Eisenhower: The White House Years

by Jim Newton

  Charles Wilson, Ike’s pick for secretary of defense, was Dulles’s exact opposite. Garrulous and outgoing, supremely confident and occasionally brash, the jowly, barrel-chested Wilson was tartly opinionated and outspoken. He came to Eisenhower from General Motors, and as such served as both cabinet officer and symbol of the administration’s loyalties. Where FDR and Truman had found allegiance with labor, Eisenhower was more comfortable with executives, convinced that their expertise was required to restore fiscal soundness. During his confirmation hearings, Wilson initially resisted calls to divest himself of more than $2 million in General Motors stock. When one member of Congress asked whether he could make a decision that was adverse to GM’s interests, he famously replied that he could but that he did not believe he’d be forced to “because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.” (The comment is frequently misquoted as “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.”) That nearly tanked Wilson’s nomination and was just the first in a long line of inartful public statements that would mark his tenure. As with his assessment of Dulles, Eisenhower’s appreciation for Wilson was nuanced. He understood Wilson’s confidence was a source of strength and also a liability. “Mr. Wilson is prone to lecture,” Eisenhower noted in his diary. “This not only annoys many members of Congress, but it gives them unlooked for opportunities to discover flaws in reasoning and argument.”

  Two more men would form the core of Ike’s cabinet, Herbert Brownell as attorney general and George Humphrey as secretary of the Treasury. Eisenhower and Humphrey hit it off at their first meeting. Recommended by Lucius Clay, who knew him from their work on German reconstruction, Humphrey arrived at Ike’s Commodore Hotel suite and introduced himself. Ike spotted Humphrey’s bald head and exclaimed, “I see you part your hair the same way I do.” A lawyer like so many of Eisenhower’s top advisers, Humphrey had joined the M. A. Hanna Company steelworks in 1917 as a legal adviser. By 1952 he was serving as its chairman, having already spent decades as its president. Genial, capable, and modest—Midwestern in every good sense of that word—Humphrey was a counterpoint to Dulles’s pomposity and Wilson’s brashness, but he was every bit as forceful and effective on budget matters as Dulles was in foreign affairs. Thrift was his dominant concern. “If you’re going to live a good life,” Humphrey liked to say, “you’ve got to live within your income.” Through his time in office, he insisted that the government do just that. He fought profligate spending, irritating liberals, and imprudent tax cuts, to the annoyance of conservatives. He exemplified Ike’s “middle way” and was often the most persuasive member of the cabinet. “When George speaks,” Eisenhower said, “we all listen.” Eisenhower’s initial fondness for the man never wavered; they hunted together at Humphrey’s Thomasville, Georgia, estate and socialized with their wives, a rarity among Ike’s professional associates. “He is,” Eisenhower rightly observed, “a sound business type, possessed of a splendid personality, and truly interested in the welfare of the United States.” In the Eisenhower cabinet, only Dulles would wield more influence.

  Brownell was the cabinet member Eisenhower knew best upon taking office, their association dating to the 1952 campaign that Brownell had done so much to orchestrate. A piercingly intelligent and deeply principled lawyer, the soft-spoken, twinkly-eyed Brownell had counseled Ike in Paris and devised the Fair Play Amendment that secured his nomination. Brownell was shy but not retiring. He had an easy smile, and he filed away observations with the precision of a card counter. On Brownell’s first day in Washington, he witnessed a Negro family being ejected from a restaurant whose owner was enforcing the city’s Jim Crow laws. Brownell did not forget. He was deepest in the areas where Eisenhower was most lacking—domestic affairs and politics. As such, Ike might have regarded him with some suspicion. Eisenhower, usually wary of professional politicians, appreciated Brownell’s subtle mind and marveled that one so steeped in politics could be so guileless. “It would be natural to suppose that he would become hardboiled, and that the code by which he lives could scarcely be classified as one of high moral quality. The contrary seems to be true … His reputation with others seems to match my own high opinion of his capabilities as a lawyer, his qualities as a leader, and his character as a man.” Eisenhower then recorded a compliment reserved only for his brother Milton and very few others: “I am devoted to him and am perfectly confident that he would make an outstanding president of the United States.”

  Eisenhower’s cabinet included two members whose mere presence represented breakthroughs. Oveta Culp Hobby was the second woman to serve in the cabinet and the first to do so in a Republican administration. And Ezra Benson, an apostle of the Mormon church, was the first clergyman of the twentieth century to hold a cabinet position. Benson’s faith informed his service: austere, hardworking, and intense, Benson kept a cot, a wooden chair, and a desk in his basement, where he worked each morning before heading to the office. Benson, who would not work on Sundays, came to the cabinet with the conviction that farm price supports, adopted during World War II to stimulate food production, were economically inefficient and morally suspect. He became a lightning rod in farm-state politics, as his reductions of price supports invariably enraged those whose livelihoods were affected. Benson was unflappable. “Oh Lord,” the motto on his desk read, “give us men with a mandate higher than the ballot box.”

