By the spring of 1951, he and Gruenther had laid by a good pile of wood. They had the team they needed and the general outlines of the military organization they would create.35 Morale in Europe seemed to be improving, and Eisenhower saw considerable potential in the new NATO Defense College for building up “common doctrine” among the forces in the alliance.36 Solidarity, he knew, would not grow organically: “It will not develop among peoples unless their leaders take constant and positive action.… So … a constant concern of leadership should be to see that differing national attitudes and policies toward Iran or Indo China, or Korea or India, or any other subject, do not become such bitter issues between NATO nations that we tend to fall apart. The Soviets will certainly not fail to give us enough opportunities to make this mistake.”37
The Soviets certainly did. And the great Allied victors of World War II frequently resembled newlyweds as they squabbled over money, pride, bureaucratic fumbles, and security classifications.38 Eisenhower worried that the nations of western Europe would be unable to muster an adequate defense force without first achieving greater unity as a “U.S. of Europe.”39 Unity was elusive, however, as the allies struggled over what to do about Germany. For Eisenhower, this was a decisive issue. NATO—he repeated again and again—needed German economic and military support if it was going to provide a bulwark against expansion of the Soviet empire. To his diary he said, “As of this moment, we ought to be showing Germany how definitely her national interests will be served by sticking and working with us!”40 As always with Ike, the French were a problem. Despairing and reaching for a “spectacular accomplishment,” he supported the creation of a European army. He hoped that “some very plain down-to-earth talks” might ease the French toward the European “amalgamation” he sought.41
By the fall of 1951, Eisenhower’s headquarters had “established a practical command framework, integrated the forces which have already been committed to the Allied Command, initiated necessary training programs, and coordinated such defense plans as could possibly be executed with the limited forces within sight at present.”42 Much remained to be done. Even the US military had yet to accommodate to a NATO-led, transnational defense strategy for Europe, and Eisenhower found it necessary to rebuke the Joint Chiefs over war plans that were entirely US-centric.43 It was still unclear whether a British intelligence officer serving in NATO would, in fact, have access to all of America’s intelligence information. In practice, national frontiers and policies were more rigid than the theory of the NATO alliance presupposed.44
In western Europe, the economic situation always dictated delay.45 The Dutch, the French, the Danes, and the British were all having financial difficulties supporting rearmament for the NATO defenses.46 The move toward greater European political and economic unity gave Eisenhower hope that the favorable economic results from consolidation would soon create an environment conducive to military progress. But as late as the end of 1951, he was still outwardly positive and inwardly uncertain.47 Britain’s position was still nebulous, and Eisenhower concluded that his friend Winston Churchill “no longer absorbs new ideas; exhortation and appeals to the emotions and sentiment still have some effect on him—exposition does not.”48 Actually, the British prime minister gave some ground on the idea of a European army, but he did so grudgingly, and Eisenhower was not satisfied with the support NATO was receiving from the European nation he knew was absolutely essential to its success. By January 1952, Eisenhower was still pressing for unity, urging faster action, and looking forward to the creation of a force sufficient to stop a Soviet invasion short of the Rhine.49
A Republican on Maneuvers
By that time, however, he was increasingly distracted by those who had him lined up for a new and even more demanding job in the United States.50 The drums calling for him to run for the presidency of the United States had been beating since 1943. Sounding lightly at first, then with steadily growing intensity, the presidential Bolero was by the spring of 1952 crashing with deafening intensity around Ike and his staff in Europe.
Eisenhower, the thoroughly professional soldier, appeared to be of two minds about politics. He was an apostle of the democratic process. But at the same time he was contemptuous of the endless struggles with interest groups that had no sense of the public interest, and he was repulsed by the preening and posing that seemed all too common at every level of government. He said he was “violently negative” about politics.51 He wanted “no part” of the nation’s “domestic struggles.”52 He fiercely and finally refused to be sucked into “the political groupments and political struggles in America.”53 Or so it seemed.
While denying any political ambitions, he had worked carefully and cautiously to build an effective network of Republican supporters. These were men with money and political clout. They were men who did not waste their time on third-party candidates or other obvious losers. They understood the probabilities of drawing to an inside straight in poker or of investing in a new enterprise. They understood how to run companies and newspapers. They put their money on Eisenhower and initially respected his oft-repeated insistence that he could not—either legally or morally—state any party affiliation while serving as Supreme Commander of NATO’s military forces.
So they did the best they could to persuade the general to declare his candidacy and unleash the hounds of fund-raising and vote-getting. Paul Hoffman pleaded with Ike over dinner.54 Lawrence Whiting and Clarence Francis added their voices to the chorus,55 as did George Whitney, chairman of J.P. Morgan & Company.56 Editors, industrialists, and politicians begged Eisenhower to save the country, and along the way to save the Republican Party from another in a two-decade-long string of defeats. Truman’s success in 1948 had seared the conservative mentality.
