The Age of Eisenhower

by William I Hitchcock

  But then election campaigns do not often bring out the best in politicians. And despite the gaffes and the overblown attacks, Eisenhower genuinely moved millions of Americans. Voters in 1952 were tired of Truman, tired of war, labor strife, inflation, big government, and the communist peril. Eisenhower legitimated these grievances because he shared them. His view of government was skeptical, distant, and wary. He urged voters to turn away from the material promises of the New Deal and return to a time of entrepreneurial spirit, to revive American traditions of independence and self-reliance. For Ike, the virtuous American was the businessman, the farmer, the innovator, the laborer: men who understood the value of money, men tempered by a decade of war and who drew sustenance from their faith in God and from the stern lessons of the marketplace. In addition to the message, Americans rallied to the messenger. Eisenhower drew people to him because he was indisputably a winner, a man touched by success, comfortable in command, unafraid of great responsibility. With some reason Americans had come to believe that Eisenhower, invested with the great power of the American presidency, could change the country and quite possibly the world.

  PART II

  * * *

  AN AGE OF PERIL

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  Scorpions in a Bottle

  “Freedom is pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark.”

  I

  ON NOVEMBER 5, 1952, THE DAY after his triumph at the polls, Eisenhower slipped away from the hubbub of New York City in the company of Mamie, her mother, his press secretary Jim Hagerty, his pals Bill Robinson and Cliff Roberts, and flew south to the pleasant confines of Augusta National Golf Club. Here the president-elect spent 10 days playing golf (including a round with golf legend Byron Nelson), writing notes to his loyal campaign staff, and conferring with his inner circle of advisers, especially Lucius Clay and Herb Brownell, to pick the members of his cabinet. Clay would take no official role in the administration but exercised enormous informal influence; Brownell was offered the post of attorney general. Sherman Adams, the wiry and taciturn New Hampshire governor who had managed the campaign, was given a special portfolio—assistant to the president—a position later called chief of staff. Robert Cutler, a wartime assistant to General Marshall who had shown administrative genius during the campaign, took the post of special adviser on national security affairs. Cutler would lead an extensive beefing-up of the procedures of the National Security Council and turn it into the most important decision-making body of the administration.1

  The name of one cabinet nominee was already etched in stone: John Foster Dulles would be named secretary of state. He had been a diplomat and lawyer for half a century and was a Republican grandee, an internationalist, and a leading anticommunist hawk with ties to both the Dewey and the Taft factions of the GOP. His imprimatur could be found on the 1952 Republican platform, with its strident demand for the “roll-back” of communism from Eastern Europe and Asia. Although a leading figure of the Establishment, during the campaign Dulles had been sharply critical of Truman’s handling of foreign affairs and the Soviet threat. Arguing that containment was passive and likely to invite aggression, he called for a more robust strategy to defeat the communist bloc. His personality seemed suited for the times: he was “tough, self-centered, suspicious, insensitive”; he could also be a bore, “ponderous and Jesuitical,” according to one biographer. Eisenhower respected his knowledge and experience but found his lengthy interventions in the cabinet tiresome. More important, Eisenhower kept Dulles’s hawkish instincts in check. Eisenhower made sure that Dulles was surrounded by reliable, steady men whose loyalty was to the president: he named Gen. Walter Bedell Smith undersecretary of state and Robert Murphy, a wartime colleague in North Africa and France, deputy undersecretary for political affairs. Dulles was a zealous and aggressive cold warrior in public; in private he took his lead from Eisenhower.2

  On Clay’s advice, Eisenhower appointed Charles Erwin Wilson, the millionaire head of the General Motors Company (nicknamed “Engine Charlie”), to run the Pentagon. A successful engineer and industrial manager, his central qualification for secretary of defense was that he had led GM during the Second World War and had worked with the government to rapidly expand production of trucks, tanks, armored cars, and aircraft engines for the war effort. One close observer called Wilson “bluff and hearty, a passionate and uncompromising simplifier of issues, fresh from General Motors with abundant confidence that his corporate experience in Detroit’s automobile industry would guide his path through all snares of politics.” Yet he was politically an outsider, and Eisenhower paid a price for picking a man with few political connections and no common touch. Ike later confessed that Wilson never found a way to “sell himself and his programs to the Congress” and proved no match for the service chiefs in the Pentagon, who ran circles around him.3

