by Jim Newton
It had been a long year—marked by patience and care. None of it was easy. Wrote Ike with a sigh: “I really could use a good bridge game.”
PART THREE
THE SECOND TERM
13
The Press of Change, the Price of Inaction
The Eisenhower who took the oath of office for the second time had been forged by his own presidency. He spoke on January 21, 1957, flanked by symbols of his term: Chief Justice Earl Warren sat to his right, Vice President Richard Nixon to his left. Mamie joined them as well, dressed in a fur coat and hat. Ike was older, thinner than he had been in 1953, less exuberant, but more forceful. He had often been frustrated by the limitations of politics but also seasoned by them and masterful at divining a middle course through a divided nation.
Ike liked the speech in his hand that morning. He arrived at the White House early to announce that he had not changed a word overnight—“the most outstanding event of the past four years, from a secretary’s … viewpoint,” Ann Whitman joked.
With the nation watching on television, Eisenhower spoke of the sacrifices of the Hungarian people and the recklessness of his allies in Suez. The Soviets and the Chinese had tested his mettle, and he knew his enemy’s designs. “The divisive force,” he said, “is International Communism and the power that it controls.” He spoke from experience as he described the nature of that force: “The designs of that power, dark in purpose, are clear in practice. It strives to seal forever the gate of those it has enslaved. It strives to break the ties that unite the free. And it strives to capture—to exploit for its own greater power—all forces of change in the world, especially the needs of the hungry and the hopes of the oppressed.”
Eisenhower also drew upon Abilene and West Point, North Africa and Washington; he projected the accumulated experience of the world’s most respected leader, his style and vocabulary recognizably formal, with his distinctive appreciation for pairings—“May we pursue the right, without self-righteousness. May we know unity, without conformity”—the contrast of abundance and want, peace and threat. “We live in a land of plenty,” Ike reminded his nation, “but rarely has this earth known such peril.”
Eisenhower’s job was demanding, of course, but family troubles also nagged at him. The very morning of his inaugural, he confronted a flare-up in the life of one of his brothers. Visiting with family that week, Ike realized that his oldest sibling, Arthur, was suffering and receiving little comfort from his demanding and difficult wife. Before leaving the White House for his swearing in, Eisenhower made time to write to Big Ike to ask his help in the matter.
The senior member of the Eisenhower brethren, Ike reported to Edgar, was struggling with heart problems and was so debilitated that his White House escort feared he was near collapse and called a doctor, believing he needed to be hospitalized. But Arthur’s wife, Louise, refused and angrily implied that Arthur was somehow betraying her by entertaining offers that he be sent to Walter Reed (Louise, a member of the Unity School of Christianity, was wary of certain medical treatments). Compounding Arthur’s difficulties was the messy residue from a long-ago divorce; he had fallen behind on alimony payments and ended up settling up with his first wife later that year. Arthur’s difficulties worried his younger brother, who fussed over the letter to Edgar even as the hour of the inauguration approached. He confessed to Edgar that there was not much to be done for Arthur, merely that his brothers should look out for him and perhaps make it a point to drop in on him in Kansas City.
In all, Ike’s letter to Edgar was the tender work of a fond and worried brother—made remarkable by the fact that he wrote just hours before being sworn in as president of the United States.
Eisenhower finished his letter, delivered his speech, and walked back to the White House with the parade. It was so cold that his fingers were numb when he trundled back inside.
Eisenhower’s smashing victory in the 1956 election left no doubt about the appreciation of the American people for their leader. But Ike also was the nation’s first lame-duck president (the Twenty-second Amendment, limiting the president to two terms, was ratified in 1951). In addition, Ike labored under the constraints imposed by his doctors following his heart attack and seemed to strive constantly to keep his temper in check.
Nineteen fifty-seven was to bring significant additions to the American experience and even the American vocabulary. The nation’s exploratory zeal and technological prowess gave Americans the word “aerospace,” while the rumblings of youthful rebellion were indelibly captured by Jack Kerouac in his masterwork, On the Road, which introduced “beatniks.” Martin Luther King Jr. founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature; John Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage. James Reston won a Pulitzer for his look at Ike’s heart attack and its effect on the government. It was a time of struggle, tension, repression, and discovery.
Eisenhower’s popularity contrasted with the Republicans’ marginal appeal to the American people. Notwithstanding Stevenson’s defeat, Democrats knew they had leverage, and that encouraged competition over the legislative agenda. Typical was the fight over America’s foreign aid budget. Since the war, Ike had argued that America’s strength lay in nurturing its network of allies, and that aid was a matter of national self-interest. Yet, more than a decade after Allied forces had defeated Nazi Germany, Eisenhower again faced opposition to his proposed mutual aid budget for 1957. Through a frustrating winter and spring, Ike leaned on legislators, appealed directly to the American people, and begged his critics to reexamine mutual aid as a function of national security rather than “do-goodism,” as some alleged. Eisenhower grew increasingly irascible, especially with Republicans who insisted that foreign aid was a luxury rather than a security instrument. He felt as though he’d made his case already, only to be asked to argue it over and over again. Eisenhower grumbled that he was willing to deliver an address or two, “but I am entirely unwilling to devote time to treating the whole matter as a philosophical exercise rather than as down-to-earth, sink-or-swim, survive-or-perish.”