Ike was not immune to flattery, and he developed a fantasy outcome that would put the boy from Abilene in the White House without any danger of being embarrassed and without a grimy campaign either for the nomination or for the presidency. He would be nominated and elected by acclaim in a true people’s revolution against the nation’s “planned economy and Socialistic trends.”57 As he quietly pondered “bridges that are a long way ahead,” he mused with his brother Milton about an outcome “bordering on the miraculous.”58
Still wishing to avoid controversy, he began to correspond in code with his close friend General Lucius Clay, now retired and chairman of the board at a large firm.59 Clay became the linchpin in the effort to ease Ike into the battle for the nomination and the ensuing campaign. Neither Clay nor Eisenhower’s other confidants were thinking about anything “miraculous.” But they could already taste a sweet victory in the election of 1952.
Finally, in the spring of 1952, Eisenhower asked President Truman to relieve him as Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, as of June 1. There were impending political responsibilities, he explained, and he anticipated a nomination “for high political office.” He retired from the US Army on May 31, 1952.60 After a tour of the NATO members’ capitals, he was relieved from active duty as SACEUR effective June 1.61 He was, at that point in his career, the unappointed but universally acclaimed leader of those European nations dedicated to protecting democratic capitalism and opposing the further expansion of the Soviet empire.
In parting, he reflected on his months as Supreme Allied Commander: “With many others I share the conviction that America’s interests and the peace of the world require that Western Europe be kept outside the Iron Curtain. Moreover, I believe this can be done, given a readiness to cooperate effectively among all nations of NATO. In spite of the great distance remaining between these nations and their goals, they have achieved, thus far, a marked degree of success in the task of building a viable defense structure in this critical region.”62 This would be an essential part of the record on which he would run for the Republican nomination for the presidency.
Aspirations for High Office
Suddenly, almost frighteningly, Eisenhower’s career was thrown back in time to 1941, befo
re he had been selected to lead the Allied forces invading North Africa. At that point he had been only one of several who might have been chosen for that post. Now in 1952 he was in a similar situation when he became a candidate for the Republican nomination for the presidency. The early favorite was Senator Robert Taft, son of President William Howard Taft. The senator had been leading the Republican opposition to the New Deal in his home state of Ohio and the nation through the 1930s and the Second World War. Beloved by the solid right wing of the Republican Party, Taft was a tough opponent, especially for a novice in party politics.
Ike had long been nervous about his “meager voting record”63 and the possibility that some of his “personal and business affairs” might occasion criticism.64 He and his supporters knew all too well that he had much to learn about leadership in American politics. He had an unparalleled reputation for military service and a personality that glowed through his interactions with individuals of all ages, nationalities, and races. But he was a beginner at dealing with wily political opponents, lobbyists, and that part of the media oriented toward either Senator Taft or the Democratic Party. That included much of the media. Television was a hurdle to be cleared rather than an opportunity to maximize on his justly famous smile. Deals had to be reached, and from time to time his instinct for a simple set of principles would need to give way to expediency.
Determined to win, Ike took a crash course in American politics from advisors who had the experience he lacked. His brother Milton, who had years of experience in Washington politics, helped. George A. Sloan of the International Chamber of Commerce began to feed Eisenhower position papers on aspects of economic policy.65 Eisenhower dutifully studied the issues and worked out his positions in more detail than had been the case in his career to date. He was armed with a solid set of principles, but not the kind of information that Senator Taft could muster.
Meanwhile, Ike was trying to learn how to be an effective speaker. He failed at his first major effort in his hometown, Abilene, the single place in America most friendly to Eisenhower, its war-hero son.66 But as his campaign progressed, he stopped trying to read his speeches and gained confidence in his ability to reach out and establish rapport with those in his audience. He actually became a good campaigner—much to the relief of his team. In the nominating convention, he defeated Taft by a narrow margin, produced in part by the type of political maneuvering he disliked.67 By that time, however, he had begun to look upon the 1952 campaign with some of the same crusader mentality he had developed in World War II. Once again, he was a man with a national and international mission.
Throughout the 1952 campaign against Democrat Adlai Stevenson, however, he was as much a follower as a leader. He still felt like a novice at politics, and he was right. He was more passive than he had been at any time since the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, when he almost lost his command. So when it came time to select a running mate, he followed the lead of his closest advisors and agreed to anoint Richard Nixon, a darling of the right wing of the Republican Party. Ike did not know Nixon very well. But he soon learned—painfully—to respect Nixon’s political savvy. Charged with accepting covert funds from a rich men’s slush fund, Nixon countered in September with a tear-jerking TV speech in which he used his wife, Pat, and his dog, Checkers, to sway the audience to his side. It worked. Eisenhower, who had been hesitant about keeping Nixon on the ticket, was boxed in—as he had been repeatedly by Charles de Gaulle. Nixon stayed on the ticket, and the campaign that Ike had labeled a “crusade” against corruption in government limped ahead.
