Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  Columbia’s financial problem was exacerbated by a decaying physical plant in which scheduled maintenance had been deferred, and by the influx of thousands of veterans who had to be accommodated. Eisenhower addressed the problem by putting in place a private gifts organization patterned on Princeton’s annual alumni campaign, and in October 1948 launched a $210 million fund drive ($1.9 billion currently) to restore the university’s solvency. Ike had not anticipated that he would be required to raise money when he accepted Columbia’s offer in 1947—Watson and Parkinson had explicitly assured him that he would not—but when confronted with the reality of the university’s budgetary shortfall, he moved promptly with the support of the trustees to correct it.

  In nonacademic matters, Eisenhower also used his considerable clout to Columbia’s advantage. When university maintenance workers threatened to strike over wages and working conditions, Ike negotiated directly with Michael J. Quill, head of the Transport Workers Union of America. (The Columbia employees were members.) Eisenhower and Quill quickly reached a settlement. “Look, General,” said Quill, “I’m not going to have any trouble with you. I’ve got more sense than to be taking on an opponent who is as popular as you seem to be in this city.”51

  A more enduring contribution, for which Columbia faculty and students have been eternally grateful, is that Eisenhower prevailed upon Mayor William O’Dwyer and the New York City Council to close 116th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. The main campus of Columbia, a total of twenty-six acres, stretches from 114th Street to 120th, and is bounded on the east by Amsterdam Avenue and on the west by Broadway. When the university moved from midtown to Morningside Heights in 1897, all of the interior streets were closed off except for 116th, which bisected the campus. Like all New York streets, it was noisy and crowded with traffic and parked cars. It made the Columbia campus look like a factory yard, said more than one observer. Nicholas Murray Butler had sought repeatedly and without success to have the street closed off. But as was the case with Mike Quill, no one on the city council wanted to pick a fight with Ike, and the street was soon closed, bringing the two halves of the campus together. Located in the midst of Manhattan, Columbia is scarcely a green oasis. Yet thanks to Eisenhower it now stands as a single entity, giving the campus a unified appearance. A visitor to Columbia today would never suspect that 116th Street was a through street as recently as the early 1950s.

  In his first six months on campus, Eisenhower demonstrated to the satisfaction of even the greatest skeptic that he was capable of providing the leadership that Columbia required. But he was not comfortable. The complexity of Columbia confounded him. Initially he had assumed—based on his West Point experience—that Columbia was primarily an undergraduate institution with a few professional schools attached. His educational mission, as he saw it, was to encourage the teaching of civic virtue. In reality, Columbia was an aggregation of more than two dozen schools and faculties ranging from law and medicine to education and journalism. Columbia College, the undergraduate body, had but 2,400 students—roughly 8 percent of the total enrolled at the university. And very few (if any) of the faculty saw their mission as one of teaching the responsibilities of citizenship.

  Dean Carman recalled that Eisenhower invited him for a talk early that fall and related how he had really wanted to be president of a small rural college where “he thought he could be useful.” But, said Ike, “in a moment of weakness I listened to the blandishments of a couple of your Trustees and here I find myself with a gigantic organization on my hands, and I don’t know a goddamn thing about it.”52

  Universities are governed by consensus. Eisenhower was accustomed to a chain of command. Like most who have not served an apprenticeship in academe, he assumed the important people on campus were the deans and department chairmen. They were his corps and divisions commanders. The faculty were the officers and the students the enlisted personnel. In reality, particularly in the supercharged intellectual atmosphere on Morningside Heights, it is the scholars who determine policy. They are the university. And in 1948–49, the faculty at Columbia was one of the most distinguished ever assembled. The roster reads like a who’s who of intellectual life in America: Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead in anthropology; C. Wright Mills, Robert Lynd, Robert Merton, and Paul Lazarsfeld in sociology; Nobel Prize winners Enrico Fermi and Isador Rabi in physics; Harold Urey (another Nobel laureate) in chemistry; Joseph Wood Krutch, Lionel Trilling, and Mark Van Doren in English. The history department represented the core of the discipline in the twentieth century. In addition to Barzun and Graff, the senior scholars included Henry Steele Commager, Dumas Malone, Carlton J. H. Hayes, Lynn Thorndike, Garrett Mattingly, and Allan Nevins. Among the younger members were David Herbert Donald, Richard Hofstadter, and William Leuchtenburg.

