14 Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, where he liked it best: in front of the microphones.
15 Democratic leader in the Senate and Ike’s political nemesis, Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas in 1955.
16 Premier Nikolai Bulganin of the USSR, Ike, Premier Edgar Faure of France, and Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden of Great Britain, in Geneva in July 1955.
17 Herbert Brownell, who as attorney general steered Ike’s program on civil rights.
18 “Tough, self-centered, suspicious, insensitive.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles with Eisenhower, August 14, 1956.
19 Ike, recovering from his heart attack, meets the press on the sun deck of Fitzsimons Hospital, wearing pajamas.
20 “He lighted up the sky like a flaming arrow.” Adlai Stevenson, right, with his running mate, Senator Estes Kefauver, in 1956.
21 Gamal Abdel Nasser is cheered by a huge crowd on his arrival back in Cairo from Alexandria in August 1956, where he announced he had taken over the Suez Canal Company.
22 Hungarians burn a picture of the Soviet leader Josef Stalin during the anticommunist revolution in November 1956.
23 “A spiritual awakening is taking place throughout the nation.” Billy Graham and Eisenhower.
24 “On the verge of a dangerous racial conflagration.” E. Frederic Morrow, the only African American on the White House executive staff, waged a persistent campaign to alert the administration to the civil rights crisis.
25 Soldiers of the 101st Airborne escort black students into Little Rock High School, September 1957.
26 Eisenhower reluctantly met with civil rights leaders in June 1958. Left to right, Lester Granger, Martin Luther King Jr., White House adviser Frederic Morrow, DDE, A. Philip Randolph, Attorney General William Rogers, special assistant Rocco Siciliano, and Roy Wilkins.
27 Ngo Dinh Diem, named premier of South Vietnam in 1954, would go on to rule with an iron hand and lavish support from Washington.
28 Sukarno, president of Indonesia, during his trip to Washington in May 1956, when he addressed Congress.
29 Five days after the launch of Sputnik, Eisenhower firmly denied accusations that America had fallen behind the Russians in the space race. Jim Hagerty sits on Ike’s left.
30 “Cold steel between us.” Nixon and Khrushchev argue in the kitchen debate in Moscow, July 1959.
31 Francis Gary Powers, whose U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviets on May 1, 1960, speaks to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 6, 1962, after returning home through a prisoner exchange.
32 “A heroic man.” Khrushchev took delight in wooing Fidel Castro when both leaders met in New York in September 1960.
33 “If you give me a week . . .” Ike campaigning for the Nixon-Lodge ticket, September 12, 1960.
34 “Good Morning, Mr. President.” On December 6, 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy paid a call on Eisenhower at the White House.
35 On April 22, 1961, days after the failed invasion of Cuba, President Kennedy sought Eisenhower’s counsel at Camp David.
36 “The man instantly conveyed one quality—strength.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have lived with Dwight Eisenhower for some eight years—as long as he served the country as president, and far longer than I had anticipated when I first began this book. During this journey I have relied on and learned from friends, scholars, archivists, and public audiences who share my fascination with the decade of the 1950s and with Ike himself.
The idea for the book came from the wise old head of my editor Marty Beiser, who thought this might be a good time to return to the Age of Eisenhower. I thank him for nudging me forward when I was rather hesitant. Before I dug in I spoke to my then-colleague at Temple University, Richard Immerman, one of the most important and authoritative historians of the Eisenhower years, to ask for his blessing, which he kindly gave. He also read the final manuscript with his usual care and attentiveness, pressing me on some of my ideas and saving me from a few gaffes.
For many years I have visited Abilene, Kansas, to work in the pleasant setting of the Eisenhower Library. The collections there are wonderfully rich, and the kind and generous staff helped me find my way through mountains of crucial documents. To Tim Rives, Valoise Armstrong, Kathy Struss, and Chalsea Millner, I want to express my deep gratitude for your professionalism and all-around decency.
