Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  More than any Western statesman, Eisenhower recognized that the age of imperial rule had passed. Both at Dien Bien Phu and during the Suez crisis he urged his European allies to bury the corpse of colonialism and move on. In his memoirs, Eisenhower wrote that the three weeks of the Suez affair were “the most demanding three weeks of my entire presidency.”2 In the midst of a contentious election campaign, Ike had reined in his wartime partners in the face of fierce Democratic criticism; deterred the Soviets from intervening during the Suez crisis; avoided needless provocation at the time of the Hungarian uprising; and preserved the peace. Any misstep could have triggered a chain of events leading to nuclear war. Throughout these crises Eisenhower had exercised personal control. American policy was not set in the State Department or the Department of Defense or by White House assistants, but by the president himself. Even more than on D-Day or at the time of the Battle of the Bulge, Eisenhower assumed direct command.

  Domestically, Eisenhower’s record was no less impressive. By 1956 he had balanced the federal budget, and when unemployment rose and recession threatened in the aftermath of the Korean War, he had nipped it in the bud with the interstate highway program—the mother of all stimulus programs. But the most serious domestic challenge Ike faced—and the most intractable—was the question of civil rights and equality for African Americans.

  The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, adopted after the Civil War, states unequivocally, “No State shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” So long as Grant was president, and federal troops remained in the South, the amendment was enforced, and former slaves were guaranteed equality, particularly the right to vote. But after the disputed election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, the United States Army was withdrawn from the South (part of a quid pro quo in which Democrats agreed not to challenge Hayes’s election), and from that point on African Americans suffered systematic discrimination at the hands of a white southern society that, like the Bourbons of France after the revolution, had “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”

  The first casualty was the right to vote. Southern states adopted literacy tests, the poll tax, and property qualifications (all with “grandfather clauses” insulating poor whites) that stripped blacks from the voting rolls.a When that was insufficient, violence and intimidation followed. Lynchings became commonplace. The resulting all-white legislatures enacted Black Codes—codes of laws pertaining to African Americans—that legalized racial segregation. The constitutionality of these “Jim Crow” statutes was open to question, given the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.b The issue reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 in the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson, testing the legality of a Louisiana law requiring blacks and whites to ride in separate railroad coaches.3 This was an era when reconciliation with the white South was at the top of the nation’s agenda, and the Supreme Court, by a vote of 7–1, upheld racial segregation as constitutionally permissible. The equal protection clause, said the court, required equality; it did not mandate a “commingling” of the races. “If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane.” The resulting doctrine, known as “separate but equal,” became the law of the land for the next fifty-eight years. The United States was a racially segregated society, and the Supreme Court had given that segregation a constitutional blessing.4 c “Separate but equal,” of course, was a myth. Facilities were segregated, but they were rarely equal, and African Americans suffered accordingly.

  This was the world to which Eisenhower was accustomed. There were virtually no blacks in Kansas when he grew up, none at West Point, and the Army was strictly segregated, with the few black units, such as the 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry regiments, commanded by white officers. Eisenhower himself had briefly served as executive officer of the 24th Infantry at Fort Benning in the 1920s. The assignment had been a punitive one inflicted by the chief of infantry, and Ike quickly managed a transfer. World War II was fought with segregated units, black soldiers were most often assigned as support troops, and segregation was accepted as a fact of American life. Whether it involved restaurants, hotels, restrooms, athletic events, water fountains, parks, schools, or swimming pools, Americans for the most part lived in a segregated world. Eisenhower’s friends were white and many were from the South. At the professional level he did not encounter African Americans. That is not to say Ike was racially prejudiced. He simply did not question racial segregation—a situation to which the Supreme Court of the United States had given its seal of approval.

