Eisenhower: The Presidency
Ambrose, Stephen E.
on hard-currency visits to the West. "The dividing line between them," says Scammell, "was still the barbed-wire fence and the ploughed strip, a ghostly barrier that continued to separate...
...All they are concerned about is to see thai their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes...
...When would we catch up with the Russians...
...It offers a visionary step-bystep plan to authors who have researched the cause and effect of excessive government spending...
...A prophet is not without honor save in affluent exile.' There is a sense of anticlimax about the last six chapters of Scammell's mammoth biography...
...What then would have been gained by Ike's acquiescence to demands for additional billions of defense spending during each of his years as President...
...For that reason i think it best to resist the temptation of trying to draw up a balance' sheet on our 34th President...
...Why wasn't the United States doing more...
...9 The Power of Being Debt-Free is a challenge to the public and private sectors to act in unison...
...Anyone who doubts the validity of Solzhenitsyn's warning to the West should read the memo reproduced by Dunlop in which Henry Kissinger urges President Ford to avoid officially honoring the exiled dissident...
...Tirelessly throughout his two terms he preached a fundamentalist gospel of fiscal responsibility (though in fact he had to endure unbalanced budgets in four of his eight fiscal years and ended up with an aggregate deficit of $18 billion...
...His inability to identify a successor in whom he could have full confidence had more to do, I think, with his own self-esteem than with the objective failings of those around him...
...His biographer notes repeated Soviet rebuffs to U.S...
...And yet his dislike for the Soviet Union was at least as great as Ronald Reagan's...
...If you can't imagine, then consult the nearest Mexican...
...Eisenhower refused to trust the Russians to even the slightest degree . . . . This was good policy for winning votes, and may even have been good for achieving limited victories in the Cold War, but it was damaging to the cause of world peace...
...Scammell, however, is concerned less with judging Solzhenitsyn than with describing him...
...And despite his frequent golf-andbridge vacations (during which, in any case, he couldn't escape the responsibilities of office) he was a prodigiously hard worker--up at six for breakfast and newspapers, at his desk by eight, straight through without a break till a working lunch at one, back at his desk until six or later, a cocktail, dinner off a TV tray while watching the evening news, then more paper work till about eleven, when he would finally knock off to spend an hour painting, before bed and a little light reading...
...The burning pronouncements with which he once shocked the conscience of a planet have become his "familiar litany of the West's failings...
...foreign policy then in place...
...Take the agrarian reforms that were the burning issue of Emiliano Zapata...
...reaction to Solzhenitsyn...
...He, like the rest of us, has had to come to terms with the fact thal the line between good and evil passes through each human heart...
...Was not the President's insistence on fiscal soundness imperiling the nation's security...
...The cries of pain and pleas of dire necessity issuing from the Pentagon simply left him unmoved...
...they continue, as Ambrose rightly says, "to divide the nation's political parties and people in the decades that [have] followed...
...This volume shows with what depressing regularity Sovietmanufactured lies and half-truths about Solzhenitsyn get taken seriously in such organs of enlightened opinion as the Guardian, the New York Times, Die Zeit, and l'Humanit~ The case of l'Humanit~is particularly interesting...
...His portrit is fair, detailed, widely documented, but above all integrated...
...Only now, with the publication of the second and final volume of Ambrose's magnificent biography, can we see the man and his administration as nearly whole as we are likely to for another generation...
...Far from being the indolent, ignorant figurehead of liberal demonology, he was as involved and well-informed a leader as we have had in the post-World War II era...
...Riding shows how reforms are ever sacrificed to political stability, how economic imperatives are frustrated by the official socialist ideology of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional--the PRi---and how everything is drowned in corruption...
...Still, there are certain hard facts that Ike partisans can point to in support of the proposition that he was an outstanding President: first, that his rigidly old-fashioned economic policies helped produce eight years of lowinflation prosperity and growth...
...he thought it a national disgrace that citizens were denied the right to vote on the basis of their color, and said so privately to his Southern friends on many occasions...
...Ambrose, whose admiration for Eisenhower shines through almost every page, finds him to have been grossly negligent in his dealings with Senator Joseph McCarthy and on most civil rights matters...
...It is the government and the people of Mexico both lying to themselvesmabout everythingmthat Reid Buckley is a novelist and has recently founded The Buckle), School of Public Speaking...
...If the civil rights question was painful for Eisenhower, the quest for arms control was positively agonizing...
...the questions he received at his press conferences were uniformly hostile...
...in which the ruling myth is historically a tissue of lies...