  Clay urged the president-elect to appoint George M. Humphrey as secretary of the treasury. Humphrey, president of M. A. Hanna, a large iron ore–processing company in Cleveland with subsidiary interests in steelmaking and other industries, was jovial, earnest, midwestern, and unaffected. According to one observer, he was “a businessman’s businessman: a pleasant, vigorous figure, working hard and playing hard, with a mind of impressive clarity, a passion for facts, and an assumption that New Dealism was spending the country into bankruptcy.” Eisenhower came to like Humphrey personally a great deal. He frequently vacationed at Milestone, Humphrey’s plantation in Thomasville, Georgia, where the two men enjoyed the excellent quail shooting. In the cabinet Humphrey volubly intervened in debates, calling for less spending in every quarter. His stolid judgment and parsimonious inclinations played a major role in the administration.4

  The Eisenhower cabinet, not surprisingly, felt and looked much like a corporate boardroom, though it retained accents of a military headquarters. For example, Robert Cutler, the national security adviser, maintained a “formidable protocol” when the National Security Council convened. According to one participant, “Bobby would come striding into the room and in a stentorian voice announce ‘Gentlemen, the president!’ Everyone stood up, and Ike would enter quietly and take his place without further fanfare. Cutler occasionally tended to embellish this ritual, and it was rumored that the president finally suggested that he moderate the pomp and ceremony.”5

  The cabinet epitomized what the left-wing sociologist C. Wright Mills called in 1956 “the power elite” when he observed that power in modern America tended to flow toward a small, dynamic coterie of men with shared experiences, ideals, values, and ambitions. Through military service, corporate leadership, and government work, and sometimes all three, these men had developed a network of influence and connections. They agreed, as Wilson would tell Congress in his confirmation hearings, that “what was good for General Motors was good for America, and vice versa.” No one in the cabinet found such an idea objectionable. Nor would they have doubted for one moment the thesis that America was in peril, fighting for its life against communism, or that disloyalty must be rooted out of public life, or that government itself was something to be looked on with suspicion, an impediment to the healthy functioning of the free market and the pursuit of individual happiness. These men had not been brought into the cabinet for their diversity or heterodox ideas. Quite simply they embodied the Age of Eisenhower.

  II

  Two weeks after the election, Eisenhower wrapped up his vacation at Augusta and headed north. His first stop on November 18 was to call on Truman at the White House. There had not been an orderly change of presidential administrations since 1933, and both Eisenhower and Truman wanted to show the world that even as the office changed hands, there would be basic continuity in government. But it was a bitter moment for Truman. When Eisenhower arrived at Washington National Airport, he was met by an army band and cheering crowds, and his motorcade wound through the city past half a million well-wishers. Standing in the backseat of a brown open-top Cadillac, Eisenhower raised his arms
in the air in a V shape and beamed at the flag-bedecked lampposts and banners hung across the streets declaring “Welcome Ike.” At 10 minutes before 2:00 p.m. he arrived at the White House. Truman did not step outside to greet him.6

  The two men had burned their bridges during the campaign. In the Oval Office, Truman tried to make some idle chatter to warm things up, but, as he recalled in his memoirs, “Eisenhower was unsmiling.” Their conversation remained formal, touching on the many pressing international issues of the moment, such as Korea, Indochina, Iran, and the hydrogen bomb. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett, and Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder made presentations to the president-elect and discussed setting up liaisons between the incoming administration and key executive offices. Yet Truman and Eisenhower remained palpably uneasy with each other. Truman later chalked this up to Eisenhower’s inexperience, writing that Eisenhower “had not grasped the immense job ahead of him. . . . He may have been awe-struck by the long array of problems and decisions the President has to face.” Nonsense. The architect of Overlord was no stranger to daunting jobs. Simply put, Eisenhower could not forgive Truman for his outrageous attacks during the campaign, accusing Eisenhower of “betraying his principles” and of “moral blindness,” among other calumnies. A novice in politics, Ike had not yet developed a thick skin to shield him from the barbs of partisan politics. He was still sore, and it showed.7