  In the few cases that had come before the court in the 1930s and ’40s testing the doctrine of separate but equal, the court had ruled that states were required to provide comparable professional and graduate educations for blacks and whites. But these decisions did not challenge the basic holding in Plessy, and indeed reinforced it.5

  That changed in 1954 when the Supreme Court, in a decision written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, reversed the holding in Plessy v. Ferguson and held that racial segregation, in and of itself, was a denial of the equal protection of the laws. The decision of the Warren Court was unanimous, and the case, Brown v. Board of Education, involving the desegregation of public schools in Topeka, Kansas, introduced a new era of racial equality.6 But the decision in Brown, while it enunciated a new principle of law, bound only the litigants to the case. The struggle to attain equality engulfed the nation for the next two decades, and Eisenhower’s leadership would prove critical.

  Legal scholars have sometimes criticized Chief Justice Warren’s epic decision in Brown because it relied on contemporary evidence and argued broad principles at the expense of judicial precedent. That criticism overlooks the fact that the great constitutional decisions of Chief Justice John Marshall—decisions that defined the very nature of the American system of government—were also based on principle, not precedent. Like Brown, the decisions of the Marshall Court in Marbury v. Madison, the cornerstone of the Supreme Court’s constitutional authority; McCulloch v. Maryland, upholding the broad legislative powers of Congress; and Gibbons v. Ogden, defining the commerce power, are innocent of legal precedent.7 Like in Brown, the argument of the chief justice was so convincing that precedent was unnecessary. Like in Brown, the issues were so fundamental that precedent was beside the point. And like in Brown, the decisions in Marbury, McCulloch, and Gibbons were unanimous. Earl Warren and John Marshall understood that when dealing with the nation’s fundamental structure, the court must speak with one voice. A unanimous court leaves no doubt about the law of the land.

  The decision in Brown came down on May 17, 1954, near the end of the court’s 1954 term. With one blow, the Supreme Court deprived racial segregation of its constitutional legitimacy. The Eisenhower administration had filed an amicus curiae brief in Brown arguing that Plessy v. Ferguson be overturned, and at the invitation of the court Assistant Attorney General J. Lee Rankin presented oral argument. Asked by the justices whether the Eisenhower administration thought school segregation was constitutional, Rankin replied that it did not.8

  While Eisenhower accepted segregation as a fact of life, he personally had no patience with racial discrimination. But as president he recognized how divisive the issue was in the South, and he wanted to move forward cautiously. Ike’s goal was to keep the country united under the rule of law. Unlike Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, who spearheaded the fight for racial equality, Eisenhower sought to stake out a nonpartisan position grounded in the president’s constitutional responsibility to take care that the laws be faithfully enforced. He eschewed the bully pulpit and preferred to remind the nation of its duty to obey the law. Eisenhower recognized the need for change, but wanted to achieve it with the cooperation of the white South if possible. That was consistent with Ike’s instinct to build coalitions based on consensus and was in many ways exactly what the country needed to buffer a change that was so fundamental. In retrospect,
it is difficult to say that he was wrong.

  But there is no doubt where Eisenhower stood. In his first State of the Union message in February 1953, Ike said, “I propose to use whatever authority exists in the office of the President to end segregation in the District of Columbia, including the Federal Government, and any segregation in the Armed Forces.”9 d When Representative Adam Clayton Powell, the prominent black congressman from Harlem, called Eisenhower’s attention to the fact that despite President Truman’s order to integrate, two-thirds of the units in the Army were still segregated, Ike moved swiftly. Where Truman had tried to convince the Army to desegregate, Eisenhower ordered it to do so. “Wherever Federal funds are expended,” he told his news conference on March 19, 1953, “I do not see how any American can justify a discrimination in the expenditure of those funds.”10 Military officers (such as General Omar Bradley) who had found dozens of reasons why desegregation was premature were not willing to resist a direct order from the commander in chief. On October 24, 1954, Defense Secretary Charles Wilson announced that the last racially segregated unit in the armed forces had been abolished.11

  Schools on military bases posed an additional problem. Those in the South were segregated, and many were operated by local school boards. Eisenhower ordered those to desegregate as well—fifteen months before the court’s decision in Brown. Where local boards refused, the federal government simply assumed control of the schools and desegregated them. By the beginning of the 1955 school year, all schools on military posts were operating on a racially integrated basis. Hospitals run by the Veterans Administration were desegregated by order of the president in September 1953.

