Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  Scarcely had he settled in when Eisenhower was confronted with two major challenges pertaining to civil liberty and academic freedom. The spring and early summer of 1948 witnessed the arrival of the Cold War with full intensity. The Russians launched the Berlin blockade in June, and Communist witch-hunting would soon reach epidemic proportions in the United States. State legislature after state legislature enacted loyalty-oath requirements for university faculty, and the great private universities of the Ivy League—Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia—were not immune from the witch-hunting virus.

  At Columbia, the issues involved guest speakers on campus and the use of endowed chairs for faculty appointments. In December 1947, before Ike’s arrival, the university had raised no objection when Columbia’s Marxist Study Group invited Arnold Johnson, the legislative director of the American Communist Party, to speak on campus in Pupin Hall.f Pupin’s daughter had written to question Columbia’s policy, and with the arrival of Eisenhower her husband took up the cause. “Will Columbia agree to keep traitors out of Pupin Hall?” he wrote Ike on May 20. “With Kremlin agents … among our school and college teachers and administrators, it is now no time for speakers ‘explaining Marxism’ by attacking all our characteristic institutions.”23

  Eisenhower replied immediately. While he had not been on campus at the time, said Ike, he fully supported the decision Columbia had made to allow Johnson to speak.

  The virtues of our system will never be fully appreciated … unless we also understand the essentials of opposing ideologies.… I deem it not only unobjectionable but very wise to allow opposing systems to be presented by their proponents.… Indeed, I believe that arbitrary refusal to allow students—especially upon their own request—to hear the apostles of these false systems, would create in their minds a justified suspicion that we ourselves fear a real comparison between democracy and dictatorship.24

  The second issue involved an endowed chair funded by the Polish government for the study of Polish philology, language, and literature. Columbia had accepted the gift in early May, and announced the appointment of Professor Manfred Kridl, an eminent Polish scholar at Smith College, to the post. The Polish-American Congress demanded that the university rescind the gift, charging that the Polish government was the tool of Moscow and was engaged in a campaign of “academic infiltration” at Columbia. The press took up the cry. “Coddling Communism at Columbia,” said The San Francisco Examiner in a lead editorial.25

  Once again, Eisenhower stood firm. Professor Kridl, said Ike, was a distinguished scholar of Polish literature who had been appointed “solely by Columbia without advice or suggestion from non-University sources.” The establishment of the Polish chair, he said, “will make it possible for the students of Columbia to learn more about the language and literature of a country that has suffered so much. A great deal of the trouble in the world today is traceable to a lack of understanding of the culture of various countries. I intend to do all in my power to remedy this situation.”26

  When Eisenhower reported the incident to the trustees on September 20, he said the charges made against Columbia were absurd. “I am certain that none of the professors [involved in filling the Polish chair] is disloyal to our government.”27 At his official installation on October 12, Eisenhower returned to the theme with a spirited defense of academic freedom. “There will be no administrative suppression or distortion of any subject that merits a place in this University’s curriculum,” said Ike. “The facts of communism, for example, shall be taught here.… Ignorance of communism, fascism, or any other police-state philosophy is far more dangerous than ignorance of the most virulent disease.… Columbia University will forever be bound by its loyalty to truth and the basic concepts of democratic freedom. No intellectual iron curtain shall screen students from disturbing facts.”28

  Eisenhower’s standing on campus could not have been higher. Historian Allan Nevins, writing in The New York Times, said, “No one can visit Morningside without feeling great energies vibrating there.” With her new president, “Columbia’s greatest years lie before her, and she knows that she will share them with a nation which has become the first power on the globe, and a city which has become a world capital.”29

  In late June, Governor Dewey won the Republican nomination on the third ballot and selected Governor Earl Warren of California as his running mate. It looked like an unbeatable ticket. In despair, many Democrats turned to Ike. “No one knew whether he was a Democrat or a Republican,” wrote The New Yorker’s Richard Rovere. “For all anyone knew he might have been a Greenbacker or a Social Credit crank. No one knew whether he knew what he was.” What people knew was that “he could win an election.”30

