Authors: Jim Newton
Ike’s open support helped push Nixon through the final obstacles in the way of his nomination—talk of a Rockefeller-Reagan ticket was squelched—and Eisenhower, again from his hospital room, addressed the Republican National Convention, meeting that year in Miami Beach. On the evening of August 5, a gaunt Eisenhower was beamed into the convention, and he gave a short talk to the delegates. The following morning, he suffered yet another heart attack. Nixon accepted his party’s nomination later that week. “I say,” Nixon urged the delegates, “let’s win this one for Ike.”
Nixon’s victory delighted Eisenhower, and the president-elect did his old boss the courtesy of soliciting his views on forming a cabinet and a government. Barbara Anne was married in November, but Ike could not attend, nor was he able to leave the hospital for David and Julie’s wedding in December. He now was on a steeply downward slope. He still managed to flirt with the nurses, over whom Mamie kept a careful eye. (“He was an old man, but after all he’d survived, you never knew,” she remarked later.) But he tired of Walter Reed and sank further into quiet. An abdominal operation in March weakened him, and by month’s end he was despairing, the famous optimism slipping away.
Ike’s wife, son, and grandson were at his side on the morning of March 28 when Ike barked out an order: “Lower the shades!” He then commanded his doctor and his son, “Pull me up.” They lifted him partway, and he grumbled, “Two big men. Higher,” he added. They did.
Sitting as he wanted, Eisenhower turned to John and spoke softly. “I want to go,” he said. “God take me.” The doctor administered a sedative, and Ike fell back asleep. He never spoke again. Three hours later, at 12:35 p.m. on March 28, 1969, Dwight Eisenhower died.
Epilogue
T
he 1950s sit nestled between two much-examined decades—the 1940s, with its great war, and the 1960s, with its cultural upheaval. One result has been to overlook the complexity of those deceptively eventful, tumultuous years, as well as that of the man who governed through them. Far from an era of consensus, the 1950s featured the rise and fall of McCarthyism and the early struggles for civil rights, sexual liberation, and feminism. The decade had bobby socks and backyard barbecues, but it also gave Americans
The Old Man and the Sea, The Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man
, “Howl,”
On the Waterfront
, and
Rebel Without a Cause
. It was jazz and Elvis,
Playboy
magazine and the Pill. Marilyn Monroe blossomed in the 1950s and barely outlived them; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed as the nation fought through subversion, real and imagined, and the unsettling struggle of the Korean War. It was an age of the Red Scare, and also Castro, Che Guevara, C. Wright Mills, and Martin Luther King. And it was an epoch of perpetual danger, as two superpowers wrestled with the sudden acquisition of unimaginably destructive power, intent on burying each other but uncertain of how to win without dying.
President Eisenhower was determined that Americans should enjoy the fruits of their freedom, and he set out to wean the nation from its addiction to crisis. Americans, he believed, would only fully secure the blessings of their liberty if allowed to pursue it with tranquility. More than any man of his era, Ike gave Americans that chance. He won the future of the West on the battlefields of Europe and then nurtured it as president, patiently marking progress, steadfastly confronting the great menace of his era—Soviet Communism—without resort to global confrontation.
Eisenhower was the first American president to have access to atomic weapons and not use them. He refrained when they might have ended the Korean War, when they might have saved the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, when they might have repelled Chinese aggression against Taiwan or Soviet threats to Berlin. He refused when his advisers begged him to use those weapons and when they urged him to develop plans for fighting smaller nuclear wars in remote areas of the world. We can only wonder how humanity’s course might have been different had Eisenhower acceded to those who believed America would have been best served by use of the weapons under his control.
He was a good man, one of integrity and decency. But he was not always right. He was too enamored of covert action, and he did not fully apprehend the moral imperatives of civil rights, where his belief in measured progress, the middle way, impeded his sympathy for those who demanded their constitutional rights immediately. There, however, his record was better than his instincts. Guided by a style of leadership gleaned from his long military career—from emulation of Fox Conner and George Marshall and from rejection of Douglas MacArthur—Eisenhower knew that capable subordinates required the support of their boss. In this case, President Eisenhower relied on the leadership of Herbert Brownell and, because of it, registered the nation’s most significant progress toward racial equality since the end of the Civil War. Brownell picked judges and justices, advanced programs and policies; Eisenhower, despite his limitations, knew well enough that progress required him to go along. If Earl Warren and the Supreme Court sometimes baffled or annoyed him, Eisenhower nevertheless followed their commands. And when the South threatened to defy the Court, Ike restored order and supremacy by force, as only he could.
