Eisenhower

by Louis Galambos

  36. For a good popular account of the impact of Sputnik, see Paul Dickson, Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (New York: Walker, 2001). See also Richard V. Damms, “James Killian, the Technological Capabilities Panel, and the Emergence of President Eisenhower’s ‘Scientific-Technological Elite,’ ” Diplomatic History 24, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 57–78.

  37. On Sputnik, see Roger D. Launius, “Eisenhower and Space: Politics and Ideology in the Construction of the U.S. Civil Space Program,” in Forging the Shield: Eisenhower and National Security for the 21st Century, ed. Dennis E. Showalter (Chicago: Imprint Publications, 2005), 151–182. See also James R. Killian Jr., Sputnik, Scientists and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977). As mentioned above, Paul Dickson gives a good account of the public and media response in Sputnik.

  38. See, for instance, DDE to Neil Hosler McElroy, October 17 and 18, 1957, Papers, 18:496–497, 501–502. See also DDE to Charles Edward Potter, October 21, 1957, Papers, 18:503–505, on US scientific resources. Also see DDE to James Van Gundia Neel, November 1, 1957, Papers, 18:534–535.

  39. In this same context, Eisenhower would request and Congress would provide support for a new National Aeronautics and Space Agency, would double the budget for the National Science Foundation, and would pass the National Defense Education Act of 1958 to fund training in science and technology. As a measure of Ike’s sense of the importance of ARPA (later DARPA), the president used General Andrew J. Goodpaster as his point man in the development of the new agency. On the National Defense Education Act, see Barbara Barksdale Clowse, Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense Education Act of 1958 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981).

  40. It is important to note that while the government provided financial support for innovation and to some extent engaged in basic research, the entrepreneurship—that is the creative combination of capital, resources, labor, and novel ideas—took place overwhelmingly in the private sector. For a different view of that complex process, see Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (London: Anthem Press, 2013).

  41. The new companies were engaged in a wide range of economic activities. They included Hyatt Hotels, Food Lion, Budget Rent a Car, Amway, and the Playboy Club.

  42. See, for instance, DDE to Russell Cornell Leffingwell, February 16, 1954, Papers, 15:903–904; DDE to Alice Liesveld, March 11, 1954, Papers, 15:947–48 (“I believe that the future of our country is still limitless, that America remains the ‘land of opportunity’ for all who are ready to apply themselves to constructive goals” [italics added]); DDE to Edward Everett Hazlett Jr., June 4, 1955, Papers, 16:1729–1731; DDE to Lewis Williams Douglas, September 30, 1956, Papers, 17:2297–98 (“We must find a way to foster a healthily growing, high-employment, peacetime economy while containing inflation. It is a new and challenging task”).

  43. There is a substantial body of literature on the performance of the economy and on the economic policies deployed in the postwar era. In addition to McClenahan and Becker, Eisenhower and the Cold War Economy, see Romer and Romer, “What Ends Recessions?,” and Romer and Romer, “The Evolution of Economic Understanding.” See also Dwight D. Eisenhower’s annual Economic Reports to the Congress, 1953–1960.

  44. See Burton I. Kaufman, Trade and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). More recently, McClenahan and Becker, Eisenhower and the Cold War Economy, give a thorough and perceptive analysis of the administration’s problems, with analysis of the tension between its security concerns and its attempt to promote free trade.

  45. DDE to Joseph William Martin Jr., June 29, 1953, Papers, 14:335–336. The matter at hand was the extension of the excess-profits tax. Eisenhower was determined to fight it out on this front: “We must move toward a balanced budget in a deliberate and orderly manner.” The administration would first achieve that goal in 1956.

  46. By January 1954, Ike’s patience with his brother Ed was almost exhausted. “It is rather disturbing,” he wrote, “to find one brother that seems always ready to believe that I am a poor, helpless, ignorant, uninformed individual, thrust to dizzy heights of governmental responsibility and authority, who has been captured by a band of conniving ‘internationalists.’ ” DDE to Edgar Newton Eisenhower, January 27, 1954, Papers, 15:857–859.

  47. DDE to Edgar Newton Eisenhower, November 8, 1954, Papers, 15:1386–1389. Ike added: “So how can you say I am getting ‘bad’ advice; why don’t you just assume I am stupid, trying to wreck the nation, and leave our Constitution in tatters?”

