Hey it’s Professor Dave, let’s talk about Dwight Eisenhower.
Dwight David Eisenhower was the first president to have been a military hero since Ulysses
Grant nearly a century earlier.
Like his predecessor Truman, Ike had to deal with Cold War tensions between the U.S. and
the Soviet Union.
That the world avoided nuclear confrontation is to his credit, but during the Eisenhower
Administration, the United States continued to grow into a massive national security state
by extending trends begun under Truman.
After serving in the Army under General Douglas MacArthur, who famously called Eisenhower
“the best clerk I ever had”, Eisenhower was made head of the Allied Forces in the
European Theater during World War II.
Unlike the vain MacArthur, Eisenhower was diplomatic, able to coordinate the egos of
such men as French General Charles DeGaulle, British General Bernard Montgomery, and his
own George S. Patton.
It was Eisenhower who made the monumental decision to undertake the D-Day invasion during
inclement weather, rightly thinking that his risky decision would catch the Germans off guard.
In June of 1944 the American, British, and French forces stormed ashore onto the European
continent and it seemed as if they could reach Berlin by year’s end.
But Eisenhower was caught by surprise in December when the Germans launched a counter-offensive.
The resulting “Battle of the Bulge” brought the biggest losses of the war.
Regardless, with the massive Russian Army pouring through Poland, the Third Reich was
doomed and the Russians reached Berlin in April 1945, having lost nearly 10 million
soldiers and civilians during the war.
Eisenhower later endured some criticism for allowing the Red Army to reach Berlin first.
With the Russians controlling virtually all of Eastern Europe, the stage was set for the
post-war conflict between the US and the USSR, the two superpowers emerging from the rubble
of the worldwide cataclysm.
Eisenhower himself became wildly popular, and both Democratic and Republican parties
wooed him to run on their tickets.
He declined, and instead accepted the presidency of Columbia University, afterwards becoming
the first Supreme commander of NATO in 1951.
But in 1952, with the unpopular Korean War in a stalemate, Eisenhower accepted the GOP
presidential nomination and handily defeated the Democrat Adlai Stevenson with the memorable
campaign slogan: “I like Ike.”
He promptly signed the truce that ended the war in Korea, and after Stalin died, Eisenhower
negotiated a peace treaty that ended the occupation of Austria, returning it to neutral status.
While the American economy was the envy of the world, bustling along with the greatest
standard of living the world had ever seen, it was also a time of great anxiety.
The Joseph McCarthy Communist witch-hunts were poisoning American political life and
Eisenhower did little to stop McCarthy’s scare tactics, having picked an equally aggressive
Red-baiter, Richard Nixon, as his Vice President.
With the fall of China to the Communist leader Mao Zedong, and the revelations of Communist
spies giving American nuclear secrets to the Russians, paranoia seeped into the very fabric
of American society.
Despite unprecedented prosperity, in 1950s America it truly was the best of times and
the worst of times.
The Eisenhower administration embarked on a series of international interventions that
would have enormous consequences in the future.
When the British government under Winston Churchill requested U.S. assistance in overthrowing
the popular Iranian government of Mossadegh because he wanted to nationalize the Iranian
oil industry that British Petroleum controlled, Truman flatly rejected the proposal.
But a year later, Churchill’s request found a receptive audience in the Eisenhower Administration,
particularly with the firm anti-Communist brothers, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
and CIA Director Allen Dulles.
These two men would drive American foreign policy during the Fifties and turn the CIA,
which began as a mere intelligence gathering agency, into a state-sponsored anti-Communist
machine, overthrowing foreign governments that were perceived as threats to Western
business interests.
Though the American backed coup was successful in Iran in 1952, it would come back to haunt
the U.S. 26 years later when the Iranian people rose up against the US-installed Shah, leading
to the fundamentalist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini.
A year later, the same thing was repeated in Guatemala, when the legally elected government
wanted to nationalize the United Fruit Company and end its brutal working conditions.
Unfortunately for Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, Allen Dulles was on the board of directors
at the United Fruit Company, and his brother had served as the company’s lawyer.
The relatively modest reforms Arbenz proposed were seen as a Communist threat to American
business interests.
The CIA organized an invasion that staged a coup d’état and installed a U.S. backed
dictator, ending the so-called Guatemalan Revolution of economic liberalization, and
in turn ending democracy in Guatemala for over four decades.
This coup enflamed anti-American sentiment in Latin America and inspired other revolts
in the region.
In the Middle East, in 1956, the CIA made plans to overthrow the Syrian government because
it would not cooperate with Western anticommunism efforts.
The plan called for the use of the Iraqi army and then shifted its focus to agents within
Syria itself.
But when Israel and Britain invaded Egypt during the Suez Crisis, the plan was called
off, with the sentiment that it could not succeed during a time of Israeli aggression
against a neighboring Arab country.
