs he leaned heavily upon his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. He delegated wide powers to those he trusted; in domestic affairs his personal assistant, Sherman Adams, exercised great influence. In a sense, Eisenhower's stance above the "battle" no doubt made him stronger.

Domestic Policies

To attempt to classify Eisenhower as liberal or conservative is difficult. He was undoubtedly sympathetic to business interests and had widespread support from them. He had austere views as to fiscal matters and was not generally in favor of enlarging the role of government in economic affairs. Yet he favored measures such as a far-reaching extension of social security, he signed a law fixing a minimum wage, and he recommended the formation of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. After an initial error, he appointed to this post Marion B. Folsom, an outstanding administrator who had been a pioneer in the movement for social security in the 1930s.

Civil Rights

But the most significant development in domestic policy came through the Supreme Court. The President appointed Earl Warren to the post of chief justice. In 1954 the Warren Court handed down a unanimous decision declaring segregation in the schools unconstitutional, giving a new impetus to the civil rights movement.

Eisenhower was extremely cautious in implementing this decision. He saw that it was enforced in the District of Columbia, but in his heart he did not believe in it and thought that it was for the states rather than the Federal government to take appropriate action. Nonetheless, he was compelled to move in 1957 when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus attempted to defy the desegregation decision by using national guardsmen to bar African Americans from entering the schools of Little Rock. The President's stand was unequivocal; he made it clear that he would enforce the law. When Faubus proved obdurate, the President enjoined him and forced the removal of the national guard. When the African Americans admitted were forced by an armed mob to withdraw, the President sent Federal troops to Little Rock and federalized the national guard. A month later the Federal troops were withdrawn. But it was a long time before the situation was completely stabilized.

The President's second term saw further progress in civil rights. In 1957 he signed a measure providing further personnel for the attorney general's office for enforcing the law and barring interference with voting rights. In 1960 he signed legislation strengthening the measure and making resistance to desegregation a Federal offense.

Foreign Policies

In foreign affairs Eisenhower encouraged the strengthening of NATO, at the same time seeking an understanding with the Soviet Union. In 1955 the U.S.S.R. agreed to evacuate Austria, then under four-power occupation, but a Geneva meeting of the powers (Britain, France, the U.S.S.R., and the United States) made little progress on the problem of divided Germany. A new effort at understanding came in 1959, when the Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States. In friendly discussions it was agreed to hold a new international conference in Paris. When that time arrived, however, the Russians had just captured an American plane engaged in spying operations over the Soviet Union (the Gary Powers incident). Khrushchev flew into a tantrum and broke up the conference. When Eisenhower's term ended, relations with the Kremlin were still unhappy.

In the Orient the President negotiated an armistice with the North Koreans to terminate the Korean War begun in 1950. It appears that Eisenhower brought the North Koreans and their Chinese Communist allies to terms by threatening to enlarge the war. He supported the Chinese Nationalists. Dulles negotiated the treaty that created SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) and pledged the United States to consult with the other signatories and to meet any threat of peace in that region "in accordance with their constitutional practices…." This treaty was of special significance with regard to Vietnam, where the French had been battling against a movement for independence. In 1954 Vietnam was divided, the North coming under Communist control, the South (anti-Communist) increasingly supported by the United States.

In the Near East, Eisenhower faced a very difficult situation. In 1956 the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. The government of Israel, probably encouraged by France and Great Britain, launched a preventive war, soon joined by the two great powers. The President and the secretary of state condemned this breach of the peace within the deliberations framework of the United Nations, and the three powers were obliged to sign an armistice. These events occurred at a particularly inauspicious time for the United States, since a popular revolt against the Soviet Union had broken out in Hungary. The hands of the American government were tied, though perhaps in no case could the United States have acted effectively in preventing Soviet suppression of the revolt.

In the Latin American sphere the President was confronted with events of great importance in Cuba. Cuba was ruled by an increasingly brutal and tyrannical president, Fulgencio Batista. In 1958, to mark its displeasure, the American government withdrew military support from the Batista regime. There followed a collapse of the government, and the Cuban leftist leader, Fidel Castro, installed himself in power. Almost from the beginning Castro began a flirtation with the Soviet Union, and relations between Havana and Washington were severed in January 1960.

In the meantime the United States had embarked upon a course which was to cause great embarrassment to Eisenhower's successor. It had encouraged and assisted anti-Castro Cubans to prepare to invade the island and overthrow the Castro regime. Though these plans had not crystallized when Eisenhower left office in 1961, it proved difficult to reverse them, and the result for the John F. Kennedy administration was the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs.

Assessing His Career

It will be difficult for future historians to assess Eisenhower's foreign policy objectively. Ending the Korean War was a substantial achievement. The support of NATO was most certainly in line with American opinion. In the Far East the extension of American commitments can be variously judged. It is fair to Eisenhower to say that only the first steps to the eventual deep involvement in Vietnam were taken during his presidency.

One other aspect of the Eisenhower years must be noted. The President's intention to reduce the military budget at first succeeded. But during his first term the American position with the Soviets deteriorated. Then came the Soviet launching of the Sputnik space probe in 1957—a grisly suggestion of what nuclear weapons might be like in the future. In response, United States policy was altered, and the missile gap had been closed by the time the President left office. Unhappily, the arms race was not ended but attained new intensity in the post-Eisenhower years.

