VII.

President of the United States

A.

Foreign Affairs

After the inauguration, it soon became clear that Eisenhower’s policy was not to go on the offensive in the Korean War, but to end it. He warned the Communist Chinese that unless they signed an armistice, he would “not be constrained” in the weapons he would use, a reference to the possibility of using nuclear weapons. In July 1953 the Chinese signed the armistice. South Korea was preserved, and the two Koreas went back to their prewar boundary.

The following year, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, and Vice President Nixon urged him to intervene in Vietnam. The French colonial forces in Vietnam were trapped at Ðien Biên by the Communist Viet Minh Army. Eisenhower refused, explaining that “The jungles of Indochina would swallow up division after division of U.S. troops. Furthermore, the presence of ever more numbers of white men in uniform would aggravate rather than assuage Asiatic resentments.”

The French surrendered at Ðien Biên, and Vietnam was divided into two states: the Communist North and the anti-Communist South. Eisenhower then began a policy of containment. In September 1954 he extended U.S. protection to South Vietnam under the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization and also provided economic aid. Asked to explain the importance of South Vietnam, he used the falling domino image: “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” If the Communists overran South Vietnam, he reasoned, Communism would then take over in other countries of Southeast Asia. When the National Liberation Front, a Communist-led organization, began to challenge the government in South Vietnam, Eisenhower sent military equipment and U.S. advisers. About 600 advisers were there by the time he left office in 1961.

During the campaign Eisenhower had called for liberation of the Communist-dominated countries in Eastern Europe. Once in office, however, Eisenhower and Dulles accepted Truman’s containment policy. They made no offensives against the Soviets, even in 1956 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent Soviet tanks into Hungary to crush an uprising.

Eisenhower’s refusal to intervene in Hungary was based on his most profound insight—that nuclear war was unthinkable. He believed that Communism was a bad system that would someday collapse on its own. “This will take a long time,” he predicted, “but our most realistic policy is holding the line until the Soviets manage to educate their people. By doing so, they will sow the seeds of their own destruction.”

Because Eisenhower wanted peace, on a number of occasions he turned down recommendations by members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that he launch a first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviets while the United States still had more atomic bombs. He called his defense policy the New Look. It relied on nuclear weapons to deter the Soviets, but he refused to spend even half as much as most politicians demanded for those weapons, and he was reluctant to spend money on rocket development. As a result, he was embarrassed in 1957 when the Soviets demonstrated their advances in rocketry by launching the first manmade satellite, Sputnik 1, into space.

Eisenhower was the first president to involve the United States in Middle Eastern politics. In 1956 the French, Israelis, and British invaded Egypt to take back the Suez Canal, which Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized (see Nationalization). They expected American support. Eisenhower, however, came to Nasser’s rescue, using a ban on trade, or embargo, to force the invaders to withdraw. It came as a shock to the invaders that the United States would help an unaligned country—one that would not take sides with either NATO or the Communists—against its closest allies. Eisenhower, however, consistently denounced such “gunboat diplomacy,” explaining “We cannot subscribe to one law for the weak, another law for the strong; one law for those opposing us, another for those allied with us. There can be only one law—or there shall be no peace.”

Eisenhower supported other countries in Africa and Asia as they struggled to win their independence. When Nixon advised him to support the French in their war to keep their colony of Algeria on the grounds that the Algerians were not ready for independence, Eisenhower replied, “The United States cannot possibly maintain that freedom—independence—liberty—are necessary to us, but not to others.”

B.

Domestic Policies

Eisenhower was a fiscal conservative who put balancing the federal budget first and refused to lower taxes until that was done. He managed to balance three of his eight budgets.

Conservative Republicans wanted him to reverse Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and return to a less active government. He disappointed them. He continued most of the New Deal programs, such as Social Security. In fact, he greatly expanded Social Security in 1954 to include about 7 million self-employed farmers and added a provision for federal disability insurance. His public works programs were bigger than Roosevelt’s had been. They included the St. Lawrence Seaway (1954) and the Interstate Highway System (1956), the largest construction project in history. He also encouraged the building of nuclear power plants and government-sponsored research into other peaceful uses for nuclear energy.

The conservatives’ biggest fight with Eisenhower, however, concerned Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, who made a career of exposing alleged Communists and Communist sympathizers in government. McCarthy demanded access to government files that he said would prove that Communists in the State Department were shaping American foreign policy to benefit the Soviets. Eisenhower refused, insisting that his administration had found and dismissed all the Communists.

Despite provocative public statements by McCarthy, Eisenhower ignored rather than denounced him. This policy was widely criticized, but it worked. When McCarthy escalated his demands for access to files, Eisenhower used the doctrine of executive privilege to withhold them. Under that doctrine, which got its name from Eisenhower but was first used by President George Washington, advice given to the president by a government official is protected from congressional inquiry. Without the documents, McCarthy soon lost his momentum.

A second major controversy was over civil rights. In 1954 Chief Justice Earl Warren, whom Eisenhower had appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, wrote the court’s unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation by race in public schools was unconstitutional. The court ordered the South to integrate its schools “with all deliberate speed.” Eisenhower’s Justice Department did little to enforce the order, and he never gave the decision a public endorsement. He was hesitant to use federal power to force social change.

Nevertheless Eisenhower in 1956 sponsored the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction. Its major goal was to give blacks in the South the right to vote. The bill passed in 1957 but was badly weakened by a provision that officials charged with violating the law would be tried by a jury. Only registered voters could serve on juries; in the South, almost no blacks were registered, so the juries were all white; and few Southern white jurors would convict an official who kept blacks from voting. Eisenhower wanted nonjury trials but was defeated on this issue by Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas.

In 1955 Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. He recovered fairly quickly, and his doctors assured him he had at least ten more years to live and would be physically able to serve another term, but he wanted to retire. The Republicans, however, fearing that without the popular “Ike” they would lose the 1956 election, once again convinced him that he had a duty to serve. He was nominated without opposition. The Democrats again nominated Stevenson. Eisenhower won by 9.5 million votes (57 percent to 42 percent), nearly twice the margin of 1952.