August 22, 2007
Eisenhower’s Reputation Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:50 AM EST If you are a certain age, Alexander Burns’s lead piece on Eisenhower yesterday leaves a certain mystery intact, which is the contempt liberal intellectuals and academics had for Eisenhower during his Presidency. At the end of Eisenhower’s second term, American historians were confident he would be remembered as one of the worst American Presidents, but by the end of the century his stock had risen so sharply with the same crowd that he was ranked as one of the best twentieth-century Presidents. What happened? I remember schoolyard chants of “Whistle while you work./ Stevenson’s a jerk./ Eisenhower’s got the power./ Whistle while you work,” but they were done without the knowledge of our parents, who greatly admired Stevenson. My own knowledge of adult contemporary attitudes is indirect, because I was born the year before Eisenhower won his first election, and my sense of the mystery was thus derived from listening to adults look back on the 1950s. So what did the adults seem to resent or dislike? For one thing, Eisenhower was the first Republican to break the 16-year Democratic lock on the Oval Office, so he represented the end of the New Deal political culture they had grown up in and loved. For another, a certain sort of educated liberal American was besotted by Adlai Stevenson, and it seemed incredible that a man as superficially mediocre as Eisenhower could twice defeat a man as superficially enthralling as Stevenson. Eisenhower’s verbal clumsiness was constantly mocked, and the mockery was tinged with a sense of bitter loss: They could have had someone they loved and passionately admired, and they got that dull clown instead. When I got old enough to read biographies of Eisenhower, one oddity of the experience was the discovery that there had been excellent reasons to dislike him, but those had not registered on me at the time, and people rarely mentioned them in retrospect. He had been timid about McCarthy, shamefully so, and in 1952 permitted a very ugly campaign to be waged in his behalf. Most shamefully, he refused to denounce Joseph McCarthy even when McCarthy foully slandered George Marshall, a genuinely great man to whom Eisenhower owed everything. After the election Eisenhower consistently avoided confronting McCarthy, and he similarly shrank from leadership in the wake of the landmark schools-desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education; he had hoped to preserve separate-but-equal schooling and only reluctantly enforced the law. His moral prestige was enormous, and his leadership might have had an enormous effect; he instead allowed Southerners to believe he was secretly on their side. This was surely the great moral challenge of postwar American politics, and Eisenhower failed it. These failings were not, however, mentioned by the adults who disliked Eisenhower. Eisenhower’s real virtues were similarly invisible, at least in those days—his enormous tact in coalition warfare, which made a genuine contribution to victory, the moral splendor of the letter he wrote in anticipation of a failure on D-day, his caution during the Cold War, when he was at the helm and was being urged to very risky endeavors. He was not a daring general, but neither was he a shamefully timid one, and he had some of the subtler military virtues. It seems strange to reflect that neither his virtues nor his vices contributed to my perception of local adults’ sense of him while I was growing up. His rise in public estimation, I think, came from his seeming to have been a do-nothing but to have been followed by do-somethings who often did something dangerous. Even when he was mocked and scorned, he was never hated, which is striking in an age when political hatred thrives. His age seems a very long time ago.
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