  48. DDE, Statement by the President upon Signing the Social Security Amendments of 1956, available at https://www.ssa.gov/history/ikestmts.html#1956a. In this regard, Eisenhower’s policies were attuned to changes taking place in corporate America. See Christy Ford Chapin, “Corporate Social Responsibility and Political Development in the Health Insurance and Home Loan Industries,” Business History Review 90, no. 4 (2016): 647–670. See also David Stebenne, “Social Welfare in the United States, 1945–1960,” in The Liberal Consensus Reconsidered: American Politics and Society in the Postwar Era, ed. Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), 108–126; and David Stebenne, Modern Republican: Arthur Larson and the Eisenhower Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), esp. 129–175.

  49. Hugh Wilson, “President Eisenhower and the Development of Active Labor Market Policy in the United States: A Revisionist View,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 39, no. 3 (September 2009): 519–548.

  50. Don T. Martin, “Eisenhower and the Politics of Federal Aid to Education: The Watershed Years, 1953–1961,” Midwest History of Education Journal 25, no. 1 (1998): 7–12.

  51. The 1954 Brown decision (347 U.S. 483) overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had allowed the states to establish separate (as they certainly were) but equal (as they clearly were not) schools.

  52. Like Britain and Germany, the United States was running out of combat replacements. So Ike’s action was prompted by a military problem, not a concern for racial justice.

  53. Michael S. Mayer, “The Eisenhower Administration and the Desegregation of Washington, D.C.,” Journal of Policy History 3 (1991): 24–41.

  54. See David A. Nichols, A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007). For a different, substantially less positive interpretation of Eisenhower’s position on African Americans’ struggle for civil rights, see Newton, Eisenhower, 242–253. See also Smith, Eisenhower, 706–730, and Jeffrey R. Young, “Eisenhower’s Federal Judges and Civil Rights Policy: A Republican ‘Southern Strategy’ for the 1950s,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 77, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 536–565.

  55. Nichols, A Matter of Justice, 169–281; Cary Fraser, “Crossing the Color Line in Little Rock: The Eisenhower Administration and the Dilemma of Race for U.S. Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 24, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 233–264.

  56. DDE, Annual Message Presenting the Economic Report to the Congress, January 20, 1960, available at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=11806. See also Ann Mari May, “President Eisenhower, Economic Policy, and the 1960 Presidential Election,” Journal of Economic History 50 (June 1990): 417–427. The author concludes: “The Eisenhower presidency provides a compelling counterexample to the political business cycle hypothesis that presidents will manipulate the economy to enhance their re-election prospects. While Eisenhower engaged in highly contractionary policies upon entering office, he did not engage in significantly expansionary policies before the 1956 and 1960 presidential elections” (427). For another perspective on Ike’s middle way, see Robert Mason, “ ‘Down the Middle of the Road’: Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican Party, and the Politics of Consensus and Conflict, 1949–1961,” in The Liberal Consensus Reconsidered, ed. Mason and Morgan, 186–203.

 
Eleven. Pursuing Peace

  1. On the long-running attempt of Republican senator John W. Bricker (Ohio) to amend the Constitution and limit the president’s power to make treaties and establish executive agreements, see Papers, 14:74–75. Bricker did not abandon his effort until 1956. Papers, 16:2109–2111.

  2. See, for instance, Eisenhower’s cordial letter to General Franco of Spain, looking forward to “a new phase of friendship and cooperation not only between our military services but between our two nations.” DDE to Francisco Franco y Bahamonde, September 5, 1953, Papers, 14:500–502.

  3. DDE to Alfred Maximilian Gruenther, February 10, 1953, Papers, 14:39.

  4. DDE to Churchill, April 7, 1953, Papers, 14:136–139; DDE to Charles Erwin Wilson, April 10, 1953, Papers, 14:160–161; DDE to Syngman Rhee, April 23, 1953, Papers, 14:166–167; and Diary, April 1, 1953, Papers, 14:172–174. On the problems of maintaining unity within his own political party, see Diary, May 1, 1953, Papers, 14:195–197.

  5. DDE to William Phillips, June 5, 1953, Papers, 14:275–276.

  6. Evan Thomas, Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World (New York: Little, Brown, 2012), 14–15, 98–109.

