DWIGHT EISENHOWER: Post-War American Presidents (2)

[This is a series describing the 12 Post-War American Presidents from a British perspective.]

Dwight D. Eisenhower (always known as “Ike”) was a most distinguished US Army and NATO commander, and a thoroughly decent man, who came to the Presidency past his prime and gave a dogged and worthy performance but ultimately failed to inspire his Nation.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower

Dwight Eisenhower (1890 – 1969) was the 3^rd of 7 sons of parents originally of Pennsylvania Dutch background. Although born in Denison, Texas, when aged 2 the family moved to Abilene, Kansas which remained the family home. His father was a mechanic; his pious mother had been a Mennonite and then a Jehovah’s Witness. He was brought up in a conservative, traditional household. Always keen on military matters, Ike managed to get to West Point despite his mother’s pacifist misgivings, and he graduated there in 1915, a respectable but by no means brilliant cadet. Ike trained enthusiastically and was upset when his battalion saw no action in WW1 and only arrived in France in time for the Armistice.

Ike was a captain and then 14 years to 1936 a major in the neglected peacetime US Army. He did however serve under fine professionals like Connor, Pershing, MacArthur and Marshall and alongside Patton. His administrative talents were well recognised and he shone on several military graduate courses; he accompanied MacArthur (with whom he quarrelled) to the Philippines in 1935 on a mission to reorganise the Filipino Army. Eisenhower was a genial, diplomatic type popular with colleagues. In 1936 he made lieutenant-colonel and joined the Army department creating contingency plans for a possible war. 

When the US entered WW2, Marshall spotted Ike’s promise and promoted him eventually to head the American Army in the United Kingdom in 1942. Ike’s professional break came when he was appointed commander of the US forces landing in North Africa in 1942. After some stumbling over the fraught relations between Vichy’s Darlan, FDR’s protégé Giraud and Free France’s de Gaulle, the Americans linked up with Montgomery’s 8^th Army and the Axis were expelled from Africa in 1943. Ike’s promotion was rapid.

Ike oversaw the successful invasion of Sicily, deftly managing Bradley and prima donnas Patton and Montgomery. The invasion of Italy itself followed and Ike was recalled to Britain to command (instead of Marshall or Brooke) the planned allied Normandy landings. This massive organisational and diplomatic challenge played to Ike’s strengths: it was a highly perilous exercise and could have gone sadly wrong: the 6 June 1944 D-Day opening of a second front was a triumph for Eisenhower.

Ike encourages his soldiers

Although military historians have criticised Ike’s broad front advance into Germany and his failure to get to Berlin before the Soviets, in the event the Allied armies routed the Nazis comprehensively after dealing with their last fling at the Battle of the Bulge. Ike, like FDR and Truman hoped for a cooperative relationship with the Russians but it was not to be. Ike was briefly military governor of the US zone in Germany but returned to Washington to succeed Marshall as Army Chief of Staff.

For the next 3 years Ike was wooed by politicians asking him to run for President. Ike’s political views were opaque, but anyway he was an all-American hero. Democrat incumbent Truman offered to run as Ike’s vice-president in 1948, especially if MacArthur won the Republican nomination. Ike declined, saying a serving officer should not get involved in politics. In retrospect Ike should have gone for the glittering prize then while his wits were sharper and his health was stronger.  The offer was repeated in 1951 ahead of the 1952 election. The Republicans wanted Ike too, but he was then committed to being the Supreme Commander of NATO from 1950. Finally Ike retired from active service in 1952 and soon announced he had Republican beliefs. Beating off the candidacy of isolationist Robert Taft, Ike was nominated at the Republican convention and the slogan “I like Ike” became a global catch-phrase.

Ike won the November 1952 election against liberal Democrat Adlai Stevenson by a landslide. Ike was quite an old 62, who had served his nation mightily, and to balance the ticket his Vice-President was 39-year-old California senator Richard M. Nixon, the hard-Right favourite of the Republican “Old Guard”. The US would hear much more of Nixon later, but he became caught up in a trust fund scandal and saved his position with his brilliant “Checkers” speech; Ike and Nixon were never close personally but Nixon was given a wider remit than most vice-presidents, doing much of the political in-fighting and often deputising for the President.