  Eisenhower installed as the thirteenth president of Columbia University, October 12, 1948. The mace is carried by English professor John H. H. Lyon. (illustration credit 17.1)

  As the Democratic convention approached, the pressure on Ike intensified. On July 1, 1948, the Eisenhowers celebrated their thirty-second wedding anniversary with the Gang at 60 Morningside Drive. Ellis “Slats” Slater recalled that an enthusiastic throng of two to three hundred persons gathered outside the residence chanting “We Like Ike.” Eisenhower went out on the balcony and waved good-naturedly to the crowd.31 On July 3, a host of Democratic leaders, including New York mayor William O’Dwyer, Senator Lister Hill (Alabama), Governor Chester Bowles (Connecticut), Jacob Arvey (Illinois), Governor J. Strom Thurmond (South Carolina), Congressman James Roosevelt (California), and Minneapolis mayor Hubert H. Humphrey, sent telegrams to all 1,592 Democratic delegates inviting them to attend a caucus in Philadelphia on July 10—two days before the convention would begin. The purpose was to “find the ablest and strongest man available” to lead the party in the coming election. No candidate was mentioned, but it was clearly an effort to dump Truman and draft Ike. At this point Eisenhower recognized that he had to step in. On the evening of July 5, he authorized Robert Harron, Columbia’s director of public information, to issue a formal statement to the press restating his January refusal to run. “I shall continue, subject to the pleasure of the University Trustees, to perform the important duties I have undertaken as President of Columbia,” said Ike. “I will not, at this time, identify myself with any political party, and could not accept nomination for any public office or participate in a partisan political contest.”32

  As Eisenhower later told journalist Marquis Childs, he thought with that statement he was out of the woods.33 But the phrase “at this time” encouraged Ike’s supporters to believe that he would accept a draft. President Truman evidently thought so as well. At Truman’s direction, Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall called Eisenhower, and over the telephone Ike and Royall drafted a follow-up statement that was then dispatched to James Roosevelt, Senator Claude Pepper (Florida), and Jersey City mayor Frank Hague—all of whom were still beating the drum for Ike. This time Eisenhower was unequivocal. “No matter under what terms, conditions, or premises a proposal might be couched, I would refuse to accept the nomination.”34 So ended the boom for Eisenhower in the Democratic party, although few doubted the nomination would have been his if he had wanted it.

  Eisenhower was very much a presence on Columbia’s campus in the fall of 1948. He attended home football games at Baker Field, presided over the traditional dinner for freshmen in John Jay Hall, and welcomed the alumni back on a gala Homecoming Day. Ike particularly liked to break off an occasional afternoon and visit Baker Field at 218th Street and Broadway to watch the Columbia football team practice under coaching great Lou Little. A few months before, Little had received an attractive offer from Yale, but to the delight of every Columbia alumnus, Eisenhower had persuaded him to remain on Morningside Heights. “You never will, in your entire time as president of the university, do anything which will elicit more universal approval,” wrote Joseph Lang (LLB, 1921).35 Little had been at Columbia since 1930. In 1934, his team had scored a stunning upset over Stanford in the Rose Bowl, and in 1947 h
ad snapped Army’s thirty-two-game winning streak with a dramatic fourth-quarter, come-from-behind, 21–20 victory. Ike liked to talk football with Little, and would occasionally reminisce about their first meeting on the football field in 1924, when Eisenhower was coaching the Fort Meade team and Little was at Georgetown. (Georgetown won 7–0.)36

  Eisenhower and Columbia coach Lou Little watch football practice at Baker Field. (illustration credit 17.2)

  Eisenhower also took up painting. Encouraged by Churchill, and inspired by watching Thomas Stephens do a portrait of Mamie, Ike began to paint with oils in his penthouse conservatory. Stephens had supplied the initial paints and brushes, and Ike, after some early hesitation, became an enthusiastic dauber. “My most urgent need at the start was a generous-sized tarpaulin to cover the floor around the easel,” wrote Ike years later. “The one thing I could do well from the beginning was to cover hands, clothes, brush handles, chair and floor with more paint than ever reached the canvas.”