Equally telling of Eisenhower’s combination of fierce ambition and passivity was a speech that he gave in Wisconsin and a paragraph that he excised from his remarks. Senator McCarthy had attacked George C. Marshall, one of the two men who had done the most to build Eisenhower’s career as a military leader. Simple loyalty and honesty required a public rebuttal from Ike. Responding to this moral challenge, he drafted a spirited defense of a man whose loyalty to the United States had been displayed over a long and brilliant career in challenging times. But the politicians would not have it. Going soft for a moment that he would have years to regret, Eisenhower cut the defense of Marshall out of his speech. But alas for Ike, the spot would not disappear. The speech had already been distributed, and the newsmen, to their delight, pounced upon the paragraph that had been excised. It made the news and cost Eisenhower the friendship of George C. Marshall, who afterward seldom spoke with his former protégé. What price victory?
But what an overwhelming victory it was. Eisenhower swept the election and pushed the Democratic Party out of the White House for the first time since 1933. Ike brought in 55 percent of the votes and 442 of the nation’s 531 electoral votes. Turnout was unusually high, as it had been in the primaries. Equally important were the victories in the House of Representatives and Senate—both of which were now in Republican control. A nation nervous about the war in Korea and the potential for the Cold War to slide into an atomic disaster elected the man they associated with victory in World War II. A nation nervous about corruption in Washington and the growth of an intrusive administrative state elected a conservative president they trusted to clean up, to slow down, maybe stop, or perhaps even reverse the growth of the federal bureaucracy. Eisenhower’s decision to follow the course charted by his political advisors was successful, if not always pleasing to Ike. Now, as thirty-fourth president of the United States, he would be back in an executive position in which the leadership skills he had mastered as Supreme Commander in World War II, as Chief of Staff of the US Army, and as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, would all come into play.
Dwight Eisenhower firmly believed in something that people routinely referred to as the “public interest.” This was an idea, a goal, that he thought existed beyond and was far superior to partisan politics, interest-group politics, ethnic politics, and the self-aggrandizement on display so often in Washington. This was a Platonic concept held by a normally Aristotelian and sometimes Machiavellian leader. It was linked tightly in his mind to democracy and to the right kind of leadership. Now he would have four years—and maybe even eight—to put those ideas to the test of practice and power.
To carry forward this study of his leadership, we will focus on the two most important aspects of his presidency: his effort to lead the nation and the world toward peace, and his closely related effort to provide Americans with a reasonable measure of prosperity. Characteristically, he would seek these goals by avoiding extremes and following the middle way.
Ten
Ike meeting with his cabinet at Camp David in November 1955. From left: John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower, and Ezra Taft Benson, with Charles Wilson in the background. Used with permission of the Associated Press. © 2017 The Associated Press.
Pursuing Prosperity
In January 1953, Dwight Eisenhower became the leader of an American economy that faced three major challenges. One stemmed from a postwar settlement that had laid the foundation for a second globalization of the world economy. The first, British-led globalization of the late nineteenth century had been destroyed long ago by the First World War and the retreat in the 1920s and 1930s to nationalism, then to autarky, and finally to war again. Now the United States had replaced Britain as the informal overseer of the global movement, but in 1953 it was still not at all clear that America would be up to this task. There were serious internal struggles over trade policy and international competition, struggles that frequently tied Congress in knots and made it difficult to frame coherent policies.1
A closely related challenge involved America’s capacity to generate the productivity gains and basic innovations that had powered the nation’s growth since the nineteenth century.2 Many learned analysts thought that the second industrial revolution had run out of gas. The leading industries of that amazing era, they concluded, would no longer provide America with new investment opportunities or the country’s consumers with the new goods and services they ha
d come to expect. There was serious discussion in the late forties and early fifties of stagnation or, even worse, stagflation—a devastating combination of slow growth and high inflation.3
The third problem was easier to understand but still difficult to solve. It stemmed from a combination of accumulated federal obligations, the ongoing expenditures for the war in Korea, and the added expenses of a major military buildup. The 1953 deficit would be $6.5 billion—an amount that would foster inflation if Congress ended the Korean War program of price controls.4
These challenges had global as well as national implications. Since 1945, the United States had been the bulwark for the capitalist nations arrayed against the Soviet Union and its allies and client states. The United States was also providing essential support for the new array of international institutions—the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank—designed to prevent the kind of economic nationalism and beggar-thy-neighbor autarky that had led the world toward war in the 1930s. Meanwhile, America had pumped substantial Marshall Plan subsidies into the effort to spur western Europe’s postwar recovery.5
In the new president’s mind, the links between these international programs, the nation’s foreign policy, and the success of its domestic economy were crucial and self-evident. He fully understood that one of his most important tasks was to guide the world’s largest industrial economy by working with Congress to craft policies that would help to keep business profitable, hold down unemployment, control inflation, and promote growth. These were awesome goals. To some considerable extent, they were conflicting goals.6 They were a formidable challenge to the new administration and its leader.
They were especially challenging because nothing in Eisenhower’s long army career had prepared him for this new role. In the aftermath of World War I, he had developed an economic mobilization plan for the War Department, but his understanding of and interest in America’s very large, very complex economy was shallow. He sought and received advice about industry from investors such as Bernard Baruch. But he appears not to have developed any particularly salient ideas that would help him in 1953. Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s he had given little thought to what made America’s capitalist system tick—or not tick.
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