Ike’s first cabinet was notable for the wealth of its members, save one – “8 millionaires and a plumber” jeered the Democrats. Ike had a circle of influential big business friends whom he had fostered for fund-raising purposes during his awkward time from 1950 as President of Columbia University in New York; the university academics and Ike were not on the same wavelength. His Secretary of State from 1953-1959 was John Foster Dulles, a Cold Warrior par excellence, blue-nosed puritan, compulsive alliance builder and bane of the alienated Western European chancelleries, especially of France and Britain. Ike knew his allies disliked Dulles but he felt him indispensable. 

Ike, the laid-back President

Ike’s failure during his campaign to challenge Senator Joe McCarthy’s rabid Red Scare tactics infuriated Truman, leading to a bitter breach between the two Presidents. Ike was basically a moderate anti-communist and removed certain suspect officials but was not a crusading fanatic. He made it his business to end the unpopular and deadlocked Korean War which had cost the US 36,000 fatalities and, after visiting the troops, the US negotiated an Armistice in 1953. There was no peace treaty and technically North Korea is still at war with the UN.

Ike and the State Department deplored but wholly misunderstood British and French colonialism. Both European powers wanted to put an end to their empires. The French had fought and lost in Indo-China and a settlement was reached in the delicately balanced Geneva Accords of 1954. Dulles thought these accords gave too much to Ho Chi Minh’s communists and ignored them, instead backing Ngo Dinh Diem’s autocracy in South Vietnam, a disastrous and costly error in retrospect. The French were furious and US policy confirmed de Gaulle’s misgivings when he returned to power in 1958, later to withdraw militarily from NATO.

Relations with Britain were also uneasy. Anthony Eden was an experienced and self-confident foreign secretary and when in 1955 the US oil company Aramco pushed its client Saudi Arabia to seize the Buraimi Oasis, claimed by British client Trucial Oman, the British trained Trucial Scouts ejected the Saudis. As it happened there was no oil at Buraimi, but UK-US relations were damaged. Eden tested US goodwill too far when in 1956, as Prime Minister, he colluded with France and Israel to seize the Suez Canal which Nasser had nationalised for Egypt. Eisenhower was not consulted and sided with Egypt against his supposedly colonialist allies Britain and France. Eisenhower orchestrated a run on the pound and Eden, his career in ruins, had to withdraw. It took painstaking diplomacy by his successor Harold MacMillan to repair the embittered alliance and rebuild the cherished (by Britain only) “special relationship”.

Ike’s support for Nasser and his ally Syria did not earn any political dividend. Nasser’s continued subversion provoked a British intervention in 1957 to bolster friendly King Hussein of Jordan and a major deployment of US troops in 1958 to rescue beleaguered Maronite President Camille Chamoun in Lebanon. Russian influence in the Middle East grew, supported by her prestigious launch of Sputnik. Khrushchev’s aggressive boast to the West “We will bury you” was to some extent countered by Nixon’s effective advocacy of Western values in the “Kitchen Debate” at the American Exhibition in Moscow in 1959.

Ike’s health was delicate and he had 7 heart attacks of varying severity while in office; all needed a period of recuperation. Ike was often an absentee President; especially in his second term he became almost obsessed by golf, often playing at Augusta – Obama seems to have caught the same bug! Ike did not care for summit conferences but was preparing for one in Paris in 1960 when Gary Powers, flying a U2 spy plane at high altitude over Russia was shot down by a Soviet missile.  Khrushchev angrily declined to attend and the meeting never took place. 

Domestically it seemed that politics did not fully engage Ike. True, he sent in Federal troops to enforce a Supreme Court de-segregation ruling for schools in Little Rock, Arkansas when Governor Orval Faubus defied it. But there was little follow-up, no ringing commitment to civil rights from the President himself. Although much admired in face to face encounters, Ike was not quick-witted, eloquent or at ease addressing large gatherings. His only memorable phrase was in his farewell broadcast when he warned the nation “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

Eisenhower was succeeded by John F Kennedy in January 1961 and Ike died of heart problems in Washington in March 1969. He had presided over a country enjoying unprecedented prosperity, serving loyally and honestly. His vision of America was rather like a Norman Rockwell painting – motherhood and apple pie – a nostalgia for the old verities. The world had sadly become a more dangerous place and to make political progress required cunning, deviousness and a mastery of camouflage – characteristics that straight-dealing Eisenhower did not possess.

SMD

27.08.14

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014