This book is very much a product of the University of Virginia and in particular the Miller Center for Public Affairs. At Mr. Jefferson’s university nobody doubts that presidents are worthy of scholarly attention, and the Miller Center has been for 40 years one of the nation’s most important centers of inquiry into the history of the presidency. I am grateful to the former director, Governor Gerald Baliles, who brought me into the Miller Center family, and to the current director, Bill Antholis, who has enthusiastically encouraged my work on Eisenhower and given me those invaluable commodities: time, space, and moral support. Gene Fife and Claire Gargalli have helped lead the Miller Center with wisdom and grace and have been kind friends and mentors to me.
The Miller Center is home to a group of smart and dedicated presidential scholars who have become friends and cherished colleagues. Heartfelt thanks to Barbra Perry, Marc Selverstone, Russell Riley, Guian McKee, Niki Hemmer, Stefanie Georgakis Abbott, Ken Hughes, and Sheila Blackford for everything they have done to help me find my way through the Age of Eisenhower. Marc shared his deep knowledge of the Kennedy years with me, and Guian gave me some insightful advice about 1950s social policy. I’m grateful to have enjoyed many hours with Doug Blackmon and Doug Trout at some of Charlottesville’s abundant diners and dives. And to Andrew Chancey for paying the bills: Thank you.
During 2013 I spent a productive semester at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress as the Henry A. Kissinger chair. That fellowship allowed me access to the greatest library in the world, and I owe a great debt to the former director Carolyn Brown for her support. I also spent a memorable month of quiet work in Oslo in 2013 as a fellow at the Nobel Institute; my thanks to Geir Lundestad and Asle Toje for their warm welcome.
A number of scholars read portions of the manuscript and gave me immensely valuable advice about how to improve it. Sidney Milkis, Kenneth Osgood, and Kathryn Brownell participated in a roundtable review of the first half of the book at the Miller Center. And at the Lyndon Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Eugene Gholz and Joshua Rovner orchestrated a high-powered scholarly review of a few chapters that led me to rethink some key passages. Sharon Weiner’s comments there were especially useful. My thanks also to old friends and presidential historians Jeremi Suri, Jeffrey Engel, and Tim Naftali, and to Michael De Groot and Lauren Turek for research and web help. Beth Bailey and David Farber put me up in their beautiful Kansas home during my trips to Abilene. To the Poker Guys, who shall remain anonymous: Thank you for your friendship, laughter, and occasional mockery.
A few friends went beyond the call of duty. David Farber, Richard Immerman, Hal Brands, and Fred Logevall read and commented on the entire manuscript, graciously taking time away from their own pressing obligations to give me immensely helpful comments. I can’t thank them enough for sharing with me their knowledge and insight. To Brian Balogh and Melvyn Leffler, my colleagues and dear friends in the History Department at the University of Virginia, I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude. Brian has been a friend, an advocate, a cheerleader, a critic, a mentor, and an inspiration ever since I arrived at Virginia. He read the whole manuscript and helped me improve it. And Mel Leffler, whom I met when I was in graduate school, has been an academic role model for me for over two decades. He is a generous reader, an insightful critic, a kindhearted scholar, and a true professional in every sense of the word. I am honored to have him as a colleague and friend.
I have relied upon the smarts and savvy of my agent, Susan Rabiner, for many years, and I am very lucky that she steered this book into the hands of Bob Bender, a l
egendary editor and wise man who has made the book immeasurably better. Johanna Li carefully guided the book through production and Judith Hoover did a truly miraculous job of copy editing. Any errors that remain are entirely my fault.
Over the years that I have been tangled up in Ike, my dear family has been there to straighten me out. My children, Ben and Emma, kept me fortified with goofy drawings of “President Ike” and gave me immense joy as they grew from little kids into inspiring adults. My wife, Elizabeth Varon, a great historian, is also the funniest lady I know. “Ike was a badass!” she once declared, brilliantly summarizing a long and ponderous story I was trying to tell. She has kept me chuckling for almost a quarter of a century.
I dedicate the book to my father, David I. Hitchcock, Jr. He lived through these years as a keen and wide-eyed young man, working as a legislative aide to Senator H. Alexander Smith, a moderate New Jersey Republican. In the mid-1950s Dad had a front-row seat in the U.S. Senate, and he observed the titans of the age as they strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage. From Richard Russell to Lyndon Johnson, Margaret Chase Smith, Everett Dirksen, Hubert Humphrey, Paul Douglas, William Knowland, and even the reptilian Joe McCarthy, Dad got to see them all in their element, in the rough and tumble of American democracy. Then, in 1957, he went overseas as a young foreign service officer—to Vietnam, as it happened, beginning his long and distinguished career in public diplomacy. Never cynical, always optimistic, ever curious, and fundamentally decent, he has throughout his life reflected the best of America. I offer him this book as a small token of thanks for all he has given me.
