Fifties (40 page)

The big winner in the whole episode was not Nixon but television. Nixon had given a powerful demonstration of what it could do. In effect, Richard Nixon had summoned his own instant convention, deputizing millions of Americans sitting in their homes as the delegates to it. With a shrewd, emotional speech, he had gone over Eisenhower’s head, forced his hand, and rehabilitated himself. The old political bosses could provide an audience of several thousand; television could provide one of millions, without the risk of hostile questioning.

The person who learned this lesson best was Nixon himself. The entire tone of his campaign began to change. If his bus was ready to roll and the print reporters, to his mind his principal enemies in the fund scandal, were not ready, his attitude now was, thought Ted Rogers, “Fuck ’em; we don’t need them.” He had become convinced that television could carry him above any obstacles the print reporters might put in his way. He was the new electronic man in the new electronic age.

EIGHTEEN

T
HOSE YEARS ARE SOMETIMES
called the Eisenhower era, and his presidency spanned much of the decade. When used by critics, the label is pejorative, implying a complacent, self-satisfied time (“looking down the long green fairways of indifference,” Frank Clement, the governor of Tennessee, sneered when he keynoted the Democratic convention in 1956—a reference to the fact that the President played golf primarily, it seemed, in the company of America’s wealthiest corporate figures). The truth was the country was changing at a remarkable rate, and a generation would soon come to power whose confidence and ambition had been intensified by both World War Two and the dynamism of the postwar economy. Still, it was Dwight Eisenhower and the men of his generation who were actually running the country, and the America they governed was the one they remembered from their childhoods, during
the turn of the century. Thus, while the country was exploding in terms of science, technology, and business, and had assumed a new international role as the most powerful nation on earth, the minds of the governing class were rooted in a simpler day. Many of the tensions of the era stemmed from this contradiction.

Dwight Eisenhower was the last American President born in the nineteenth century. The fifties had not shaped him; rather, he was the product of small-town life in America at the turn of the century. He was the best of that generation—educated, intelligent, ambitious. He had considerable ego, but he also had exceptional control of it. That allowed him to deal successfully with such immensely egocentric generals as Patton and Montgomery without losing his temper, and also to handle with great skill such delicate tasks as overseeing the transfer of power from a declining England to an ascending America. At a moment when feelings in both countries were raw (reflected most notably in Eisenhower’s constant problems with General Montgomery, who was not only unbearably egocentric but also openly insulting), Ike always managed to control his temper. After one particularly egregious offense, Ike had put his hand on Monty’s knee and said, “Steady, Monty. You can’t speak to me like that. I’m your boss.” Eisenhower never lost sight of the fact that he had to hold the alliance together, a job that was greater than one man’s ego. To ordinary British citizens he came to represent the embodiment of the new America just coming of age—fresh, strong, modern, decent, and generous.

He was ten years old when the new century began. His hometown, Abilene, Kansas, was a simple place then. In the center of town there were still hitching posts and watering troughs for the horses that drew the buggies. When his family had arrived in Abilene from Texas in 1891, the town did not yet have streetlights or paved streets. The mud made the streets virtually impassable after heavy rains. During Ike’s boyhood the town began to change. First there were sidewalks, made of lumber. Hard pavement on the streets came around 1904. Other amenities soon followed, like electricity and running water and then sewers. Abilene had but one policeman, who patrolled the town not for local crime, of which there was none, but for visiting hustlers and card sharks. The proprietors of the town’s handful of shops knew, Eisenhower later noted, that their customers came in to buy only what they needed and nothing more. (Later, as President of the United States, with some money in his pocket for the first time, Eisenhower became a shopper of legendary proportions.) There were no radios, and the local telegraph operator, as a favor to
his neighbors, kept the wire open late during the World Series so that he could pass on the scores every half-inning to the boys at the Smoke House, the local pool hall. As a boy, Eisenhower had seen a tennis court, but he had never seen anyone play on it. He had never even heard of golf.

