Book Review: 'The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s'
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| (C) 2018 Simon & Schuster |
Whenever I see – or hear – Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan
that he will “make America great again,” I can’t help thinking that many of his
mostly white, older, and politically conservative supporters are pining for an
America that – in their minds – existed between 1945 and 1961: the “age of
Eisenhower.”
To most Americans who long for a return to those seemingly
idyllic years between the end of the Second World War and John Fitzgerald
Kennedy’s Inauguration as President on January 20, 1961, the world was a better
one than the one we live in now. The United States, with its huge advantage in
nuclear weapons over its deadly Communist rival, the Soviet Union, was the
undisputed leader of the “free world.” Its industrial capacity was second to
none, and as an ascendant Republican Party reclaimed control of the Congress
and the White House after 20 years of Democratic dominance, conservatives began
the long process of undoing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and cementing the GOP’s
alliance with Big Business.
The idea that unfettered capitalism, free from government
regulation, was the key to America’s success can be encapsulated by a quote
from Charles Erwin Wilson, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first Secretary of
Defense.
At his confirmation hearing in the U.S. Senate, Wilson, who was
chairman of General Motors when President-elect Eisenhower selected him as a member
of the Cabinet, was asked if he could make procurement decisions that would not
necessarily favor GM. His reply – which is often misquoted – reflects the pro-Big
Business mentality that prevailed in the 1950s:
“For years I thought that what was good for our country was
good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our
company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country. Our contribution
to the nation is considerable.”
In our imperfect memory, the 1950s was a prosperous, placid,
and peaceful decade. The Korean War faded away and became the “forgotten war”
almost as soon as the ink dried on the July 1953 armistice documents. A fierce colonial
war fought between the dying French Empire and its unwilling Vietnamese
subjects barely intruded into the average American’s thoughts except in newsreel
footage of President Eisenhower pledging to send millions of dollars to finance
France’s flailing war effort in what was then French Indochina. But even at a
time when Americans worried about aggressive Soviet expansionism in Europe, Asia,
and elsewhere, the nation was nominally at peace, people tended to conform to the
existing social norms, and families attended church regularly. In this Father Knows Best version of the 1950s,
minorities knew their place, and women were not marching in the streets and agitating
for equal rights.
But, as William I. Hitchcock’s new book The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s shows,
the Fabulous Fifties that many Americans misremember and long for were not so
fabulous, and the undercurrents of society seethed and bubbled with social tensions
between the two political parties, white America and blacks (then called
Negroes), and Cold War “hawks” and “doves.”
For those of us who think that we live in the most bitterly
partisan era in American history, Hitchcock’s The Age of Eisenhower is a badly-needed look into a dark age when writers,
actors, and ordinary citizens were called to testify before the House Committee
for Un-American Activities (HUAC) or lived in fear that a neighbor or friend
might be a Communist sympathizer. It was the age of McCarthyism, when a hard-drinking,
paranoid, and bombastic Senator from Wisconsin helped to create an atmosphere
of fear and hate when he insisted that Soviet spies and agents had infiltrated
the government at its highest levels. Joe McCarthy was not necessarily lying; according
to Hitchcock, the Soviet Union did penetrate America’s government, the entertainment
industry, and other areas of our society from the 1930s on, but never to the extent
of the ultra-conservatives’ claims that led to the “Red Scare” and the even more
damaging “Lavender Scare” (the fear that homosexuals were deliberately
destroying the “American Way of Life” by supporting the civil rights movement
and challenging the South’s Jim Crow laws).
Hitchcock, a history professor at the University of Virginia
and a faculty fellow at the Miller Center for Public Affairs, gives readers a well-researched
and illuminating look at America’s 34th President and how he carefully
steered the U.S. – and the world, really – through a stressful eight-year
period full of challenges, both at home and abroad.
