The Ike-Stevenson campaign had been accompanied by two other fads: flying saucers and painting by the numbers. The first sighting of an airborne saucer is believed to have occurred in 1947, when a pilot in the state of Washington reported nine unidentified flying objects (UFOs) resembling shallow dishes and moving at about 1,200 mph in the skies above Yakima Indian Reservation. By the time of Ike’s election the baffled Air Force was investigating fifty UFO reports a month; at the end of the decade $500,000 would have been spent on them, and the mystery would be as great as ever.
There was nothing unfathomable about enumerated art. It was a kind of crib for the inartistic, allowing them to pass themselves off as painters without creating anything. In a decade remarkable for its high incidence of sham, it served as a cultural weathercock. The idea of providing color-coded canvases is attributed to the Palmer Paint Company of Detroit. Customers bought an intricate outline of a still life, say, or a portrait—Milton Berle was a favorite. With it came as many as fifty oils or watercolors, each numbered. Matching numbers were stamped on the canvas, or paper. If sepia was 14, you covered every 14 area with it, and so on. Using the Palmer method, you could reproduce Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper for $11.50 plus tax, with a “beautiful antique gold frame” thrown in. The frame was plastic.
***
At 5:30 in the starlit morning of Saturday, November 29, 1952, two men in heavy overcoats, their collars turned up against the cold, emerged from 60 Morningside Drive in Manhattan and entered a black limousine waiting at the curb. One of them was Secret Service agent Edward Green; the other was the President-elect of the United States. At that hour there was no traffic in the city. The car moved swiftly down the deserted streets toward the East River, crossed the Triborough Bridge, and swung across Long Island to a back road paralleling Mitchel Field. There two Constellations were waiting, the fastest aircraft in that pre-jet age. One was for the general, who hurriedly mounted the ramp, buffeted by a sharp, chill wind.
The other plane would carry Ike’s staff. All over metropolitan New York, Secret Service automobiles had been coming and going through the small hours of that Saturday morning, their movements synchronized with those of the President-elect’s limousine. Extraordinary measures had been taken to make certain that no outsider’s curiosity was aroused. Eminent men awaiting transport had left home and dawdled at unfamiliar street corner rendezvous; Defense Secretary-designate Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Motors, had awaited his driver by hanging around Grand Central Station pretending to be a stranded passenger. Press Secretary Jim Hagerty had prepared a simulated Eisenhower agenda crowded with fake appointments. These would be released to the press, which would be told that the general was working busily at home. Reporters conscientiously standing watch at 60 Morningside Drive would see a steady procession of distinguished statesmen arriving and departing, for Hagerty had left nothing to chance. It was thought unlikely that Communists would make an attempt on Eisenhower’s life, but with international tension as taut as it was, nobody was taking any chances.
The two planes landed outside Seoul Tuesday at 8 P.M. Generals Mark Clark and James A. Van Fleet met them. Their former commanding officer and next commander in chief spent three days in Korea, studying situation maps, listening to artillery fire, and visiting infantrymen. The American people first learned of the journey on Saturday, December 6. In a statement released by Hagerty they were warned that their next President had “no panaceas, no solutions,” but assured that “much can be done and much will be done” to back the embattled U.N. forces along the 38th Parallel. Ike, meantime, was bound for Honolulu aboard the U.S. Navy cruiser Helena with his advisers. Caustic Democrats assumed that his only reason for flying the Pacific had been to fulfill his campaign pledge. It is true that he had achieved little in his seventy-two hours there, but there was more to the trip than that. Word that he had gone to the front was a sorely needed boost to U.S. morale, and the sight of the ice-rimmed foxholes had reminded him, as nothing else could, of the desperate need for a truce. Finally, there was the cruise on the Helena. During it he received and pondered advice from Douglas MacArthur, met and chose the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Arthur W. Radford, and became better acquainted with the man he had designated Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. Since each of these last three believed that America’s adversaries understood nothing but naked force, the trip was a fateful one.