  Initially, Ike placed Hobby at the head of the Federal Security Agency, but once the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare formally came into being, Hobby took charge of it. Hobby, a Democrat, was married to a former governor of Texas and was active in that state’s journalism—she and her husband managed the Houston Post—and politics. During the war, she had deftly navigated Washington politics and overcame the discrimination of her day to forge a new force in the military, “an army of women,” as she and others referred to the Women’s Army Corps. She overcame resistance within the War Department and Congress to secure jobs for women and even redesigned the WAC uniform to make it more appealing. By the time she was through, the WACs were 200,000 strong, with three times that many applications. Hobby worked herself into exhaustion. When she resigned in 1945, her husband met her with a stretcher to take her to the hospital. She recovered and in 1952 spearheaded Democrats for Eisenhower. Eager to place a woman in a position of influence, Ike sought her out. It took some convincing, but she finally agreed. She would, again, work herself to a frazzle.

  Once he had assembled his senior advisers, Ike recorded his thoughts about them in his diary. Brownell and Milton Eisenhower might make fine presidents. Dulles deserved to be regarded as a “wise man.” Wilson and Humphrey were admired businessmen, well positioned for their new duties. Vice President Richard Nixon, by contrast, warranted not a mention.

  Beyond the formal positions of power, Ike added three other loyalists before his inauguration. James Hagerty, a second-generation newsman who had signed up with Tom Dewey, was an early member of the Eisenhower campaign team. He was among the first to accept a post with the new president—Ike made him press secretary—and he remained in that position to turn out the lights.

  C. D. Jackson, another media businessman, agreed to take a short leave from Time-Life to join the White House staff. He had served under Ike in Europe at the end of the war and later as a writer during the campaign. It was he who had first come up with the idea to have Eisenhower pledge, if elected, to “go to Korea.” Given the consensus that the pledge sealed Eisenhower’s victory, Ike turned to him not just for speechwriting but for strategic insights. Acknowledging Jackson’s fierce anti-Communism and nuanced grasp of character, Eisenhower asked him to serve in the unusual position of director of psychological warfare. Jackson eagerly agreed, with the caveat that he would return to Time-Life after a short time in the White House.

  As he filled positions in the first Republican administration in generations, Eisenhower bitterly disappointed one old friend. Bedell Smith had served him brill
iantly in the war, acting as chief of staff and meticulously organizing the critical work of Ike’s headquarters. In the years since, Truman had made him director of Central Intelligence. But Smith’s loyalty was to Ike; during the campaign, he personally briefed Eisenhower on security matters and had repeated the favor just prior to Ike’s trip to Korea. With Eisenhower’s permission, Smith set up a small office at the Commodore Hotel during the transition, though Adams made sure he controlled Smith’s access to the president. Given their long relationship, the director of intelligence imagined a vaunted position for himself in the new administration—perhaps secretary of state or defense or chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On December 19, he met with Adams and Eisenhower for an off-the-record discussion. Smith left visibly dejected. On the silent trip back to Washington, he muttered, “And I thought that it was going to be great.”

  Rather than slot Smith for one of the administration’s visible positions, Eisenhower placed him where he needed him, as undersecretary of state. That was a marked demotion from director of Central Intelligence, but Eisenhower was not handing out rewards. He was building an administration, and Smith served an invaluable purpose. As undersecretary, he would be in a position to watch not just Secretary of State John Foster Dulles but also Smith’s own replacement at the CIA, Dulles’s brother, Allen Dulles. Smith would prove invaluable to Ike, not just as an adviser, but as a counterpoint to the capable John Foster and the less reliable Allen.

  One more associate would also shape Ike’s presidency. Ann Whitman came to Eisenhower somewhat by chance. She had been working at Radio Free Europe, where she met C. D. Jackson, and Jackson suggested that she sign up with Eisenhower’s campaign. She did and quickly became indispensable. When Eisenhower was preparing to leave for Denver that summer, the campaign needed a secretary to travel with him. Whitman offered to do the job for two weeks—what her husband would later describe as the longest two weeks in history. Described as “keen, sensitive, risible, youthful, chic and distinctly good looking,” Whitman would be among the small group of aides who entered the White House with Eisenhower and stayed until the final day. Married to an executive for the United Fruit Company, Whitman kept a punishing schedule—usually at her desk by 7:30, often there until late at night, and always at the mercy of the president’s travel plans. She could be irritable, especially when officials excluded her from meetings with the president. And she and Mamie clashed from time to time. Mamie was accustomed to managing Ike’s private life, and Whitman assumed some of that responsibility during the presidency, to Mamie’s irritation. But Whitman was careful to avoid direct conflict with the First Lady: One day in 1958, she was about to board the president’s helicopter for Gettysburg when she learned at the last minute that Mamie would be meeting it at the other end. Whitman opted to drive.

  And, of course, Ike brought with him the Gang. His friends worked hard for his election, but once it was won, they feared they might lose him to his new duties. They need not have worried. When Ike was inaugurated, Bill Robinson, the Gang’s central figure, wrote to Ike of his joy and mixed feelings. “Your companionship shall be sorely missed,” he said. “I can only hope to earn a continuation of a friendship which has become a precious possession.” Ike would have none of that; he responded the same day, his first in office, to proclaim his dedication to their friendship and his determination to remain close with his friends, even as president.

