Mark Malcomson
Eisenhower: General and President in Context

Mark Malcomson | Eisenhower: General and President in Context | 02.22.24

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- Hi, it’s Mark Malcolmson here and welcome everybody. We are kind of continuing in my little series about post-war American presidents and we’ve looked at two parts of Truman a couple of weeks ago. And now we’re going to look at President Eisenhower. But we’re going to do it in context, and I think this is, part of the reason that I think Eisenhower is interesting is from a British perspective, the idea that a general goes from being a general to being president is kind of a bit, oh, interesting. Obviously we’ve had soldiers and sailors going on to be politicians, people like Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill fought in the First and Second World War, they both. But you’ve got to really go back probably 200 years to where Wellington becomes prime minister or have that idea that a military person becomes the head politician of the country. So America’s kind of interesting and challenging from our point of view because it just seems a bit different and a bit alien. And I suppose if you go back to fundamentals, it’s interesting because the definition of president is also they are president and they are commander in chief. So you have this slight sense of duality around the military, kind of inbuilt into the role of president.

But it doesn’t per se mean that you have to be a military person. This is not some South American banana Republic or whatever in terms of the generalissimo becomes the leader of the country. And that’s very much sort of a thing that we can dismiss in the way that we look at this. But the idea that a military figure as opposed to necessarily somebody who has served because quite a lot of presidents have served. In fact, if you look at the stats, we’ve had 45 presidents. And out of those presidents, 31 of them have served in some form or another. However, there are 12 of them who have been generals. Now, that means that they’re more than just, they’ve enlisted during the First, the Second World War, or they’ve fought at low levels in the Civil War or one of the earlier wars compared with that. Now, these are people who have risen right to the top of the ranks of the military. Now, if you actually look at the last few decades, America has seemed to have swung in a very different direction in my view. You used to have people who very, was president, who very proudly sort of celebrated them, their military prowess or their taking part in the war.

So Harry Truman fought in the Second World War, sorry, the first World War. Obviously Eisenhower we’re going to look at it in a minute. But then you get John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, all took part in the second World War in some form. But you kind of get to the ‘90s and you start to see something quite different happen, which is first off with Bill Clinton. So Bill Clinton has this whole controversy around him about being a draught dodger. And was he a draught dodger? You know, was he helped? Was he better? And that becomes a big theme, particularly of the 1992 campaign. He still wins that election by a very sizable electoral college mandate. Not quite a landslide, but it’s a very good win. And he beats the incumbent president, George H. W. Bush. Now, George H. W. Bush had fought in the Second World War. His plane had crashed on a mission over Japan. He was very much what you would call a hero. He was somebody who had engaged in the war and come out of it well. But when America had the choice, they didn’t do it on a binary choice, which I think the Republicans at that point wanted, which was hero versus draught dodger. Let’s paint it in those ways.

Actually, no, what they did was we’re not happy with the economy and the incumbent president got punished for a weak economy. Whether it was his fault or not, it’s a different matter. But that was the overriding thing. And trying to paint this around military service kind of failed. You then move on four years, and you look at the election of 1996. 1996 is Bill Clinton again, but this time against Bob Dole. Bob Dole, a decorated war hero, badly injured, and always carried the pen in his hand because his arm had so been badly injured during the Second World War. A genuine hero, first class, et cetera. Again, Clinton wins by an overwhelming amount. So in a sense, as you see, tried and tested the idea that war hero meets non-war hero, the tried and tested formula of war hero wins doesn’t hold out. George W. Bush served in the Air Force, but never, and again, there was some controversy in 2000, never went abroad during Vietnam. Did his service in the southern states of America flying around, doing whatever you do, flying around in the southern states of the America during the Vietnam War.

You get to 2008, and I think 2008 is really, the one that’s interesting for me is you have Barack Obama who actually didn’t, kind of wasn’t of the age where a war was happening, that he was too young for the Vietnam War, and he was kind of way past it by the time Afghanistan and ultimately Iraq happens 'cause so therefore you see him versus John McCain. And John McCain, in my view, is one of the great war heroes of all time. He’s one of the great heroes of all time, irrespective of his politics. He was a great man in my view. And you again have this juxtaposition of a relatively unexperienced, non-military person against somebody of great stature. And again, America chooses the issue again about the economy, in my view in 2008. And Barack Obama absolutely routes John McCain. Finally 2016, 2020 is, Trump has never served. He had heel spurs and those heel spurs got him multiple deferments from serving in Vietnam war. And yeah, didn’t stop him winning a tennis tournament, but apparently they couldn’t be in the war itself.