  7. DDE to Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek, May 5, 1953, Papers, 14:208–211.

  8. DDE to Emmet John Hughes, December 10, 1953, Papers, 15:749.

  9. Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. 123–146 on Solarium and its immediate aftermath.

  10. DDE to Gruenther, February 10, 1953, Papers, 14:39.

  11. For an excellent history of the Eisenhower strategy and the manner in which the services responded to it, see Daun van Ee, “From the New Look to Flexible Response, 1953–1964,” in Against All Enemies: Interpretations of American Military History from Colonial Times to the Present, ed. Kenneth J. Hagan and William R. Roberts (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 321–340. See also DDE, Diary, November 11, 1953, Papers, 14:671–672; DDE to Charles Erwin Wilson, January 5, 1955, Papers, 16:1488–1491; and DDE to Edward Everett Hazlett Jr., August 20, 1956, Papers, 17:2254–2257. Ike’s Atoms for Peace program was closely linked to the new strategy. Martin J. Medhurst, “Atoms for Peace and Nuclear Hegemony: The Rhetorical Structure of a Cold War Campaign,” Armed Forces and Society 23, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 571–593.

  12. DDE to Errett Power Scrivner, June 30, 1953, Papers, 14:341–343. See also Donald Alan Carter, “Eisenhower Versus the Generals,” Journal of Military History 71 (October 2007): 1169–1199.

  13. DDE to Charles Erwin Wilson, January 5, 1955, Papers, 16:1488–1492.

  14. Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower, vol. 2, The President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), esp. 85–96.

  15. For a different tack on this question, see Thomas, Ike’s Bluff, esp. 394–404.

  16. DDE to Churchill, February 2, 1953, Papers, 14:18–19.

  17. Burton I. Kaufman, The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Command (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 287–348.

  18. Diary, October 8, 1953, Papers, 14:570. Ike went on to write: “Trying to save South Korea is a little bit like trying to defend the basic rights of someone in court who insists on behaving in such fashion as to earn the contempt of the judge, the jury and all of the spectators.”

  19. DDE to Syngman Rhee, June 6 and 18, 1953, Papers, 14:278–282, 309–310.

  20. DDE to Syngman Rhee, November 4, 1953, Papers, 14:638–640; DDE to Rhee, January 31, 1955, Papers, 16:1534–1536.

  21. David Holloway, “Nuclear Weapons and the Escalation of the Cold War, 1945–1962,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 380–382.

  22. Diary, December 10, 1953, Papers, 15:738–747.

  23. David McIntosh, “In the Shadow of Giants: U.S. Policy Toward Small Nations: The Cases of Lebanon, Costa Rica, and Austria in the Eisenhower Years,” Contemporary Austrian Studies 4 (1996): 222–279. See also Kenneth Lehman, “Revolutions and Attributions: Making Sense of Eisenhower Administration Policies in Bolivia and Guatemala,” Diplomatic History 21, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 185–213.

  24. Geoffrey Warner, “Eisenhower and Castro: US-Cuban Relations, 1958–60,” International Affairs 75, no. 4 (1999): 803–817. See also Bevan Sewell, “A Perfect (Free-Market) World? Economics, the Eisenhower Administration, and the Soviet Economic Offensive in Latin America,” Diplomatic History 32, no. 5 (November 2008): 841–868.

  25. See, for instance, DDE to Churchill, July 22, 1954, Papers 15:1207–11: “Colonialism is on the way out as a relationship among peoples. The sole question is one of time and method. I think we should handle it so as to win adherents to Western aims.” See also DDE to Gruenther, November 30, 1954, Papers, 15:1413–1415.

  26. See DDE to Paul Gray Hoffman, June 23, 1958, Papers, 19:952–960, for Eisenhower’s lengthy explanation of his positions on events in Lebanon, Cyprus, France, and Indonesia.

  27. See, for instance, DDE to John Foster Dulles, April 23 and 24, 1954, Papers, 15:1030–1031; DDE to Gruenther, April 26, 1954, Papers, 15:1033–1036; DDE to Churchill, July 8, 1954, Papers, 15:1170–1173. Also see Ambrose, Eisenhower, 2:100–101, 173–185, 204–211.