The general had never before met the admiral, who came on board at Iwo Jima in his role as Commander in Chief, Pacific. Omar Bradley’s second term as JCS chairman would expire in August, and Eisenhower had come to the conclusion that Bradley’s successor must be a man who believed, as Charles E. Wilson did, that Asia would be the pivot of the cold war in the 1950s. Radford more than met that test; he was so ardent a champion of the Pacific theater that he wouldn’t even hear of closing down Sand Point Naval Station in Seattle. He also agreed with their choice of a new strategic concept. Ike believed that huge defense budgets played into Stalin’s hands; if the new administration tried to meet every Communist threat around the globe, he argued, it would spend the country into oblivion. More sensible, in his view, was a policy of discouraging aggression by building up a large stockpile of nuclear weapons. If the Soviet Union knew that a hopeless confrontation could end in bombs being unloaded on the Kremlin, the chances for world peace would be greater, or so the theory went. Dulles liked it. Later he would call it “massive retaliation.”
It was dangerous, of course, and the subsequent debate over it became one of the great political issues of the 1950s. Some Democrats blamed it on George Humphrey, who would be Ike’s Secretary of the Treasury. Humphrey was a passionate advocate of balanced budgets, and the Pentagon was the biggest spender of federal money. But Humphrey was only one of many converts to massive retaliation. Another was MacArthur. While aboard the Helena Eisenhower read that his old chief had told an NAM convention that he had “a clear and definite solution to the Korean conflict,” involving “no increased danger of provoking universal conflict.” He refused to disclose it publicly, but said he would give it to the President-elect. Most of the notables on the Helena no longer took MacArthur seriously. Ike disagreed. He wired the Waldorf that he looked forward to a meeting where “I may obtain the full benefit of your thinking and experience.” MacArthur replied that he was pleased, “especially so because, despite my intimate personal and professional concern therewith, this is the first time that the slightest official interest in my counsel has been evidenced since my return.”
On December 9 Hagerty released the exchange to the press. Harry Truman read it next morning while returning to Washington from his mother-in-law’s funeral, and he all but went through the roof. If General MacArthur knew of a sensible way to end the fighting, he said, it was his duty to lay it before the President of the United States. At a press conference the following day he said he doubted that MacArthur had a workable plan. While still seething, he fired a salvo at the Helena. Ike’s pledge to visit Korea, he said, had been an irresponsible piece of campaign demagogy. Everybody was angry now. MacArthur’s thoughts were scarcely worth the price—calling at the Waldorf when he reached New York, Ike learned that his idea was to threaten Peking with extermination—and all hope was now gone for a smooth transition between incoming and outgoing administrations.
Prospects for it had never been great. Before flying to Seoul Eisenhower and his aides had called at the White House in an attempt to mesh the two foreign policies. Truman had introduced Acheson, who had reviewed world trouble spots. He dwelt at length on Vietnam, where the big question, he said, was whether the French had the will to carry on the fight against the Communists.
***
Ike wanted a good start, but he had his own way of preparing for it. His concept of leadership reflected his faith in experts and the delegation of authority. Sherman Adams was to be his chief of staff, with the title “the Assistant to the President.” Beneath Adams would be the cabinet. Sel
ecting it was the President-elect’s first crucial task. Most Presidents have found the cabinet too unwieldy to be of much use as a deliberative body; they have preferred to work with the White House staff, leaving the secretaries to administer the departments. Eisenhower intended to treat his cabinet as a national council, laying all important matters before it; so instead of working in tandem with Truman and Acheson in the weeks before his inauguration, he would put his designated secretaries through two rehearsals at the Commodore Hotel in New York on January 12 and 13.
His appointees reflected his admiration for the American business community. Ike wanted his stewardship to be remembered as a business administration, and said so frequently. In his opinion, businessmen were abler than military men, and both more competent than politicians. To him, politicians were men of very small caliber. At the pinnacle of his value scale were the great captains of industry. His designated cabinet was so heavily weighted with them that Stevenson called it “the Big Deal,” and TRB, writing in the New Republic, said it comprised “eight millionaires and a plumber.” The plumber was Martin P. Durkin, a union leader. He was chosen to lead the Labor Department.
