The Age of Eisenhower

by William I Hitchcock

  At Columbia he and Mamie moved into the newly refurbished presidential mansion at 60 Morningside Drive, a six-story home built in 1912 by McKim, Mead and White. Eisenhower had no idea what lay in store for him as a university president; the only man he knew at Columbia was Lou Little, the football coach, who had once led a Georgetown squad against an Ike-coached Army team in 1924. He didn’t even know what to wear: Thomas Watson had to send Ike a private tailor to provide him with a wardrobe of suits of a style and quality consistent with his new civilian status.

  Eisenhower attacked the job with his usual energy and impatience, but he found academia a strange new world. He thought he would diagnose Columbia’s problems and fix them simply by drawing up a plan and ordering others to carry it out. It surely could not be as difficult as invading Normandy. And yet he found he was temperamentally unsuited to this sort of work. He wanted to move fast; the university moved slowly. He wanted decision-making power in his hands; the trustees often derailed his plans. He expected it would be easy to call on great men for significant donations; these proved hard to secure. The faculty expected Ike to open the president’s home for social occasions; instead he and Mamie entertained only army friends and old acquaintances, shunning the academic community. Before long it was clear that Eisenhower did not fit in.

  Global affairs also distracted him from his academic duties. In June 1948, just a few weeks after Eisenhower had unpacked his bags in New York City, the Soviet Union triggered a major crisis in Berlin, cutting off road and rail access into the western portions of the occupied city. It was the first major eruption of the cold war, and it brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of war. The Allied powers launched a major airlift to keep the city supplied with food and fuel, and the Great Powers faced off in an icy staring match across an increasingly hostile border. Until now Eisenhower had generally preached a sermon of toleration toward the Soviets. But with the crisis in Berlin, he sharpened his criticisms. “I am beginning to think,” he wrote Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal in September, “that they may push the rest of the world beyond endurance.”29

  Two weeks after his formal inauguration as president of Columbia in October 1948, he swept down to the Pentagon to meet with the chiefs of the armed services to discuss military preparedness. Sounding eager to be back in the thick of things, he reassured Forrestal that no obligation at Columbia would stand in the way of his serving in Washington: “I can scarcely think of any chore that I would refuse to do” for the cause. In December, Forrestal took him up on this offer and asked him to serve as a senior military adviser and work with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to bring some unity into defense planning. Eisenhower did not wish to be sidelined in the ivory tower.30

  Indeed he was almost incessantly active in the public sphere, offering his views on a wide range of topics—almost as if he were running for national office. In October 1948 alone, he gave 20 speeches in 30 days; this was the pace he set for much of the next two years. He clearly believed the country faced a crisis of national leadership. And though he always prided himself on articulating a “middle way” between left and right, Eisenhower in the late 1940s drew heavily on the vocabulary of the emerging conservative movement in America.31

  In particular he was formulating a broad political argument that would in due course become the centerpiece of his political ideology. In Eisenhower’s view, the great issue of the day was freedom. As he put it in his Columbia inaugural address on October 12, 1948, “Human freedom is today threatened by regimented statism. . . . In today’s struggle, no free man, no free institution, can be neutral.” Americans must fight for freedom at home and abroad or risk losing it to forces of subversion, tyranny, and a paternalist state. On the world stage he called for vigilance against Soviet aggression and tyranny, but much of his criticism was directed at the home front. There, freedom was threatened by the unchecked growth of the federal government, which arrogated to itself too much power over the citizen and the free market. After 20 years of the New Deal and its extension under Truman, Americans had grown content to let the government take care of them, to provide for them, and to make their decisions for them. The result was a creeping socialism that he likened to a stealth dictatorship.32

  Truman’s narrow reelection in November 1948 over New York’s governor Thomas E. Dewey distressed Eisenhower intensely. The New Deal, he feared, would live on for another four years, leading to bloated government while suffocating individual initiative. Eisenhower wrote in his diary at the start of 1949, “In the name of ‘social security’ we are placing more and more responsibility upon the central government—and this means that an ever growing bureaucracy is taking an ever greater power over our daily lives.” As he put it in a letter to a faculty colleague at Columbia, “Each increase in centralized bureaucratic control of our national life increases the danger of bankruptcy in spirit and enterprise as well as finance, and facilitates a potential dictator’s seizure of power.” In a speech to alumnae of the Seven Sisters colleges he proclaimed, “We are drifting toward something we hate with all our hearts . . . centralized government.” If Americans did not strive to combat this “constant trend,” they could expect “a kind of dictatorship” to emerge.33

  In private Eisenhower began to sound downright cynical about his fellow citizens. In a letter to an old friend, the publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Amon G. Carter, he confessed that “for many years” he had been growing anxious about the aspirations of common Americans: “Many of us seem to want only a powerful and beneficent central government which will insure us nice jobs during our active years and a comfortable old age when we’re too old to work.” While admitting that government had a role to play in modern society by cushioning the harsh blows of the free market, he rejected the claims of those who “insist that only through collectivism, with centralized control of all our affairs, can justice, equity and efficiency be maintained.” Liberals just did not understand the real world, he claimed. They were “essentially humanitarian and altruistic in purpose,” but by making the working man dependent on the state for his well-being, they were advancing the country “one more step toward total socialism, just beyond which lies total dictatorship.” Such people think “the government owes us a living because we were born.” Dependence upon state handouts, he asserted, “must be repudiated everywhere.”34

