Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  MR. MOHR: We understand that the power of the decision is entirely yours, Mr. President. I just wondered if you could give us an example of a major idea of his that you had adopted in that role, as the decider and final—

  THE PRESIDENT: If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” said Jack Bell of the Associated Press, terminating the news conference.69

  Not surprisingly, relations between Eisenhower and Nixon, which were tepid to begin with, cooled further as the campaign progressed. Eisenhower believed that Nixon was becoming too partisan and was driving away independents and conservative Democrats who had voted for Ike in droves; Nixon chafed under Eisenhower’s shadow and resented playing second fiddle. At the end of August, Eisenhower paid a highly publicized visit to Nixon at Walter Reed—Nixon was in the hospital with an infected knee. Afterward, Ike told Ann Whitman, there was “some lack of warmth.” According to Whitman’s notes, “He [Eisenhower] mentioned again, as he has several times, the fact that the Vice President has very few personal friends.” As Whitman saw it, the difference between Ike and Nixon was all too obvious. “The president is a man of integrity and sincere in his every action. He radiates this, everybody knows it, and everybody loves and trusts him. But the Vice President sometimes seems like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one.”70

  1960 Herblock Cartoon, copyright by The Herb Block Foundation (illustration credit 27.3)

  Nixon insisted on making all of the important campaign decisions himself. Ike’s advice was not sought, and when offered was rarely heeded. Eisenhower suggested Nixon not debate Kennedy on television because Nixon was much better known, and there was no reason to give Kennedy so much free exposure. Nixon rejected the advice on the grounds that he was a much better debater than Kennedy. The first debate was an unmitigated catastrophe. As Ted Rogers, Nixon’s television adviser said, Nixon’s eight years of experience as vice president was “wiped out in a single evening.”71

  The election was a cliffhanger. With a 64.5 percent turnout, Kennedy received 34,221,463 votes to Nixon’s 34,108,582—a difference of 112,881 out of the more than 68 million ballots cast.f In the electoral college, Kennedy carried twenty-three states with 303 electoral votes; Nixon carried twenty-six states with 219 votes. (Mississippi cast its electoral vote for Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia.) A shift of only 4,500 votes in Illinois and 28,000 in Texas would have given Nixon the election.72

  As Eisenhower’s term drew to a close, Norman Cousins, the longtime editor in chief of Saturday Review, suggested to Ike that he give a “farewell address” to the nation—a parting testament after fifty years of public service. Eisenhower at the time was the oldest president to occupy the White House, and would be the last to be born in the nineteenth century. John F. Kennedy, at forty-three, was the youngest ever to be elected. Eisenhower liked Cousins’s suggestion. George Washington had warned the country against entangling alliances; Ike wanted to warn against the perils of ever-increasing defense expenditures and the garrison state.73

  Eisenhower worked on the speech for more than a month, aided by his brother Milton and speechwriter Malcolm Moos, a young political science professor on leave from Johns Hopkins. At eight-thirty on the evening of January 17, 1961, Ike spoke to the country from the Oval Office. After briefly sketching the larger issues of war and peace, Eisenhower warmed to his theme. “Our military organization bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime.” Until World War II, “the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could … make swords as well.” But now, because of the Cold War, “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend more on military security than the net income of all United States corporations.”

  Eisenhower’s voice continued with somber intonation. “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new to the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.” Then, in the most widely quoted passage, Ike said: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

  Eisenhower’s fear of the garrison state also manifested itself in his warning against excessive government influence in the world of scholarship. “The free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” Eisenhower cautioned against “the domination of the nation’s scholars” by the power of federal money, which he said was a danger “to be gravely regarded.”g

  Then, in a timeless warning for the future, Eisenhower said America “must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”74

  * * *

  a “The United States will not enter into any arrangement or embark on any course of conduct which will have the effect of abandoning the responsibilities which the United States, with Great Britain and France, has formally assumed for the freedom and security of the people of West Berlin,” said Eisenhower. White House Press Release, November 30, 1958, EL.

  b I was stationed in Berlin at the time as a junior officer in the 6th Infantry Regiment. Throughout the entire six-month crisis I do not remember that we did anything out of the ordinary. Never for a moment did we think anything would happen—although we were prepared to meet every contingency. As I look back on it, I believe the fact that we did not do anything out of the ordinary provided great reassurance to the Berliners.

  c According to Khrushchev, Stalin liked Westerns as well. “When the movie ended, Stalin always denounced it for its ideological content. But the very next day we’d be back in the movie theater watching another Western.” Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament 407, Strobe Talbott, ed. and trans. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). Also see Khrushchev Remembers 297–98, Strobe Talbott, ed. and trans. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970).

