The Age of Eisenhower

by William I Hitchcock

  In the early spring of 1956, while Eisenhower relaxed on George Humphrey’s Georgia plantation, shooting quail and enjoying the luxurious surroundings with Jock Whitney, Bill Robinson, Bob Woodruff, and their families, Nixon endured a period of “agonizing indecision.” Even by the time of Ike’s official announcement on the last day of February that he would run again, the two men still had not resolved Nixon’s future. The press asked the president directly if he wanted Nixon as his running mate. Eisenhower simply said he would wait to see what the Republican convention would decide. While full of “admiration” for Nixon, he would “say no more about it.” The press predictably interpreted this evasive comment as a sign of disapproval; a week later they peppered Eisenhower with more questions. The president replied testily that he had asked Nixon “to chart out his own course, and tell me what he would like to do.” But Nixon refused to beg.4

  The stalemate endured. In mid-March the two men discussed the issue again. Nixon told Eisenhower that the decision to wait until the convention to announce his running mate had created “some misconception in the minds of some people that there is some conflict between the President and himself.” Further he said that moving to the cabinet would suggest to the press that “Nixon is afraid to run again, or the president is afraid to have him; therefore it is a way of kicking him upstairs (or downstairs).” Ike replied that the decision was Nixon’s to make but continued to make his own preference clear. “The president’s concern is,” according to the written summary of one conversation, “where is Nixon going to be 4 years from now? . . . What does 8 years in this job do for him? In the long run, he is thought of as the understudy to the star of the team, rather than being a halfback in his own right.” Eisenhower kept repeating how much he liked Nixon and that he had his best interests at heart, but Nixon said at least three times in this conversation that he would not move to the cabinet.5

  Ike did not relent. In early April he again urged Nixon to take a cabinet job but did not order him to do so. Nixon again demurred, waiting for an offer to stay on the ticket that did not come. Privately Eisenhower told RNC chairman Len Hall that Nixon, while having done a fine job as vice president, was “making a mistake” in seeking to stay on the ticket: “I think he would do better by taking a Cabinet post.” Even so, Eisenhower would not directly order Nixon off the ticket. Ike did not like confrontation and hated to deliver bad news. He hoped Nixon would interpret the offer of a cabinet job as a presidential command. But Nixon did not comply. On April 25, two full months after Ike had announced his reelection bid, the matter came to a head. In his news conference, journalists asked Eisenhower if Nixon had made a decision yet about his own future, and Ike replied that Nixon hadn’t “reported back.” This comment cleverly placed the onus for the delay on Nixon and made it impossible for Nixon to remain aloof any longer. The next day Nixon formally asked Eisenhower to be kept on the ticket. Eisenhower pretended to be “delighted,” but he then sent Nixon out to meet the press with Jim Hagerty by his side to inform the waiting reporters while Ike stayed out of sight, suggesting that more pressing business needed his attention.6

  The whole affair would not matter much but for the insight it gives into Eisenhower’s style. He could have ended the standoff simply by stating publicly that he wanted Nixon to remain his vice president. He never said this. Instead he made Nixon sweat. The price of rejecting Ike’s advice was public humiliation, which duly came and which Nixon never forgot or forgave. With good reason, Nixon concluded years later that Eisenhower “was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized.”7

  Nixon was not alone in drawing this conclusion. Although Eisenhower appeared to the public as a rosy, optimistic, ebullient figure, a genial and avuncular man, those who watched him carefully never could quite understand him. “Four years ago this week,” wrote the seasoned newsman James Reston in late May 1956, “Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in Washington from Paris to seek the presidency. The capital is still trying to figure him out.” Reston mused about how Ike governed. Was he a leader or a mediator? Did he make tough decisions or avoid them? Had he merely substituted personality for policy? Other than optimism and pragmatism, what skills did Eisenhower possess that made him such a political phenomenon? Reston concluded simply that Ike looked good to Americans because the previous two decades had been so troubled. “After a generation of contention, of war, of depression, of acrimonious divisions in the nation, he was urged to enter the arena precisely because he was an attractive mediator.” He had calmed a turbulent nation, poured soothing balm on its abrasions. His bid for reelection in 1956 rested mainly on a promise to deliver more of the same.8