  Navy yards in the South, employing thousands of civilian workers, proved particularly difficult to desegregate. “The Navy must recognize the customs and usages prevailing in certain geographic areas of our country which the Navy had no part in creating,” said Robert Anderson, Eisenhower’s first secretary of the Navy, on May 28, 1953.12 Ike overruled him. Eisenhower told Congressman Powell that he would not permit the desegregation of federal facilities to be obstructed by his subordinates. “We have not taken and we shall not take a single backward step,” the president said. “There must be no second class citizens in this country.”13 The Navy yard in Charleston, South Carolina, was the last holdout. “Not even President Truman deemed [desegregation] necessary at such installations,” Governor James Byrnes wrote Eisenhower in August 1953.14 Despite his affection for Byrnes, Ike was unmoved. On January 14, 1954, the Charleston yard reported that the last vestige of segregation had been eliminated.15 Eisenhower successfully integrated the armed forces, the VA hospitals, Navy yards in the South, and the schools on military bases well before the Supreme Court held “separate but equal” unconstitutional. Adam Clayton Powell—scarcely anyone’s Uncle Tom—put it best in a speech to his constituents on February 28, 1954. “The Honorable Dwight D. Eisenhower has done more to eliminate discrimination and to restore the Negro to the status of first-class citizenship than any President since Abraham Lincoln,” he said.16

  When the decision in Brown was announced, Eisenhower immediately ordered the schools in the District of Columbia desegregated.17 Washington’s schools, he told the D.C. commissioners, should be “a model for the nation.”18 e But the court left open how desegregation was to be achieved elsewhere. Unless local school boards acted on their own initiative, the issue remained in limbo. Not until a year later did the court hand down a second decision (Brown II) providing guidance as to how integration should proceed. In another unanimous decision, also written by the chief justice, the Supreme Court entrusted desegregation to the local school boards, supervised by the ninety United States District Courts scattered across the country. The Supreme Court set no timetable, except to say that desegregation should proceed “with all deliberate speed.”19 f As the court decreed, integration would be achieved through legal process at the local level, not by sweeping judicial fiat or executive intervention.

  In the hiatus between Brown and Brown II, Justice Robert Jackson died, creating a Supreme Court vacancy for Eisenhower to fill. To replace Jackson, the president nominated Judge John Marshall Harlan II of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Harlan had replaced the legendary Learned Hand on the second circuit, and now Eisenhower was tapping him for the Supreme Court. Harlan was the grandson and namesake of Justice John Marshall Harlan, the great dissenter in Plessy-Ferguson, and no appointment could have been better calculated to indicate where Ike’s sympathies lay.20 Eisenhower would make three more appointments to the Supreme Court, William Brennan (1956), Charles Whittaker (1957), and Potter Stewart (1958). If Eisenhower had been skeptical of the holding in Brown, he could easily have appointed southerners who might have challenged the decision. But he did not. Harlan, Brennan, Whittaker, and Stewart supported the holding in Brown that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional, and became part of the continuing unanimity of the Warren Court on racial issues.

  Eisenhower’s judicial appointees to lower courts in the Deep South were equally opposed to segregation. Ordinarily, the appointment of federal judges involves significant senatorial input. But the senators from the South were wedded to segregation, and their judicial nominees invariably shared that view. The senators were also Democrats. Party affiliation afforded Eisenhower sufficient reason to ignore their preferences, and the Department of Justice under Herbert Brownell habitually recommended judges for the Fifth Circuit (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas) without senatorial endorsement. That enabled Eisenhower to appoint supporters of desegregation who did yeoman service to make the decision in Brown a reality. Elbert Tuttle of Georgia, John Minor Wisdom of Louisiana, and John Brown of Nebraska were appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, where they joined Richard Taylor Rives, a Truman appointee, to form a solid phalanx determined to enforce desegregation.g At the district court level, Eisenhower appointed Frank M. Johnson, Jr., in Alabama; in 1956 he struck down segregated seating on Montgomery’s buses after Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat had triggered a citywide black boycott of the city buses. It was also Johnson who ordered the teaching staffs of Montgomery’s schools desegregated—a monumental step on the road to racial integration.

