The pressure on the new president was enormous. Here was a young, untested, and overconfident leader who, as a candidate, had stridently called for action against the communist menace in Cuba. Taking office, he found a large, complex plan already in place, endorsed by the greatest soldier of the era, and now backed by the Joint Chiefs and the CIA. The plan had been in the making for a year, and thousands of people were waiting for a signal to set it in motion—not least the Cuban fighters at their Guatemalan training grounds, straining at the leash. In these circumstances, backing off the invasion was almost unthinkable. Politically it would have made him look “soft.” And what an enormous victory it would be for the new team if it worked!
During the month of March, Kennedy became, as even his loyal and devoted chronicler Arthur Schlesinger Jr. admitted, “a prisoner of events.” The invasion plan had a momentum of its own, and the bureaucratic forces pushing for it would have been hard to resist. On March 11 Kennedy told his senior advisers that he was “willing to take the chance of going ahead,” though he asked that the plan be modified to mask the role of the United States. Dulles assured him the plan would work just as smoothly as the daring coup in Guatemala that Dulles had orchestrated in 1954—another sign of the powerful continuities at work in this drama. Kennedy continued to feel uneasy about the invasion plan, but he did not stop it. He allowed himself to be carried toward disaster.24
On April 15 the misguided and ill-conceived affair began. A few aging B-26 aircraft, flown by Cuban pilots from airfields in Nicaragua, bombed three Cuban airfields, doing only moderate damage to Castro’s tiny fleet of combat aircraft but alerting the Cuban government that the invasion was imminent. Castro accused the United States of fomenting the attack and raised the alarm at the United Nations, spooking the Kennedy administration into canceling further air support, lest the U.S. connection be discovered. Meanwhile, late at night on April 16, the invasion force of some 1,400 Cuban exiles jumped into their landing craft and headed toward their target: a swampy inlet on Cuba’s southern coast called Bahía de Cochinos, or Bay of Pigs. The landings were immediately discovered by local militia, and at dawn Cuban aircraft began to fire on the invaders. Their ships were hit, sinking much of their ammunition and equipment, while Cuban forces swarmed into the landing zone, bringing with them heavy tanks. With no air support, the invaders were sitting ducks. Castro’s forces mounted sustained attacks and by the end of the day on April 17 had effectively crippled the invasion. Kennedy, under pressure to authorize American air strikes from the nearby carrier Essex, refused. On the afternoon of April 18 the invasion force surrendered, having lost over 100 men killed and nearly 400 wounded. Kennedy was shattered by the fiasco. “How could I have been so stupid?” he repeatedly asked his advisers.25
Kennedy drew as his chief lesson from the Bay of Pigs affair never to trust the experts, especially the generals and the CIA planners who had all but promised success. But this lesson he could have learned by heeding Ike’s warning, proffered just weeks before, that “in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Kennedy had mocked the old asshole then; he was not laughing now.
In order to protect himself politically from Republican attacks, Kennedy invited Eisenhower to confer with him at Camp David on April 22. It must have been an absolutely delicious moment for Ike, though he was too much of a patriot to take any pleasure in seeing Kennedy in trouble. Eisenhower choppered in from Gettysburg, and the two men wandered the grounds of the woodsy retreat, side by side, a father figure tutoring the younger man. Over lunch Ike peppered Kennedy with the kind of questions Kennedy ought to have asked the military brass: about the logistics, the air support, the timing of the landings, just the kind of thing Eisenhower had spent his life mastering. Eisenhower questioned Kennedy’s decision-making process, again stressing the need for an orderly and disciplined approach to national security policy. Kennedy, mournful and chagrined, could only say that he had asked Gen. Maxwell Taylor to prepare a full review. “No one knows how tough this job is until he has been in it a few months,” Kennedy sighed. Ike could not resist a small moment of triumph: “Mr. President, if you will forgive me, I think I mentioned that to you three months ago.”
