Introduction
Good Judgment Seeks Balance
On January 17, 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke to the nation for the last time. After eight years as president, Eisenhower wanted to do more than say goodbye and wish the nation well. Like George Washington had at the end of his presidency, Eisenhower hoped to pass on some of the knowledge and experience that came from a lifetime of service to his country. The United States, he said, had emerged from a half century of conflict as the most influential nation in the world. He cautioned, however, that military strength and material riches would not be enough to maintain this position of influence. What mattered was “how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.” Throughout America’s history, its basic purpose had been “to keep the peace, to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity, and integrity among peoples and among nations.” In its continued pursuit of these interests, he warned, the United States would encounter many crises.
In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small … each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs… . Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.1
These lines from the beginning of the Farewell Address have been overlooked by scholars who have focused almost exclusively on its warning about the dangers of the military-industrial complex. In this book, I will argue that the “need to maintain balance” defines the Eisenhower presidency. In the chapters that follow I will introduce readers to several significant events in Eisenhower’s political career: his decision to run for president; his pursuit of a “Middle Way” for social welfare policy; his creation of a “New Look” for national security; his reluctance to intervene in the French-Indochina War; his handling of Senator Joseph McCarthy; his intervention in the Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis; his response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik; and his crafting of the Farewell Address. A common element in each of these events is Eisenhower’s attempt to find balance. Balance between personal preference and civic duty; public responsibility and private enterprise; national security and economic prosperity; states’ rights and federal responsibility; Democrat and Republican; liberal and conservative.
Readers familiar with Eisenhower will likely think of additional events that I might have included. The armistice that ended combat operations in Korea, the covert operations that overthrew the governments of Iran and Guatemala, and the downing of an American U2 in Soviet airspace are three others that I considered for inclusion in this book. In each of these situations, and many others, Eisenhower acted in a way that is consistent with my overall thesis that his presidency can be defined by his desire to find balance. Producing a concise book that would be accessible to students and the general public, however, required that I limit the number of topics.
Those who appreciate the value of studying history are fond of quoting Spanish philosopher George Santayana’s aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”2 For historians, however, using knowledge of the past to offer practical lessons for the present is fraught with difficulty. Historians may be authorities on the past, but we are unlikely to have a comparable expertise on the present. This is due, in part, to the fact that many of the sources we rely upon are not yet available. References to current events also risk dating our work too quickly. A well-researched work of historical scholarship will remain relevant until historiographical trends render it otherwise—decades if we are lucky. But if that work is filled with references to the time in which it was written, readers will dismiss it as soon as those references no longer seem timely. Finally, attempting to infer lessons from the past runs the risk of alienating potential readers who might find a historian’s application of those lessons to contemporary issues too subjective. For these and other reasons, historians who believe that the subject of their research offers valuable lessons for the current day often leave it to their readers to make these inferences themselves. In the People for Our Time series, however, authors have been encouraged to make these references more explicit. The connections between Eisenhower’s time and our own are so numerous that—as with chapter topics—I was forced to make some difficult choices. My intention was to make connections that, although timely, were also timeless. These connections offer lessons not just for our own time, but for the future. Eisenhower’s pursuit of balance makes him a good fit for the series. In our time of political partisanship, Eisenhower’s assertion that “good judgement seeks balance” is a valuable lesson.
In 1962, Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. conducted a survey of seventy-five leading American historians. They were asked to rank the thirty-four former presidents of the United States based on their achievements while in office. Based on the results of the survey, Schlesinger placed the presidents in five categories: great, near-great, average, below average, and failure. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most recent president to be included in the survey, was ranked number 21, near the bottom of the average category. This put him just below Benjamin Harrison and Chester Arthur, and just above Andrew Johnson, the lowest ranked “average” president. In a New York Times article summarizing the results of the survey, Schlesinger admitted that Eisenhower had been difficult to evaluate since his term had only recently ended. Eisenhower, he explained, had “received a few votes in the near-great category” but many more votes for below average and failure. A two-thirds majority had placed him toward the bottom of the average category. In explaining the average or, as he called it, the “mediocre” category, Schlesinger explained that it included twelve presidents who “believed in negative government, in self subordination to the legislative power. They were more content to let well enough alone or, when not, were unwilling to fight for their programs or inept at doing so.”3
In 1982, a new survey of historians and political scientists conducted by the Siena College Research Institute ranked Eisenhower at number 11. By 2018, the Siena College survey, taken during the second year of the first term of each president since 1982, placed Eisenhower at number 6.4 This put him behind only George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Thomas Jefferson. Although it is not unusual for a president’s ranking to improve over time, Eisenhower’s rise from twenty-first out of thirty-three to sixth out of forty-four is truly remarkable.