But plans for a Syrian regime change continued, including an assassination attempt in 1957,
in collusion with the British intelligence service MI6.
In yet another example of the CIA making policy decisions, Allen Dulles ordered the murder
of imprisoned African pan-nationalist Patrice Lumumba to be “an urgent and prime objective,”
after learning incoming President John F. Kennedy would order his release.
Lumumba was killed by Belgian allies three days before Kennedy’s inauguration.
To his credit, when the French fortress of Dien Bien Phu fell to the Vietnamese Communists
in May 1954, Eisenhower refused to provide military intervention despite urgings from
the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Vice President Nixon, though he did authorize economic
assistance to France to continue fighting.
In 1954 the Geneva Conference met to determine the future of Vietnam.
The Soviet Union, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and the People’s Republic
of China participated throughout the conference, addressing the future of post-colonial Vietnam
following the Indochina War between France and the Viet Minh.
They produced the Geneva Accords, which separated Vietnam into two zones, a northern zone governed
by the Viet Minh, and a southern zone, governed by former emperor Bao Dai, with a general
election to be held by July 1956 to create a unified state.
In 1955 there was a referendum in South Vietnam between Vietnamese Prime Minister Ngo Dinh
Diem and Bao Dai.
Diem would win 98.2 percent of the vote, though the vote was suspiciously fraudulent.
A total of six hundred and five thousand votes were cast despite there being only four hundred
and five thousand registered voters.
The popular communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, was set to win the 1956 national election,
vowing to unify the country.
Eisenhower, afraid of losing another Asian country to Communists, had Diem cancel the
proposed national election.
And so the stage was set for the war that would tear America apart in the decades to come.
The U.S. was stunned in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first orbiting
satellite in space.
This fed the paranoia that the United States was being surpassed by the USSR and Eisenhower
immediately called for an increase in American exploration of outer space.
The space race was on.
He created NASA as a civilian space agency in October 1958, paving the way for spy satellite
technology to orbit over sovereign territory.
As fear spread through the United States that the Soviet Union would invade, Eisenhower
wanted to not only create a surveillance satellite to detect any threats but also ballistic missiles
to protect the United States.
Ike devised the American basic strategy of nuclear deterrence based upon the triad of
B-52 bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and Polaris submarine-launched missiles.
Much of Eisenhower’s domestic policy was inevitably linked to the Cold War, including
one of his most enduring achievements, championing the Interstate Highway System in 1956.
He justified the project through the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 as essential to American
security during the Cold War, believing that large cities would be targets, and therefore
an interconnected national highway system would facilitate evacuations and speed military
transportation.
Even Civil Rights was tied to the Cold War.
The administration declared racial discrimination a national security issue, as Communists around
the world used America’s history of discrimination and racial violence to criticize the myth
of American freedom and equality.
In his first State of the Union address in February 1953, Eisenhower stated, “I propose
to use whatever authority exists in the office of the President to end segregation in the
District of Columbia, including the Federal Government, and any segregation in the Armed Forces."
When he encountered opposition from the services, he used government control of military spending
to force the change.
Eisenhower told District of Columbia officials to make Washington a model for the rest of
the country in integrating black and white public school children.
He proposed to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, and signed those acts into law.
The 1957 act established a permanent civil rights office inside the Justice Department
and a Civil Rights Commission to hear testimony about abuses of voting rights, and the 1960
act assured federal inspection of voter registration polls.
Although both acts were much weaker than subsequent civil rights legislation, they constituted
the first significant civil rights acts since 1875.
In 1957, the state of Arkansas refused to integrate their public school system despite
the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court, which declared that
the segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.
Arkansas governor Orval Faubus resisted the court order, and Eisenhower responded with
federal intervention, whereby the 101st Airborne Division of the Army personally escorted nine
black students into Little Rock Central High School.
Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to Eisenhower to thank him, stating “The overwhelming
majority of southerners, Negro and white, stand firmly behind your resolute action to
restore law and order in Little Rock.”
Ike called himself a progressive conservative.
He expanded Social Security and other New Deal programs and combined them into a new
cabinet-level agency, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, while extending benefits
to an additional ten million workers, and maintained such popular Roosevelt policies
as support for labor unions.
In his televised farewell speech, Eisenhower raised the spectre of the Cold War and the
role of the U.S. armed forces.
He was deeply troubled by the growth of militaristic sentiments, feeling that such actions could
bring about the end of civilization, and said: “We must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
It was a bold, prophetic speech, warning of the growth of a national economy based upon
being permanently at war.
Eisenhower confronted Communism aggressively, but also judiciously avoided conflicts sought
by McCarthy and other hawks in his government.
He projected a warm, comforting grandfatherly image that reassured the public during a time
of growing Cold War anxiety.
Voted Gallup’s most admired man twelve times, he achieved widespread esteem both in and
out of office.
He has consistently been rated as one of the greatest US Presidents.