Drawing on newly
declassified documents and thousands of pages of unpublished material, The
Age of Eisenhower tells the story of a
masterful president guiding the nation through the great crises of the 1950s,
from McCarthyism and the Korean War through civil rights turmoil and Cold War
conflicts. This is a portrait of a skilled leader who, despite his conservative
inclinations, found a middle path through the bitter partisanship of his era. At
home, he affirmed the central elements of the New Deal, such as Social
Security; fought the demagoguery of Senator Joe McCarthy; and advanced the
agenda of civil rights for African Americans. Abroad, he ended the Korean War and
avoided a new quagmire in Vietnam. Yet he also charted a significant expansion
of America’s missile technology and deployed a vast array of covert operations
around the world to confront the challenge of communism. As he left office, he
cautioned Americans to remain alert to the dangers of a powerful military-industrial
complex that could threaten their liberties. – Dust jacket blurb, The Age of Eisenhower.
The book is divided into three parts (Duty; An Age of Peril;
and Race, Rockets, and Revolution) and 20 chapters. The shortest part, Duty,
has only four chapters and is a short recap of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s early
life, a military career that saw him rise from West Point cadet (Class of 1915)
to America’s most respected and admired five-star general. In 66 crisply-written
pages, Hitchcock describes how Eisenhower parlayed the arts of diplomacy that he
learned as the Western Allies’ Supreme Commander in World War II in his roles as the Army’s
first postwar Chief of Staff from 1946 to 1948, then as president of Columbia
University in New York City, then, shortly before running for President in 1952,
NATO’s first Supreme Commander, Allied Powers Europe.
The balance of The Age of
Eisenhower is devoted to Ike’s two terms as President of the U.S., starting
with his first campaign in the summer of 1952 and ending with his famous farewell
address of January 1961.
The Age of Eisenhower dispels
the myth that Ike was an inexperienced and ineffectual President who only
played golf and stood blithely aside while Joe McCarthy ran wild during the Red
Scare. This view of Ike, which was created by Harry S Truman, his Democratic
predecessor in the Oval Office, was widely held by contemporary journalists and
perpetuated by many historians until the 1980s. Because of these prevailing
opinions and the notion that the postwar boom was the product of conformist
white males a la The Man in the Grey
Flannel Suit, Eisenhower’s reputation was not as great as that of such 20th
Century Presidents as Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, John F. Kennedy, or the modern GOP’s
icon, Ronald Reagan.
The book also shows that Eisenhower, the man who made the
monumental decision to launch the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944 based on a not-ideal
weather forecast, was not as naïve or indecisive as his detractors claim.
Although he was unwilling to use military force to “roll back Communism” in
Eastern Europe as many American right wingers wanted him to do, Eisenhower used
both the threat of nuclear war and the covert assets of the Central Intelligence
Agency to dissuade “Red China” and the Soviet Union from reckless adventurism
that could start a Third World War.
Sometimes – as in the Korean peninsula – Ike’s strategy had
some modicum of success and the U.S. was spared from the high cost – in blood
and materiel – of a major conflict with a rival world power. Most of the time,
as even Hitchcock admits, Eisenhower’s foreign policy, especially its use of
the CIA’s “dark arts” to promote what we now call “regime change,” tended to sow the seeds for future crises,
such as the 1954 coups that toppled nationalist leaders in Iran and Guatemala,
as well as the enmity between the U.S. and leftist movements in Cuba, Latin
America, and other countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. And of
course, even though Eisenhower refused to send American forces to help the
French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, it was under his Administration that Vietnam
was divided into two zones; and it was his Secretary of State, John Foster
Dulles, who refused to accept the terms of the Geneva accords that called for general
elections in that conflict-plagued country that would allow the Vietnamese to
chart its own course during the Cold War.
Even though my political views skew to the liberal side of
the spectrum, I’m still a middle-of-the-road pragmatist. I’m also an admirer of
Eisenhower, especially since he led the “Great Crusade” to liberate Western
Europe from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi tyranny in World War II. Thus, I must agree
with Joseph Goulden, who reviewed The Age of Eisenhower
for the conservative Washington Times,
when he writes:
“Mr. Eisenhower suffered two debilitating illnesses during
his presidency which undoubtedly hampered his leadership at times. But he
presided over a White House that was relatively devoid of turmoil and corruption
(though he did fire one chief of staff from taking unwise contributions from a
lobbyist).
“As a president, Dwight Eisenhower deserves the judgment of historian
Hitchcock that he ‘was a model of loyalty, dignity and decency…. Eisenhower lent
his name to the age. And his people knew they had lived in the presence of greatness.’”
And in the age of a less loyal, decent, dignified but more maladroit Republican President,
America needs another Ike.
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