  d Eisenhower put it somewhat differently. Speaking later to Gang member Ellis Slater, Ike said it was absolutely essential to create a feeling of confidence and trust among people working for government. “His [Eisenhower’s] philosophy is that by cajoling, by assurances, by backing up and by sharing responsibility, he can insure people staying in government service.… Hence, if errors had been made in the U-2 or other cases, honest mistakes, unavoidable perhaps—he felt that D[wight] E[isenhower] should assume responsibility.” Ellis D. Slater, The Ike I Knew 229 (Ellis D. Slater Trust, 1980).

  e Arizona nominated Barry Goldwater, but Goldwater immediately withdrew. He received ten votes from Louisiana on the first ballot, and then Nixon was nominated by acclamation.

  f American voter turnout is always reported as a percentage of the population twenty-one years and older. In Canada, Great Britain, and in western Europe, turnout figures are reported as a percentage of registered voters. That is why European and Canadian turnout figures are always so much higher. It’s apples and oranges.

  g Eisenhower also warned against the growing power of a “scientific-technological elite.” Herbert F. York, an academic physicist who served Eisenhower as director of defense research and engineering, explained that Ike had in mind what had happened during the forty months from the launching of Sputnik to the end of his administration: “The people who irritated him were the hard-sell technologists who tried to exploit Sputnik and the missile gap psychosis it engendered.… They invented all sorts of technological threats to our safety and offered a thousand and one technical delights for confronting them.” Eisenh
ower understood both “the necessity of having a military-industrial complex and … the problems and dangers it brought with it.” Herbert F. York, Making Weapons, Talking Peace: A Physicist’s Odyssey from Hiroshima to Geneva 126 (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Taps

  Lower the shades. Pull me up. Higher. I want to go. God take me.

  —DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER,

  March 28, 1969

  Eisenhower and Mamie departed Washington immediately after John F. Kennedy’s inaugural ceremony on January 20, 1961. They drove to Gettysburg in the 1955 Chrysler Imperial that Mamie had given Ike on his sixty-fifth birthday, followed by a lone Secret Service car. At the entrance to the farm the car honked, and the agents waved and made a U-turn to head back to Washington. In 1961, ex-presidents were not entitled to Secret Service protection.

  Eisenhower settled in easily to Gettysburg. He taught himself to drive again, passed the Pennsylvania test for a driver’s license, and learned to use a dial telephone. He was given an office at Gettysburg College, and his classified papers were housed in a vault at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland.

  Before leaving Washington, Eisenhower let it be known that he would like to be restored to his five-star rank as General of the Army, an action that required congressional legislation.a President Kennedy was mystified. Why would Ike want to relinquish the title of “Mr. President” to be called “General”? he asked his military assistant, Brigadier General Ted Clifton. As best he could, Clifton explained to Kennedy that Eisenhower was a military man at heart. The term “Mr. President” applied to Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, and Kennedy himself, but General of the Army was an independent title, something Ike had worked for all of his life. “Besides, if he is a five-star general, he needs no favors from you or the White House.”1 Kennedy saw the point, and the bill was passed unanimously in March 1961.

  ​Eisenhower devoted himself to writing his presidential memoirs—a two-volume collection commendable for its completeness and documentation but scarcely bedtime reading for the uninitiated. Unlike Crusade in Europe, which was written personally by Ike in twelve-to-sixteen-hour days, Mandate for Change and Waging Peace, dealing with his first and second terms, were initially drafted by his son John and former White House speechwriter William Ewald. Eisenhower reviewed the drafts and retooled the manuscripts, and the prose is serviceable. But the books, which have set the tone for subsequent presidential memoirs, lack the elegance of Grant’s memoirs or the feistiness of Harry Truman’s. Ike eschewed high drama in the interest of historical accuracy. He is circumspect, befitting an elder statesman, and more than evenhanded when dealing with adversaries such as Joe McCarthy. The books received mixed reviews. As Eisenhower wished, they provide an indispensible guide to his eight years in the White House and are essential for scholars of the period. Later, Ike wrote the commendable At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, an informal, almost random, look at the events of his life before the presidency. Eisenhower dictated these reminiscences in the evenings at Gettysburg, and his portraits of old associates such as Fox Conner, Douglas MacArthur, and George Patton are frank and uninhibited.

  Ike at leisure in Gettysburg. (illustration credit 28.1)

  Eisenhower’s daily schedule at Gettysburg varied little from his time in the White House. He rose at six or so, read the daily papers as he ate breakfast, and was in his office by seven-thirty. He returned home for lunch at noon, took a short nap, and then either returned to the office or headed for the golf course. Back home at five, he showered and changed clothes, enjoyed a scotch before dinner, and invariably ate alongside Mamie on trays set up in front of the television set. If a quorum could be mustered, there was often a bridge game. He was usually in bed well before ten.