Humphrey at the Treasury, Wilson in the Pentagon, Attorney General Brownell, Postmaster General Summerfield, Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, Douglas McKay at Interior, Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks, Oveta Culp Hobby, who would become the first Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare when the department was created April 11—the change from the Democratic appointees was breathtaking. Three of the newcomers would be General Motors men: Wilson and Summerfield and McKay, who were Chevrolet dealers. (During one stormy session of the new cabinet, Jerry Persons passed a note to Emmet John Hughes: “From now on, I’m buying nothing but Plymouths.”) Since GM accounted for 7.8 percent of all Pentagon business, Wilson had to sell his stock in it. Then Ike insisted that all his nominees do the same.
Like Eisenhower himself, his designated secretaries were farther to the right on some issues than Republican politicians—Taft confided to friends that he had misgivings over the number of industrialists high in the government—and their rhetoric was more conservative still. In the coming months the country would be provided with some striking examples of it. The most voluble member of the new administration was Wilson, nicknamed “Engine Charlie” (the president of General Electric was named Charles E. Wilson, too). Engine Charlie sometimes claimed that he was misquoted, and he was sometimes right. He never said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” What he said, in testifying before a Senate committee weighing his confirmation, was, “What was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa”—a very different remark, one that was turned round by liberal reporters unsympathetic to the new regime. Wilson was capable of gaffes of his own, however. In dismissing complaints of excessive Pentagon spending he said, “I didn’t come down here to run a grocery store.”
Hughes has left a memorable description of Eisenhower’s slow burn whenever he learned of a feisty Wilson remark; first came an “audible grinding of teeth,” then a “strained tightening of the mouth,” and lastly a “slow, pained rolling of the bright blue eyes heavenward.” Engine Charlie’s colleagues were sometimes stricken by foot-in-mouth attacks, too. George Humphrey said of Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novel, The Old Man and the Sea, “Why should anyone be interested in some old man who was a failure and never amounted to anything, anyway?” Weeks admitted that he didn’t really believe in government regulation of trade, his job under Ike. Benson liked to talk about the “spiritual side” of farm prices. Confronted by a proposal to provide the country’s children with free Salk vaccine, Mrs. Hobby denounced it as “socialized medicine” by “the back door.” Another member of the administration, Howard Pyle, who as a deputy assistant to the President was privy to cabinet confidences, permitted himself to be quoted as saying that “the right to suffer is one of the joys of a free economy.”
Seen in retrospect, the incoming cabinet was more impressive than any of those remarks would indicate. As a group it was characterized by dedication, industry, sobriety, and patriotism. Week after week the secretaries punctually took their places at their long coffin-shaped table in the West Wing of the White House, sitting erect on their high-backed black leather chairs, solemnly fingering the little white notebooks before them and nodding gravely whenever the chief executive spoke. Luckily they were not easily daunted, for their new burdens were immense. None of them, not even Wilson, had been asked to cope with anything anywhere near as large as the U.S. government of January 1953. The last time a Republican had occupied the White House there had been 630,000 civilian employees on the federal payroll. Now there were 2,561,000, a fourfold increase, and the budget, having risen from $3,863,000,000 to $85,400,000,000, was more than twenty times as large.
In some ways the most interesting figure in the new administration was the youngest and most partisan Republican at the cabinet table. Hughes saw Vice President Nixon as “crisp and practical and logical: never proposing major objectives, but quick and shrewd in suggesting or refining methods—rather like an effective trial lawyer, I kept thinking, with an oddly slack interest in the law.” Like the others, Nixon sometimes made Ike wince. In discussing early Eisenhower decisions on television he said, “Incidentally, in mentioning Secretary Dulles, isn’t it wonderful, finally, to have a Secretary of State who isn’t taken in by the Communists, who stands up to them?” When Earl Warren was appointed to replace Fred Vinson, the Vice President incensed Ike by calling Warren “a great Republican Chief Justice,”1 and he was photographed smiling over the rim of a wineglass at the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo Molina while proposing “A toast to this great country and its illustrious ruler.”