His effort was taxing and largely unsuccessful: Ike’s 1957 budget asked for $4.4 billion in mutual aid. In May, he yielded to pressure and cut the request to $3.9 billion. Congress approved only $2.8 billion. Eisenhower, recalled Sherman Adams, was deeply disturbed by what he regarded as a personal rejection. He accused the Republican Alvin M. Bentley, who proposed the final round of cuts, of being “completely indifferent to any consideration of national good or party loyalty.” Stymied by his own party, Eisenhower struggled to maintain his composure and his health: his spring vacation in Augusta was dampened by his spotty golf play. Ike blamed it on flabby muscles. His friends worried about him and gently conspired to help him.
On top of all that, Congress rejected Eisenhower’s requests for funding the U.S. Information Agency—a whipping boy since McCarthy’s heyday—and insisted that an educational funding bill be amended to limit federal support for new classrooms to those areas that would use the money only in integrated schools. There again, Eisenhower retreated to the middle ground. He regarded those who demanded fidelity to the law and those who persisted in segregating students despite it as morally equivalent. He thus disagreed “with both extremes.” The country might not have been ready to hinge all federal support for school construction on integration, but Ike’s reluctance to challenge that consensus perpetuated it. The bill died in the House and, with it, a program to spend $270 million on new schools for the children of every state. Eisenhower’s critics blamed him for its failure—the bill fell just five votes short—while Ike complained that despite his reservations, he would have signed the legislation if the House had passed it. Failing to educate America’s children, Eisenhower insisted, was a “national calamity.”
What baffled Ike more than tussling with Congress was his continuing friction with the Supreme Court, even as its ranks filled with his appointees. By the summer of 1957, four justi
ces of the Court—Warren, Harlan, Brennan, and Charles Whittaker—owed their seats to Eisenhower, but some of their decisions continued to perplex the president, especially in the area of domestic security. Although congressional witch-hunting had abated by June 1957—and McCarthy himself had died a month earlier—the practice of legislative committees, federal and state, hauling in witnesses, badgering them about their affiliations, and demanding that they implicate others remained an insidious staple of American domestic security. In the final weeks of the Court’s 1957 term, the justices made it abundantly clear how they regarded that practice as well as the larger question of the presence of Communists in American life.
The first of the landmark decisions was handed down on June 3. It resolved the case of Clinton Jencks, a union president who was accused of falsifying his history when he filed paperwork stating that he had never been a Communist. Charged with lying, Jencks asked to see the reports made by witnesses testifying against him so that his lawyer could cross-examine them; the trial judge denied the request. Jencks was convicted, and his conviction was upheld by a federal appeals court. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Jencks’s appeal. Its consideration turned on how much latitude defendants should be given to peruse statements by prosecution witnesses. William Brennan, one of Eisenhower’s appointees, wrote for the Court’s majority—which included Warren and Harlan (Whittaker did not vote). Brennan concluded that Jencks was denied the right to assess the evidence against him. Two justices, Harlan and Harold Burton, concluded only that the judge should have screened the material himself, but they joined the majority in finding that Jencks deserved a new trial. Only Tom Clark, a Truman appointee, dissented, famously writing that the nation’s intelligence agencies “may as well close up shop, for the Court has opened their files to the criminal and thus afforded him a Roman holiday for rummaging through confidential information as well as vital national secrets.”
That was just the beginning. On Monday, June 17—thereafter to be known as Red Monday—the justices handed down four decisions that permanently altered the nation’s approach to domestic security. Warren wrote for the majority in two cases: Watkins v. United States and Sweezy v. New Hampshire. The latter involved an economics professor from the University of New Hampshire who was ordered by that state’s attorney general to discuss his lectures on economics and his involvement with the Progressive Party. The professor, Paul Sweezy, denied that he was a Communist but refused to say much more. Sweezy argued that to be required to testify further would violate not his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination but rather his First Amendment right of free speech and association. He was charged with contempt and convicted. The conviction was upheld by the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The Warren Court took the case and overturned the state ruling. Though it declined to find New Hampshire had violated Sweezy’s First Amendment rights, it came close. “Our form of government,” Warren wrote, “is built on the premise that every citizen shall have the right to engage in political expression and association.” Instead, the Court concluded that it was Sweezy’s right to due process that had been violated.
Warren was also careful in Watkins, again declining to find a specific First Amendment right that protected John Watkins, a labor organizer, from answering questions put to him by the House Un-American Activities Committee. In this case, Warren and the majority concluded that Watkins was inadequately informed of the scope of the committee’s inquiry and thus could not properly assert his rights in deciding whether or not to answer. That was a bit of a dodge, but its meaning was summed up in one clear sentence: “There is no congressional power to expose for the sake of exposure.” With that, the Warren Court put its stamp of disapproval on McCarthy and all that he had done.