Few presidents have enjoyed greater popularity than Eisenhower or left office as solidly entrenched in public opinion as when they entered it. Eisenhower was not a great orator and did not conceive of the presidency as a post of political leadership. But at the end of his administration, admiration for his integrity, modesty, and strength was undiminished among the mass of the American people.

Eisenhower played at times the role of an elder statesman in Republican politics. His death on March 26, 1969, was the occasion for national mourning and for worldwide recognition of his important role in the events of his time.

Further Reading

Works written by Eisenhower are Crusade in Europe (1948) and his account of the presidency, Mandate for Change, 1953-1956: The White House Years (1963) and Waging Peace, 1956-1961: The White House Years (1965). For a brief summary of Eisenhower's early career see Marquis W. Childs, Eisenhower, Captive Hero: A Critical Study of the General and the President (1958). For the war years see W. B. Smith, Eisenhower's Six Great Decisions (1950). Eisenhower's election to the presidency is covered in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections (4 vols., 1971). Very important is Sherman Adams, Firsthand Report: The Story of the Eisenhower Administration (1961). The most illuminating discussion of the President is Emmett John Hughes, The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years (1963). See also Robert J. Donovan, Eisenhower: The Inside Story (1956), and Merlo J. Pusey, Eisenhower the President (1956). □

Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1890–1969), World War II general and thirty‐fourth president of the United States.Dwight David Eisenhower was born to David and Ida Stover Eisenhower in Denison, Texas, 14 October 1890. The following year, he, his parents, and two brothers moved to Abilene, Kansas, his father's childhood home. After graduating from high school, Eisenhower received appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and in 1915, he was commissioned second lieutenant. Following U.S. entry into World War I, he commanded the U.S. army tank corps training center at Camp Colt near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In the postwar years, Eisenhower held staff positions under the most accomplished and influential officers in the U.S. Army, including Generals John J. Pershing, Fox Conner, and Douglas MacArthur. In the process, he became a military strategist, rising slowly through the ranks from major to brigadier general. In World War II, Gen. George C. Marshall, army chief of staff, appointed Eisenhower to command of the War Plans Division (later the Operations Division) of the Army General Staff; then to supreme command sequentially of the Allied invasions of North Africa, Sicily and Italy, and of Normandy, France, as well as being Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

Eisenhower accepted the German unconditional surrender for the Western Allies on 8 May 1945. Returning to the United States as a five‐star general (general of the army), he accepted appointment as army chief of staff. After overseeing the demobilization of the army and writing a best‐selling war memoir, Crusade in Europe, in 1948, Eisenhower retired from the army and became president of Columbia University.

Not long after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, President Harry S. Truman called him back to active duty as the first supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a position Eisenhower retained until May 1952, when he announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. He was elected thirty‐fourth president of the United States and served two terms. His health became a problem beginning in the mid‐1960s, and he died on 28 March 1969.

A man with two distinguished careers—one as a professional soldier and the other as political leader and statesman—Eisenhower was the subject of more than the usual amount of controversy, much of which was unnecessary. The first area of controversy concerned his performance as Supreme Allied Commander. American critics observed his swift rise through the ranks after the outbreak of World War II despite a lack of combat experience and erroneously attributed it mainly to “Ike's” genial manner. The British, especially Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery, whose army had defeated the Germans and Italians at El Alamein in 1942, questioned Eisenhower's strategy for the Battle for Germany. Instead of Eisenhower's planned broad advance, aimed at surrounding the Ruhr industrial heartland and destroying the German Army, Montgomery advocated a narrow (“pencil thrust”) aimed across the northern European plain at Berlin. Eisenhower had read military history, including the works of the Prussian military intellectual Carl von Clausewitz, and had studied the art of war under the supervision of the leading American strategists. Accordingly, he stayed with his objective and methods of attaining it. The British High Command later admitted—and American historians agree—that Eisenhower's approach was correct. Like most commanders, he had some setbacks, but his achievements were large. They included the movements that turned back the unforeseen German attacks at the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia in February 1943, and at the Ardennes—the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. That month, Congress bestowed on him a fifth star and the rank of general of the army.

The Eisenhower presidency, in retrospect one of the most successful of the modern era, also involved controversy, reflected by the fact that not long after he left office, historians ranked him only twenty‐second in polls of presidential effectiveness. Many contemporary critics focus on his frequent relaxations, golf and trout fishing. And after his heart attack in 1955 and a slight stroke in 1957, pundits doubted his stamina. They condemned his failure publicly to repudiate the anti‐Communist demagogue, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. Civil rights advocates criticized the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 for not going far enough. Other critics incorrectly said Eisenhower turned over U.S. foreign policy to John Foster Dulles, his secretary of state. The Soviet launching of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, testing of intercontinental missiles, and shooting down of an American U‐2 reconnaissance airplane (1960) brought charges that Eisenhower had weakened American defenses, allowing an alleged “missile gap” to develop with the Soviet Union. The president, they also charged, used the Central Intelligence Agency to put the United States on the side of right‐wing dictators in Third World nations such as Iran and Guatemala.