  Eisenhower thought the conservatory at 60 Morningside was an ideal studio. “A professional might have objected to its lack of northern exposure, but privacy and quiet were more important to me than lighting.”37 Gradually, Eisenhower became proficient, although unlike Churchill he never took himself seriously as a painter. “I have nothing whatever of artistic talents,” he wrote his childhood friend Swede Hazlett in August 1949. “I simply get a bang out of working with colors and occasionally one of my efforts comes out with sufficient appeal about it to entice some of my friends to steal it and carry it away. Many others find their way to the waste paper basket.” Eisenhower not only derived pleasure from painting, but found the quiet time useful for meditating and assembling his thoughts. At Columbia, he usually painted in the evening between eleven and twelve-thirty, but as he warned Hazlett, “if you ever take it up it will consume so many of your vertical hours that you will wonder how they have ever slipped away from you.”38

  Eisenhower took no role in the 1948 election. On election night he was joined at 60 Morningside Drive by George Allen, Bill Robinson, and Cliff Roberts for dinner and bridge. As they played cards and listened to the returns, it became apparent that the election was going to be close and that Truman might win. Roberts said Ike was “just as disappointed as Robinson and I were.” Roberts was unable to recall Eisenhower’s exact words, but remembered that the general “indicated quite clearly to me that he was having second thoughts about his decision to stay clear of political involvement.”39 g

  With Dewey’s defeat, Eisenhower was back in the political spotlight. The GOP nomination in 1952 was now wide open, and Ike moved cautiously to reposition himself. During the fall, Eisenhower had been in Washington on several occasions to consult with Defense Secretary James Forrestal and the Joint Chiefs on the Defense Department budget. On November 4, two days after Truman’s victory, Ike wrote Forrestal. Without referring to the election, Ike told the secretary that he shared Forrestal’s concern over the state of world affairs, and volunteered his assistance. “I can scarcely think of any chore that I would refuse to do whenever people in responsible positions feel that I might be able to help.”40

  Forrestal was delighted. The National Security Act of 1947, which had created the Department of Defense, did not provide for a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.h Forrestal saw Ike’s offer as a way to circumvent that omission. “What I have in mind,” he wrote Truman on November 9, “was inviting him [Eisenhower] to come down, with your approval, of course, to sit with us for a period of three or four weeks. I should like, if it were possible, to have him named by you to preside over the Joint Chiefs, but if that were impossible an informal basis would be second best.”41

  One hand washed the other. With Dewey defeated, life at Columbia may have looked less attractive to Ike, and with Congress barring the door to the creation of a chairman for the Joint Chiefs, Forrestal saw Eisenhower as an informal substitute. Whether Ike and Forrestal coordinated more closely is unclear, but on November 18, Eisenhower wrote Truman to congratulate him on his reelection. “It seems almost needless for me to reaffirm my loyalty to you as President; or to assure you again that I always stand ready to attempt the performance of any professional duty for which my constitutional superiors believe I might be specially suited.”42

  Ike was fishing and President Truman took the bait. “You didn’t have to reaffirm your loyalty to me,” he replied on November 26. Resorting to a bit of double entendre, the president told Eisenhower, “I always know exactly where you stand.” Nevertheless, he asked Ike to stop by the White House and see him the next time he was in Washington.43

  Eisenhower followed a familiar game plan. When stymied in his career, he invariably sought outside assistance. He had appealed to Fox Conner three times—to attend Leavenworth, to escape from the 24th Infantry, and to be rescued from a dead-end assignment with Pershing in Paris. In 1939, when duty in Manila with MacArthur paled, he wrote his friend Mark Clark and was promptly reassigned to the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Lewis, Washington. For any number of reasons Ike was growing restive at Columbia, and his approach to Forrestal and Truman followed a pattern.

