Toddlers should just come with a tag that says "spoiler alert" on them, if you ever watch one of their favorite movies with them. My niece and I were watching "Jungle Book" together. During "That's What Friends Are For" she kept announcing: "Tiger coming. Tiger coming! TIGERCOMINGTIGERCOMING!"
I felt a similar sense of foreshadowing as I researched the Eisenhower era. "Sixties coming. Sixties coming! SIXTIESCOMINGSIXTIESCOMING!" I kept having the image in my head of a black and white jack-in-the-box slooowly being wound up....with a psychedelic surprise inside.
A lot of Americans have a great deal of nostalgia for the 1950's. It was the beginning of the United States being the most powerful nation in the world. It was an era of tremendous prosperity....I doubt any of us will see its equal in our lifetime. Also, thanks to the rather antiseptic sitcoms that were popular at the time, there is a "Father Knows Best" idea about the time that was not necessarily true.
This was the Greatest Generation's big chance at "normalcy." Or at least, the perception of normalcy that a generation who had their childhood in the Great Depression and their young adult life in World War II. It was the beginning of white flight to the suburbs....often to Levittown type suburbs with identical tract housing. It was the beginning of fast food, in particular the McDonalds empire. It was the beginning of CIA aided coups to topple governments the United States did not like.
Out of all the eras in United States history that I've researched to do this series, the 50's by far is the one I found the most repugnant: the greed, the paranoia, the pressure to conform... Fortunately I was pleased to discover that General Dwight David Eisenhower is more admirable than the era that bears his name.
Dwight David Eisenhower was born October 14, 1890 in Dennison, Texas, the last president to be born in the 19th century. He was the third of seven boys. When he was 2 the family moved to Abilene, Kansas, which he considered his hometown.
School did not particularly interest him except for military history and sports. He was an avid baseball and football player. Later a lot of his strength in leadership as a general was very similar to being a particularly good football coach.
After high school Ike enrolled in West Point. His pacifist parents were not thrilled with the idea, but were still supportive. Ike was an average student, and didn't believe in following the rules too strictly. He took up smoking at West Point specifically because it was against the rules. (45 years later he quit cold turkey...on his first try.) His graduating class in 1915 would later be known as "the class the stars fell on" as out of 164 graduates, 39 of them became generals. Ike and classmate Omar Bradley would eventually become 5 star generals.
When Eisenhower was stationed in Texas, he fell in love and married Mamie Doud. Mamie would be the perfect 1st lady for the 1950's. She's pretty much the anti-Eleanor Roosevelt. She was totally obsessively devoted to her husband. She didn't strike me as particularly bright...and due to ill health, and just because she liked to....would spend large portions of the time lounging around in bed. The staff at the White House nicknamed her "Sleeping Beauty." She didn't have any particular causes except for hosting teas at the White House...and putting pink ruffly frou frou crap all over the place. (Yeah as you can see I'm a big fan.)
To her credit, she did follow Ike all over the place and moved roughly once a year for the first 35 years of their marriage. When Ike would finally retire at 70....he did all the cooking! Why? Because Mamie could only boil steak and potatoes, and make fudge. Apparently all those years she'd been too busy lying in bed, drinking tea and playing canasta to learn how to do much else.
The oldest Eisenhower son "Icky" would die of scarlet fever in 1921. This made Ike and Mamie, understandably, a bit overprotective of their second son John, born in 1922.
Early in the Eisenhower marriage, Ike was preparing to go into World War I. Ike was working hard training the troops. He was just ready to be shipped off to France when he found out the war was over. D'oh! It was one of the biggest disappointments in his professional career.
He spent the next 20 years having a respectable, if undistinguished, military career. He was over the 50, and on the verge of being forced into retirement, when World War II started.
As with all the wars....I'll leave the play by play, battle by battle part to the military historians. What impressed me the most about his command of the Allied Forces in Europe...is he was a big factor in making the allies...ALLIES. Ike had the thankless jobs of juggling all sorts of different egos, and clashing cultures as well. He managed to both be a decisive leader and a team player at the same time. In 1943, Eisenhower was in a plane with Harold MacMillan. They were flying over North Africa watching the Allied troops march to victory. MacMillan remarked "There, General, are the fruits of your victory." Ike turned to him with tears in his eyes and responded "Ours, you mean, ours."
During his time in Europe, Eisenhower became very close to his driver, a beautiful woman named Kay Summersby. There have been a lot of rumors of an affair between the two. While she definitely was his moral support, and the two were most definitely fond for teach other....there really is no evidence to prove or disprove an affair. In the Stephen Ambrose biography he points out that Eisenhower and Summersby had so little time alone, there wouldn't have been many opportunities.
After the war Eisenhower became president of Columbia University. It was not a good fit. Eisenhower thought there should be an extra emphasis on patriotism at the university, even above academics. The faculty pretty much rolled their eyes at any suggestion he made. In this time period he was also made the supreme commander of the newly established NATO forces. Eisenhower initially hoped that in 10 years or so NATO would be a strictly European organization that could function on its own. Um....yeah that never happened. 60 years later we're still a part of NATO and still have troops in Europe.
In 1952 Eisenhower ran for president for the first time. Both parties had been courting him. Ike was a moderate Republican. (Remember those?) To balance him out, they wanted a Republican with a strong anti-communist history, that had a good connection with the old guard right wing element of the Republican party. 39 year old senator Richard Nixon was the obvious choice. They defeated Democrat (and original inspiration for the word "egghead") Governor Adlai Stevenson.