  28. DDE to Ngo Dinh Diem, February 3, 1955, Papers, 16:1546–1549.

  29. DDE to Churchill, February 24, 1953, Papers, 14:68–69; DDE to Muhammad Naguib, May 24, 1953, Papers, 14:244–245.

  30. Steve Marsh, “The United States, Iran and Operation ‘Ajax’: Inverting Interpretative Orthodoxy,” Middle Eastern Studies 39, no. 3 (July 2003): 1–38.

  31. Steven E. Ambrose with Richard H. Immerman, Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999, orig. 1981), 189–214. In November 1954, Ike told his brother Edgar, “A year ago last January we were in imminent danger of losing Iran, and sixty percent of the known oil reserves of the world. You may have forgotten this. Lots of people have. But there has been no greater threat that has in recent years overhung the free world. That threat has been largely, if not totally, removed. I could name at least a half dozen other spots of the same character.” DDE to Edgar Newton Eisenhower, November 8, 1954, Papers, 15:1386–1389. Ike’s solution would last until 1979, when the Iranian Revolution overthrew the shah. See also Daniel C. Williamson, “Understandable Failure: The Eisenhower Administration’s Strategic Goals in Iraq, 1953–1958,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 17 (2006): 597–615.

  32. See, for instance, Cole C. Kingseed, Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis of 1956 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), who concludes that Ike “was successful due to the force of his own personality, his bureaucratic skill, and his personal direction of an elaborate staff network that deferred all major decisions to the president before coordinating their execution” (154). In a more recent study, David A. Nichols, Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis: Suez and the Brink of War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 286, comes to a similar conclusion: “By any standard, his was a virtuoso presidential performance—an enduring model for effective crisis management.”

  33. DDE to Churchill, November 27, 1956, Papers, 17:2412–2415, lays out Eisenhower’s reactions stated diplomatically. He clearly was not happy to have first learned about the invasion in the newspapers.

  34. DDE to Hazlett, November 2, 1956, Papers, 17:2355.

  35. Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Random House, 2012), 686.

  36. Shortly afterward the president exercised this new power, sending American troops into Lebanon. Peter L. Hahn, “Securing the Middle East: The Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 36, no. 1 (March 2006): 38–47.

  37. DDE to Chiang Kai-shek, September 1, 1958, Papers, 19:1085–1086; Qiang Zhai, “Crisis and Confrontation: Chinese-American Relations During the Eisenhower Administration,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 9, nos. 3–4 (2000): 221–249.
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  38. DDE to Chiang Kai-shek, September 1, 1958, Papers, 19:1085–1086; DDE to Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, September 29, 1959, and to Harold Macmillan, September 29, 1959; Papers, 20:1678–1683; DDE to Chiang Kai-shek, October 24, 1958, Papers, 19:1168–1170; and DDE to Chiang Kai-shek, January 12, 1961, Papers, 21:2245–2246.

  39. Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, 543–544.

  40. Nichols, Eisenhower 1956, 183ff., describes in exciting detail the intertwining of the Hungarian revolution and the Suez crisis. See also Chris Tudda, “ ‘Reenacting the Story of Tantalus’: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Failed Rhetoric of Liberation,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 3–35; and Jim Marchio, “Resistance Potential and Rollback: US Intelligence and the Eisenhower Administration’s Policies Toward Eastern Europe, 1953–56,” Intelligence and National Security 10, no. 2 (April 1995): 219–241.

  41. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. 8, Berlin Crisis, 1958–1959, ed. Charles S. Sampson (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1993); David G. Coleman, “Eisenhower and the Berlin Problem, 1953–1954,” Journal of Cold War Studies 2, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 3–34.

  42. DDE, Memorandum for Files, February 27, 1959, Papers, 19:1378–1379.

  43. DDE to Konrad Adenauer, September 28, 1950, and DDE to Khrushchev, September 28, 1950, Papers, 20:1676–1678.

  44. Michael R. Beschloss, MAYDAY: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair (New York: Harper and Row, 1986); R. Cargill Hall, “Clandestine Victory: Eisenhower and Overhead Reconnaissance in the Cold War,” in Forging the Shield: Eisenhower and National Security for the 21st Century, ed. Dennis E. Showalter (Chicago: Imprint Publications), 119–149; R. Cargill Hall, “The Eisenhower Administration and the Cold War: Framing American Astronautics to Serve National Security,” Prologue 27 (1995): 58–72.