Authors: Jim Newton
Rather than slot Smith for one of the administration’s visible positions, Eisenhower placed him where he needed him, as undersecretary of state. That was a marked demotion from director of Central Intelligence, but Eisenhower was not handing out rewards. He was building an administration, and Smith served an invaluable purpose. As undersecretary, he would be in a position to watch not just Secretary of State John Foster Dulles but also Smith’s own replacement at the CIA, Dulles’s brother, Allen Dulles. Smith would prove invaluable to Ike, not just as an adviser, but as a counterpoint to the capable John Foster and the less reliable Allen.
One more associate would also shape Ike’s presidency. Ann Whitman came to Eisenhower somewhat by chance. She had been working at Radio Free Europe, where she met C. D. Jackson, and Jackson suggested that she sign up with Eisenhower’s campaign. She did and quickly became indispensable. When Eisenhower was preparing to leave for Denver that summer, the campaign needed a secretary to travel with him. Whitman offered to do the job for two weeks—what her husband would later describe as the longest two weeks in history. Described as “keen, sensitive, risible, youthful, chic and distinctly good looking,” Whitman would be among the small group of aides who entered the White House with Eisenhower and stayed until the final day. Married to an executive for the United Fruit Company, Whitman kept a punishing schedule—usually at her desk by 7:30, often there until late at night, and always at the mercy of the president’s travel plans. She could be irritable, especially when officials excluded her from meetings with the president. And she and Mamie clashed from time to time. Mamie was accustomed to managing Ike’s private life, and Whitman assumed some of that responsibility during the presidency, to Mamie’s irritation. But Whitman was careful to avoid direct conflict with the First Lady: One day in 1958, she was about to board the president’s helicopter for Gettysburg when she learned at the last minute that Mamie would be meeting it at the other end. Whitman opted to drive.
And, of course, Ike brought with him the Gang. His friends worked hard for his election, but once it was won, they feared they might lose him to his new duties. They need not have worried. When Ike was inaugurated, Bill Robinson, the Gang’s central figure, wrote to Ike of his joy and mixed feelings. “Your companionship shall be sorely missed,” he said. “I can only hope to earn a continuation of a friendship which has become a precious possession.” Ike would have none of that; he responded the same day, his first in office, to proclaim his dedication to their friendship and his determination to remain close with his friends, even as president.
Eisenhower’s Gang formed a protective nucleus around the president for his entire tenure, giving him the outlet of focused relaxation that his temperament required. Whether at golf or bridge or even in relaxed conversation, Ike replenished his energy by immersing himself wholeheartedly in his distractions. The members of the Gang understood their importance. As Ellis Slater recorded in his diary in 1953: “This ability to segregate his thoughts—to relax—has been and will be the thing that will save him and make his life worth living.”
Eisenhower rounded out his cabinet while still in New York. Although without formal position, the group gathered for a two-day meeting beginning January 12. At that session, Eisenhower shared his draft of his inaugural address. The members listened, then burst into applause. Ike scolded them lightly, saying he had “read it not for praise but for analysis and criticism.” Privately, he was just as grumpy, complaining to his diary that his speechwriter was “no help—he is more enamored with words than with ideas.”
Ike continued to fiddle with the draft as Inauguration Day approached. He wanted neither to lecture nor to preach as he tried to articulate the grounding principles of his administration. It was frustrating work, but telling: he was a careful draftsman, thoughtful and precise.
When the morning of the inaugural arrived, Eisenhower joined Truman at the White House for the short trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Their meeting was frosty. The campaign had left scars on both, and the arrangements for the ceremony only exacerbated them. When Ike suggested that Truman pick him up at the hotel, Truman refused, believing protocol demanded that the president-elect present himself to the president. Eisenhower accepted that, but when he arrived at the White House, he discovered that the Trumans had planned a light lunch. Eisenhower declined. He and Mamie waited outside. Even Eisenhower’s decision to wear a homburg rather than a top hat annoyed Truman, who felt it demeaned the ceremony.
The only warmth during their short trip up Capitol Hill came when Eisenhower asked who had ordered John Eisenhower home from Korea for the ceremony. “I did,” Truman replied. Eisenhower thanked him, then resumed his silence for the balance of the ride.