So you have this more recent narrative of the military not really matter, but I’d like to kind of step back and say, “Okay, is that how it always was?” That’s kind of that preamble. So I’m going to share my screen now, and I’m just going to go and have a look and just make us think about the context, and then when you get to Eisenhower, how important Eisenhower was as the last Great general so far. You know, those things might change again of somebody who’s heavily involved in the military and went to the highest levels of it, but then becomes a really consequential president. But of course, it all starts at the beginning. And the first president of the United States was the guy who had been commander in chief in the Revolutionary War. And George Washington is interesting. He retires from the military and retires from public service and goes back to Mount Vernon. He retires with a little R and and goes off and doesn’t genuinely aspire to the thing that has yet to exist, which is the presidency. He feels he has served his country well, et cetera. He has been a lieutenant general and when it comes to the fact that the first 10 years in the constitutional convention hasn’t worked so well, and they realise they need a head of state figure, he is overwhelmingly the popular choice because he has such an important stature and almost by his reticence about being involved means that he can be trusted.

Interestingly, he also has no children. So that means that you’re not going to create a hereditary king or this will be passed on from generation to generation. So Washington is great in so many levels, but that military service and that helping founding the nation and seeing what seemed insuperable odds going against the biggest army in the world in terms of the British, that creates the first president, but it also creates the first general turned into a president. And I think that’s really important. And it’s interesting by the way, is there’s various grades of generals. I’m not going to go into the arcane levels of this, but he was a lieutenant general, but in 1974, General Ford posthumously made him general of the armies of the United States, which is a level 12 in military terms, which up until that point, there’d only been an 11 and the level 12 means that it’s above a five-star general. So technically, posthumously, he became the only six-star general in history.

But that gives you an idea of there’s something right at the beginning. I always like to go back, we all often look at history and think about the here and the now or that particular period, but you always go back to context. So right from the beginning of the United States, the idea that the military was a way of going into the highest office in the nation was valid right from the beginning. You go forward a few years. By the way, Jefferson Adams served. So you have those, a bit like the batch that comes after the Second World War. You know, you hand, and also after the Civil War, you have a whole series of people who are in politics who have served because it was the great conflict of their time. So you have, after Washington, you have a number of presidents who have obviously served during the Revolutionary War. You go forward and this man with big hair is Andrew Jackson, as I’m sure you identified, and he was a major general in the War of 1812 against the British. And he did very well in that and he was very popular. He parlayed that into a populist kind of approach to politics. And in 1824, runs for the presidency.

Of course, the presidency is not done by the popular vote. He wins the popular vote very substantially, and he is somebody who is then kind of wins. But of course, the electoral colleges we know can go in sort of certainly weird directions. And he gets the biggest amount of votes, but there are four candidates. And ultimately, a deal is done where John Quincy Adams becomes president by cobbling together enough electoral college votes. Andrew Jackson is furious, goes off in essentially a monumental kind of sulk-soaked anger for four years, and then returns and wins the electoral college in 1828. So he parlays his war record into being the president. And I think that’s an interesting kind of example again of where a very specific, he ran on his military record more than anything in terms of what he’d managed to achieve and how well he’d done by the nation itself. You fast forward and again, in the meantime, I’m just selecting a few just to give the highlights of the narrative. You have Ulysses S. Grant. So he becomes president in 1868. He has been the general of the Army during the final years of the Civil War. So he’s from the north, he’s appointed by Lincoln. and he helps turn around what was not the greatest shape for the north in terms of the military campaigns that they’d been doing for the first few years of the Civil War. And he ultimately triumphs in 1864.

Actually, funny enough, Lincoln invites him to the theatre on the night to join him at the theatre on the night of his assassination. And he says he’s otherwise engaged. So there’s a brush with history that might mean he’s the great Civil War general, but that’s where we end with him. After Lincoln’s assassination, you have the fairly catastrophic presidency of his vice president, Andrew Jackson, not Andrew Jackson, what am I saying, sorry. Andrew Johnson. Andrew Johnson is impeached and only loses, only avoids being removed from the presidency by one vote in the Senate in the trial, but he isn’t able to run for reelection in 1868. And Grant uses, again, and is an overwhelmingly very popular and is swept into the White House on the, you’ve saved the union, you’ve done tremendously well. His presidency’s very controversial. You kind of look back and I’ve read accounts that both say that he was a great general, which I think is undisputed, but that he’s usually a great general, comma, but a lousy president.

You know, that his administration was very corrupt, all of this type of stuff. I think a lot of to-and-fro about that, but that’s for kind of secondary. He does win overwhelmingly reelection. And for me, it’s again that bit of, you’ve won the war for us. This is probably to Eisenhower, you’ve won the war for us and we therefore trust you to take over running the country. So there’s that kind of arc and narrative that which starts with him. You’ve then got people like Teddy Roosevelt who isn’t, by the way, he doesn’t become a general, but becomes famous because of his exploits in the army and as part of the war against Spain in 1898. And he again parlays that first to being vice president. So he’s McKinley’s vice president in 1900. And when McKinley’s assassinated, he becomes president. But again, the military record piece plays nicely to him, although obviously he’s not, he’s much lower down in the ranks. But then that’s, shows there is precedent, not the word president, for Eisenhower. And it shows that there is a narrative that successful generals who’ve led their country and led their armies have then gone on to the highest office of the politics. And Eisenhower very much fits this mould.