Those preinaugural cabinet meetings in the Commodore foreshadowed much that would follow in the Eisenhower years. From the very beginning they were devout. Each meeting opened with a silent prayer or a few prayerful words from Benson, who was one of the Council of Twelve Apostles of the Mormon Church. If Eisenhower forgot it, Dulles would clear his throat and murmur a reminder, and Ike would blurt out, “Oh my gosh! And I really need all the help we can get up there this morning. Ezra, please…” There was also a tremendous amount of talk. At that time the chief topic was the coming ceremony in Washington. Despite Democratic grumbling Ike had decided to replace the traditional toppers with homburgs—an illustration of his preference for the informal, one reason for his popularity in the new suburbs. He also read to the group the remarks he would make after taking the oath and, when they applauded, modestly protested that he had presented it “more for your blue pencils than your applause.” Wilson said, “You flew the flag! It was wonderful!” Engine Charlie, it quickly developed, relished having the first word on any subject. When the President-elect spoke of one of his most cherished beliefs—the need for free trade with all nations, including the Communists—Wilson snapped, “Well, I’m a little old-fashioned. I don’t like selling firearms to the Indians.” That secretly pleased the anti-Communist vigilantes, but he could shock them, too; in a discussion of the possibilities for a cease-fire in Korea he asked, “Is there any possibility for a package deal? Maybe we could recognize Red China and get the Far East issues settled.”
Eisenhower’s preparations having gone well in New York, he left there on Sunday, January 18, 1953, and rode to Washington with his family on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Business Car No. 90, the same one he had used on his return from Europe in 1945. The capital’s quadrennial upheaval had already begun. Every hotel room was occupied. The New York Times reported that hairdressers were offering a “Mamie bang” for $2 a coiffure if the customer wanted her own hair curled and anywhere up to $17.50 for “store hair.” The President-elect was too busy to notice such trivia. His train had left Manhattan an hour late because he had been revising his inaugural address at the Commodore, and he and his staff continued to hone it Monday in the Statler’s twelfth-floor presidential suite, three blocks from
the White House. Unfortunately, too many advisers had a hand in it. As delivered Tuesday noon, it was prosy and tedious. The prayer preceding it, on the other hand, was entirely his own, and it gave that day its one really unforgettable moment. It reminded the country of the new President’s most prized attribute, that of a unifier and healer. During the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue that followed, a button vendor checked his stock and made an interesting discovery. Two of his novelty pins read “I like everybody” and “I hate everybody.” His supply of the first was exhausted; that of the second was almost untouched. To a bystander he remarked, “Most people like everybody today. We’re not moving the ‘hate’ ones, except to kids.”
Democrats had little reason to feel cheerful, though. Still smarting from Truman’s brickbats, Ike had declined the outgoing President’s invitation to share his last White House breakfast. Dulles had already twice called on Acheson, who rather wished he hadn’t. Though both men were cold war hard-liners, they agreed on little else. Acheson suspected—correctly, it later developed—that his successor would bow to McCarthy pressure and dismiss John Carter Vincent, an able foreign service officer who had drawn the senator’s fire.
McCarthy became a Republican problem at the stroke of noon on January 20. The GOP had been dishing out criticism for twenty years—the tenure of only one Republican senator reached back to the last Republican President—and now they would be taking it. Departing Democrats felt a surge of relief. Riding from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to Acheson’s Georgetown home, Margaret Truman turned to her father and said jubilantly, “Hi, Mister Truman!” He looked astonished for an instant; then he laughed. There had been no advance word of his plans, yet the pavement outside Acheson’s P Street home was crowded with five hundred well-wishers, and at Union Station five thousand had gathered to see the last departure of the “Ferdinand Magellan” for Independence. From the platform Truman told them that he would never forget this gesture “if I live to be a hundred”; chopping air in a parody of his awkward campaign gesture, he added with mock stridency, “And that’s just what I expect to do!” The engineer gave a warning toot, the train lurched forward. A lone voice sang the first few bars of “Auld Lang Syne”; then, as the crowd joined in a thundering chorus, Truman receded into history.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 97