  Some commentators delivered a more cutting assessment. Richard Rovere, the acerbic New Yorker columnist, described the Eisenhower administration as a non-event in the nation’s history: “It has left the country almost exactly as it found it, with nothing added and nothing taken away.” Ike governed with reference to a “pastiche of pieties” and seemed content to “subcontract” his job to others. Eisenhower himself was lazy. “The whole operational side of government has bored him,” Rovere asserted. “No president since Calvin Coolidge, who was a devotee of the afternoon snooze, has relaxed more or taxed his energies less than Eisenhower.” He preferred to be kept out of the loop: “There is a great deal of which Eisenhower has never heard, and he has organized his office staff and his Cabinet into a kind of conspiracy to perpetuate his unawareness.” To be sure, he had steered the country away from war and proved able to restrain his hawkish lieutenants. Even so, the dirty work of politics diminished him. He had become merely a “distressed, flustered, put-upon man.” If Eisenhower possessed a certain sanity, a quality of decency and maturity that Americans respected and valued, his chief characteristic as president had been his coldness, what Rovere called “a formidable indifference.”9

  This theme of a president missing in action—a leader uninterested in leading—became the leitmotif of the Democratic Party’s 1956 campaign. Governor Stevenson, trying to erase the memory of his Hamlet-like hesitations of 1952, had declared his candidacy in November 1955 with a hard-charging speech about the need to avoid confusing “moderation with mediocrity.” Following Eisenhower’s prolonged absence from Washington as he recovered from his heart attack, Stevenson declared that the presidency “cannot be conducted on a part-time basis.” Nor should the president be allowed to forgo a serious national campaign on account of fatigue or infirmity. According to Stevenson, Eisenhower’s refusal to campaign vigorously seemed disdainful, more like the behavior of a monarch or corporate CEO than a public servant. Stevenson made every effort to link Eisenhower to the do-nothing presidencies of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, Republicans who had failed to use the powers of the presidency and chose simply to “stand pat.” He accused Ike of sleepwalking through four years of an inconsequential presidency.10

  Even some on the right voiced a similar critique. In the pages of the new magazine National Review, William F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell articulated conservatives’ deep disappointment with the president’s record. The armistice in Korea, the deal to partition Vietnam, the lack of support for Chiang Kai-shek, the cheery embrace of Soviet leaders at the Geneva summit—achievements Eisenhower believed had helped the cause of global peace—all looked like appeasement to hard-line conservatives. Worse, Eisenhower’s actions on the home front, from appointing Earl Warren to the Supreme Court to expanding the role of the federal government in civil rights, public housing, and social security while cutting the defense budget, amounted to a betrayal of the conservative principles Eisenhower had embraced as a candidate in 1952.11

  Soon after Ike announced that he would run for a second term, Buckley cast a vote of no confidence. What were “the objectives of the Eisenhower program?” Buckley asked in a scathing National Review editorial. “It is hard to say.” Buckley likened Ike to the “housewife next door” who wishes only “to get on with her chores, . . . to like, and to be liked, to be tranquil a
nd serene.” Ike’s policy vision was “undirected by principle, unchained to any coherent idea as to the nature of man and society, uncommitted to any estimate of the nature or potential of the enemy.” The Eisenhower administration “is always emitting a squid-like ink of moral justification,” and then hastily darting away through the clouded waters. Eisenhower was self-righteous but hollow, doctrinaire in rhetoric but soft in action; strident in mouthing words like “freedom” and “liberty” but afraid to fight for them. And here for Buckley lay the genuine danger of Eisenhower: to resist “the socialist tidal wave,” Americans needed ideas, passions, and beliefs; Ike had given them only “aimless mush-headedness.” Eisenhower himself was mostly immune to these kinds of criticisms, but Buckley’s critique laid the groundwork for a campaign to push the GOP further to the right once the Age of Eisenhower had run its course.12