Unlike the others where wars happened and they kind of got involved, he was very much right from the beginning, a career politician. Sorry, career. He was never a career politician. He was very much a career military guy. He was born in Texas in 1890 and he’s the third of seven boys. His parents moved to Kansas. I have this thesis and it’s not completely bulletproof, but it’s mostly good. His American friends, those of you who are on here, you tend to like one of two narratives around your presidency. You either like rich person, patrician, rich family does well, let’s appoint them, or poor boy. And of course, it’s always been men, poor boy does well. So Eisenhower is definitely in the category of poor boy does well. I mean, he and his brother decided, because there wasn’t enough money in the family, that they would take alternate years of going to college. The kind of deal fell apart and eventually, Ike or Little Ike as he was known, they went to West Point and got a scholarship to West Point.

So took himself out of the normal kind of academic running in terms of university, but went of course to the greatest military academy in the United States. He joins there in 1911 and graduates in 1915. What’s fascinating is that class, the graduating class of 1915 produces more senior military people than any other in the history of America. It’s the ultimate big class that has so many generals, so many majors, all of this stuff. It is just the ace class of all time. And of course, amongst that ace of class of all time is you have probably the most successful general in certainly last a hundred years if if not longer. He stays in the army. And actually, it’s an interesting choice. He doesn’t get to serve actually in the military or in combat during the first World War, unlike his predecessor, Harry Truman, who actually enlists a much lower rank and goes and fights in France.

Eisenhower is actually put into training and he trains people to go and fight. And so he serves, but he serves in the United States during the first World War. So actually, Eisenhower never sees active combat as a soldier. We think of him as the great soldier, which he is in many ways, but actually in terms of going there, battle fire, all of this stuff, that’s not him. And so he finishes and much to his disappointment, by the way, but he finishes at the end of the First World War when America brings its troops back and actually retrenches with isolationism into being kind of the isolationist nation that rejects the League of Nations and kind of pulls up the drawbridge. So being in the army at that point really isn’t kind of like that great. It’s very much a thing that you do within the parameters of the United States and the United States’ territories. So for me, it’s an interesting bit of where he’s very committed to the army, even though the Army doesn’t offer by that point, that much to do. And the army shrinks massively.

It goes down to a couple of hundred thousand people. And during the 1920s where Eisenhower goes very steadily up the ranks, this is not due to being, doing things in action. This is very much doing as a staff officer of somebody who’s organising, making stuff happen. And actually, if you look at the secret source for Eisenhower, it is his ability to make stuff happen and to organise things. He had a brain that was just genius at a level of order, planning, all of those things. So he wasn’t a big swashbuckler, he wasn’t a, and particularly, you’d look at Grant and you’d look at Jackson who were out there in the shell fire, kind of guns blazing, et cetera. That wasn’t Eisenhower. Eisenhower is your logistical genius. And actually, it’s something that I think served him tremendously well as president. He carries on during the ‘20s into the '30s, and then over the course of the 1930s and into the early 1940s up until 1941, he’s very lucky in a way that he has patronage of, and I see somebody’s already put in his patronage of three great generals who were very much wartime inaction generals. And he’s chief of staff under general MacArthur who they have quite a few run-ins and times to come.

Also under George Marshall, who becomes Secretary of State under Truman and then also under General Pershing, as Jacob says, is the other level 12 general, but doesn’t go into politics, interestingly. Just has missiles named after him. So you have him being the faithful, really supportive soldier to these great generals and they pay that back and he then progresses very well. So much so that when America enters the war after Pearl Harbour, he goes over to Europe and he is first put in charge of Operation Torch, which is in North Africa, and then ultimately in Sicily. And that’s his first time actually commanding something in action. So you’ve joined essentially the military back in 1911. It takes him to 1942, '43 to see action and be part of the action. He does it well, a few setbacks, but mostly is good. Comes to London and at this point, the road to the preparation for D-Day. And there are various choices, the initial choice.

You know, on one hand you’ve got the British and the British are assuming Montgomery, Earl Montgomery of Alamein is going to be in charge. Actually, the Americans assume that George Marshall is to be in charge and there’s this kind of clash. And what actually happens is that the Americans kind of say, “Look, we’re going to be running the show.” And that makes a lot of sense and was right. And, but Roosevelt decides to keep Marshall as overall commander of both theatres in Washington because he feels he needs him there rather than running the one kind of major front in Europe. Remember it’s a massive two-front war that’s going on and Marshall chooses his protege, Eisenhower, to go and basically prepare for and get ready for the attack on Europe and attack on Nazi Germany through France. Montgomery is outraged. Montgomery thinks, he records in his diary that Eisenhower, very nice man, typically British kind of way of doing it.