All presidents save Washington are measured against their predecessors. As he ascended to the presidency that January morning, Eisenhower naturally was most compared to Truman, just as Truman had been so unfavorably, and unfairly, found wanting in the shadow of FDR. In fact, the president whose background and service most resembled those that Ike brought to the office was Washington himself. Both were military heroes of their country (their colonies, in Washington’s case), and both commanded respect and regard that crossed party, regional, and sectarian divisions. They were presidents, of course; but more than that, they were cohesive forces for America, Washington at its outset, Ike as it entered a troubling phase of its history, a period of grave and vague danger, of war without war, of threat and bluff. But if Eisenhower’s presidency echoed his distant predecessor’s, so, too, did their difference speak to their times. Washington was the regal general, so removed from his colleagues that they feared to touch him; Eisenhower was bluff and warm, a hero of the Republic and yet also a man of its people, a natural politician as the nation turned to television. Even his famous gaffes spoke to that duality. In formal speeches, he was eloquent, precise, and equipped with a broad, deep vocabulary; informally, he bollixed words and mismatched verbs with nouns. His news conferences could be bafflingly hard to track, but when he prepared a text, it was polished.
His inaugural address evidenced the latter. It hinted at much of what would mark his years as president: the invocation of God; the resolute commitment to security that comprehended economic prudence. He asked the nation to place country over comfort and convenience, and he pledged to refrain from using American power to impress the nation’s values on others. At its core were nine principles, ticked off by the president as he stood on the east steps of the Capitol, his head bare on a cool, breezy January day.
Eisenhower’s prevailing argument was for balance: he abhorred war as well as appeasement; he trumpeted American strength as a source of international peace but insisted on restraint; he stressed the importance of economic well-being and human equality and expressed appreciation for the United Nations, “the living sign of all people’s hope for peace.” The speech was often lofty, laced with potent imagery. “The faith we hold belongs not to us alone but to the free of all the world,” he said. “This common bond binds the grower of rice in Burma and the planter of wheat in Iowa, the shepherd in southern Italy and the mountaineer in the Andes. It confers a common dignity upon the French soldier who dies in Indo-China, the British soldier killed in Malaya, the American life given in Korea.” Rejecting appeasement, he added: “Americans, indeed all free men, remember that in the final choice, a soldier’s pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner’s chains.”
Eisenhower spoke for twenty minutes, shook the hands of the men around him as they offered their congratulations, and, in a touching note, kissed his First Lady, something no other American president had ever done at an inauguration. Then the exhaustion set in. After swearing in White House aides, presiding over the first official meeting of his cabinet, and bidding farewell to family and friends, Eisenhower fell ill with a cold and retired to his quarters, holing up there for two days.
This was a time of transition in American leadership, but also in the Eisenhower family. The brothers gathered, and their families bickered. As was often the case, it was Arthur’s wife, Louise, who got under Ike’s skin. During a rare moment when the family was alone, Louise caused a scene: she was angry with Ike for making it clear in his family tree that Arthur was divorced and Louise was his second wife. “I guess the old gal will never learn,” Ike complained in a note to Edgar. “I do think it is really something on the order of a nervous disease rather than real intent.”
Ike was pleased to see Louise off, and Mamie then began converting the White House from the Trumans’ home to the Eisenhowers’. The White House had been renovated by the Trumans, so the residence now featured a movie theater and solarium, not to mention air-conditioning. A veteran of moving, Mamie decorated in pinks and greens—by then the Eisenhowers’ trademark colors. She was forced to work with a limited budget, but she gamely improvised: for drapes, she purchased parachute silk and asked the White House seamstress to convert it. The Eisenhowers kept separate quarters but shared a bed, the first First Family in memory to do so. Mamie was delighted when the bed arrived; she could finally get a good night’s sleep now that she could “reach over and pat Ike on his old bald head anytime I want to.” Mamie also handled the family’s personal accounts, supervising the renovation of the Gettysburg home and scrupulously seeing to it that family expenses did not appear on the government’s bills.