A NOTE ON EISENHOWER SCHOLARSHIP
The documentary sources held at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, along with the 21 volumes of private letters and papers published by Johns Hopkins University Press, form the foundation for any serious study of Ike’s life. There is also an abundant scholarly literature on Eisenhower and his times. Some of the earlier surveys of his life and presidency have not aged well. Peter Lyon, Eisenhower: Portrait of the Hero, and Herbert Parmet, Eisenhower and the American Crusades, are quite out of date. Others skim along the surface, such as Michael Beschloss, Eisenhower: A Centennial Life; Geoffrey Perret, Eisenhower; and Piers Brendon, Ike: Life and Times of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Stephen Ambrose’s two-volume life contains much of value but is crippled by the author’s use of dubious evidence. More substantial and well-researched is Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, which gives more attention to war than to peace. Jim Newton, Eisenhower: The White House Years, is concise and even-handed, while Evan Thomas, Ike’s Bluff, provides a loose jumble of revealing vignettes. An excellent short synthesis is Chester Pach and Elmo Richardson, The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike produced a two-volume presidential memoir, The White House Years, whose subtitles are Mandate for Change and Waging Peace. Stolid and mostly reliable, they are guarded and buttoned up, revealing little of the man himself. None of these authors effectively captures the acidic contempt with which the intellectuals of the era viewed Eisenhower. For a contemporary example of that, see Richard Rovere, The Eisenhower Years.
The most useful sources on Eisenhower’s pre-presidential life include his own memoir, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, and Kenneth Davis, Soldier of Democracy, a book full of purple prose and many small mistakes but that treats in detail the early family life in Abilene. Ike’s prewar diaries and letters are now available in a collection edited by Dan Holt. Six volumes of Eisenhower’s papers from the war years have been published in the Johns Hopkins series. Ike’s own memoir of the war, Crusade in Europe, is diplomatic to a fault and ought to be read alongside his diary, as well as the candid, and controversial, diary kept by his naval aide, Harry Butcher, published as My Three Years with Eisenhower. For key details of Eisenhower’s personal and social life during the war, Kay Summersby’s admiring (and discreet) account is valuable: Eisenhower Was My Boss. Her rather less discreet memoir, published 30 years later, is Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower. John Gunther, the journalist who covered Ike in the war and after, wrote a short but revealing biography in 1952 titled Eisenhower: The Man and the Symbol. Among the better treatments of Eisenhower’s war leadership are the study written by his grandson, David Eisenhower, Eisenhower at War, 1943–45; Carlo d’Este, Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life; and Merle Miller, Ike the Soldier: As They Knew Him.
Eisenhower was an avid letter writer and diarist, and these written materials are a boon to scholars. Robert Ferrell published selected highlights in The Eisenhower Diaries. Ike’s Letters to Mamie and his correspondence with Swede Hazlett, edited by Robert Griffith and published as Ike’s Letters to a Friend, are especially valuable. His son John’s observations of the president, titled Strictly Personal, are also revealing. Two books written by White House aides shed light on Eisenhower’s leadership style: William Ewald, Eisenhower the President, and Arthur Larson, Eisenhower: The President Nobody Knew.
Among the most useful sources on the election of 1952 are the memoirs of key advisers: Sherman Adams, Firsthand Report; Herbert Brownell, Advising Ike; Robert Cutler, No Time for Rest; and Emmet Hughes, The Ordeal of Power. William B. Pickett, Eisenhower Decides to Run, gives a detailed narrative. Eisenhower’s own version in Mandate for Change is somewhat sterile. James Patterson, Mr. Republican, expertly covers the contest with Taft. On Nixon in 1952, William Costello, The Facts about Nixon, provides a critical view; Earl Mazo, Richard Nixon, is far more positive. Both are essential, but the authoritative work on the young Nixon is Roger Morris, Richard Milhous Nixon. On the crisis over Nixon’s campaign fund, the most revealing account of all is surely Nixon’s own in Six Crises, next to which must be placed Nixon Agonistes by Garry Wills, although it overstates Eisenhower’s political genius in handling the issue. For a fresh look at Nixon, see John Farrell, Richard Nixon: The Life. Two new books assess the Ike-Nixon relationship: Jeffrey Frank’s Ike and Dick is a masterwork of elegance and concision; a more detailed portrait, quite favorable to Nixon, is Irwin Gellman, The President and the Apprentice.