  By dealing through deans and chairmen and ignoring Columbia’s scholars, Eisenhower was moving against the grain. If Ike had dedicated himself full-time to Columbia, he would have soon mastered the nuances of university life. But in late December 1948, he went to Washington, conferred with Forrestal and the president, and agreed to become the senior adviser to the secretary of defense and acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Unification of the services was working poorly, the Army and Navy were at loggerheads over the defense budget, and Forrestal’s health had begun to deteriorate. Ike assured Columbia’s trustees that he could handle both jobs, and began a backbreaking schedule commuting between Washington and Morningside Heights. “We would go up to New York,” recalled Major Schulz, “be met by a car, go to Columbia, get a little work done, go downtown to a dinner where the General would speak, over to Penn Station, into a train, and do it all over again. Frankly, there were days that I didn’t know whether I was waking up in New York or Washington. And he [Eisenhower] must have been the same way. It was a rat race.”53

  By February it was clear that the situation in the Pentagon would require Ike’s full-time presence in Washington. Not only was the budget contentious, but the Navy and the Air Force were at each other’s throat over the future of the naval air arm. “Pres. and Mr. F[orrestal] assume that I have some miraculous power to make these warring elements lie down and make peace together,” Eisenhower recorded in his diary on February 9, 1949.54 Ike agreed to assume the duties of chairman of the Joint Chiefs for a period of three months, and the Columbia trustees granted him a leave of absence. “Cognizant of the tradition of public service which has characterized Columbia’s long history,” said board chairman Frederick Coykendall, the trustees “are happy to give their full approval to President Eisenhower’s important work in Washington … and are glad the University can make this contribution to the public welfare.”55 No acting president was named, and Columbia’s provost, Albert C. Jacobs, assumed operating responsibility in Ike’s absence.

  Not having to commute eased the pressure on Eisenhower partially, but Forrestal collapsed in late February, Truman accepted his resignation, and Louis Johnson, who became secretary of defense, expected Ike to carry the ball. Eisenhower continued his extensive speaking schedule and returned to New York monthly to meet with the trustees. Mamie remained at 60 Morningside Drive, and Ike lived out of a suitcase at Washington’s Statler Hotel. Nevertheless, the infighting at the Pentagon continued. “I am so weary of this inter-service struggle for position, prestige and power that this morning I practically ‘blew my top,’ ” Ike wrote on March 14, 1949. “I would hate to have my doctor take my blood pressure at the moment.”56 Five days later, after a particularly testy meeting with the Joint Chiefs, he began his diary entry with the blunt statement “The situation grows intolerable”—a reference to the Navy’s reluctance to cooperate with unification. Even worse, Secretary Johnson informed Eisenhower that he expected him to remain in Washington for the “next six months, at least. He says he told Pres. he’d take job only if I stayed on!”57

  The tension of holding two jobs, even if he was on leave from Columbia, was getting to Ike. On March 21, after a luncheon with the Motion P
icture Association of America, he became ill with a severe stomach disorder and returned to his hotel. Major Schulz recalled that by the time they got Eisenhower to his room, “his stomach was bloated and getting larger. It seemed like a balloon.” Dr. Snyder flew down from New York, diagnosed Ike’s condition as “a severe case of acute gastroenteritis,” and ordered complete rest. “I knew that I was sick,” wrote Eisenhower in his memoir. Dr. Snyder “treated me as though I were at the edge of the precipice and teetering a bit. For days, my head was not off the pillow.”58