Mamie’s bangs and grandmotherly manners made her the object of much derision—particularly after Jackie Kennedy brought youth and vivacity to her position—but Mamie was a comfortable and gracious hostess, far more appreciated in her day than in history. Under her watch, military customs replaced the Trumans’ frumpier entertainments. Formal protocol and dress brought style to the White House, and the Eisenhowers regularly hosted foreign leaders, many of whom were long known to Ike.
Mamie was proud of her style, even if it was not universally appreciated. Although she annually was named one of the world’s twelve best-dressed women, some critics sneered at her charm bracelets and other middle-class affectations. She was superstitious and delicate, her health often frail. Rumors of her drinking, first whispered during the war, followed her to the White House. Though she drank, whispers of her drunkenness were exaggerated by the unsteadiness caused by her inner-ear disturbance. Her heart troubles as a little girl also worried her as an adult, and she took precautions to protect herself: Mamie disliked sleeping above an altitude of five thousand feet and hated to fly. She often worked in bed, propped up by pillows and surrounded by photographs and papers.
Mamie could be a rough boss—but she also tended to her staff and to those in trouble who beseeched the president for help. Year after year, Mamie answered thousands of letters, shook so many hands that hers sometimes ached, and pushed her sometimes-reluctant husband to rise to the social expectations of his office.
Through it all, Mamie was a dignified First Lady and a supportive, though hardly fawning, spouse for Ike. Like her husband, she enjoyed cards—canasta and Bolivia were favorite games—and she, like Ike, impressed friends with her concentration and memory. One story, perhaps apocryphal, though repeated by their granddaughter in her biography of Mamie, captures their partnership in full. One night, while Mamie was slow dressing, Ike became irritated. “You have kept the President of the United States waiting!” he is said to have complained. Legend has it that Mamie replied: “Oh, I thought I was dressing for my husband.”
A few weeks after settling in, Eisenhower called a meeting of Republican legislative leaders and department heads to explain the efforts that the administration was making to trim Truman’s budget. Eisenhower expected the meeting to be informational and uneventful—essentially a briefing intended to secure allies for a Republican campaign to reduce a Democratic deficit. All told, the measures under consideration would cut a projected $9.9 billion deficit to about $4 billion. Ike’s hope for an easy consensus was quickly dashed. In the words of James Hagerty, Robert Taft “blew up.” He complained on the one hand that the budget merely parroted Truman’s approach—with minor cuts here and there—and on the other that it allowed for no tax cuts. Taft threatened to oppose the budget, predicted other congressional Republicans would as well, and suggested that it would doom the party in the 1954 elections. Eisenhower seemed stunned, and aides, seeing him struggle to control his temper, jumped in before he could respond.
When he did reply to Taft, his response crystallized the rifts in the Republican Party. Eisenhower stressed the financial obligations imposed by the continuing war in Korea and other security threats, and though he doubted Taft’s prediction of dire political consequences, he was willing to risk them: “The nation’s military security will take first priority in my calculations.” With that, Taft’s anger was defused, and he apologized—the beginning of a curious, though short-lived, friendship. It was “one of the worst days I have experienced since January 20,” Eisenhower wrote in his diary, but the conclusion “was not quite as bad as some of the moments in its middle.”
The tension between economy and security never disappeared for the eight years of Ike’s presidency. But the administration’s initial preoccupations were often directed toward accusations of treason and espionage, some emanating from Senator Joe McCarthy, some in the divisive case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Born in New York in 1918, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, educated as an electrical engineer, idealistic, serious, and bighearted, Julius Rosenberg was hardly an extraordinary young man. As a teenager, he was drawn to an idealized vision of Communism and joined the Young Communist League. While studying at City College of New York, he attended a benefit for the International Seamen’s Union where a pixieish young woman with a lovely face and a beautiful voice caught his eye and ear. She sang “Ciribiribin,” and Julius fell in love. Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Greenglass courted for several years, and Ethel’s younger brother, David, came to worship his sister’s boyfriend; Julius shared his books and thoughts with the boy, who was less interested in politics than in pleasing Julius. Julius took an extra semester to graduate, receiving his bachelor of science in electrical engineering in early 1939. Four months later, Julius and Ethel were married, eventually giving birth to two sons, Robert and Michael.