More recently, history has been kinder to the Eisenhower presidency. Eisenhower retained many of the approaches to social, economic, and foreign policy that the American people had come to accept during the Great Depression and World War II, while at the same time altering those laws and policies that discouraged economic growth and stifled initiative. Congress, with administration prodding, strengthened and expanded Social Security, authorized the national system of interstate highways and the St. Lawrence Seaway, and brought Alaska and Hawaii into the Union. The economy flourished, the gross national product growing 70 percent to $520 billion from $365 billion. As a Republican and a conservative, Eisenhower received criticism from the liberals. But since he refused to roll back the social policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he also irritated the right wing of the GOP. To the dismay of both, he refused to confront McCarthy, working instead to bring “McCarthyism” to an end by terminating executive branch cooperation with the senator's scattershot investigations. And though Eisenhower doubted the capacity of federal legislation to bring racial justice, his appointment of Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the enactment of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 encouraged some hope for blacks against discrimination. In his national security policies, Eisenhower obtained a negotiated armistice in Korea, increased U.S. military readiness, especially in airpower, and completed his predecessor's policy of containing Communist expansion by establishing a worldwide system of treaties and alliances. He increased U.S. assistance to South Vietnam but refused to authorize the use of U.S. combat forces there. The archival record shows that Eisenhower, not Dulles, was in active charge of U.S. foreign policy. The CIA did assist undemocratic forces in the Third World, but the allegations about a “missile gap” were without merit. The United States had a commanding lead in missile development when Eisenhower left office. By the 1980s, he had moved to ninth place in the ranking of presidential performance.
[See also Cold War; Commander in Chief, President as; D‐Day Landing; Eisenhower Doctrine; V‐2 Incident; World War I: Military and Diplomatic Course; World War II: Military and Diplomatic Course.]

Bibliography

Martin Blumenson and and James L. Stokesbury , Masters of the Art of Command, 1975.
Freed I. Greenstein , The Hidden‐Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader, 1982.
Stephen E. Ambrose , Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President‐Elect, 1983.
Stephen E. Ambrose , Eisenhower: The President, 1984.
R. Alton Lee , Dwight D. Eisenhower: A Bibliography of His Times and Presidency, 1991.
William B. Pickett , Dwight David Eisenhower and American Power, 1995.

William B. Pickett

Dwight David Eisenhower , 1890–1969, American general and 34th President of the United States, b. Denison, Tex.; his nickname was "Ike."

Early Career

When he was two years old, his family moved to Abilene, Kans., where he was reared. He entered (1911) West Point and graduated in 1915. In 1916 he married Mamie Geneva Doud. In World War I, Eisenhower was commanding officer at Camp Colt, Gettysburg, Pa., a training camp for the new U.S. Army tank corps. After the war he was stationed (1922–24) in the Panama Canal Zone, was a member of the American Battle Monuments Commission, and was assistant executive (1929–33) in the office of the Assistant Secretary of War. From 1935 to 1940 he was in the Philippines, where he served as an aide to Douglas MacArthur .

General during World War II

Eisenhower's impressive performance in the 1941 army maneuvers led to his assignment in Washington, D.C. as chief of operations (1942) and preceded his meteoric rise to the top as Allied military commander of World War II. In June, 1942, General Eisenhower was named U.S. commander of the European theater of operations. He commanded U.S. forces in the North African landings (Nov., 1942) and in Feb., 1943, became chief of all Allied forces in North Africa. After successfully directing the invasions of Sicily (July, 1943) and Italy (Sept.), he was called (Dec.) to England to be supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. He was largely responsible for the cooperation between the British, American, and other forces and for the integration of land, sea, and air forces in the great battle for the European continent. His own account of the Allied defeat of Germany was published in book form as Crusade in Europe (1948).

In Dec., 1944, he was made general of the army (five-star general), and in 1945 he commanded the U.S. occupation forces in Germany. In Nov., 1945, he became chief of staff of the U.S. Army and advocated the unification of the U.S. armed forces and universal military training. He resigned (Feb., 1948) as chief of staff to become (June) president of Columbia Univ.

Presidency

Eisenhower was sought as a nominee for presidency of the United States in 1948 but rejected the offers made him. In Dec., 1950, he obtained a leave of absence as president of Columbia to become Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR). After he negotiated basic commitments from member countries to build up the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization , he retired from active duty (1952) with the army to campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. With the support of Republican liberals and internationalists, he defeated his chief rival, Senator Robert A. Taft , for the nomination. His popularity as a World War II hero, and his promise to end the Korean War brought Eisenhower an easy victory over his Democratic opponent, Adlai E. Stevenson , and he took office on Jan. 20, 1953.

First Term

Eisenhower soon fulfilled his campaign pledge when an armistice was signed (July, 1953) in Korea after he threatened to use nuclear weapons. Eisenhower and his secretary of state John Foster Dulles continued the Truman administration policy of containing Communism and of financing the French attempt to maintain control of Indochina. Defense treaties were signed with South Korea (1953) and Taiwan (1954), and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization was formed in 1954 to halt Communist expansion in Asia. After the French lost the battle of Dienbienphu and withdrew from Indochina, Eisenhower sent military aid to South Vietnam. He also tried, after the death of Soviet leader Josef Stalin in 1953, to ease cold war tensions. His "atoms for peace" plan and his statements at the Geneva summit conference in July, 1955, were widely heralded.

At home, Eisenhower's record was less distinguished. He failed to oppose publicly Sen. Joe McCarthy . The predominance of business executives in his cabinet lent a conservative tone to his administration, while his concern for a balanced budget at a time when defense expenditures were rising rapidly, as well as his commitment to limiting the role of the government in the economy, kept Eisenhower from expanding the social welfare programs begun by his Democratic predecessors. Despite an attack of coronary thrombosis in Sept., 1955, he was reelected over Adlai Stevenson in 1956 by an even wider margin than in 1952.