  Later that day Eisenhower flew to New York City and the familiar embrace of the Columbia president’s mansion at 60 Morningside Heights. For 10 days he held meetings with a stream of Republican Party leaders, senators and congressmen, advisers and friends. But in the early hours of November 29, under cover of darkness, he was ferried by car to Long Island and Mitchell Field, from which he departed for his promised trip to Korea. The offer to “go to Korea” had been one of the defining moments of the 1952 campaign; now, in secrecy, General Eisenhower was going to fulfill his pledge.8

  It is not clear what Eisenhower thought he would learn by going to Korea that he did not already know: the war was a bloody morass, a stalemated conflict that neither side wished to prolong and neither side dared to lose. The trip was logistically complex: a 10,000-mile flight via San Francisco, Hawaii, Midway Island, and Iwo Jima, to Seoul, in the company of his old friend and now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Omar Bradley, as well as Wilson, Brownell, and Hagerty. A second plane with a small team of handpicked newsmen, sworn to secrecy, followed. The arrangements were handled personally by Defense Secretary Lovett, and ships and aircraft around the world were put on high alert. The president-elect stopped on Iwo Jima for the night and slept in a brand-new Quonset hut just a few yards from the foaming strand where so many marines, storming this barren citadel, had been scythed down by Japanese machine guns in February 1945. The next morning Eisenhower rode in a jeep to the summit of Mt. Suribachi, passing remnants of Japanese entrenchments and dugouts; from the top he looked with reverence upon the black volcanic beaches below.

  The reality of war was a constant companion on this trip. Upon arrival in Seoul on the evening of December 2, Eisenhower’s party drove from the airfield into the war-scarred city center. Seoul had changed hands numerous times in the seesaw battles of the previous two years, and it was a charred ruin. Hagerty was shocked by the hundreds of thousands of refugees crouched over cooking fires in the darkness and bitter cold. “Block after block of what had once been buildings were leveled flat. . . . The Korean Capitol building was all shot up, bombed and vacant.” Propaganda banners with slogans such as “Destroy Communism” snapped in the wind in the burned streets. Through this misery Eisenhower’s motorcade drove on toward a large university complex, now the heavily fortified headquarters of the U.S. Eighth Army, whose commander, Gen. James Van Fleet, welcomed the president-elect. In the next three days Ike toured American military installations, met with commanders in the field, visited wounded soldiers, and ate army rations. He felt the sting of the bitter winter wind that made Korea such a misery for the soldiers and toured the battle front in a light L-19 Cessna aircraft that allowed him to see the mountainous terrain below. He quickly confirmed his own hunch that this war could not be won without a dramatic increase in firepower, men, and risk.9

  While in Seoul, Eisenhower met twice with South Korean president Syngman Rhee. The 77-year-old lobbied Ike hard for an immediate and aggressive attack on the North. “An all-out drive to the Yalu River”—the Chinese border—“is the only alternative to break the stalemate,” Rhee believed. Naturally he had no desire for a permanent division of his country; now was the moment to unleash a crippling blow on the North and unify the peninsula—under Rhee’s leadership, of course. Eisenhower met these calls for a wider war with stony silence. He knew such an attack might trigger a global war with China and the Soviet Union, but he was convinced the present bloody stalemate must end: “We could not stand forever on a static front and continue to accept casualties.” Eisenhower made it his first priority to bring the war to an end, either through an armistice or through an all-out drive for victory.10