The “New Look”—Eisenhower’s cold war grand strategy—has received sustained and detailed attention from many historians over the years. Among the most valuable works are Richard Immerman and Robert Bowie, Waging Peace; John Gaddis, Strategies of Containment; Melvyn Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind; Campbell Craig, Destroying the Village; Richard Hewlett and Jack Holl, Atoms for Peace and War; McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival; Richard Leighton, Strategy, Money and the New Look; and Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron. Immerman’s book John Foster Dulles is an excellent portrait of Ike’s wingman, and the essays in John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, edited by Immerman, are excellent.
For Eisenhower’s approach to McCarthy and the Red Scare in general, see Jeff Broadwater, Eisenhower and the Anti-Communist Crusade; David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense; Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate; and a highly critical contemporary account, Richard Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy. William Ewald wrote a well-researched study on Eisenhower’s role in undermining the Red-baiting senator: Who Killed Joe McCarthy? Fred Greenstein’s classic study, The Hidden-Hand Presidency, rests mainly upon the McCarthy case as evidence of Ike’s governing style. David Nichols follows Greenstein in Ike and McCarthy, making a somewhat overstated case for Eisenhower as the genius behind the effort to bring down McCarthy. For Oppenheimer, see the excellent study by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, American Prometheus. Two important works that reveal the gendered nature of McCarthyism are Robert Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, and David Johnson, The Lavender Scare.
Historians of the CIA and its associated secret agencies owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the National Security Archive at George Washington University for its efforts to pry out of the U.S. government many of its most closely guarded secrets. One of their scholars, John Prados, has written many books studded with new revelations, including his masterful if somewhat droll account of America’s obsession w
ith covert operations, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA. Stephen Ambrose wrote an early survey of these matters called Ike’s Spies that suffers from lack of access to much declassified material. On Allen Dulles, Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy, should be supplemented by the CIA’s once-secret study Allen Welsh Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence, written by Wayne Jackson in 1973. Stephen Kinzer’s work is uniformly critical and polemical; see The Brothers and All the Shah’s Men. A similar accusatory tone infuses Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes. The most up-to-date book on events in Iran in 1953 is Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne, Mohammad Mossadeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran. On Guatemala, Nick Cullather added enormously to our knowledge with Secret History, a book that has a complex history of its own. Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, is an essential book, the product of deep archival and oral history research in Guatemala. One of the first and still best books on the topic is Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala. The CIA itself has at long last started to release large troves of secret materials from the 1950s. See the CIA Reading Room at https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom.
Amid a sea of controversial and contentious works on America’s early involvement in Vietnam up to 1960, a few stand out for balance and good sense. Fredrik Logevall’s Pulitzer Prize–winning survey of the transition between the French and the American wars, Embers of War, brilliantly narrates this often misunderstood moment, though Logevall’s Eisenhower appears far more eager for war in 1954 than the portrait sketched in these pages. See as well William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War; Ronald Spector, Advice and Support; David Anderson, Trapped by Success; and William J. Duiker, U.S. Containment Policy and the Conflict in Indochina. For the decision not to go to war in 1954, see the important 1984 article by George Herring and Richard Immerman, “Eisenhower, Dulles, and Dienbienphu: ‘The Day We Didn’t Go to War’ Revisited,” as well as Melanie Billings-Yun, Decision against War. In 2011 the National Archives released the full text of the Pentagon Papers; this once-secret report can be read at https://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers/. On the Taiwan crisis, see Gordon Chang, Friends and Enemies; a critical assessment by Appu Soman, Double-Edged Sword; and for China’s point of view, Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War.
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