Second Term

During his second term, desegregation became one of the primary issues on the national agenda. Although personally unenthusiastic about desegregation, he sent federal troops to Little Rock, Ark. to enforce a court-ordered school desegregation decision (Sept., 1957). His administration supported the civil-rights legislation that passed Congress (1957, 1960); and he prohibited discriminatory practices in the District of Columbia and in federal facilities such as navy yards and hospitals.

International tensions increased during his second term. In 1957 he promulgated the so-called Eisenhower Doctrine, in which he proposed to send military and economic aid to any Middle Eastern nation requesting it in order to bolster that region against Communist aggression. Pursuant to that doctrine, he sent U.S. Marines to Lebanon in July, 1958. Eisenhower hosted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the latter's visit to the United States in 1959. When they met at the Paris summit conference in the following year, the tone was less friendly; Khrushchev denounced Eisenhower for permitting high-altitude espionage flights over the Soviet Union and walked out of the summit. Fidel Castro's Communist regime in Cuba exacerbated cold war tensions, and In 1961, Eisenhower broke diplomatic relations with Cuba and authorized preparations for an invasion (see Bay of Pigs Invasion ).

Later Years

In his farewell address as president, Eisenhower warned against the influence of the growing "military-industrial complex." After leaving the White House, he remained generally aloof from politics, although he did occasionally comment on national issues and campaign for Republican candidates. In 1962 the Eisenhower presidential library was dedicated at Abilene, Kans.

Bibliography

See Eisenhower's memoirs of his years in the White House, Mandate for Change (1963) and Waging Peace (1965); his papers, ed. by A. D. Chandler, Jr., and S. E. Ambrose (5 vol., 1970); memoir, General Ike (2003), by his son, J. S. D. Eisenhower; biographies by H. S. Parmet (1972), P. Lyon (1974), S. E. Ambrose, (2 vol., 1985–90), his grandson, D. Eisenhower (1986), G. Perret (1999), and T. Wicker (2002); S. Adams, Firsthand Report (1961); E. K. G. Sixsmith, Eisenhower as Military Commander (1973); C. D'Este, Eisenhower: A Soldier's Life (2002); M. Perry, Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace (2007); S. Weintraub, 15 Stars: Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall (2007); J. W. Jordan, Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, and the Partnership That Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe (2011).

EISENHOWER, DWIGHT D. 1890-1969

Supreme allied military commander (1943-1945)

Second Act

Dwight D. Eisenhower's military career in World War II belies F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation that there are no second acts in American life. By 1938 Eisenhower's career was by any objective standard over, and his ambitions were thwarted. By 1950 he was the most recognizable figure in the United States and a shoo-in to the presidency in 1952. Between those two dates he served as supreme Allied military commander in World War II and president of Columbia University. As it did for so many Americans, World War II gave him a second chance, and he used his talent for organization and administration to lead the United States to victory and himself to the pinnacle of power and success.

Early Career

Eisenhower, or "Ike," as he was often called, grew up in modest means in the farming community of Abilene, Kansas. An athlete and a good student with a penchant for history and math, he won an appointment to West Point in 1910. His early military career was unexceptional; for a man of his high ambitions, his rise in the ranks was painfully slow. Although he earned a Distinguished Service Medal for his organization of the Tank Corps, he missed service in World War I. He earned a reputation as a competent administrator; compared to more flamboyant soldiers, such as George S. Patton or Douglas MacArthur, he was overshadowed. He served in unglamorous postings in Panama and the Philippines. By 1938, forty-eight years old and still a lieutenant colonel, he contemplated retirement. It seemed his career was over.

War

The outbreak of World War II presented Eisenhower with an opportunity he quickly seized. He argued that this war, more than previous conflicts, would require careful planning and logistical precision—skills at which he excelled. He also possessed a keen political sense and a shrewd judgment of personal character, traits honed during his labors under MacArthur in the Philippines. Both abilities served him well during the war. Better than most American officers during the conflict, he understood the intertwined political and military character of the war. Unique among the high-ranking staff of the Allies, he possessed the temperament and focus necessary to juggle the competing imperatives of often mercurial generals, such as Patton and British general Bernard Montgomery. Eisenhower's talents were noted and prized early on by Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, who assigned him to the War Plans Division of the General Staff after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. By February 1942 Eisenhower headed the division; by summer he was on his way to England as head of U.S. forces in Europe. In November 1941 he supervised Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa, and went on to lead the invasion of Italy. On 15 January 1943 he traveled to Casablanca, Morocco, to apprise British prime minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt on European theater operations. On 10 February 1943 he became a four-star general, the highest rank in the army at the time. He was also appointed supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, the combined military agency responsible for liberating Europe from the Nazis. At fifty-two, Eisenhower had arrived.

Operation Overlord

Eisenhower's place in world history was set by nightfall, 6 June 1944. On that date, D-Day, he successfully began Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of France that within a year would end the war in Europe. A monumental seaborne assault across the English Channel, Operation Overlord had been nearly two years in the making, and he had been responsible for it from the start. It was a task that would over-whelm most men. As part of the assault force and in supporting positions, he had to coordinate the activities of 2.8 million personnel; 5,000 ships and landing craft would be needed to cross the channel; 14,000 land vehicles were to be transported for use in France; 14,500 tons of supplies were to be landed on the first day of the invasion; 7,000 aircraft would support the assault; and in preparation for the landing Allied air corps would drop 76,000 tons of bombs and 23,000 airborne troops on Normandy, the area of France where the invasion would take place. The logistical problem involved in a cross-channel invasion was akin to moving a city the size of Madison, Wisconsin—including its vehicles and buildings—sixty to one hundred miles in one night. Against the troops, moreover, would be arrayed the hardened defenses of Hitler's Fortress Europa, the troops of Erwin Rommel, and German numerical superiority. Yet by 12 June the Normandy invasion had been so successful that Eisenhower and Marshall crossed the channel to inspect the beachhead. What Churchill had called "the most difficult and complicated operation that has ever taken place" had been accomplished. Eleven months later Eisenhower accepted the unconditional surrender of Germany in a school in Rheims, France.