Publicly Ike backed Kennedy and told the waiting press that all Americans must stand together when the chips were down. But privately he was appalled at the poor planning and management of the invasion, especially Kennedy’s lack of resolve in sending in additional air power once the fight had started. In his diary Ike jotted down his real feelings: “This story could be called a ‘Profile in Timidity and Indecision.’ ”26
Kennedy might have agreed with that brutal assessment. He had been timid, but he would not make that mistake again. Although he dismissed Dulles and Bissell from their posts, he moved quickly to recommit the country to the basic cold war maxims so frequently invoked during the Age of Eisenhower. Even as the pathetic Cuban exiles were being marched into Castro’s jails on April 20, Kennedy gave a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he expressed no regret for his audacious failure in Cuba. “The message of Cuba, of Laos, of the rising din of Communist voices in Asia and Latin America—these messages are all the same. The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong, only the industrious, only the determined . . . can possibly survive.” A week later, sending the message that he would not falter in waging the cold war, he approved an increase of U.S. military personnel and military aid to South Vietnam. He then ordered Vice President Lyndon Johnson to deliver personally a letter to South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, pledging greater American support to meet the communist threat in Southeast Asia.27
Nor did Kennedy forget about Cuba. In the fall of 1961 he authorized an expanded covert operation against Castro, to be led by none other than Gen. Edward Lansdale, the man so closely identified with the botched Bay of Pigs operation. Relying on propaganda, economic sabotage, and guerrilla operations inside Cuba, the CIA aimed to destabilize Castro’s regime and foment conditions that might open the way to an American invasion of the embattled island. The specter of the disgraced Allen Dulles hung over it all.28
Thus Kennedy could not escape the Age of Eisenhower. During his short time in office, Kennedy confronted the problems of Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Berlin, nuclear weapons, the space race, and civil rights—all issues that had taken shape during Ike’s years. Though a gifted leader, Kennedy found these tangled troubles no easier to resolve than Eisenhower had, and many of his proposed solutions drew from the tool kit of his predecessor. Far from charting a new course for the country, Kennedy steered the ship of state through the same shoals and eddies that Ike had navigated. No wonder Schlesinger, looking back over Kennedy’s first 18 months in office, would confide in his diary this downcast assessment: “In area after area, we have behaved exactly as the Eisenhower administration would have behaved—in spite of everything we said in the campaign. . . . The old continuities, the Eisenhower-Dulles continuities, are beginning to reassert themselves.”29
VI
On November 22, 1963, with the unspeakable murder of President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, the country changed forever, and the Age of Eisenhower slipped into the past. The United States soon entered a decade of civil strife, racial unrest, antiwar protests generated by a misguided war in Vietnam, and still more violence, punctuated by the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968. From the vantage point of such a troubled era, Americans inevitably looked back to the period from the end of World War II until that awful day in Dallas with reverence and nostalgia. Those seemingly charmed years would be forever invoked as a time of peace, prosperity, security, and confidence. The ugly realities of the 1950s—the war in Korea, the shame of McCarthyism, the persistence of Jim Crow, the deadly CIA plots, the nuclear fears—drifted out of focus. Instead popular memory dwelled happily
on kitschy ephemera like Father Knows Best, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and men in fedoras. We know the 1950s were never so happy, so innocent, so magical, but they were certainly different from what came after, and Americans have never ceased to think and dream about the “glad, confident morning” of those years.
Ike himself lived through the upheavals of the 1960s, through Kennedy’s death, through the worst of the Vietnam War, the student protests, and the racial violence. He and Mamie retreated to Gettysburg and, in the winter months, to the lavish Eldorado Country Club in Indian Wells, California, a sparkling oasis in the arid desert just on the border of Joshua Tree National Park. He devoted considerable time to his ponderous two-volume memoir, an earnest if uninspiring defense of his presidential record. He also published a far more lighthearted and revealing book titled At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, which recounts his family history, his life in the army, and his wartime career. He stayed abreast of Republican Party politics and opposed Goldwater’s ascendancy in 1964, seeing the Arizona senator as too far right and dismissive of the modern Republicanism that Ike had championed. Goldwater’s catastrophic defeat at the polls seemed a partial vindication of Eisenhower’s moderate views.30
As the years passed, the great leaders of the age disappeared. On January 24, 1965, Churchill died. President Johnson chose not to attend the funeral, but Eisenhower did, and gave a memorable eulogy. Ike recalled the great Englishman as the “embodiment of British defiance” before Hitler’s onslaught and warmly praised Churchill’s leadership during the cold war years. With an elegant flourish, he ended simply, “Here was a champion of freedom.” It was another sign of the passing of that generation of war leaders who had won the great struggle against fascism and shaped the strategy to contain and finally defeat communism.
In late 1965 Eisenhower suffered another heart attack. He lost weight and spent more time secluded at Gettysburg and his winter retreat in California. At the end of April 1968 he collapsed after a golf game at Eldorado and was transferred to Walter Reed Hospital, where he spent the last year of his life. He delighted in seeing his old sidekick, Dick Nixon, finally elevated to the presidency in November 1968; it was a moment of enormous relief for both men, and Nixon rushed to Ike’s bedside the day after his victory to receive the benediction of the man whose esteem he most craved and had never fully won. On March 28, 1969, a bright spring day, Eisenhower died, while his faithful doctor, Leonard Heaton, his son John, and his grandson, David, stood at attention at his bedside.31
Although Eisenhower remained among the most popular men in America at the time of his death, contemporary journalists and analysts could not bring themselves to see his true worth. The obituaries praised his war leadership but discounted his presidency. Time magazine polled a number of prominent intellectuals—the kind of people who never quite understood Ike’s appeal—and their assessment of his presidency reflected the by-now familiar condescension of academia. One leading scholar of the presidency, Clinton Rossiter of Cornell University, said Eisenhower “didn’t believe in the exercise of presidential power” and so failed to grapple with the great problems of the country. James Banner of Princeton termed the Eisenhower era “a period of drift rather than mastery.” Arthur Link, the longtime student of Woodrow Wilson, concluded that Eisenhower was “hemmed in, hobbled by a lifetime of experience in the Army,” and so failed to understand and apply the powers of the presidency. At best, he achieved “a healing of wounds” in the country following the partisanship of the Truman era.32
Looking back at Eisenhower now, however, across a half-century of war, presidential scandals, resignations, impeachments, Oval Office calumnies, and bitter partisanship, we see him in a new light. In 2017 a poll of over 100 historians ranked Eisenhower among the five greatest presidents in the nation’s history, behind only the true titans, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt. It was a judgment that would have stunned his contemporaries but seems eminently sensible now. According to the poll, historians gave Ike particularly high marks for his handling of international affairs, his management of the economy, and his moral authority.33
These are sound judgments. Eisenhower’s approach to international affairs was masterful. In 1953 he used his considerable political capital to bring about an armistice in the Korean War, ending an unpopular conflict that had taken the lives of over 36,000 Americans. He declined to bail out France in its doomed colonial war in Indochina, refusing to send American troops there in 1954 despite immense pressure from his military advisers to do so. He used American economic pressure to compel Britain and France to halt their ill-conceived invasion of Egypt in 1956, following Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. In 1957, in response to the launch of Sputnik, Eisenhower initiated a massive program to build a new generation of rocket and space technology that positioned the United States to dominate the celestial arena for the rest of the century. And he was always willing to talk to his Soviet adversaries, going so far as to welcome Khrushchev for a memorable visit to Camp David in 1959. His foreign and security policies combined restraint and vigilance in equal measure.