Taxes were almost nonexistent. People took care of their own, as the saying went. Almost everyone voted Republican. The Midwest was isolated from the rest of America, as in a subsequent age of radio, television, automobiles, and highway systems it was not. “The isolation,” Milton Eisenhower once said “was political and economic as well as a prevailing state of mind. Self-sufficiency was the watchword; personal initiative and responsibility were prized; radicalism was unheard of.” Abilene was a town with its own subtle class distinctions. The railroad tracks divided the town. On the north side were the leading merchants and doctors and lawyers, in their expansive Victorian houses with huge porches; on the south side of the tracks were the people who served them—the railroad workers, carpenters, and bricklayers. The Eisenhowers were respectable but not part of the gentry.

Religion, not entertainment, was the focal point of the town’s life. “Everyone I knew went to church,” Eisenhower wrote years later. “The only exception were people we thought of as the toughs—pool room sharks, we called them.” The Eisenhowers were Mennonites from the Rhineland who had been persecuted for their faith and had come to America in the middle of the eighteenth century. They settled in a Mennonite community in Pennsylvania. In 1878 Jacob Eisenhower—the name means hewer, or artist, of steel—hearing of rich land further west, led his family and other Mennonites to Kansas. He sold his farm in Pennsylvania for eighty-five hundred dollars to pay for the trip. Tales of the fertile quality of the land in Kansas turned out to be true: Within a year his butter production was a thousand pounds, six times what it had been back in Pennsylvania. In addition, land on this new frontier was cheap. In Pennsylvania it went for $175 an acre; in Kansas, for $7.50 an acre.

Dwight’s father, David Eisenhower, hated farming. Instead, he loved tinkering with machinery and wanted to be an engineer. His father insisted farming was God’s work but eventually relented and allowed David to attend a nearby Mennonite college. There, David met and married Ida Stover, who came from a similar background. She was even more religious than he and had once won a prize for memorizing 1,325 biblical verses. As a wedding present Jacob gave his son a farm of 160 acres (as he had done with his other children)
and two thousand dollars, but David mortgaged the land and bought a general store in Hope, Kansas, twenty-eight miles south of Abilene. Soon thereafter the region’s farmers were hit by a plague of grasshoppers, which devastated the local economy. David’s partner ran off with what little money they had, and the store went bankrupt. He had been carrying all the local farmers on credit, and now, as they went broke, so did he.

It was a bitter failure, and the shadow of it hung over the Eisenhower family. David became dour, pessimistic, and wary of granting anyone his trust. At first he went to work for the railroads in Texas, at ten dollars a week, and then returned to work at a creamery run by his brother-in-law. It was not an easy life. There was never extra money. Everyone in the family had to work hard. The Eisenhowers grew most of their own food. Nothing was to be bought on credit. After his bankruptcy, David never wanted to owe anything to anybody. Once, Ike did not have enough money to buy a pair of pants from a local storekeeper and he agreed to pay the balance later. He swore the storekeeper to secrecy, but somehow a bill was sent out. David Eisenhower was furious, but to his son’s surprise there was no punishment for once.

The chores were rotated by Ida Eisenhower among her six sons. Each boy had his own vegetable garden. So humiliated by his failure, David remained distant and aloof. No one ever dissented from anything he said. His sons took turns getting up at 5
A.M.
to build a fire in the cookstove and to fix their father’s breakfast. He went to work every morning at six-thirty and came home at five. Every day one of the boys would bring him a hot lunch.

It was a seriously religious family. David read from the Bible before meals, and after dinner he brought the Bible out again and read it again. There was no discussion of the meaning of these biblical stories; the word of God was sufficient unto itself, David thought. Were it not for Ida Eisenhower’s ebullience and generosity of spirit, it might have been a grim boyhood. But she was both religious and gay, softening the family’s harsh circumstances for her children.

Dwight Eisenhower was known as Little Ike, a mutation of his last name. His older brother was Big Ike. As a boy, he had a ferocious temper. One Halloween night when he was ten years old, he was not allowed to go out trick-or-treating with his two brothers. Enraged, he pounded his hands against an old apple tree until they were bloody. His father was furious and used a hickory switch on him. Later that night Ida Eisenhower took him to his room and
bandaged his hands while she quoted to him from the Bible: “He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who takes a city.” It was an important lesson for the man who would lead the mightiest army in the history of mankind.