Eisenhower was a conservative man, raised to believe in industry and thrift. He did not believe that government could or should substitute for individual initiative, and he adhered to Republican notions of private enterprise. He was, however, refreshingly unbound by partisanship. He won approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 with Democratic and Republican support; he championed the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Interstate Highway System even when his brother grumbled about his tolerance for socialism. When President Eisenhower was frustrated by Congress, it was more often McCarthy or Knowland who bedeviled him than liberal Democrats.
His legacy at the U.S. Supreme Court suggests Ike’s lack of concern for ideological or partisan orthodoxy. Of his five appointees, one, Charles Whittaker, can be regarded as unsuited to the position, and he did not last long. Of the others, Potter Stewart and John Harlan were conservative Republicans, Warren was a liberal Republican, and William Brennan was a liberal Democrat. Few presidents can point to a broader or more consequential range of appointees to that bench. They unanimously advanced the cause of social justice, and they did so because Ike put them there to do it.
Ike’s patient pursuit of progress, his faith in his subordinates, and his rejection of doctrinaire partisanship combined to produce an American triumph in the two great challenges of his epoch: black Americans secured the right to join the society that once enslaved them, and all Americans outlasted Soviet Communism without a war of annihilation to defeat it. As Ike understood better than those around him, peace gave America time. In the fullness of that time, America fulfilled the destiny its founders imagined for it.
Dwight Eisenhower left his nation freer, more prosperous, and more fair. Peace was not given to him; he won it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Before this book was mine, it belonged to my editor, whose foresight imagined these pages and whose insight enriched them. Phyllis Grann, as all who know her know well, is far more than an editor. She is a reader of the first order, a sharp-eyed cultural critic, a shrewd businesswoman, a discerning gourmand, and, I’m happy to report, my friend. I am grateful to her for bringing me to this project and for sharing it with me.
Equally instrumental has been my extraordinary agent, Tina Bennett. Tina is responsible for my life as a book writer, and I am so deeply in her debt, so lastingly grateful for her guidance, acumen, and wisdom that I have long ago lost the ability to thank her properly. This must suffice.
Though I owe special debts to Phyllis and Tina—and their capable and cheerful assistants, Jackie Montalvo, Daniel Meyer, and Svetlana Katz—they head a long list. One who deserves special note is Ingrid Sterner, who copyedited the manuscript with deftness and care, reminding me of my lifelong debt to copy editors whose exacting labors are the unsung strength of both daily journalism and the work of making books.
The staff of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum has supplied more knowledge and answered more questions than anyone should ever be asked to do on behalf of a writer. Several people there are worthy of special note: Tim Rives, deputy director, shared his insights into Ike’s life and presidency; my appreciation for Tim is enhanced further by his kind willingness to read the manuscript and spot errors and omissions. Valoise Armstrong shepherded me through more than a dozen weeklong visits to Abilene, Kansas, guiding me to valuable material and making my trips there as pleasant as they were productive. In the reading room, Chalsea Millner and Catherine Cain were good-natured, professional, and patient with my endless requests for help and my thousands of trips to the copy machine. Kathy Fruss helped identify and select appropriate images from the library’s vast collection. Finally, Karl Weissenbach, who oversees this exemplary enterprise, was a gracious host who introduced me to members of the interlocking Eisenhower-Nixon family. Karl’s institution is a credit to his leadership.
The bulk of this book is built on the holdings of the Eisenhower Library, but is supplemented by materials elsewhere, and thus owes its existence to the wisdom of librarians at Dartmouth College’s Rauner Library; the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; the California State Archives in Sacramento; the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson presidential libraries; and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. To each, I am beholden. Thanks, too, to the University of California, Los Angeles, which honored me with a teaching position and a senior fellowship, allowing me to conduct much research in UCLA’s astonishing libraries. Visits to those libraries meant absences from my day job at the
Los Angeles Times
, where my colleagues perform noble, sometimes heroic, work under difficult circumstances. I appreciate the paper’s willingness to tolerate my double life, and am especially indebted to my assistant, Linda Hall, for maintaining that complicated balance.