  These kinds of sentiments, spoken openly in speeches or in private correspondence, fed the Ike-for-president speculation. Eisenhower received a flood of entreaties and appeals to enter the political arena. One, from Clare Boothe Luce, struck a deep chord. A former Republican congresswoman and the wife of publisher Henry R. Luce, she was someone Ike admired. In his diary he recounted the discussion: “She believes I may turn out to be the one who could provide the leadership she believes to be mandatory” for the survival of the country. A failure of leadership now means “increasing use of federal subsidies; growth of paternalism; weakening of community responsibility and individual rights,” and nothing less than “dictatorship.” Even Governor Dewey, twice the standard-bearer for the Republican Party—and twice defeated—now lobbied Eisenhower to make himself available to the country. “He remains of the opinion that I must soon enter politics or, as he says, be totally incapable of helping the country when it will need help most. He is most fearful (as are thousands of others, including myself, in varying degree) that we, as a nation, will fail to see the dangers into which we are drifting.” For a man who claimed no interest in politics, Eisenhower had begun to sound quite political.35

  V

  In February 1950 the Custom Tailors Guild released its annual poll of the best-dressed men in America. The top 10 included Clark Gable, the dashing screen superstar; dancing impresario Arthur Murray; and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, whose bespoke suits, made by Farnsworth Reed, had won him best-dressed honors in 1949. But Acheson was a distant second in 1950 to none other than Eisenhower. The Guild declared that Columbia’s president “shows perfect ju
dgment in wearing clothes which reflect the dignity of his office and his role of elder statesman.”36

  For those who may recall Eisenhower as a somewhat sedate, rumpled, and even sickly president, it may come as a surprise to find that in the early 1950s he was considered the very paragon of American masculinity. His personality and his vigor were essential to his political appeal. According to Emmet Hughes, his speechwriter, “Upon first encounter, the man instantly conveyed one quality—strength.” He had “blue eyes of a force and intensity singularly deep, almost disturbing, above all, commanding.” He carried himself with “healthy self-confidence” and an “easy air of personal authority.” He weighed about 175 pounds and maintained this trim weight for most of his adult life. He was broad shouldered, had a narrow waist, walked leaning slightly forward, and was agile and quick. “Irrespective of their actual age,” one senior adviser would note, “some people move ‘old’; some move ‘young.’ Ike moves ‘young.’ It is noticeable in the spring of his walk as he enters a room. It is noticeable in the flashlike speed in which he moves from sitting to striding in his office in the middle of an interview.”

  As he aged, he gained gravitas. He had a gift for commanding a room. People wanted to be near him. Arthur Krock, the New York Times columnist and veteran Washington reporter, identified his key features: “physical vigor, a ruddy and pleasing countenance, a personal warmth of manner, high intelligence, professional competence, and a most infectious grin.” His self-confidence and cheerful face enchanted those around him. When Eisenhower was serving as army chief of staff, Secretary of Defense Forrestal quipped, “Ike, with that puss you can’t miss being president.” Yet there was steel behind that smile. Robert Cutler, who would serve Eisenhower as national security adviser, recalled his first meeting with him in 1948: “His uniformed figure appeared trim and poised, compact and full of power. . . . His speech was incisive, crisp, the speech of one accustomed to command. Never lacking in courtesy, but pressing to dig in and get to the heart of things.”37

  By 1950 many seasoned political observers agreed: Ike was, politically speaking, “a natural.” Philip W. Porter of the Cleveland Plain Dealer laid it out for his readers in a gushing, breathless column in April 1950: “There’s something about the common sense of his remarks, the clarity of his English, the homely charm of his smile, and the natural humility of the unaffected, un-swellheaded man who has had greatness thrust upon him, that would bowl over the workers and the young people, the very groups that the opposition to Truman must reach. I defy anyone to watch Eisenhower in action, to see him personally, and not be convinced of this.” His column ended with a flourish: “He’s got it. He can really sweep the country.”38

  Simply put, Ike was a winner, and it is no surprise that many men of power, success, and influence in 1950s America sought him out and desired to be in his company. He was shrewd enough to take advantage of many of them. From 1948 on, Eisenhower developed a posse of wealthy, politically active Republican friends who had made their fortunes in manufacturing, oil, finance, and publishing and who served him as an informal kitchen cabinet. These men, hugely successful in their own right, virtually worshipped Eisenhower and set out to coax him into the political world. They made their considerable resources available to him, helped him develop a network of contacts across the country, and, perhaps most important, provided him with access to the private, elite world of Republican grandees. He was a constant guest at the most exclusive country clubs in America, where he played golf on the finest courses. At private estates he could pursue his passion for hunting and fishing and bridge in the company of like-minded men. He was made an honorary member of the Bohemian Grove in 1950, the secretive northern California resort for conservative and wealthy Republicans who gathered in luxurious camping sites under the benevolent sponsorship of former president Herbert Hoover.

