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.