  In the fall of 1961 Eisenhower and Mamie took up winter residence at the Eldorado Country Club in California’s Coachella Valley, midway between Palm Desert and Indian Wells. For the next seven years they would spend five months a year at Eldorado, Ike finding the dry desert air more agreeable than the humidity at Augusta, and the company just as exclusive. After sending troops to Little Rock in 1957, Eisenhower’s welcome at Augusta was also not as warm as it had once been. At Eldorado, the Eisenhowers lived in a home on the eleventh fairway recently constructed by Texas oil baron Robert McCulloch for their exclusive use. Ike established his office at the Cochran Ranch in nearby Indio, and found the seclusion at Eldorado much to his liking. Unlike Gettysburg, where the Eisenhowers lived on a place open to the public, Eldorado was a gated, heavily protected community for the cream of society in the California desert.

  Other than writing his memoirs, Eisenhower played little role in national politics. He supported Nixon for governor of California in 1962, never warmed to Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid in 1964, and strongly endorsed Nixon’s effort four years later. In his role as elder statesman, he buttressed Kennedy at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and refrained from criticizing Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam.2

  At the state funeral of President Kennedy, he and Harry Truman once again found common ground. Protocol dictated that as former presidents the two would ride in the same limousine from Blair House to Arlington National Cemetery. Making a virtue of necessity, the two decided to share a glass of whiskey at Blair House before leaving. Perhaps the whiskey had a mellowing effect, after the saying in vino veritas. The two former presidents forgot their past animosity and began to chat affably, trading observations and stories about former colleagues. Among other things, they agreed that their actions as president sometimes had a rationale that few others would understand. Perhaps it was best left that way. “We know what we did,” said Truman.

  “We surely do,” Ike replied.3

  It was after President Kennedy’s funeral that Congress passed legislation to provide full Secret Service protection to former presidents. In the summer of 1965 a detail of agents returned to Gettysburg and staked out the positions they had used when Eisenhower was president. Ike was ambivalent about the protection. “Life for me personally would be much happier if I had less of this so-called ‘protection,’ ” Eisenhower wrote his son John. Ike said one man with a six-shooter—“possibly reinforced by one in my own pocket”—should be sufficient for his own security, but he worried about “cranks” targeting the family, particularly the grandchildren.4

  Eisenhower was seventy-five. His health was failing. At the Augusta National in November 1965 he suffered a second near-fatal heart attack. He began to lose weight, and his interest in the farm diminished. The Angus herd was disbursed in 1966. Nevertheless his hold on American public opinion continued unabated. In January 1968, with disaster looming in Vietnam, the Gallup poll named Eisenhower the man most admired by the American people—an honor he had previously won in 1950 and 1952.5 Ike and Mamie went to California as usual, and Eisenhower spent as much time on the links as possible. On February 6, 1968, he presented the Eisenhower Trophy to the winner of the Bob Hope Classic—his good friend Arnold Palmer. The following day he shot a hole-in-one at the Seven Lakes Country Club—the first he had ever shot, climaxing, as it were, his lifetime devotion to the game.6

  On Monday, April 20, 1968, Ike was again on the course at Seven Lakes but quit after nine holes complaining of chest pains. He went home, but was soon rushed to the hospital with what doctors initially diagnosed as a mild heart attack. He was placed in intensive care at nearby March Air Force Base, but failed to respond to treatment. After four weeks he was flown to Washington and installed in the presidential suite at Walter Reed. Mamie moved in next door. For the next ten months, from May 1968 to March 1969, Eisenhower remained hospitalized, gradually losing ground to a series of follow-on heart attacks. On March 27, Ike instructed his son John to remove him from the life support system to which he had been attached. “I’ve had enough, John. Tell them to let me go.”7

  At 12:35 p.m. the following day, Dwight David Eisenhower died, surrounded by his family and the doctors who had treated him. Eisenhower’s body
lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda, resting in a standard-issue eighty-dollar Army coffin, clad in his Ike jacket, unadorned with metals or decorations other than his insignia of rank. After the ceremony his flag-draped casket was placed in a railroad car of a funeral train for the trip back to Abilene. Forty hours later Eisenhower was laid to rest on the grounds of the home in which he grew up. It was a simple ceremony, closed to all but family and friends.8

  De Gaulle renders a final salute, in the rotunda of the Capitol. (illustration credit 28.2)

  Several years later, a young David Eisenhower asked his grandmother Mamie whether she felt she had really known Dwight David Eisenhower.

  “I’m not sure anyone did,” Mamie replied.9

  * * *

  a On March 4, 1885, former president Ulysses S. Grant, in dire financial circumstances, was restored to his rank of four-star general by unanimous vote of both houses of Congress. The legislation had been originally introduced by Joseph E. Johnston, the former Confederate general who now represented Virginia’s Third Congressional District.

  In Grant’s day, former presidents did not receive pensions, but as a general his salary would be restored. Eisenhower did not benefit financially by regaining his rank, but as a General of the Army he was permitted to retain the servies of his driver, Leonard Dry; his valet, Sergeant Moaney; and his aide, Colonel Robert Schulz.