Well, dude, very nice, but yeah, useless. He’d never seen combat. He doesn’t, he’s going to be just organising stuff. He hasn’t got clue. And when Eisen, I love this particular story that makes me laugh a lot is when Eisenhower meets the king for the first time, it’s just the two of them there and the king says, “Well, how is it going on getting on with Montgomery?” And Eisenhower honestly turns around and says, “Well, to be honest, I think he really wants my job.” And the king, without missing a beat, turns around and says, “Oh, thank God for that because I’ve always thought he wants mine.” So you see, Eisenhower knows how to charm, knows how to play people. He’s a great coalition builder. He’s a person that everybody trusts in the room even if they feel that they are kind of, we’re better than him. Certainly, the British would always condescend and feel they’re probably better than him. But the reality is a way of going into Europe that ultimately is hugely successful.

There are ultimately setbacks in the year afterwards where the Battle of the Bulge, various things don’t go well. But ultimately, he drives the arc of narrative over defeat of Germany, right the way through from that kind of late 1943, right the way through to the collapse of the Nazi regime in 1945. He’s also great one for contingency planning. So his auto, the ghost writer, the writer that helped him write his memoirs, found, going through his documents, the speech or the press release that he was going to give had D-Day failed. So he had written this in advance. So he had the scenario where we’ve landed, et cetera, et cetera. And then the scenario, well, it’s went wrong, I decided to do this, very much taking personal responsibility, which you have to kind of accept. We win, the Allies win, and he is seen very much by actually not just the American public, but the French and the British public as the guy who won the war in Europe. Obviously, the war is still going on and MacArthur is still running the war out in Asia, but Europe, it’s done. And then you have the problem and the advantage of then the Cold War coming around at the same time.

So Eisenhower stays in Europe and he becomes military governor of Germany. Obviously, Germany is partitioned, but he’s now starting to negotiate with the Russians. And the Russians, of course, have steamrolled it after the massive setbacks they have in 1941 and '42. They’ve steamrolled it right the way in through Western Europe and taken control, physical control of a lot of Germany, as well as all of Eastern Europe. So he’s now coming to have to deal with what is brewing to be the Cold War. He does that 'til 1948. And in 1948, he steps down from the army. Apparently, although there’s a lot of debate about this, Harry Truman, who of course has become president in 1945 when Roosevelt dies, goes to him and offers him a deal. He says, “Look, you should be president. If you declare yourself as a Democrat, I will be your vice president.” I don’t know whether that really happened. It’s a great story if it did, but there’s a lot toing and froing historically about that.

But what it does show is that by 1948, he is definitely being considered as a future president. And the other bit that’s very interesting, he’s being wooed very much for both parties, both the Republicans and the Democrats see him as potentially their lifeline. By 1948, Truman scores his famous victory, but he’s not going to stand, he doesn’t stand again in 1952. So you will have a situation where those four years, both sides are regularly trying to woo him. He basically stands down, and this is the thing that is interesting about him, and this is something that I think becomes really, really important, this quote. And there’s a whole series of quotes like this for him. This quote gives you an idea of how much actually he will go to, he will go to war, but not when, only when he has to and when it’s necessary. And that piece of, “I’m going to do this and I will do it when pushed,” I think is hugely important, particularly with regards to the Chinese in Asia and particularly around the Korean War and certainly with the Soviet Union in the 1950s when he’s president.

He’s not somebody who will go to war to prove himself. He’s been there, he’s done it, and he will go there when it is necessary or if it becomes absolutely necessary. And I think that’s something to kind of bear in mind because I think he’s quite special in that way. He, after he steps down, he goes and becomes president of Columbia University in New York. It’s not the greatest fit on earth. For those of you, like me, who’ve worked in a university at various points, yeah, telling people to do stuff, you know, generals do orders and stuff and it’s not so much the way in university. So I think he enjoyed the prestige, it got him back on mainland US. It also allowed him to write his memoirs or co-write his memoirs with his ghostwriters. But, you know, wasn’t great. And I don’t think he would’ve been particularly happy with it. To my knowledge, I think it’s interesting, I think Woodrow Wilson is the only other college university president who then goes on to be president. He’s rescued, to some degree, it’s a mutual rescue. Harry Truman is trying to get NATO going. It’s really important that there is a response to the Cold War and the Soviet Union, particularly after the Berlin airlift.

Knowing that America is in danger of slipping back to isolationism, he needs to have NATO but he also needs NATO to have credibility so that it will be established and that Congress will ratify it 'cause it’s a treaty and Congress has to ratify treaties. And he calls on Eisenhower. Will he go and be the first supreme commander of NATO? And he says yes. And I think that’s really good for NATO and for Truman. And actually, it was a job perfectly suited for building something and organising something and aligning things using his amazing diplomatic skills, all of those things where he was a great choice. And also he got him out of Columbia. So I think there’s, it’s a positive thing for all concerned. But he comes to 1951 and then in sorts into 1952, and he’s based in Brussels. And the joke is there’s this constant trail of American politicians of both the Democrats and the Republicans trailing through Europe and they stop in Brussels and they kind of say, “Come and be our presidential candidate.”

