Dwight D. Eisenhower

A

Domestic Affairs

Eisenhower had severe problems in his second term. His chief of staff, Sherman Adams, was accused of corruption for accepting gifts from a businessman who had problems with the Internal Revenue Service. Eisenhower reluctantly asked for Adams’s resignation.

A crisis in civil rights came in 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state’s national guard and ordered it to block the court-ordered integration of Little Rock Central High School. The integration had been ordered on the basis of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and this was the first severe test of the use of federal power to enforce that decision. To Eisenhower it was unthinkable for a state governor to defy a federal court order. “There must be respect for the Constitution,” he explained, “—which means the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution—or we shall have chaos.” He ordered the Arkansas National Guard into federal service, which put it under his orders rather than those of Faubus, and sent the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock to enforce integration.

B

Foreign Affairs

In January 1959 Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba. Although Castro initially denied that he was a Communist, Eisenhower soon concluded that he was and imposed an economic blockade on the island nation. He also created a Cuban counterrevolutionary force and ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to plan an invasion of Cuba (which President John F. Kennedy carried out unsuccessfully in 1961). Communism for the first time had come to power in the Americas, only 145 km (90 mi) off the southern tip of Florida.

One of Eisenhower’s deepest disappointments in foreign relations came in 1960. A summit meeting of the Big Four powers (the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviets) was scheduled to be held in Paris. Both Eisenhower and Khrushchev were to attend. Eisenhower had hopes that he could get Khrushchev’s agreement on a nuclear test ban treaty, as a first step toward arms control, and on the status of divided Berlin. But on May 1, shortly before the summit was to convene, the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane over their territory. Khrushchev demanded an apology for the spying, which Eisenhower refused to give. He pointed out that Soviet secrecy had forced the United States to overfly in order to be assured that the Soviets were not preparing a first-strike nuclear attack. The summit never got started, and the chance for peace faded.

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Eisenhower faced other challenges during his presidency, including clashes with Communist China over Taiwan in 1955 and again in 1958, and with the Soviets over Berlin in 1959. He managed each one without overreacting, without going to war, without increasing defense spending, and without frightening the American people. He downplayed each crisis, insisted that a solution could be found, and then found one. His proudest accomplishment as president was making and keeping the peace. What he did best was managing crises, many of which threatened to lead to nuclear war.

As a political leader, Eisenhower rejected extremes. He instinctively sought the middle ground on every political problem. He believed that the extremes to the right and to the left in any political dispute are always wrong.

IX

Leaving Office

The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which limited presidents to two terms, prevented Eisenhower from running again in 1960. He gave his support to his vice president, Richard Nixon. The Democrats nominated Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. Kennedy’s narrow victory was a bitter blow to Eisenhower, who felt that he personally had been rejected. If not for the two-term limit, however, he could have been the candidate and almost certainly would have won by a wide margin. Despite the problems of his second term, he remained remarkably popular.

In his farewell address to the American people on January 17, 1961, he spoke of his deepest beliefs. He had held the line on defense spending despite tremendous pressure to build more rockets and bombs, but even so the American military services and defense industry had expanded enormously in the 1950s. Eisenhower believed this expansion was necessary to deter the Soviets, but still it worried him. “The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” he said. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

X

Retirement

Eisenhower retired to a small farm he owned outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, an area he had loved ever since he was stationed there in World War I. He raised cattle on his farm and spent the winter months in Palm Desert, California, where he played golf. He wrote a two-volume history of his presidential years, entitled Mandate for Change (1963) and Waging Peace (1965), and a personal memoir called At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends (1967). He was still involved in politics, conferring with President Kennedy at the time of the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba and later advising President Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War (1959-1975). In 1964 he endorsed Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who lost, and in 1968 he supported his former Vice President Richard Nixon, who won. In that same year his grandson David Eisenhower married Nixon’s daughter Julie.

Eisenhower’s health began to fail. Beginning in 1965 he suffered three more heart attacks, and he spent his last few months in Walter Reed Army Hospital. On his deathbed on March 28, 1969, he summed up his life: “I’ve always loved my wife. I’ve always loved my children. I’ve always loved my grandchildren. And I have always loved my country.” His last words were, “I want to go. God take me.”

Eisenhower seldom boasted, but he once summed up his presidency in these words: “The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration. We kept the peace. People asked how it happened—by God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that.”

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