I owe thanks not just to those who contributed directly to the research and writing but also to those whose thoughts enriched it, whose welcomes I overstayed, and whose friendships I treasure. Steve Stroud and Carol Stogsdill are grand souls who fortify our lives; they have given our family our summers for a decade, and many are the passages of this book that have taken shape on their Wisconsin dock or in the quiet woods beyond. Brad Hall and Julia Louis-Dreyfus bring warmth and fellowship into our family beyond measure, and they, too, have hosted us more times than I can recall—the descriptions of the Eisenhower administration’s attempt to destabilize the Sukarno government were incongruously drafted at their Santa Barbara home, as far as one can imagine from Indonesia and covert action. Chris and Sarah Capel have enveloped us with their faith and grace, not to mention our annual respite with them and Sarah’s mother, the magnificent Virginia Beeton Brown; there, too, is a link to these pages, as the descriptions of Ike’s Farewell Address were written in their guesthouse on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay. Kelly Baker and Whitney Ellerman have put me up on many a visit to Washington, including a hasty trip that sealed the research on this book; their welcome is matched by their cheer and overwhelming goodness. And then there are Paul and Victoria Barrosse, without whom no holiday in our home is complete; Paul and Victoria radiate a spirited love of history that infects this book and makes me forever appreciative of their good company. Finally, I take this opportunity to thank those closest to me for longest: my parents, Jim and Barbara Newton, and my brother, John Newton. I owe my Newtons, well, everything.
Several others deserve special mention. JR Moehringer, my dear friend since our clerk days at the
New York Times
and the best writer I know, talked me through many crises. Henry Weinstein was, as he always has been, a font of wisdom and courage. And Bill McIntyre, whom I first relied upon in high school and who ever since has been there with kindness and wit, is among those I most admire on earth. Finally, my friend and colleague Tim Rutten offered boundless intelligence about the Eisenhower years and did me the extraordinary favor of reading the manuscript.
This is a book built largely on documents, but it also involved a number of interviews, two of which were essential. Colonel Clinton Ancker III, introduced to me by our mutual friend Will Gates, gave up a morning to educate me on military history and Eisenhower’s abilities as a general. Those were invaluable insights that helped focus the book’s early chapters. And most significant of all was John Eisenhower, who set aside his reluctance to tutor yet another writer on the life and accomplishments of his father and allowed me to visit with him on those subjects. John is a shrewd and thoughtful analyst, as well as a captivating writer with a practiced eye for detail and story. As a result, our time together and the exchanges of countless messages brought Ike to life for me.
In acknowledging those to whom I owed debts after my first book, I recounted the mentors and colleagues who have left deep impressions on me. I will not repeat those encomiums here, except to say that James Reston, Bill Kovach, Sonny Rawls, and John Carroll remain, individually and collectively, the bearers of a standard to which I aspire.
One further note is in order, as it regards those men and their work. Immersion in the history of the 1950s entails deep study of the many currents of life in that period. Thankfully, the story of those years was painstakingly and memorably captured in the journalism of the era. Week after week, the
New York Times
of the 1950s devoted acres of newsprint to publish transcripts of the McCarthy hearings, the debates of the United Nations, and the public addresses of Eisenhower and Stevenson; Dulles, Nixon, and Kennedy; and other leading figures of the day. When Scotty Reston broke the news of the Oppenheimer security board inquiry, the next day’s paper carried not just his scoop but also the full text of the letters exchanged between Oppenheimer and the AEC. That is a tribute to Reston, of course, but also to publishers who understood service. Devotion to chronicling society in all its serious complexity was an article of faith for American newspapers in their heyday—not just at the
Times
but also at the
New York Herald Tribune
, the
Washington Post
, and, late to the enterprise, the
Los Angeles Times
. The stewards of American journalism at its apex understood that it was expensive and difficult, that it was a job for serious, seasoned people, not amateurs, poseurs, or profiteers. They spent lavishly and constructed a vital business as well as a sustaining culture. It is a lesson that no engaged citizen should forget but that, sadly, many have.