  Resistance to the ruling in Brown was immediate. Throughout the South, White Citizens Councils sprang up, composed of outraged citizens determined to preserve white supremacy at the local level. The Citizens Councils did not wear sheets and did not burn crosses, but their tactics of bullying and intimidation were often as vicious as the Klan’s. (“The Ku Klux Klan in business suits,” in the words of one social historian.)21 There was also vociferous opposition in Congress. On March 10, 1956, Senator J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina announced the “Southern Manifesto,” a document signed by 101 members of Congress pledging themselves “to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision [Brown v. Board of Education] which is contrary to the Constitution.” The document was signed by every member of the congressional delegations from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia, plus a sprinkling from other states. In what has become a hackneyed refrain, the signatories said, “We regard the decision of the Supreme Court in the school cases as a clear abuse of judicial power. It climaxes a trend in the federal judiciary undertaking to legislate … and encroach upon the reserved rights of the States and the people.”22

  At his press conference four days later, Eisenhower was asked by ABC’s Edward P. Morgan to comment on the “manifesto,” particularly insofar as the president’s responsibility was concerned. Ike typically replied with a carrot and a stick. He commended the signers for pledging to use legal means to resist the court’s decision. But he coupled that with a clear warning. If they were thinking about nullification, there would be serious trouble. In words that Andrew Jackson might have used, Ike said, “I am sworn to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States and I can never abandon
or refuse to carry out my own duty.”

  Eisenhower pleaded for patience and moderation. He reminded the press that because segregation had been constitutional for almost sixty years, it was going to take time and effort to bring about change. “I have never yet given up my belief that the American people, faced with a great problem like this, will approach it intelligently and with patience and understanding, and we will get somewhere.”23 Eisenhower worked behind the scenes, hoping to enlist the South’s religious leaders to ease the way. A week after his press conference, he met with evangelist Billy Graham for almost an hour in the White House. Graham said later that Ike “felt strongly that the church could make a tremendous contribution toward the bettering of race relations” in the South.24

  Eisenhower followed up his meeting with Graham with a lengthy letter. “Ministers know that peacemakers are blessed,” he told the evangelist. “They should also know that the most effective peacemaker is one who prevents a quarrel from developing.” Ike suggested to Graham that more qualified blacks be elected to local offices in the South, that entrance to graduate school be strictly on the basis of merit without regard to race, and that public transportation be fully integrated. “It appears to me that things like this could be properly mentioned in a pulpit.” Eisenhower also suggested that Graham might find an opportunity to commend the Reverend Joseph Francis Rummel, the longtime Catholic archbishop of New Orleans, who had desegregated the city’s parochial schools on his own authority. In a pastoral letter, Rummel warned Catholics they faced “automatic excommunication” if they supported segregation for parochial schools.25

  Outside of the Catholic schools in New Orleans, however, desegregation in the South was minimal. According to the NAACP, no public schools had been desegregated in eight southern states in 1955, and the economic intimidation of blacks was on the increase. In Mississippi, a state whose population included 900,000 blacks, the number of African Americans on the voting rolls had declined from 22,000 to 8,000 during the year. Racial violence also spiked upward. No lynchings had been recorded in the Magnolia State during the five years from 1950 through 1954. In 1955, there were three.26 And it was not just in the South. Fiery crosses were burned in the front yards of Supreme Court justices in Washington, and kerosene was dumped under the windows of Attorney General Brownell’s house in the District.27