Watkins and Sweezy highlighted a busy day for the Court, as it also reinstated John Service, a State Department employee dismissed after repeated—and futile—investigations of his loyalty. That case, captioned Service v. Dulles et al., bore a special sting for Dulles, as it carried his name and the Court was unanimous against him. Finally, in Yates v. United States, the Court reversed criminal convictions of a group of California Communists convicted under the Smith Act. Both Service and Yates were written by Harlan, Ike’s most conservative appointment to the Supreme Court, meaning that all four opinions released that day, as well as the Jencks decision from earlier that month, were the work of his appointees.
The next night, Ike hosted a stag dinner. It had been a long day: the White House had been overrun with visiting 4-H guests, followed by a rapid-fire series of meetings into the late afternoon. Finally secluded with friends, Ike let down his guard. He had “never been as mad in my life” as he was to see Communists and accused Communists coddled by the Court, he said. He was “practically fed up” with Warren.
Eisenhower’s remarks made it into the press, embarrassing him and forcing him to apologize to the chief justice. He did with a halfhearted note later that week, not exactly denying the remark but hoping to tamp down Warren’s reaction. “I have no doubt that in private conversation someone did hear me express amazement about one decision, but I have never even hinted at a feeling such as anger,” Eisenhower explained. “To do so would imply not only that I knew the law but questioned motives. Neither of these things is true. So while resolving that even in private conversations I shall be more careful of my language, I do want you to know that if any such story appeared, it was a distortion.”
Warren waited until July to answer, but then dismissed Ike’s note as “in no sense necessary.” Warren had won seven elections in California, had campaigned for the vice presidency in 1948, had been elected governor three times. He understood reporters. At least so he said. Years later, he confronted Ike directly, asking what the president, then retired, would have done with the Communists who came before the Court. “I would kill the SOBs,” Eisenhower responded. Warren, bemused, said he regarded the president’s reply as “merely petulant rather than definitive.”
Tellingly, Eisenhower’s unhappiness with the Court was over Communists, not civil rights. There, his reluctance to grapple with the politics of segregation was lamentable but not absolute, as he had allowed his attorney general wide authority to lead. Prodded by Brownell, Eisenhower in 1957 reintroduced a modest civil rights bill intended to begin the methodical expansion of federal supervision over integration in the southern states. The specific bill was hardly revolutionary; indeed, a version of it had been rejected by Congress in 1956 over lukewarm objections from the administration. Its principal provision was to allow the attorney general to file suit in federal court in order to punish those who violated the right to vote or the right to attend integrated schools under federal court order. If at one level, it seemed almost trivial to allow the attorney general to enforce rights already guaranteed by the Constitution and resolved by the Supreme Court, it nevertheless spelled trouble for southern segregationists, who recognized that it would empower the attorney general to bring actions against those who continued to defy the courts. The bill was fiercely contested in much of the South, and it divided the Eisenhower cabinet. When Brownell first presented the bill to the cabinet, Dulles, mindful of the propaganda advantages that segregation provided America’s Communist enemies, supported the legislation. Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey opposed the measure, and others questioned aspects of it. Secretary of Defense Charlie Wilson, for instance, warned against “adding more fuel” to the already explosive issue. Eisenhower was initially tepid. He endorsed the bill but declined to support the provision expanding the power of the attorney general to file civil rights cases. Even as the final bill was prepared, Eisenhower was still urging Brownell to emphasize the administration’s understanding of the complexities faced by those confronting integration.
Eisenhower’s position was politically understandable—he was running for reelection in 1956—but it was offered against vivid evidence of the price of inaction. Congress’s debate was haunted by Emmett Till, whose 1955 murder still ene
rgized supporters of civil rights.
Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy visting Mississippi from Chicago, was alleged to have insulted the wife of Roy Bryant at the Bryant family store. Four days later, he was abducted from his grandmother’s house. He was bludgeoned and shot, his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River. Bryant and J. W. Milam were arrested and tried by a Tallahatchie County jury. On September 23, 1955, just hours before Eisenhower suffered his heart attack in Denver, the jury acquitted Milam and Bryant. The prosecution, jurors said, had failed to positively establish that the body taken from the river was that of Till. Never mind that his mother testified that it was her son or that the ring on his finger belonged to her boy. Bryant and Milam waited just one hour and five minutes for the good news. Hearing it, they lit cigars, smiled faintly, and walked free.
Absent federal jurisdiction, there was nothing the Department of Justice could do to bring a case against Milam, Bryant, or the countless other thugs who inflicted brutalities against southern blacks. Brownell’s bill would, for the first time, give the Department of Justice the power to prosecute. In addition, federal judges would acquire the authority to issue injunctions and hold violators in contempt. Beyond that, the bill also sought to establish a Civil Rights Commission, to expand the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Section into a full division, and to create enforcement mechanisms for protecting voting rights.
Segregationists girded for battle. Richard Russell, the Senate’s wiliest negotiator, charged that the bill would transform the attorney general into a “czar” with unbounded powers. He helped beat the bill in 1956, in part because Eisenhower refused to support the provisions regarding the attorney general. Then, during the 1956 campaign, Eisenhower reversed himself on that point. So when Congress addressed the matter in 1957, it now confronted the president himself, along with the memory of Till and the growing national impatience with southern racism.