It’s obvious by now that Truman isn’t going to run again, or if he does, he’ll do badly. It’s also likely that the nominee for the Republican party, remember now that the Republican party have been out of government, out of the presidency for 20 years. So they are desperate that the nominee will be Senator Taft of Ohio, President Taft’s son, who is very much of the old school Republican isolationism, et cetera, et cetera, and that’s not good. And Henry Cabot Lodge, who’s the senator for Massachusetts, Republican senator of Massachusetts, is the one who ultimately seals the deal with Eisenhower by calling on his duty to say, “Look, if you don’t run the Republican nomination, it’ll go to Taft.” And after 20 years, there’s a really good chance whoever the Republican wins will win, whoever the Republicans nominate will win. So therefore, let’s just realise this is what you, all of your work about engaging Europe, all of this stuff will be for naught. And that plays to Eisenhower civic duty and his conscience, and he agrees to be the nominee.

The Republican party, as it has a want to do, splits itself a bit internally, but there are primaries, et cetera, and Eisenhower wins. He wins the nomination on the first to vote. He’s a general. He’s never run for political office. By the way, this quote, I love it actually it’s from 1964, but I think it works at this period about generals and politicians. So I think it’s worth having a little read of that while I’m chatting. But this is him accepting the nomination at the Republican convention. He is, he needs guidance. And what’s very interesting is Thomas Dewey, who was the failed 1944 and 1948 Republican candidate, basically helps craft his campaign and makes a lot of the key kind of decisions. Eisenhower has a very kind of bumpy ride, initially makes some schoolboy errors in terms of kind of being too candid, not candid enough, not really knowing how politicians work, but he settles into it. He, in my view, ends up being a very good president.

You know, the candidate thing, not so much. And that’s kind of fine. Interestingly, by 1956, when he’s running a second time, he really doesn’t run that much the second time. It’s just, “Look what I’ve done, do you want any more of it? I’m up for it, let’s do it.” But 1952, he has to show that he can step from being the great general to being the president. And I think that bit, I think is, it’s work in progress. What he does have is probably, in my view, the greatest campaign logo of all time. It just works. And it everywhere in America, it just summed up this guy from Kansas that everybody trusted who’d saved America and the Allies, all of this stuff, but he’s also approachable, he’s home spun. It’s all of those things. I like Ike, as I said. I just think it’s the greatest campaign slogan in history and we kind of all still remember it. So for me, he’s helped hugely by a great kind of campaign, but he’s also helped to some degree because of two other reasons. The Americans are fed up with 20 years of the Democrats. Every party, every presidency, everything has its time where it’s done. And 20 years is definitely time for a change. And what Eisenhower and the Republicans run on is what is called K1C2, which is K, Korea.

The Korean War is now fully underway and has been blamed on the Democrats. Communism, that they’re soft on communism and they’ve allowed China to slip, the Russians to take, the Soviet Union to take control of Eastern Europe. All of these things have happened under them. And also, as with all parties who’ve been in power for 20 years, there’s corruption. Now, in reality, was there any more corruption than any other point? Probably not, but there’s this perception of corruption that is there as well. So you have, that is the overarching campaign screen. Truman is furious by the way, because he feels that Eisenhower is very much part of the decisions around Korea. He also was very much part of how you dealt with communism and felt a little bit of like, “Seriously? You’re campaigning on that?”

But Eisenhower tries to rise above it. And the reality is, is had Eisenhower come out and said, “I am a Democrat,” Eisenhower would’ve been given the Democrat nomination and I think absolutely, Eisenhower would become the president as a Democrat. Eisenhower was one of these figures that transcended politics. You’re going back to that George Washington level of non-partisanship. So had he chosen the other way, then it would’ve been 24 and 28 years of Democrat presidents. And then who knows what would’ve happened to the Republican party having been out of power for so long? What would they have done at that point? One of the interesting political decisions, which is a lecture that I’ll give in a couple of weeks time, is his choice of vice president. And he decides to go for a much younger, much more conservative, much more partisan Republican in Richard Nixon. It’s a very interesting decision. It’s a very controversial decision. It has a lot of bumps, but that’s a bit of a spoiler alert because I’ll tell you more about that when we look at Ike and Dicky in a couple of weeks time. But he also, because he wants to be the statesman, he wants to not get involved with dirty politics, Nixon proves to be a very good foil for him.