President

Eisenhower's low-key, confident approach to victory in war made him a folk hero in America. He was an immediate postwar political prospect, but he opted for a slightly less pressured vocation as army chief of staff under President Harry S Truman from 1945 to 1948. In 1948 he accepted the presidency of Columbia University in New York. No academic, however, he quickly returned to public life. In 1950 he assumed command of the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In 1952, as a result of continuous prompting by friends and associates, he ran for president. Enormously popular with the public, he won easily and was reelected in 1956. Although during the presidential campaign of 1960 Eisenhower's administration was portrayed as vapid, almost geriatric—a portrayal reinforced by his 1955 heart attack—Eisenhower proved a solid, cautious president. Through diplomacy he ended the Korean War; through sound management he sustained a prosperous economy; by statesmanship he avoided war at a time when the Cold War threatened to escalate into nuclear combat. In light of subsequent events, perhaps his greatest accomplishment was to avoid engaging U.S. military forces in combat in Vietnam, as was proposed in 1954. When he died in 1969, his presidency was widely considered the most successful of the postwar administrations, and his sober leadership remains his legacy.

Source:

Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990).

Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1890–1969), U.S. army general, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, and thirty‐fourth president of the United States.Dwight David Eisenhower was born in Denison, Texas, but spent his youth in Abilene, Kansas. After high school he spent two years working before entering West Point, from which he was commissioned in 1915. The following year he married Mamie Doud; they had one son, John.

Eisenhower remained in the United States during World War I. In the 1920s he served in Panama and attended both the General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. From 1930 to 1935, he was assistant secretary of war and then chief of staff to General Douglas MacArthur in Washington, D.C. In 1936 he accompanied MacArthur to the Philippines, but returned to America when war broke out in Europe in 1939.

Eisenhower rose meteorically during World War II. His performance in the 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers earned him a summons to Washington to assist Army Chief of Staff George Marshall. In 1942 he was given command of American and Allied forces in North Africa; his rout of General Erwin Rommel's forces led President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to select him to lead the Allied invasion of Normandy (Operation Overlord). Eisenhower's key decision—to invade on 6 June 1944 (D‐Day) despite bad weather—proved critical to the operation's success. Although he was criticized by second‐guessers, most notably for allowing Russian troops to liberate Berlin, his strategic decisions have withstood retrospective scrutiny.

After brief service as army chief of staff, Eisenhower returned to civilian life in 1948 as president of Columbia University. In 1951, President Harry S. Truman appointed him as commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Europe. A year later, moderate Republicans successfully pressed Eisenhower to run in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary; he did well there and in other primaries. At the Republican party convention in July, his forces outmaneuvered those of Senator Robert Taft to secure the nomination, thus launching the “nonpolitical” general's political career. With Senator Richard M. Nixon as his vice presidential running‐mate, he easily defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson in the general election.

As president, Eisenhower was less conservative than liberals feared, but more so than moderates hoped. A committed internationalist, he supported the United Nations and engaged in a series of historic summit meetings with Soviet leaders. His differences with extreme conservatives included opposition to the communist‐baiting Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy. Although criticized at the time for his seemingly passive role, Eisenhower worked subtly to undermine McCarthy even while remaining publicly neutral. In foreign policy, he successfully brokered an armistice ending the Korean War, and presided over a military build‐up (mostly airpower and nuclear weaponry) while holding the federal budget virtually constant. He refused to send American troops to aid the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet military rule, but acted decisively in invading Lebanon in 1958 to stabilize its prowestern government. His appeal across the political spectrum was reflected in his sweeping reelection in 1956, again defeating Stevenson.

Eisenhower sought to moderate American tendencies to over‐militarize the Cold War, defying public pressures to build up U.S. defenses after the Soviets launched the world's first space satellite, Sputnik, in October 1957. In domestic policy, he steered a moderately conservative course, opposing public power and direct support for farmers and labor, while compromising with a Democratic Congress. Although cool to the civil rights movement, he did send federal troops to Arkansas in 1957 when Governor Orval Faubus defined a court order to integrate a Little Rock high school. A dramatic confrontation with the Soviets over the downing of an American surveillance (U–2) plane in 1960 only increased Eisenhower's popularity. His January 1961 farewell address, warning against the “military‐industrial complex,” proved to be one of his more enduring political contributions.

After leaving the White House, Eisenhower avoided partisan activities. In 1964 he disappointed Republican moderates by refusing until the last minute to support their efforts to stave off Barry Goldwater's presidential nomination.

A major figure of the twentieth century, Eisenhower was one of those rare American presidents whose reputation rests more on his prepresidential achievements than on his activities as president or afterward. His strategic decisions and political acumen are widely viewed as crucial to Allied victory in World War II. Still, his accomplishments as president were significant. As the first Republican to occupy the White House after the New Deal, he helped to legitimize the liberal political revolution it represented. He also introduced a staff system to the White House that became the model for succeeding presidents. Finally, the peace (after Korea), prosperity, and balanced federal budgets that characterized his White House years underscore the success of his moderate leadership.
See also Conservatism; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Fifties, The; Foreign Relations; Liberalism; Military Service Academies; Military, The; New Deal Era, The; Nuclear Strategy; Nuclear Weapons; Space Program.