  Eisenhower, at Truman’s recommendation, flew to the naval station at Key West aboard The Sacred Cow, where he underwent an extensive battery of tests and was forbidden solid food and cigarettes. After two weeks in Key West, he flew to Augusta, where Mamie joined him. Ike remained at the Augusta National Golf Club for the next month, playing golf and painting. “I feel stronger every day,” he wrote Secretary Johnson on April 20, “though I must admit the ‘drives’ are somewhat short of their expected destination.”59 A week later he wrote Swede Hazlett that he had been miserable for a time but that for the past two weeks “I have been puttering around with a bit of golf every day.”60 There is no evidence, as some have asserted, that Eisenhower suffered a mild heart attack and that Dr. Snyder had covered it up.i

  Ike returned to Columbia in mid-May, presided over commencement activities in June, and then went on an extended summer vacation to Wisconsin and Colorado. “I am going to take not less than a total of 10 weeks leave during the year,” he wrote his brother Milton at Kansas State. “If I am not able to keep up to this leave schedule, I will simply quit all my jobs except that of helping out in Washington.”61

  Eisenhower was back at Columbia, but the university had become a secondary interest. As the supreme commander of the greatest allied effort in history, and recently exposed to the wrenching problems of military unification, Ike found academic affairs increasingly trivial. At commencement, he declined to host the traditional reception for honorary degree recipients (“He wouldn’t even read the citations,” said Provost Jacobs), and chose instead to have a private dinner at 60 Morningside with General Lucius D. Clay and his wife, Marjorie. Provost Jacobs held the reception for the university’s distinguished guests, including Helen Hayes, Arnold Toynbee, and General Omar Bradley, at the Men’s Faculty Club in Ike’s stead.62 j

  After two months of fishing and golf in the lake country of Wisconsin and in Denver, Eisenhower was back on Morningside Heights on September 17. He had been appointed president of Columbia twenty-seven months earlier, but of those twenty-seven months, he had spent less than ten on campus. The seeds of discontent were beginning to sprout. Columbia needed a full-time chief executive, and Ike was devoting less and less time to university affairs. Eisenhower had an “auspicious start,” Lionel Trilling recalled, but it “gradually and quickly disintegrated. I began to sense he was nowhere in relation to the University.”63 Professor Eli Ginsberg, who had worked with Ike in Washington and who was one of his few acquaintances on the faculty, thought that Eisenhower “never found a way of responding to anything substantive on campus. Nothing gave him a real kick … a central focus.”64 Jacques Barzun, who would soon become provost, thought Eisenhower had “a curiously ambivalent feeling about the University, especially the faculty.”65 Trilling, Ginsberg, and Barzun were not only senior scholars, but had devoted their professional lives to Columbia and understood the university intimately. They had no ax to grind.

  Eisenhower lacked a sixth sense, an intuitive feel to tell him what was important to the faculty. He declined to preside at meetings of the university council and at various faculty meetings as Butler had done, refused to attend the university’s gala celebration for John Dewey on the philosopher’s ninetieth birthday, and avoided almost all participation in academic affairs, leading many on Morningside Heights to conclude that he “begrudged the University.”66

  The Eisenhowers, both Ike and Mamie, also had a sense of entitlement that rubbed the faculty the wrong way. The presidential mansion at 60 Morningside Drive was traditionally the social center of the university. Evenings with Nicholas Murray Butler could be “exceedingly stiff and formal,” Dean Carman recalled, but those evenings served a useful university purpose.67 The Eisenhowers never revived those dinners. Ike and Mamie saw 60 Morningside as their private residence. They entertained old Army friends who might be passing through New York and invited the Gang for dinner and bridge several nights a week. In the late evening, Eisenhower would get out his paints and canvas and go to work. On weekends, John and Barbara would come down from West Point with their son David for a visit. But the house no longer brought the Columbia community together. “I don’t know of a single instance where any of the Columbia people were ever invited,” said Gang member Cliff Roberts.68