So Nixon goes around campaigning, bashing the Democrats who have chosen a great orator in Adlai Stevenson II, who is the governor of Illinois, but somebody who just doesn’t seem to have it. I don’t know how many election years Adlai Stevenson would’ve been able to translate from his nominee to presidency, but he certainly wasn’t going to do it against Eisenhower. And what you see is, and this is a picture of the electoral college, is that Eisenhower wins this enormous landslide in the electoral college. Basically, the Democrats are left, winning solely that old tradition bastion of the solid Democrat South, which is still kind of the legacy of the Civil War. And they’re the only states he wins. And even then, Eisenhower is able to peel off Virginia, Tennessee, Texas. So it’s a monumental landslide for Eisenhower. And he settles into the presidency well. Truman, who has liked him a lot, they kind of fall out in this last year of Truman’s presidency. Truman takes a lot of the criticism about his administration very personally and blames Eisenhower for allowing it to happen, even though Eisenhower doesn’t necessarily say it himself, it’s his people who are saying it.

And then there is a big falling out on the fact that as an act of kindness, Truman brings Eisenhower’s son to the inauguration and Eisenhower absolutely loses it, saying, “How dare somebody,” not realising Truman had done it, “how the hell are you here? What the hell? You’re on active military service. There’s no way you should be given special dispensation,” et cetera. And Truman’s like, “Well, I kind of did it.” Eisenhower calls down a few days later, but it’s not great. And for two people who had to work so closely together, that kind of presidential campaign that Truman is involved in 'cause Truman’s, despite not running, is still trying to help Stevenson. It doesn’t end well for the two of them, although they kind of have a bit of reproach more later, but it’s not brilliant. And Eisenhower brings so many really interesting choices into things. One of the first things, he’s the first president to have a chief of staff.

He brings that military concept in. And for all of us who’ve watched “West Wing,” you need Leo, you need CJ, you need that chief of staff that’s now taken for granted. But up until Eisenhower, it wasn’t there. And so that’s number one. Number two is he makes, what I consider in history, quite a controversial choice is that he chooses two brothers as John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles as Secretary of State and head of the CIA. And they are aren’t conservatives. They are very much hawks in terms of their military views and their foreign policy views. And particularly, and we’ll talk in a minute about Guatemala, is they have very reactionary views in a lot of ways. And I would say much more, in a sense, much more militaristic and conservative than Eisenhower himself. And they also get Eisenhower into trouble, especially around the Soviet invasion of Hungary where the Dulles brothers have been encouraging the Eastern block to rise up. And then when they do, and they expect America to come to their aid, America won’t and can’t.

But anyway, they are really part of that infrastructure. And obviously, having two very close siblings running the CIA and the State Department, there is not necessarily conflict of interest, but there is certainly an alliance that shouldn’t, there should be a healthy frisson on between the two rather than being in lockstep. One of the major problems Eisenhower faces is Europe is in stasis to some degree. The Cold War is locked and entrenched both sides, but you have both sides really in flux in Asia. You have the Korean War going on. It started onto Truman, nothing to do with, not anything Truman had done, but he gets there. You have the problems with MacArthur who makes the bad situation worse. Eisenhower pretty quickly gets to peace negotiations. Of course, technically the conflict has never ended. It’s still going on now, but you get a ceasefire that happens very early on. And I think it’s because the Chinese and the North Koreans feared what Eisenhower will do. This is the great general is now in charge as opposed to this little guy from Missouri who we’re not really sure will really follow through on things and is fighting with MacArthur. Eisenhower goes this region.

You see him here being greeted by mass enormous crowds in Taiwan. He goes there very clearly to show support for, what was the Republic of China, which America still had relations with as opposed to communist or what was known as then Red China. He also starts a commitment to Vietnam, the French pullout in 1954, and America slowly starts to get involved in the Vietnam conflict. America’s involvement starts under Johnson, under Eisenhower, escalates somewhat under Kennedy, gets out of control under Johnson, and then kind of reaches its apotheosis under Nixon. So Southeast Asia and actually North and South Asia in terms of Korea and Vietnam we start, are big issues. Also, you see that he views start, Eisenhower is under him the phrase the domino theory. This idea of if Korea goes, then Japan will go. If Vietnam goes, then Cambodia and then Thailand, et cetera.

This idea that if you don’t stop the communists, things will just get out of control. And that’s very much the foreign policy mantra of you’ve seen containment under Truman, but Eisenhower really kind of takes it to the next level and saying, “Right, okay, there’s a damn good reason why we’re not going to go any further.” He makes a number of interesting decisions that play out later. I mentioned before, Guatemala. Guatemala nationalises its fruit industry. Not that it’s communist, no, it just has natural resources. The United Fruit Company, which basically runs the whole of central and Caribbean in terms of fruit production, appeals to the Dulles brothers who were used to be, one of them used to be their legal counsel, and the Guatemalan government got deposed. Arbenz, the president, presidential palace gets strafed by American jets, Arbenz gets killed, and Central America gets back in line until the '80s when things start to unravel. In a similar way, the Shah is deposed in Iran and first the British, and then ultimately the Americans restore him.

