August 23, 2007
Eisenhower’s Reputation III Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:05 PM EST Fred Smoler and John Steele Gordon have been discussing Dwight Eisenhower’s reputation. It’s a good discussion to have, as Eisenhower remains relatively difficult to judge. Mr. Smoler does a first-rate job of laying out the man’s virtues and failings. On the one hand, historians should appreciate his “enormous tact in coalition warfare . . . the moral splendor of the letter he wrote in anticipation of a failure on D-day, his caution during the Cold War.” On the other hand, one ought not understate the problematic nature of his relationships with Joseph McCarthy and powerful segregationists. An interesting footnote to this discussion is that Eisenhower may be the only man to have served as President who actually adjusted his behavior based on a poll ranking the American Presidents. Ike campaigned energetically in the 1962 midterm elections after Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., released a survey ranking him twenty-second among the Presidents. At the time, John Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “It’s all your father’s poll. Eisenhower has been going along for years, basking in the glow of applause he has always had. Then he saw that poll and realized how he stood before the cold eye of history—way below Truman; even below Hoover. Now he’s mad to save his reputation.” Eisenhower himself, as the younger Schlesinger described it in a 1997 article, blasted the 1962 poll for conflating “an individual’s strength of dedication with oratorical bombast; determination, with public repetition of a catchy phrase; achievement, with the exaggerated use of the vertical pronoun.” I agree with Fred Smoler that much of Eisenhower’s “rise in public estimation . . . came from his seeming to have been a do-nothing but to have been followed by do-somethings who often did something dangerous.” In the midst of the growing enthusiasm for the Eisenhower Presidency, however, it’s important to remember that this apparent do-nothingness actually had consequences for the country. John Steele Gordon is probably right that Eisenhower sometimes presented himself as verbally unclear “because he wanted to be unclear, not because he was incapable of clarity.” But I’m not sure the most useful lesson to take away from this is that Eisenhower fooled a lot of gullible liberals and college professors. When then-Senator Kennedy campaigned for President in 1960, he consistently faulted the Eisenhower administration for allowing the country to slip into a state of torpor. A famous refrain of his campaign was the exhortation to “get this country moving again.” In his fourth debate with Richard Nixon, Kennedy argued, “We haven’t met our problems in the United States, because we haven’t had a moving economy.” He also exclaimed: “We’re not moving ahead in education the way we should.” Even Nixon had to adopt some of this vocabulary, declaring in an October 25, 1960, speech: “We want to see this country move forward. We want to see it move forward, because it will never grow old.” There’s a reason why this rhetoric was appealing to voters in 1960. Fairly or unfairly, many Americans felt dissatisfied with the modest goals and humdrum, inoffensive tone of the Eisenhower White House. Eisenhower’s Presidency featured shrewd—Nixon called it “devious”—management, focused on quietly strengthening America’s hand abroad. His administration did not demonstrate strong, inspiring moral leadership of the variety that garners applause from both historians and the general public. I don’t really think it’s right to blame Americans for not thinking Eisenhower was a genius masquerading as a simpleton. We’re not all writers in search of a counterintuitive thesis, and, after all, sometimes a person who acts bumbling or senile is really just bumbling or senile. Eisenhower wasn’t either, but if he cultivated a benign, geriatric image, then his weakened reputation was in large part a consequence of his own choosing.
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