  II

  Just as critics on both the left and the right were registering doubts about Eisenhower’s competence and energy, the president suffered another health crisis. On June 7, 1956, Eisenhower attended a dinner at the Sheraton Park Hotel to honor the White House news photographers. He enjoyed the elaborate floor show and ate a bland dinner that had been approved beforehand by his personal physician, Howard Snyder. Soon after returning to the White House, Eisenhower went to bed. Around midnight, however, Mamie called Snyder at his home and reported that the president was having terrible stomach pain. Snyder, used to such calls, suggested that Mamie give Ike some Milk of Magnesia. But 20 minutes later she called again and said the pain was worse. Snyder hurried to the president’s bedside.13

  Eisenhower was stricken with an attack of ileitis, the chronic inflammation of the lower portion of the small intestine. For many years he had endured sharp pains in his lower abdomen, at times extremely painful and debilitating. Snyder had examined Eisenhower repeatedly, trying to find the precise source of the problem. But not until he administered a barium x-ray in May 1956 did he find a constriction in the lower ileum. The problem did not incapacitate the president, but Snyder knew it would flare up again. As he examined the president in the early hours of June 8, Snyder realized that this was no mere attack of gas. Eisenhower began to vomit, his blood pressure was 160 over 90, and he was perspiring. The problem demanded immediate operative relief. At 1:30 in the afternoon Snyder ordered an ambulance and had Eisenhower transferred to Walter Reed Hospital.

  Unfortunately virtually all the senior medical staff at Walter Reed had left Washington. Gen. Leonard Heaton, the commander of the hospital and its chief surgeon, was on vacation in West Virginia, where the state police tracked him down and put him on an airplane back to Washington. The team of doctors who gathered at Walter Reed were wary of conducting the operation Snyder recommended on a 65-year-old man who had suffered a heart attack only nine months earlier. As Snyder wrote later, “Everyone hesitated to put a knife into his abdomen.”

  In fact 12 hours passed while the doctors deliberated. After more x-rays they reached agreement that the problem was an acute obstruction of the terminal ileum. In the early morning of June 9, after lengthy debate, Heaton accepted the unenviable task of performing major surgery on a sitting president. At 2:25 a.m. the doctors gave Eisenhower general anesthesia; at 2:59 Heaton made the first incision, and for two hours he snipped away at Eisenhower’s innards, searching for, then finding, and then cutting out the constricted portion of the ileum. It was for Heaton a familiar operation, one he had performed “scores of times.” But there could be no denying the tension in the room. At 5:00 in the morning Heaton finished his work and deemed the operation a success.14

  The surgery resolved the physical crisis but inevitably triggered a political one. Above all, reporters wanted to know, who had been in charge while the president was unconscious? The answer seemed to be, as usual, Sherman Adams. Spokesman Jim Hagerty casually told the press corps in the hours after the operation that “no thought had been given to transferring presidential powers” to the vice president. (The Twenty-fifth Amendment, clarifying the procedures for presidential succession, did not become law until 1967.)

  The operation posed again the question of whether Eisenhower should go ahead with his plan to run for reelection. He spent three weeks in Walter Reed after the surgery, and his medical reports reveal a difficult recovery. His inflamed bowels caused him distress, and his wound briefly became infected. He stoically endured frequent enemas (one of “milk and molasses,” another of olive oil). He had diarrhea and did not eat solid food for a week. His weight dropped to 158 pounds—almost 20 pounds lighter than usual. Two weeks after the operation he continued to endure “moderately severe anorectal pain” and hemorrhoids. After three weeks he moved to his home in Gettysburg to continue his recuperation.15

  Eisenhower clearly could not endure an arduous national campaign for reelection. For a time, he wrote, he “seriously doubted if I would ever feel like myself again” and was “miserably uncomfortable.” He found Gettysburg restful after the constant surveillance of Walter Reed, but not until July 14 could he boast of having “walked all the way to the gate and back, a distance of a mile.” He put on a brave face when a group of congressional leaders visited the farm on July 10 and reassured them that he had every intention of keeping his pledge to run for reelection. He told them, “I have had a rough ride. But if I was right on February 29th, I am now in much better condition.”