That works until 1979 when he’s deposed again. And some of the world’s mess that we have now around Iran dates back to a democratic regime getting rid of a dictator is overturned by Eisenhower’s guys and 25 years later, the Americans are not forgiven. So some seeds of bigger problems take place under Eisenhower. What he also does though is he initially doesn’t deal with McCarthy. General McCarthy becomes a massive issue under Truman. He’s a demagogue and nasty man and Eisenhower dodges it a lot. Eisenhower doesn’t like confrontation. Really odd for a military man. This is the bit I find him a bit of an odd one is he doesn’t like confrontation. He’ll always get people to go and do stuff for him to go and sack people or whatever. And he ignores Eisenhower, sorry, McCarthy until McCarthy starts attacking the army. And then at that point, Eisenhower works and helps get the destruction of McCarthy, which should have happened far earlier.

Although this is mostly around foreign policy, I think the one thing that is interesting is that one of the great things presidents get to do is nominate members of the Supreme Court. And if you’re really lucky, you get to nominate a Supreme Court chief justice. Eisenhower gets two opportunities to three actually. Ultimately, he likes one of them, but two of them turn out to be unsatisfactory in his terms. And the main one is he appoints Earl Warren, who’s the governor of California to the chief justice of the Supreme Court. In my view, he becomes one of the great Supreme Court justices of all time. Amazing man who did amazing achievements in sort of moving America forward in the 1950s and '60s, particularly around civil rights. Eisenhower wasn’t best pleased, even though he was a Republican and put him in there. He ends up far more liberal than Eisenhower would’ve liked. He has, oh, I’ve just done something to the questions.

He has a massive heart attack in 1955. He really thinks about not running again and decides ultimately that he will do. In the prelude to the 1956 election, he’s running against Adlai Stevenson again. The Democrats kind of can’t get over the fact that they’ve had a really bad loss last time. They go with the same guy. And strangely enough, same result. The Suez Crisis happens and hungry crisis happens in those last few weeks before the election. And Eisenhower is genuinely worried that he might lose, but he doesn’t. And he again wins a massive majority. Second terms are always problematic for American presidents. They’re automatically on the day after election a lame duck because they know that they’re never going to run again, certainly since the 22nd Amendment. So he starts, well, huge majority, but he’s faced with a lot of challenges. 1957, you have issues around desegregation in Little Rock in Arkansas where you have students trying to enrol in what were traditionally being white schools and universities.

It gets so bad that Eisenhower is the first general, first president since the Civil War to send in American troops into America, i.e. on their own soil. He doesn’t like doing it. Eisenhower is very, very slow on civil rights. It’s the area that I think he doesn’t cover himself in glory and he doesn’t like having to do it, but he’s a rule of law man and a rule man. And the Supreme Court has said, “This has got to happen, it’s got to happen, and therefore he will enforce the rules.” And that’s really important from his point of view. Rules matter. Ultimately, the way I think you can define his presidency, and this is a quote from Khrushchev, is that how during the 1950s, how did the relationship with the Soviet Union work? And I think ultimately, this is Eisenhower’s great achievement up until he becomes president. The Russians are constantly pushing and prodding and trying to take advantage as are the Chinese in Asia. And they don’t really rate Truman. I rate Truman, but they didn’t. And as a result there’s a lot of push all over the world, Greece and Turkey, in Asia, in the Middle East, et cetera.

It kind of doesn’t stop under Eisenhower, but the Cold War goes on pause for a large degree during that period. And I think that is a great achievement of Eisenhower because in a way the Russians was scared of him. They knew that he was the great general, they knew that he when pushed he would push back and as a result they stopped pushing. Didn’t mean everything went, Vietnam started et cetera, et cetera, stuff going on. But if you look back at that period of Eisenhower’s presidency, it was one old relative car. The 1940s up 'til '52 under Truman, really problematic period, lots of contrast. Under Kennedy, they start to press and prod again, Berlin Wall goes up, lots of different things start to happen. Escalates under Johnson and then you get Nixon and detente. Eisenhower is that period of kind of calm. There’s big arms builds up, there’s lots of worries and threats about various things. But actually if you look at it through the arc of history, it’s a relatively calm period. And I think that’s something that you’ve got to take into account.

However, the copy book gets blotted just at the last minute. Just as Eisenhower in 1960 is going to go over to Paris to have arms reduction talks with Khrushchev you have the U-2 disaster against Eisenhower’s better judgement . There is spy planes going over the Soviet Union and one gets shot down. This is quote from Truman, sorry, from Khrushchev. And they say, we’ve shot down a spy play. Eisenhower lies knowing perfectly well it was a spy plane and said it wasn’t, it was a weather balloon and this is the thing. So the Americans have this whole parallel kind of narrative. And then suddenly the Russians appear with Gary Powers and say that in fact there was a spy plane, here’s the guy who flew the spy plane and you’ve been lying along, massive embarrassment for Eisenhower. Eisenhower said, “If I could resign now, I would do because it’s so awful.” It destroys the chances of an arms reduction meeting in Paris.