Bibliography

Piers Brendon , Ike: The Life and Times of Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1987.
Stephen E. Ambrose , Eisenhower: Soldier and President, 1990.
Robert Bowie and and Richard Immerman , Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy, 1998.

Gary W. Reichard

EISENHOWER, DWIGHT DAVID

Dwight David Eisenhower achieved prominence in military and political careers and was the thirty-fourth president of the United States.

Eisenhower was born October 14, 1890, in Denison, Texas. A graduate of West Point Military Academy in 1915, he served during world war i as officer in charge of Camp Colt, which was located at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and which served as the center of training for the U.S. Army Tank Division.

From 1922 to 1924, Eisenhower was assigned to a post in the Panama Canal Zone. Five years later, he served as an administrator in the Assistant Secretary of War Office and acted in this capacity until 1933. In 1935, he was stationed in the Philippine Islands, and, for the next five years, he displayed his exceptional military expertise. As a result of his achievements, Eisenhower—promoted to general—became chief of operations in Washington, D.C., in 1942.

Throughout the years of world war ii, Eisenhower continued to demonstrate his military proficiency. In 1942, he was in charge of the battle operations in Europe. He subsequently directed the U.S. maneuvers in North Africa and, in 1943, commanded the Allied armies there. Later that year, he supervised the victorious attacks on Sicily and the mainland of Italy. As a result of these successes, he was transferred to England to serve as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. He was instrumental in coordinating the armed services of the Allies and in directing the use of land, sea, and air battle units in the war maneuvers in Europe.

In 1944, Eisenhower was awarded the prestigious rank of five-star general. He was assigned to Germany the following year, and, subsequently, became Army chief of staff.

Eisenhower resigned as chief of staff in 1948 and entered the education field, serving as president of Columbia University. Two years later, he returned to the military and established a defense corps as part of the north atlantic treaty organization, which was composed of countries determined to prevent Soviet aggression.

"You don't promote the cause of peace by talking only to people with whom you agree."
—Dwight Eisenhower

In 1952, Eisenhower officially ended his association with the military and began a brilliant political career. As a Republican, he campaigned for the office of U.S. president against Democrat adlai stevenson; he was victorious, primarily because of his impressive military achievements and his pledge to end the war in Korea. As president, Eisenhower was instrumental in the achievement of peace in Korea in 1953. His main concern was the growing threat of the spread of communism, and he adopted a policy—similar to that of predecessor Harry S. Truman—to keep communism in check. As part of this program, the United States formed defense treaties with South Korea and Formosa,

now Taiwan; South Vietnam received military assistance; and, in 1954, the southeast asia treaty organization (SEATO) was created to prevent the spread of communism in Far Eastern countries.

Despite Eisenhower's intent to stop the growth of communism, he sought to reach a harmonious relationship with the Soviets, as was evidenced by his speeches at the 1955 Geneva Summit Conference. Participants included Eisenhower, Nikolai Bulganin, and Chairman Nikita Krushchev from the Soviet Union, Anthony Eden from Great Britain, and Edgar Faure from France. No agreements were reached, but foreign relations were strengthened.

In 1956, Eisenhower again defeated Adlai Stevenson for the presidency. During this administration he became a proponent of the civil rights movement and ordered the federal militia to Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to ensure the enforcement of desegregation of schools; in addition, he was responsible for civil rights legislation.

Eisenhower's second administration was again hampered by global tensions, and he issued the Eisenhower Doctrine in response to these pressures. This program, drafted in 1957, provided that any country in the Middle East requiring military and economic assistance to counteract the threat of communism would receive it upon request. In 1958, the doctrine was put to its first test in Lebanon when the U.S. Marine Corps was dispatched to that country.

World tensions continued through the latter years of his second term, and in 1960, Eisenhower was criticized publicly by Soviet leader Krushchev for condoning espionage flights over Soviet territory. A year later, Eisenhower severed relations with Cuba after Communist leader Fidel Castro assumed Cuban leadership.

In addition to his presidential and military achievements, Eisenhower wrote three noteworthy publications: Crusade in Europe (1948), a chronicle of the defeat of Germany in World War II by the Allies; Mandate for Change (1963), an account of his years as president; and Waging Peace (1965). Eisenhower died March 28, 1969, in Washington, D.C.

further readings

Perret, Geoffrey. 1999. Eisenhower. New York: Random House.

Wicker, Tom. 2002. Dwight D. Eisenhower. New York: Times Books.

cross-references

Dulles, John Foster; School Desegregation; Warren Court.

Eisenhower, Dwight D. 1890-1969

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, a five-star general and the thirty-fourth president of the United States, was born in Texas and raised in Abilene, Kansas. He entered the United States Military Academy as a member of the class of 1915, later known as “The Class the Stars Fell On” for the record number of general officers it produced. As a West Point cadet, he was best known for his football skills and disregard for military discipline.