In some ways, the relationship worked well. They very much had a good cop/bad cop dynamic. Eisenhower could come off as the benevolent grandfatherly figure while Nixon did the dirty work.
However, it was never a comfortable relationship. During the 1952 campaign, Nixon had received campaign funds from some dubious sources. The situation got bad enough that the Republican Party debated dropping Nixon from the ticket. Nixon managed to save his own ass by making what is now famously known as "The Checkers Speech." However in the process, he basically implied that ALL the candidates should disclose their tax returns and campaign contributions. Eisenhower was utterly furious at having to do this, and never forgave Nixon, and never trusted him. He was also concerned by Nixon's ambitious nature.
When re-election time came in 1956 Eisenhower hemmed and hawed over whether to include Nixon on the ticket for his second term. Initially he kept trying to get Nixon to accept a cabinet post instead. Nixon refused as this in his eyes would be a demotion. He also put Nixon in an awkward position by pretty much saying "Look, a cabinet position would be the best for you to get experience....unless you don't think I'll survive another 5 years. Then you should stay as vice-president." There pretty much WAS no right way to answer a statement like that. Eisenhower also gave a pretty lukewarm....endorsement seems to be too strong a word for it....for Nixon in 1960. Nixon would later remark about Eisenhower "He was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized."
As for the presidency itself, it was a mixed bag. My personal favorite of his accomplishments is the highway system. Eisenhower had been very impressed by the German autobahn, and decided we needed something like that at home. A few years ago when I was turning green from a bumpy Mexican highway I found myself thinking "Right now Eisenhower is my favorite president!"
He also balanced the budget. Part of how Eisenhower did this was by reducing military spending....which upset the Democrats. Yes, you did read that last sentence correctly. Sounds pretty Bizarro World! In the 1950's thanks to the Soviet Union getting the bomb, and then launching the satellite Sputnik...anti-Communist hysteria, and pressure for arms race spending was pretty high. I give Eisenhower a lot of credit for keeping a level head. The Korean War ended on Ike's watch. This can partly be credited to his decisions, and partly to the death of Stalin. He also refused to send troops to Vietnam in the 1950's after the French were defeated by the Vietnamese independence movement. (A LOT more on that in later entries...)
It also should be noted, that after the initial attempts to put a satellite in orbit, Eisenhower consented to the creation of NASA. Although he largely thought it was a waste of time and resources.
On an interesting side note, the Pledge of Allegiance was changed in the Eisenhower administration to include the phrase "under God" in 1954. My father was in 2nd grade at the time. He came to the conclusion that each year in school the Pledge would have another line added to it.
However, for a man who had been so decisive as a general, Ike was oddly passive for quite a few issues as president. He did a fair amount of waiting for an issue to work itself out....which it usually didn't. McCarthyism was still an issue (although somewhat less so) in the Eisenhower administration. Eisenhower was slow to act. Although his first speech that was deemed anti-McCarthy is one of my favorites. At a commencement speech for Dartmouth College he urged "Don't john the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book."
Ike's record for Civil Rights is pretty piss poor. The biggest thing he did for the Civil Rights movement....and that wasn't intentional...was selecting Earl Warren as chief justice. Earl Warren made the decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education unanimous, and made school segregation unconstitutional. At first Eisenhower was silent on the issue, and did next to nothing to aid school integration in the south. Southerners took his silence as evidence that they were on the same side. Finally he sent federal troops the Little Rock in 1957 to enforce school integration...and pretty much because at that point, the segregationists were in such open defiance of the law, many more problems would have cropped up if Eisenhower hadn't stepped in. In his Eisenhower biography, Stephen Ambrose (who for the most part is an Eisenhower fan) concedes that Eisenhower's lack of action on Civil Rights issues just made the issue worse, and a more volatile issue for his successors to deal with.
The Eisenhower administration was also the beginning of what I feel is the unfortunate trend of using the CIA to topple governments, usually because they were bad for U.S. business. The first coup was in Iran replacing Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh with the Shah. While the coup at the time was successful, from that time on the Shah was viewed as a puppet of the United States. There was very little effort later to protect him during the revolution of 1979. In the long term, I think the United States placing the Shah in power caused more problems than it solved. The CIA also toppled governments in the Belgian Congo and Guatemala during the Eisenhower adminstration. The policy continued afterwards. The Bay of Pigs, though in the JFK administration, was planned in Eisenhower's. The other most famous is the coup in Chile in 1973 during Nixon's administration.
By 1960, Eisenhower was feeling frustrated by both men running to take his place: Vice-President Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy. Both were running on a platform of increasing military spending continuing the arms race. Eisenhower took the election of Kennedy personally, as if people did not appreciate what he had been working on for the past 8 years. While both Kennedy and Johnson would consult him, for the most part Eisenhower was frustrated with that administration....and the whole long-hair hippie rock and roll culture of the 1960's in general.
Eisenhower had suffered from a heart attack in his first administration, and a stroke in his second. He recovered from both. In the 1960's however, his health gradually went downhill. He died after a prolonged hospital stay on March 28, 1969. Thanks to the instability of the 1960's and 1970's, he would be the last president to serve two complete terms until Ronald Reagan.
Recommended reading:
"Eisenhower Solder and Presidnet" by Stephen E. Ambrose
"The Fifties" by David Halberstam (I'd especially recommend this book. It covers a bunch of different facets of the 50's: the culture, the politics, the business innovations...)
I think I would be remiss if I did not include the famous "I Like Ike" ad.
I also need to include the song I had running through my head throughout my 1950's research. Despite the video....this song is primarily about the 1950's....and then speeds through the next 3 decades.