  The central figure in this network was William E. Robinson, a discreet, dignified, and politically calculating advertising and newspaper executive. Ike and Robinson had met during the war, when Robinson was running the Herald Tribune from behind Allied lines in recently liberated Paris. He was awed by the general and described him as “natural, alive, alert, spirited,” and possessing an “intense amount of unloosed energy, both intellectual and physical.” In 1947 Robinson persuaded Ike to write his memoirs and introduced him to Douglas Black of Doubleday. Crusade in Europe, which appeared in 1948, had netted Eisenhower about half a million dollars—the first real money he’d ever had—and Robinson had been its midwife.

  Robinson, an excellent golfer and frequent winner of country club charity matches, also introduced Eisenhower to the pleasures and privileges of one of the nation’s most exclusive playgrounds, Augusta National Golf Club, the setting that would become Ike’s favorite presidential retreat. Robinson was a self-made man who worked his way from a paper route in Providence, Rhode Island, to New York University and into the advertising and publishing business. He was a gifted leader and joined the boardrooms of a number of newspapers before becoming executive vice president of the New York Herald Tribune. In 1954 he would move over to Coca-Cola as head of its marketing department and eventually would become chairman of the board. He was a devoted Catholic, a member of elite clubs in New York and Florida, and a civic leader, serving on the board of trustees of New York University. In his later years Robinson kept two things on his mantelpiece: a gold bottle of Coca-Cola and a bronze head of Eisenhower.39

  If Robinson was avuncular, tolerant, known to be a soft touch to old friends with money troubles, Clifford Roberts was just the opposite: a cold, driven perfectionist who made his living as an investment banker in New York but made his reputation as the cofounder and dictatorial chairman of the Masters golf tournament at Augusta National. Originally from Iowa, he moved to New York in the 1920s and quietly built a powerful client list whose interests he deftly managed to protect from the Wall Street Crash of 1929. (His firm, Reynolds and Co., merged with Dean Witter in 1978.) Roberts’s lifelong passion was Augusta: he created the club in 1933 as a springtime retreat for well-heeled friends, and of its 80 original members, 60 were New Yorkers. At a time when the country was still in the grips of the Depression, Roberts oversaw the purchase of the land and the construction of the course and clubhouse, and then hired a special train with Pullman sleeping cars to whisk the wealthy members down to Georgia for a sneak preview in January 1933.

  Roberts had the brains, connections, and money to build Augusta. His partner was the perennial amateur golf champion Bobby Jones, a native Georgian and one of the most well-known sportsmen of the era. The two made a powerful team and created a cult around Augusta that endures today. It was an exclusive, invitation-only club and strictly segregated: Augusta National did not invite a black man to play there until 1974 and did not include black members until 1991. (Not until 2012 did Augusta invite two women to join; one of them was an African American, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.)40

  W. Alton Jones, known as Pete, was another self-made man in Ike’s inner circle. He was born in 1891 in southwest Missouri on a hardscrabble 40-acre farm, one of seven siblings. His first job was as a janitor and meter reader for the Webb City and Carterville Gas Company. By 1952 he was making $150,000 a year as president of Cities Service Company (today CITGO), a network of oil, gas, and utilities services that Jones built into a billion-dollar corporation. He had one year of college education, at Vanderbilt; the rest of the business he learned on the job. His talents as an engineer and administrator were put on display during the war, when he was tasked by the government to build an oil pipeline from Texas to the East Coast, and to do it in time for the D-Day landings so American trucks in France would not run out of gasoline. He was awarded the Presidential Certificate of Merit in 1948. He served as chairman of the board of the Richfield Oil Corporation, a director of the Chrysler Corporation, Tiffany’s, and the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company. Jones owned a 2,300-acre estate in Rhode Island, where he pursued fishing avidly and frequently h
osted Eisenhower. Upon his death in 1962 in an airplane crash, Eisenhower called him “one of my dearest, closest and best friends.”41

  The richest man in Eisenhower’s circle was Robert W. Woodruff, the longtime chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company. Even among these titans of industry and finance, Woodruff was a kingpin. He made Coke into the sugary black gold that transformed Atlanta and the South. Woodruff grew up in Georgia, the son of a successful businessman and banker. But he did not have his fortune handed to him: he quit college after a year and set out to earn his own living, working his way up through the auto business to become vice president of White Motor Company in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1923, when the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta offered him the job of leading the struggling soft-drink concern, he jumped at the chance. He was only 33 years old, and he would run the company for the next six decades, turning it into the most recognized brand in the history of American capitalism. His greatest coup came during the war, when he announced that every GI fighting overseas would be guaranteed a bottle of Coke for five cents wherever he was serving. This was a great morale booster for the troops and a savvy business move. At a time when sugar was rationed, the government now exempted Coke from the restrictions to allow more production and paid for transportation of the fizzy drink around the world. Woodruff used the opening to build over 60 bottling plants to slake the soldiers’ thirst. By the end of the war, GIs had guzzled five billion bottles of Coke and the brand was a global powerhouse.42