  For the long journey home, Eisenhower chose to take the 17,000-ton cruiser USS Helena, which he boarded in Guam. The six-day sea journey to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, afforded him some time to relax, play bridge, and meet with senior advisers. Dulles joined the party at Wake Island, along with George Humphrey, Budget Director–designate Joseph Dodge, Adm. Arthur Radford, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet (and soon to replace Bradley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and speechwriters Emmet Hughes and C. D. Jackson. This floating presidential administration naturally aroused a great deal of comment and speculation in the press once the news blackout was lifted on December 6. Hughes recalled that press secretary Hagerty played up the “portentous strategic decisions” being made during this “epic mid-Pacific conference.” There were broad discussions about Korea and the strategic options available to the new president; the general outlines of Eisenhower’s first budget proposal were also discussed. But the cruise was principally a time for the chief players on the new team to get to know one another and discuss in broad outlines the goals for the coming year.11

  Upon his return to New York on December 14, Eisenhower found a controversy brewing. Truman had labeled Ike’s trip to Korea “a piece of demagoguery” in a press conference on December 12. Truman also lambasted General MacArthur, the embittered former allied commander in Korea, who had told the press that he alone had a “secret plan” to end the war. Truman demanded that MacArthur reveal the plan; MacArthur announced he would share it instead with Eisenhower. The slight was deliberate and Truman seethed with anger and contempt. Eisenhower tried to walk a fine line: he accepted MacArthur’s offer to meet and discuss Korea, though he privately dismissed MacArthur’s plan, which was little more than an atomic ultimatum to the Reds: end the war in Korea or experience all-out atomic attack. Instead Eisenhower issued a statement that was measured and restrained: there was “no simple formula for bringing a swift, victorious end” to the Korean War; he wanted a “satisfactory solution” and an “honorable peace,” and in the meantime Americans would continue “our world-wide struggle against Communist aggression.” Privately, though, he was furious at Truman for disparaging his Korean trip as a political stunt.12

  On January 20, 1953, a cloudy and mild day, Eisenhower went to the East Portico of the U.S. Capitol to take the oath of office. Truman, his sour and mute companion in their limousine ride down Pennsylvania Avenue, now stood across from him, his face unmoved and distant. Chief Justice Fred Vinson faced Eisenhower, holding in his left hand two Bibles: one, used by George Washington in 1789, opened to II Chronicles 7:14 (“If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land”), and Ike’s own personal Bible, opened to Psalm 33:12 (“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord; and the people whom he hath chosen for his own
inheritance”). Behind Eisenhower stood Vice President Nixon, who had been sworn in just moments earlier. Eisenhower raised his right hand, solemnly took the oath of office, and then turned to the gathered crowd.

  He had agonized over his inaugural address, working closely with Hughes for weeks to craft it. He started with a hastily written prayer—a telling overture to a presidency that would attempt to place piety and devotion at the center of American public life—then launched into a remarkably unmerciful 20-minute speech, keynoted by overtones of conflict, war, ideological division, and sacrifice. “Forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history,” he began, and continued in this somber tone. Americans, he said, faced a deadly and insidious enemy who “know no god but force, no devotion but its use. They tutor men in treason. They feed upon the hunger of others. Whatever defies them, they torture, especially the truth.” The battle between communism and democracy was truly a clash of civilizations: “Freedom is pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark.”

  Americans would not shrink from the struggle against communism, he insisted. They would fight, with full conviction of the moral rightness of the American way of life, and without compromise or appeasement. “We shall never try to placate an aggressor by the false and wicked bargain of trading honor for security. Americans, indeed all free men, remember that in the final choice a soldier’s pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner’s chains.” Eisenhower preferred war with honor to peace with dishonor. “We must be ready to dare all for our country. For history does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.” The great task of the second half of the 20th century was to wage freedom’s battle and persuade the world to join in that struggle against tyranny. “This is the hope that beckons us onward in this century of trial,” he concluded. “This is the work that awaits us all, to be done with bravery, with charity, and with prayer to Almighty God.” Dark and ominous, Eisenhower’s speech conjured a vision of struggle, conflict, and sacrifice. The Great Crusade was off to a cheerless start.13