Although Ike’s father provided little in the way of companionship and emotional warmth, the young Eisenhower did befriend a local trapper named Bob Davis. An illiterate man, Davis shared his superb hunting and fishing skills—some of them legal, some not—with Ike and also taught him how to play poker. Ike, it turned out, had a natural talent for the latter, and he played it so ruthlessly, coldly calculating the mathematical odds, that later in his life, as a young Army officer, he had to give it up lest his phenomenal success stir up resentment among his fellow officers.

If Ike was not rich, he was popular and admired. He had an engaging grin and natural charm. The word most often used to describe him throughout his life was
winning.
He was ambitious in an old-fashioned, straightforward way, without being a toady. He did well in school when the subject matter interested him. Military history was his first love, to the horror of his pacifist mother, and he read everything he could, at first about the military battles of the Greeks and Romans and then of modern European and American warfare. For a time his mother hid his books, locking them in a closet, but he managed to find the key. This was one battle she was destined to lose.

Ike aspired to attend the University of Michigan, where his brother Edgar had gone. Then a friend told him about Annapolis. He applied there but did not get in. Eventually he was accepted at West Point. Ida Eisenhower was not pleased: The day Ike set off on the three-day train trip to New York, his mother returned home from the station and broke into tears. It was the first time, Milton Eisenhower, Ike’s younger brother, noted, that he had ever heard his mother cry. She must have realized he would never come back. There was nothing for him in Abilene—at best he might end up as a clerk in a store.

At West Point Ike was surrounded by small-town boys very much like himself. Freed from the strictness of David Eisenhower’s rules, he constantly perpetrated such minor infractions as smoking, and he did not apply himself to his studies with any great seriousness. The one thing he seemed to care about was football. Before he tore up his knee he seemed on the verge of becoming an All-Eastern halfback. He graduated 125th in a class of 162, entering a professional army of 120,000 men. Europe was already embroiled in what
was to become the First World War. He asked for duty in the Philippines, but instead he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston in 1915. That year he met a young woman named Mamie Doud, who was spending the season with her family in San Antonio. The Douds were wealthy: John Doud was the son of a Chicago meatpacker who had made millions through shrewd investments. He had retired from his day-to-day business in his early thirties and moved his family to the frontier town of Denver. They had a chauffeur and a maid, and John charged his wife with keeping the books, it was said, down to the penny they spent.

When Ike called Mamie for a date, the maid told her, “Mister I-something called all day.” Mamie had already noticed how striking he looked in his uniform. Who’s that handsome young man? she asked one of her friends. The woman-hater of the post, her friend answered. She told him she was busy. He asked her out for the night after that. She had a full social life but granted him a date four weeks in the future. Eventually, he talked her into canceling some of her overloaded social schedule. He was making $141.67 a month, which he supplemented by coaching football and playing poker. They caught a jitney and had a Mexican meal in San Antonio, where two people could eat for $1.25, including tip. A few months later he proposed to her. He was still a second lieutenant, but he told John Doud that he expected a promotion soon. Doud liked Eisenhower but was worried because his daughter was accustomed to servants and a generous allowance. Mrs. Doud warned that they would have to live within Ike’s income. They wed in July 1916, as the signs mounted that America would soon be drawn into the European war.

The life of a young Army wife was not easy for Mamie. She had to devote her life entirely to her husband, living on an endless series of Army bases, with little in the way of creative comforts. In the first thirty-five years of their marriage, they moved thirty-five times. Not until 1953, when he was sixty-three and President of the United States and she was fifty-six, did they own a house. In the Army, Dwight Eisenhower was immediately drawn to the new weaponry that was reshaping modern warfare. At first he had sought a position with the new Army Air Corps, but John Doud thought it far too dangerous and announced that he would oppose the marriage if Ike intended to spend his life flying airplanes. Instead Ike opted for tank warfare. As war spread throughout Europe, he was desperate to get a command, preferably of a tank battalion. On several occasions he seemed about to get one, only to be transferred to a training unit. In October 1918, at the age of twenty-eight, he was finally given orders
for France. His tank unit would be part of the big spring offensive of 1919. But the Germans surrendered before Ike saw any action. “I suppose,” he told one of his friends, “we’ll spend the rest of our lives explaining why we didn’t get into this war.”