His first assignment was at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, where he met and married Mamie Doud. When the United States entered World War I (1914–1918), Eisenhower expected orders to Europe; instead, he commanded a training base near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Certain his lack of combat duty meant the end of his career, his fears were compounded by the rejection of his proposals for the role of tanks in future warfare. Those concerns diminished under the mentorship of Brigadier General Fox Conner, who arranged to have Eisenhower assigned to his staff in Panama. He encouraged and inspired Eisenhower, and ensured his selection to attend the Army’s staff college, where Eisenhower graduated first in his class. In the 1930s Eisenhower held key political-military posts under Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur. He chafed at MacArthur’s control, and frequently requested reassignment. In 1939 MacArthur finally released Eisenhower for duty with troops.

Two weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall summoned Eisenhower to serve as an Army war planner. Six months later, Eisenhower was selected to command all Allied forces in Europe. At the war’s end, Eisenhower was a five-star general, chief of staff of the Army, and an international hero touted as a possible Democratic candidate for president. In 1949 Eisenhower was named president of Columbia University. Despite his lack of academic credentials, he initiated important curriculum changes and established new academic programs. Eisenhower was recalled to active duty in 1950 to serve as Supreme Allied Commander–Europe.

Eisenhower was again urged to run for president in 1952, this time as a Republican challenging isolationist Senator Robert Taft for the GOP nomination. Taft was a strong candidate, but a compromise between those urging fiscal restraint and those promoting internationalist foreign policy resulted in Eisenhower’s nomination. The Korean War stalemate, and Eisenhower’s campaign promise to “go to Korea,” contributed significantly to his victory over Democrat Adlai Stevenson.

The cold war was President Eisenhower’s dominant foreign policy challenge. His efforts built a cohesive Allied defense capability in Europe, and his 1954 refusal to commit U.S. troops to support the French in Indochina is still considered one of his wisest decisions. His handling of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and his use of the Central Intelligence Agency in covert operations were among his less successful policies. Eisenhower’s domestic successes included the interstate highway system. Following the Soviet launch of Sputnik, Eisenhower refocused the space program and increased support for math and science education. He used federal troops in Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce court-ordered school desegregation. Eisenhower would not, however, support a broader, proactive civil rights agenda.

Eisenhower was reelected in 1956 despite concerns about a heart attack suffered a year earlier. His second term was marked by foreign policy disappointments in Cuba, heightened Soviet–U.S. tensions, and charges of corruption against his chief of staff. In his final address as president, he warned against the influence “sought or unsought” by the “military-industrial complex”—an imperative of the cold war with “grave implications.” Eisenhower died in 1969 and is buried in Abilene, Kansas, near the small home where he was raised.

SEE ALSO Cold War; Cuban Revolution; Desegregation; Foreign Policy; Military-Industrial Complex; Nixon, Richard M.; Presidency, The; World War II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ambrose, Stephen. 1983. Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890–1952. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Ambrose, Stephen. 1984. Eisenhower: The President. New York: Simon and Schuster.

D’Este, Carlo. 2002. Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life. New York: Henry Holt.

Greenstein, Fred I. 1994. The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Jacobs, Travis Beal. 2001. Eisenhower at Columbia. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Pickett, William B. 2000. Eisenhower Decides to Run: Presidential Politics and Cold War Strategy. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.

Tudda, Chris. 2006. The Truth Is Our Weapon: The Rhetorical Diplomacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Jay M. Parker

EISENHOWER, DWIGHT D. 1890-1969

President of the united states, 1953-1961

Ike's Presidency Reconsidered

Dwight D. (" Ike") Eisenhower was once portrayed as a dull, somewhat lazy president; in a 1962 poll of historians he was ranked twenty-second of thirty-one presidents. In the minds of more-recent historians, however, Ike is considered to have been a shrewd, moderate, sensible, deeply patriotic man—and today is ranked often among the top ten of U.S. presidents. Eisenhower could campaign with Richard Nixon but distance himself from Nixon's partisan and often inflammatory rhetoric. Eisenhower, above all others, could warn of the threats posed by the "Military-Industrial Complex" at a time when the American public was responding favorably to calls for increased defense spending.

Role as President

His reputation as a donothing president in part was due to his belief in governmental noninterference in state and local politics. He did not believe that as president his role was to initiate social change. Instead, he believed his job was to represent the voice of reason in warning against federal spending sprees and peacefully ushering the United States through dangerous times. Faced with challenges from the Democrats to increase military spending after the Soviets launched Sputnik, Ike resisted. Criticized for not doing enough on civil rights, Eisenhower nevertheless remained determined to let the social movement follow its own natural course. (In one case, however, he did bring presidential dictum to bear on state matters by sending federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas. He maintained that he did so to restore social order rather than to enforce a federal mandate.) Having inherited high price levels from Truman, Ike demanded and received budgets nearly in balance, and twice the administration even ran surpluses.

Government Continues to Grow

Yet despite his proclamation in 1950 that further growth of government was "a creeping paralysis" and a greater danger to freedom than the atomic bomb, government contined to grow during his years in office. Vast new bureaucracies such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were created. Ike signed legislation ensuring the expansion of federal power, such as the National Highway Act. Eisenhower presided over the creation of a new cabinet-level department, Health, Education, and Welfare. Although he publicly denounced the "Military-Industrial Complex" at the end of his second term, his foreign policies had entangled the United States in Vietnam (then called Indochina) and had permitted the Communist takeover of Cuba. He kept the United States out of Egypt during the Suez Crisis and out of Hungary in 1956, yet his perceived complacency about the new Soviet missile threat—which terrified most Americans—left him open to charges that he had allowed a "missile gap" to develop. Ironically, when Ike scored successes—by limiting government's role in shaping the economy, for example—they were credited to factors outside the White House.