  Ike recognized that he was being pulled in different directions. He was no longer traveling to Washington, but his extensive speaking schedule kept him on the road and away from Columbia. “I believe that if a man were able to give his full or nearly full attention to such a job as this,” he wrote Swede Hazlett, “he would find it completely absorbing.… Sometimes, however, my loyalties to several different kinds of purposes lead me into a confusing kind of living.”69 For Eisenhower, national politics were never far from the horizon. In November, he met privately with Governor Dewey. The Columbia Business School had just completed a comprehensive report on the New York State hospital system, and Ike presented it to the governor in a formal ceremony at the Men’s Faculty Club. Afterward they adjourned to 60 Morningside. Dewey “remains of the opinion that I must soon enter politics,” Ike wrote in his diary on November 25, 1949. “He wants me to run for Gov. of N.Y. in 1950. I said ‘No’—but he wants to talk about it once more. Every day this question comes before me in some way or other. I’m worn out trying to explain myself.”70

  By the spring of 1950 the support for Eisenhower at Columbia had all but evaporated. A puff piece by Quentin Reynolds in Life magazine (“Mr. President Eisenhower”) backfired badly,71 and the feeling developed on campus that Ike was using the university for his own political purposes. “There is intense hostility toward him on the part of both faculty and the student body,” wrote Richard Rovere in Harper’s. “Columbia’s disappointment in Eisenhower stems not so much from any administrative ineptitude as from his inattentiveness to the problems of administration. It isn’t so much that he is a bad president as that he hardly ever functions as president.”72 Grayson Kirk, who would succeed Eisenhower as president, said that Ike “had alienated many on the faculty by making speeches about the purpose of education being to develop citizens rather than develop people intellectually.”73

  Kirk’s observation is valid. Eisenhower was not an intellectual. But on the other side of the ledger, at a time when many university presidents ran for cover, Ike did not flinch when members of the Columbia faculty came under attack for Communist leanings. On March 8, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy, the first-term Republican from Wisconsin, accused Ambassador-at-Large Philip C. Jessup, Hamilton Fish professor of international law and diplomacy at Columbia, of “an unusual affinity for Communist causes.” This was one month after McCarthy’s dramatic speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he claimed to have a list of 205 Communist sympathizers in government, and he was flying high. Jessup was called to testify before a Senate subcommittee, and Eisenhower—without prompting—wrote a letter on Jessup’s behalf that was introduced into the record. “My dear Jessup,” wrote Ike. “I am writing to tell you how much your University deplores the association of your name with the current loyalty investigation in the United States Senate. Your long and distinguished record as a scholar … has won for you the respect of your colleagues and of the American people as well. No one who has known you can for a moment question the depth or sincerity of your devotion to the principles of Americanism.”74 Ike’s public letter handed McCarthy his first setback. A year later, when he was in France commanding NATO, Eisenhower again came to Jessup’s
defense.75

  When North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, the Cold War turned hot, and speculation about Eisenhower’s future occupied the nation’s pundits. American forces were in headlong retreat on the Korean Peninsula, and many wondered how long he would remain on the sidelines. On Friday, October 13, 1950, Governor Dewey called Ike and said he was scheduled to appear on Meet the Press on Sunday, and that he planned to endorse Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican nomination. “I merely said I’d say ‘No comment,’ ” Ike recorded in his diary.76 Governor Dewey followed through, the press picked up the scent, and Eisenhower’s hat was in the ring. His official denial of interest, which was issued by the Columbia public information office the next day, was scarcely designed to take him out of the race.k And the fact that Dewey cleared his announcement with Ike beforehand speaks for itself.

  The combination of the Berlin blockade and the fighting in Korea acted as a spur to the United States and the nations of Western Europe to move forward with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and to establish a military force under NATO’s control. President Truman and the European heads of government believed that only Eisenhower, the supreme commander in World War II, had sufficient credibility to bring those forces into being—and at the same time to be taken seriously by the Soviets. American public opinion was also not convinced that U.S. forces should be sent back to Europe, particularly with the war in Korea, and it would require someone of Ike’s stature to make the case.