  The irony is that in the fall of 1948, Eisenhower had mastered Columbia. “General Eisenhower has taken Columbia the way he took Normandy Beach,” said The New York Times on November 7. “The entire university population of 35,000—students, professors, officers, trustees, and janitors—has happily surrendered and adores its conqueror.”44

  Eisenhower was also much in demand as a public speaker. The New York Herald Tribune began serializing Crusade in Europe the Sunday after the election, and the book was released by Doubleday on November 22. Prepublication publicity had been massive, the first pressrun was 150,000 copies, and the book was greeted with critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Drew Middleton, writing in The New York Times Book Review, placed Crusade “in the first rank of military memoirs.” Robert Sherwood, who had won three Pulitzer Prizes as a playwright and a fourth for his biography Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History, called the book “a heartening demonstration of what we are pleased to call Americanism at its best.” Liberal critic Richard Rovere, writing in Harper’s, considered Crusade in Europe “a document that sometimes comes close to splendor.” In London, Goronwy Rees, reviewing Crusade for The Spectator, called Ike “the greatest single architect of the greatest military alliance in history. I don’t believe any other man could have achieved what he achieved.”45

  On the Columbia campus, where publish or perish was a way of life, the response was rapturous. Ike might not have had a graduate degree, but he had proved he could hold his own with the nation’s best historians. Allan Nevins said he started reading the book as his train was leaving Washington and became so absorbed that he missed his stop at Princeton where he was scheduled to give a lecture and had to take another train back.46

  Eisenhower also mixed effectively with faculty and students when he chose to do so. When Professor Robert Livingston Schuyler asked him to speak to his graduate class in historiography, Ike not only agreed but “spoke with passion and deep knowledge about two of the college’s most illustrious former students, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.”47 When the history faculty invited Eisenhower to their annual black-tie dinner, Ike stole the show. According to Jacques Barzun, Columbia’s brilliant intellectual historian, one of his colleagues quoted Churchill’s remark about Europe’s “soft underbelly.” Eisenhower, according to Barzun, “got quite huffy, and said, ‘That is one of the most ignorant remarks made by anybody,’ and he proceeded to give us, without prompting, a history of the campaigns, beginning with Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War, that had taken place in the south of Europe which, as we all know, is a mass of mountains, and he went right on to the Austrian War of 1866, the German-Austrian War. It was a masterly performance and with hardly a hesitation for words.”48 Henry Graff, a junior member of the department at the time, recalled that it was “a dazzling talk delivered without notes and with uncommon insight and
learning. He spoke of the great captains of history who had preceded him on the battlefields of Europe. Let no one tell you that he was not an historian, that he was not one of us.”49

  Eisenhower also invigorated the administrative side of the university. He instituted organizational reforms advocated by the consulting firm of Booz Allen years earlier, and established a mandatory retirement age of sixty-eight for faculty and administrative staff. Most important, he balanced Columbia’s budget for the first time in four years and put in place the first systematic fund-raising structure the university had known. Nicholas Murray Butler had been spectacularly successful as a fund-raiser during his first thirty years as president, but he did so on a strictly personal basis. Unlike Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, Columbia had no fund-raising arm other than Butler himself. The combination of advancing age, the Great Depression, and the progressive income tax caused Columbia’s fund-raising to dry up almost completely. Its principal source of income, other than tuition, was the rent on Manhattan real estate, most of which had been let on long-term leases at prices far below 1948 levels. As a result, Columbia was living off its capital. Figures provided by the American Council of Education show that between 1929 and 1939, Columbia’s endowment decreased by $3 million ($46 million in current dollars). During the same period, Harvard’s endowment increased by $27 million ($416 million currently) and Yale’s by $18 million ($278 million). Of the sixteen universities in the council’s study, Columbia was the only institution whose endowment had declined.50