In Paris turns out to be a debacle and it really ends the presidency on a low note. And I think that’s something that is a real shame, given how well he managed foreign affairs mostly during that period, particularly the issues around Soviet Union. Just as a passing thing, Eisenhower’s kind of lasting memorial in America in my view is the interstate highway system and the bit that I never knew, which is, 'cause you always wander around and you always see that the five stars symbol of the interstate system. And it’s the basically for people not in America, it’s the motorways. It’s the way up until that point, America had very poor infrastructure and apparently Eisenhower really took to the fact that in Germany you had the auto barns, et cetera. And I was like, “Wow.” Actually they have proper roads, things work really well. But the symbol of the interstate system is the five stars, which of course Eisenhower was the five star general. That’s his legacy, he lives until 1969. Mostly the last 10 years of his life in poor health. He was a 60 a day smoker. He ended up, I think having seven heart attacks during his 1955 to before he died.

Still consulted by Kennedy, still consulted by Johnson in terms of military and particularly around initially Bay of Pigs, but then also Vietnam. And he is hands over. Now one of the things I think it’s interesting, which a parting thing to leave you with is that he makes this farewell speech and he talks about the military industrial complex that’s been developed during the Second World War. Now that has got a life of its own. And I think it’s incredibly prescient. In a couple of years later, when you have the Cuban Missile Crisis, this Kennedy stands up to what I would say was the military industrial complex, which are trying to push him towards war. And Eisenhower spots this and it almost, it needs a general, the great general to be able to say, “Hang on, this is all getting a bit out of control.” And I think that for me is fascinating. So an incredibly consequential president, certainly in the post-war period, but somebody, I think it was a consequential from, if you look at the whole span of America.

I mean you see these rankings, one just come out recently of American presidents and who rates where, and he tends to rate in the top 10. Stability, quiet, peace, prosperity. Of course, America goes through the biggest unprecedented boom of growth. Wages go up during his presidency by 45%. Millions upon millions of people go into the middle class. So lots go right under his presidency. There’s a period of narrative afterwards of, “Oh, he was lazy, played golf, et cetera, too much.” But the reality was he was completely in control of what he does. I think the shadow over his legacy is definitely his whole sort of history on civil rights. But in terms of foreign policy, in terms of domestic growth, et cetera, there’s a lot of positives that can be said. So that’s, that’s the end of of my slides.

Q&A and Comments

I’m just going to quickly look and see if I can see some questions. I’ve a couple of questions. One about Milton Eisenhower, his brother about being, he was, Milton Eisenhower I think was president of three different universities. Sorry I, it’s quite a condensed lecture, so I can’t say every Eisenhower I could do many, many hours on. And for me that I just some stuff didn’t make it. He was very close to that, as I said there were seven brothers, but Milton and him were, it was his ultimate confidant. He was the person that he could turn to all the way through. Peter asked about his role in the Suez Crisis. I think the Suez Crisis is probably a lecture on its own, but certainly I think it’s fascinating. He was, when the conflict started and the British and the Americans went into Suez under arguably false pretences against NASA, which certainly, the British saw as a major threat and Anthony Eden saw as a potential another Hitler.

Eisenhower is furious because A, he doesn’t believe they should be doing it and B, he believes that they are taking a massive risk around what they’re doing and alienating what was then known as the third world. But also he’s furious that basically the two allies, the French and the British lied to him and he takes it quite personally. He basically lays down the law to them and causes a crisis in terms of the British financial system. That means that he ultimately is responsible for the toppling of Anthony Eden and Anthony Eden’s prime ministership is broken after that. So, but it’s interesting as well that Suez happens as does Hungary right before the election.

So he is making the interesting, the positive thing about what he does is he makes decisions that he feels is right, both of which he worries could lose in the election, but he makes those decisions anyway. And MacArthur and Eisenhower had a torrid relationship. Marilyn’s got a quote about how Eisenhower was just a glorified clerk, which doesn’t surprise me because MacArthur was a thoroughly unpleasant man and also was quite jealous I think as well. And then, yeah. There’s a couple of question about Nixon, which we’ll come back to. I’m going to leave you there. Sorry if I haven’t finished, I haven’t been able to answer all of them.

Q: Was the two nominees that Eisenhower said were bad choices? A: Well Warren who’s the Chief Justice and Justice William Brennan. So there’s that.

Anyway, hopefully you all enjoyed that. I’m back, as I said, I can’t remember the exact date, but I’m doing a sequel to this, which is what I think is one of the great fascinating relationships, we touched on it very briefly here, the relationship between Eisenhower and Nixon. His protege, his partner in so many different things. But also a very interestingly challenging relationship in many ways. So I’m quite excited to do that one. So hopefully, I think it’s in two weeks time and I would love you to join me then.

So thanks very much. Hopefully you have a good evening or a good afternoon or wherever you are. Thanks very much.