Post-Eisenhower Era

After Ike's presidency, the federal bureaucracy, already primed to grow dramatically, exploded with the dual stimuli of the war on poverty and the war in Vietnam. Eisenhower died in 1969, at the peak of the Vietnam War, a conflict whose embers he had at least fanned a little.

Source:

Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).

Eisenhower, Dwight David ( ‘Ike’ Eisenhower) (b. 14 Oct. 1890, d. 28 Mar. 1969). 34th US President 1953–61 Born in Denison, Texas, he grew up in Kansas and graduated from the Military Academy in West Point in 1915. During World War I he commanded a tank-training unit and had numerous assignments between the wars, including service with Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines. In 1942 General George Marshall selected him over 366 more senior officers to be commander of US troops in Europe. As a lieutenant-general he went on to command Operation Torch in November 1942, the Allied landing in North Africa (North African campaigns). In December 1943 he was appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces. As such he was responsible for the planning and execution of the D-Day landings and subsequent campaigns in Europe. His tact, optimism, and command of bureaucratic politics enabled him to secure inter-Allied collaboration and to avoid confrontation. After the war he retired to the USA, where he was courted by Republicans at the same time as Democrats. The latter feared Truman's defeat, and offered him the 1948 Democrat nomination for President, which he refused. In 1951 he was persuaded to return to active service as supreme commander of NATO, a command he held for fifteen months, finally retiring from the army in June 1952.

He was elected President as a Republican in November 1952, with Richard Nixon as Vice-President. In July 1953 he fulfilled his promise to seek an end to the Korean War by signing an armistice. The first Republican President since 1933, Eisenhower considered himself a ‘dynamic conservative’, attempting to encourage business through tax cuts and the decrease of federal control in the economy, while expressing a concern for social welfare. His administration became a bystander in the right-wing ‘witch hunt’ of Senator McCarthy, and he has been criticized by posterity for his public neutrality in the episode. Eisenhower's record on civil rights was moderate, culminating in the important decision to appoint Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, as well as the relatively moderate 1957 Civil Rights Act. In 1957 he used federal troops to quell segregationist violence at Little Rock, Arkansas. In foreign policy, Eisenhower increased US political commitment in Indochina following the defeat of France at Dien Bien Phu, though he resolutely opposed the sending of US troops into the area. With Dulles as Secretary of State, the NATO and ANZUS pacts were extended by the SEATO Pact of 1954. Keenly interested in foreign affairs throughout his Presidency, he was embarrassed in May 1960, when he publicly denied that a US high-altitude reconnaissance U-2 plane was shot down over Soviet territory. The Soviets proved him wrong by producing evidence, and publicly exposed his lie. In the 1960 presidential contest between Nixon and John F. Kennedy, he refused to throw his full support behind his Vice President (Kennedy was elected by a narrow margin).

Eisenhower, Dwight David (1890–1969) U.S. Army general and 34th president of the United States (1953–61), born in Denison, Texas, and raised in Abilene, Kansas. He graduated from West Point in 1915, but saw no action in World War I, in which he was in charge of training camps. Eisenhower held various staff assignments in the interwar years, but his military career began to rise when he was named to head the War Plans Division (later Operations Division) of the War Department in 1941, responsible for planning the strategy of the war. He took command of American forces in Great Britain in 1942 and was soon named supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, leading the invasion of French North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. He was promoted to four-star general (1943) and made supreme commander for Operation Overlord (1944), the invasion of France. Eisenhower was recognized as an outstanding strategist, adept at handling complex joint operations. In 1944 he was promoted to five-star General of the Army. He led the Battle of the Bulge (1944–45), the greatest single battle ever fought by the U.S. Army, before moving into Germany. After receiving the unconditional German surrender (May 1945), Eisenhower served as head of the occupation in the American zone for several months until he was named chief of staff of the U.S. Army (1945), a post which he held until his retirement in 1948. After two years as president of Columbia University, in 1951 he was sent to Paris by President Harry S. Truman as the first supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, where he organized the beginning of a NATO armed force and advocated the creation of a united Europe. In 1952 Eisenhower successfully ran for president on the Republican ticket, with Richard M. Nixon as his running mate. During his two terms (1953–61), he negotiated a truce to end the Korean War (1953); launched the interstate highway system (1956); reduced spending on conventional weapons while building more bombs and bombers; and constantly searched for peace with the Soviets. At the Geneva Conference in 1954, together with secretary of state John Foster Dulles, he agreed to the division of Vietnam and the creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), which formed the basis for later U.S. involvement in Vietnam. When the governor of Arkansas defied court-ordered school desegregation, Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock to enforce the decree (1957). In 1958 he sent U.S. troops into Lebanon in accordance with his earlier proclaimed Eisenhower Doctrine. The last year of his presidency was devoted to the pursuit of peace, but a planned summit conference in May 1960 was thwarted by the U-2 incident. His farewell address (1961) warned of “unwarranted influence” on government “by the military-industrial complex.”

Eisenhower, Dwight David (known as ‘ Ike’) (1890–1969) US general and Republican statesman, 34th President of the USA (1953–61). In World War II he was Commander-in-Chief of Allied forces in North Africa and Italy (1942–43) and Supreme Commander of Allied Expeditionary Forces in western Europe (1943–45). As President, he adopted a hard line towards Communism both in his domestic and foreign policy; in the USA an extreme version of this was reflected in McCarthyism.