The first generation of historians to study Eisenhower’s presidency took a primarily negative view of his performance. They portrayed him as a simple man, unprepared to deal adequately with the many complex issues that faced postwar American society. According to this view, Eisenhower delegated most of his duties to subordinates. If the 1950s was a time of peace and prosperity it was not because of anything that Eisenhower did, but rather because he had few critical issues with which to deal.5
Historians began to revise this interpretation in the 1970s. As the National Archives declassified documents, a different picture of Eisenhower emerged. Historians saw that he played the leading role in meetings of the cabinet and National Security Council. The minutes of these meetings show that while Eisenhower’s subordinates may have received credit for major policy decisions, they made none without his explicit approval. Furthermore, historians came to realize that the decade was not a time when “nothing happened,” but rather a period when important decisions and actions by Eisenhower prevented many events from escalating to the crisis stage. This realization had a powerful effect on historians who saw how unsuccessfully Eisenhower’s successors were in dealing with the many challenges of the 1960s and 1970s. The Vietnam War, racial unrest, and a recessionary economy made many Americans nostalgic for the relative peace and prosperity of the 1950s.
Eisenhower revisionism gained momentum in the 1980s. Political scientist Fred Greenstein made an important contribution to the field with The Hidden-Hand Presidency.6 Greenstein argued that Eisenhower was an active president who worked behind the scenes, deftly employing a “hidden hand” as a distinct leadership style. The hidden-hand thesis revolutionized the study of Eisenhower’s presidency, and scholars found ample support for it in the records of the newly opened Eisenhower Presidential Library. Historians now accepted that Eisenhower was an active leader who took a personal interest in his administration. As time went on, however, they became more critical of his decisions.7
Synthesizing the work of the previous decade into a new interpretation of the Eisenhower presidency, historian Chester Pach concluded, “Too often revisionists mistook Eisenhower’s cognizance of policies for brilliance and his avoidance of war for the promotion of peace.”8 Pach called his interpretation postrevisionist. “The postrevisionists,” historian Richard Damms explained, “accepted some of the basic tenets of Eisenhower revisionism, that the president was intelligent, articulate, and fully in command of his own administration’s major domestic and foreign policies, but took issue with the wisdom of his policy choices, the effectiveness of his decision-making, and the long-term legacies of his actions.”9 Most Eisenhower scholarship of the last thirty years can be categorized as “postrevisionist.”
In this work I hope to reveal some of the attributes and abilities that have led historians to rank Eisenhower among the top tier of U.S. presidents. Some of these were thought by earlier generations of historians to be his weaknesses: executive ability, leadership, decision-making, and willingness to compromise. Others are often considered too subjective for historians to consider, but recent events remind us of their importance: duty, honor, integrity, and good character. The defining moments detailed here will show Eisenhower as an active president, intimately engaged in the decisions that defined the United States in the 1950s. Although his actions are not above criticism, on balance they place him among the most successful presidents to hold the office, and they provide us with many lessons to guide us in the future.
As his presidency came to an end, Eisenhower seemed cognizant of the fact that his hidden-hand leadership style had given many Americans the impression that he had presided over an eight-year period during which little of consequence had taken place. Reflecting on the relative peace and prosperity of the 1950s he said, with a hint of bitterness, “People ask how it happened—by God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that.”10 Most historians no longer doubt this.