  Eisenhower’s Gang formed a protective nucleus around the president for his entire tenure, giving him the outlet of focused relaxation that his temperament required. Whether at golf or bridge or even in relaxed conversation, Ike replenished his energy by immersing himself wholeheartedly in his distractions. The members of the Gang understood their importance. As Ellis Slater recorded in his diary in 1953: “This ability to segregate his thoughts—to relax—has been and will be the thing that will save him and make his life worth living.”

  Eisenhower rounded out his cabinet while still in New York. Although without formal position, the group gathered for a two-day meeting beginning January 12. At that session, Eisenhower shared his draft of his inaugural address. The members listened, then burst into applause. Ike scolded them lightly, saying he had “read it not for praise but for analysis and criticism.” Privately, he was just as grumpy, complaining to his diary that his speechwriter was “no help—he is more enamored with words than with ideas.”

  Ike continued to fiddle with the draft as Inauguration Day approached. He wanted neither to lecture nor to preach as he tried to articulate the grounding principles of his administration. It was frustrating work, but telling: he was a careful draftsman, thoughtful and precise.

  When the morning of the inaugural arrived, Eisenhower joined Truman at the White House for the short trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Their meeting was frosty. The campaign had left scars on both, and the arrangements for the ceremony only exacerbated them. When Ike suggested that Truman pick him up at the hotel, Truman refused, believing protocol demanded that the president-elect present himself to the president. Eisenhower accepted that, but when he arrived at the White House, he discovered that the Trumans had planned a light lunch. Eisenhower declined. He and Mamie waited outside. Even Eisenhower’s decision to wear a homburg rather than a top hat annoyed Truman, who felt it demeaned the ceremony.

  The only warmth during their short trip up Capitol Hill came when Eisenhower asked who had ordered John Eisenhower home from Korea for the ceremony. “I did,” Truman replied. Eisenhower thanked him, then resumed his silence for the balance of the ride.

  All presidents save Washington are measured against their predecessors. As he ascended to the presidency that January morning, Eisenhower naturally was most compared to Truman, just as Truman had been so unfavorably, and unfairly, found wanting in the shadow of FDR. In fact, the president whose background and service most resembled those that Ike brought to the office was Washington himself. Both were military heroes of their country (their colonies, in Washington’s case), and both commanded respect and regard that crossed party, regional, and sectarian divisions. They were presidents, of course; but more than that, they were cohesive forces for America, Washington at its outset, Ike as it entered a troubling phase of its history, a period of grave and vague danger, of war without war, of threat and bluff. But if Eisenhower’s presidency echoed his distant predecessor’s, so, too, did their difference speak to their times. Washington was the regal general, so removed from his colleagues that they feared to touch him; Eisenhower was bluff and warm, a hero of the Republic and yet also a man of its people, a natural politician as the nation turned to television. Even his famous gaffes spoke to that duality. In formal speeches, he was eloquent, precise, and equipped with a broad, deep vocabulary; informally, he bollixed words and mismatched verbs with nouns. His news conferences could be bafflingly hard to track, but when he prepared a text, it was polished.

  His inaugural address evidenced the latter. It hinted at much of what would mark his years as president: the invocation of God; the resolute commitment to security that comprehended economic prudence. He asked the nation to place country over comfort and convenience, and he pledged to refrain from using American power to impress the nation’s values on others. At its core were nine principles, ticked off by the president as he stood on the east steps of the Capitol, his head bare on a cool, breezy January day.

  Eisenhower’s prevailing argument was for balance: he abhorred war as well as appeasement; he trumpeted American strength as a source of international peace but insisted on restraint; he stressed the importance of economic well-being and human equality and expressed appreciation for the United Nations, “the living sign of all people’s hope for peace.” The speech was often lofty, laced with potent imagery. “The faith we hold belongs not to us alone but to the free of all the world,” he said. “This common bond binds the grower of rice in Burma and the planter of wheat in Iowa, the shepherd in southern Italy and the mountaineer in the Andes. It confers a com
mon dignity upon the French soldier who dies in Indo-China, the British soldier killed in Malaya, the American life given in Korea.” Rejecting appeasement, he added: “Americans, indeed all free men, remember that in the final choice, a soldier’s pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner’s chains.”

  Eisenhower spoke for twenty minutes, shook the hands of the men around him as they offered their congratulations, and, in a touching note, kissed his First Lady, something no other American president had ever done at an inauguration. Then the exhaustion set in. After swearing in White House aides, presiding over the first official meeting of his cabinet, and bidding farewell to family and friends, Eisenhower fell ill with a cold and retired to his quarters, holing up there for two days.

  This was a time of transition in American leadership, but also in the Eisenhower family. The brothers gathered, and their families bickered. As was often the case, it was Arthur’s wife, Louise, who got under Ike’s skin. During a rare moment when the family was alone, Louise caused a scene: she was angry with Ike for making it clear in his family tree that Arthur was divorced and Louise was his second wife. “I guess the old gal will never learn,” Ike complained in a note to Edgar. “I do think it is really something on the order of a nervous disease rather than real intent.”