  Brave talk. But he had been significantly slowed by his recent surgery. When he returned to Washington on July 16 he looked frail and thin. According to Ann Whitman, his personal secretary, the president had regained some strength but showed signs of “a great physical and psychological depression.” And he would have trouble hiding this from the public. The Democrats made it clear Eisenhower’s “health and his absences from the White House would be a major issue in the election campaign.” After all, in the 11 months since his September 1955 heart attack, Eisenhower had been incapacitated for six of them. With the Republican National Convention set to open on August 20 in San Francisco, it was natural that some might ask: Could he carry on?16

  III

  The issue of Eisenhower’s strength and fortitude became urgent in 1956, not only because a presidential reelection campaign loomed but because the country entered into a period of dramatic tumult over the politics of race. If ever there was a time for wise and active presidential leadership on civil rights, the mid-1950s was it, and yet Eisenhower seemed to many observers to have gone missing in action.

  By the start of 1956 the white South had developed a political strategy to oppose the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. One influential activist who helped shape this strategy in defense of racial segregation was James J. Kilpatrick, the 35-year-old editor of the Richmond News Leader in Virginia. A balding, stocky, humorless Catholic originally from Oklahoma, Kilpatrick used his editorial page to rally southerners to fight the ruling by reviving the doctrine of “interposition.” This warmed-over version of the nullification thesis conceived in the 1830s by the pro-slavery senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina held that the states could interpose themselves between the people and the federal government to block any tyrannical usurpation of power by Washington. The Brown decision, according to Kilpatrick and many other white southerners, sought to rob the states of their right to educate children in a manner conducive to southern tastes and values. The Constitution did not give to the federal government the duty to educate children; it left education to the states. This right must now be defended with “massive resistance” to federal demands for racial integration. In Kilpatrick’s skilled hands, “interposition” became a way of hiding the ugliness of white supremacy in the legalistic appeal to states’ rights.17

  Kilpatrick’s arguments found a warm welcome across the South. On February 1, 1956, Virginia’s Senate and House of Delegates passed a resolution denouncing the “illegal” action of the U.S. Supreme Court in ordering desegregation of public schools. (On the same day four large crosses were set alight on the
campus of the University of Alabama in protest of the court-ordered enrollment of Autherine Lucy, a black graduate student.) South Carolina’s legislature followed Virginia’s lead, passing a resolution of interposition that railed against the “illegal encroachment by the central government into the reserved powers of the States.” Mississippi did the same on February 29, as did Georgia on March 9. Soon every state of the Confederacy had passed similar resolutions defying the Supreme Court.18

  And the leading political figures of the South rose with one voice in the halls of the Capitol to denounce federal overreach and the specter of race mixing. On March 12 Senator Walter George read the infamous “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” or “Southern Manifesto,” on the floor of the Senate. Nineteen senators and 82 members of the House of Representatives appended their names to the shameful document. Distinguished legislators like Richard Russell of Georgia, Harry Byrd of Virginia, Russell Long of Louisiana, William Fulbright of Arkansas, and even the 1952 Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Sparkman of Alabama, all signed. The manifesto accused the Supreme Court of substituting “naked power for established law,” declared the Brown decision an “abuse of judicial power,” and insisted that the South be allowed to protect its “habits, traditions, and way of life.” The Supreme Court’s action had triggered racial tumult in the South that was “destroying the amicable relations between white and Negro races.” The Court had “planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.”19