Eisenhower showed less restraint in his use of covert operations. In Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia, Cuba, and Congo, Eisenhower gave CIA director Dulles carte blanche to cause havoc. The CIA in the 1950s triggered coups, plotted assassinations, and shipped arms and cash to authoritarian regimes. Dulles also urged upon Ike an aggressive use of the U-2 spy plane, which led to the disastrous events of May 1960. Eisenhower was a cold warrior, and there was brutality in the means he adopted to wage that ideological conflict. To be fair, all the postwar presidents have succumbed to the temptations of shadow warfare. Historians will continue to debate the consequences of Eisenhower’s use of the CIA, but they will have to balance that story against the remarkable record of Great Power stability and the absence of large-scale conflict that marked his presidency.
Evaluating his stewardship of the economy, historians gave Eisenhower high marks, and with good reason. The GDP of the United States increased by an astonishing 60 percent during his administration. Because of his antipathy toward budget deficits and inflation, Eisenhower kept a tight hold on the federal purse strings. He balanced three budgets and came close on five others. Fewer federal dollars in the economy translated into sharp recessions in 1953–54 and 1958, with unemployment spiking significantly in 1958. Still, Ike demonstrated real creativity: he found a way to expand defense spending, boost the minimum wage, widen social security, and invest in infrastructure—especially highways, school construction, and public housing—all while maintaining tight fiscal policies. He rightly deserves to be known as one of the shrewdest managers of the nation’s economy.
Finally, the historians gave Eisenhower superlative marks for his moral authority. And no wonder: Americans viewed Eisenhower as a legendary hero even before he entered politics, and his time in the White House strengthened his reputation as a man of integrity. He gave his life to public service in war and in peace, and his administration was remarkably free of scandal. Eisenhower possessed great dignity, and he held himself to the highest standard of personal conduct befitting the most honored office in the country. He could do no less.
Between 1915, when he left West Point, and 1961, when he finally laid down the cares of office, Eisenhower worked wholeheartedly and passionately for the good of his country. Americans looked to him during the 1950s as a model of loyalty, dignity, and decency. For a period of nearly two decades, from the cataclysms of the Second World War, through the prosperous if anxious days of the early cold war, until the transfer of power to a younger generation, Eisenhower lent his name to the age. And his people knew they had lived in the presence of greatness.
1 “It was a good, secure small-town life.” Left to right, Milton, a dour David, DDE, the always smiling Ida, Earl, and the family dog Flip in 1910.
2 “Her long-lashed eyes were the dark blue of a piece of sky reflected in a well.” Mamie Eisenh
ower in 1916, the year she and Ike married.
3 “The greatest disaster in my life.” Doud Dwight Eisenhower, nicknamed Icky, died on January 2, 1921, of scarlet fever.
4 “No one . . . can understand the intensity of these burdens.” Eisenhower observing the invasion forces off the shores of Normandy, France, June 7, 1944, the day after D-Day.
5 “An easy air of personal authority.” DDE, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, enjoying a smoke in Hawaii, May 1946.
6 “You have summoned me . . . to lead a great crusade.” At the Republican National Convention, July 11, 1952.
7 Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, who narrowly lost the GOP nomination after a bitter convention fight.
8 Hiding the bitter feelings between them, Eisenhower and President Truman drive to the inauguration ceremony, January 20, 1953.
9 “I insist on going for a bit of recreation every once in a while.” Ike at Augusta just after his election in 1952, with golf greats Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan. His close pal and founder of the Augusta National Golf Club, Clifford Roberts, is at the far right.
10 “It’s pound, pound, pound. Not only is your intellectual capacity taxed to the utmost, but your physical stamina.” Eisenhower in 1954.
11 One of Ike’s first major decisions was the appointment of Governor Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court.
12 The decade’s most powerful pair of brothers: Allen and John Foster Dulles.
13 Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, who had nationalized Iranian oil production, speaks to the crowd on October 3, 1951.
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