...makes Mexico an economic basket case and a sociological nightmare...
...But the major sin is selfdeception...
...It's time for the people of the U.S...
...This is understandable...
...The dividing line between them," says Scammell, "was still the barbed-wire fence and the ploughed strip, a ghostly barrier that continued to separate the oppressed 'us' from the privileged 'them.' " Solzhenitsyn's comments on Tvardovsky may sound unduly harsh and tendentious, but they were made, Scammell reminds us, in harsh and tendentious times...
...but it was always Ike's hand, nobody else's, on the levers of power...
...Distant Neighbors, nevertheless, is an indispensable study...
...Second, and less obvious, Eisenhower was by all odds the most fiscally conservative President we have had since Calvin Coolidge, this despite the label of "Modern Republican" that he insisted on attaching to himself...
...Dunlop makes clear, tbr example, that President Ford's refusal to receive Solzhenitsyn in the White House was not just a gaffe in the same category as his comment on Poland, but part of consistent U.S...
...Here again the truth could hardly be more different, as the following piece of unimpeachable testimony should make clear: After a stag dinner Ike hosted for some of the nation's top journalists, businessmen, and government officials, George Kennan, dazzled by the President's performance, remarked that he had shown "his intellectual ascendancy over every man in the room...
...But what will never again be in dispute is Eisenhower's total mastery of the office...
...Kennan may have been surprised by this, but the object of his new-found admiration certainly would not have...
...Most politicians he simply regarded as intellectual and moral pygmies, most businessmen as far too narrow-minded...
...Do these apparent triumphs mask deeper failures sub specie aeternitatis...
...Not surprisingly, he found it almost impossible to believe he had ever been wrong about anything...
...Two factors account for his intransigence on the issue...
...Moreover he was genuinely committed to securing full voting rights for blacks: "This was an area in which the President was unequivocal...
...Riding demonstrates, no sooner was Zapata murdered (at the instance of General Carranza) than the "reforms" that took place did so mostly to the enrichment of warlords...
...Never for a moment did he doubt that he was the best man to lead America...
...Perhaps the most chilling essay is that of John B. Dunlop which analyzes U.S...
...How finally shall we judge Eisenhower the President...
...We would do better, instead, to settle for what we now know about him--thanks to the work of Stephen Ambrose, above all, but also William Bragg Ewald, Fred Greenstein, and a few others--that is so strikingly different from what we thought we knew during his presidency: in Murray Kempton's words, written in 1967 in an article entitled "The Underestimation of Dwight D. Eisenhower," that he was "the great tortoise upon whose back the world sat for eight years," never recognizing "the cunning beneath the shell...
...Well, as Mr...
...The picture one takes away from them is of a hero who has outlived his greatness...
...It is broke, internationally a laughingstock, and torn with self-doubt...
...We're beyond the point of wading through political controversy and rhetoric concerning the national debt -- it's time for action...
...The Russians because of Hungary...
...And, true: The Carranzas, Obreg6ns, Calleses, and " " Cardenases, not to mention such bandits of the more recent past as Presidents Echevern'a and l_~pez Portillo---the caciques and the politicians, along with their tens of thousands of minions in the bureaucracies--have feasted on this poor suffering country as though it were carrion...
...in which political assassinations are the order of the day...
...By the early 1980s, a new poll placed him ninth...
...Most surprisingly, as ex-President he supported passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, strongly disapproved of Barry Goldwater's vote against it, and through the press and friends warned Goldwater against courting the "white backlash" vote...
...Two decades later all of Vietnam fell under Communist rule--and 50,000 Americans and millions of Indochinese were dead and incalculable damage was done to our political and social fabric...
...This newspaper is, of course, the voice of the French Communist party...
...But the book remains open on almost every other major decision of his presidency...
...The first, obviously, was his unshakable conviction that no one knew more about the subject than he--not an unreasonable belief for the former supreme commander, Army chief of staff, and head of NATO...
...initiatives such as Atoms for Peace and Open Skies, but argues that the President's "own deeply rooted antiCommunism was certainly a contributing factor to the failure...
...The times were unstable and unconducive to matrimonial permanence...
...to calf for a declaration of economic independence...
...Where he showed his extraordinary selfconfidence most markedly was in his determination to hold down defense spending against the near-unanimous advice of his official family, and in the face of a massive onslaught by not only the news media but the entire Democratic party[!] and much of the Republican congressional leadership as well...
...In any case, the sharp deterioration of our military power relative to that of the Soviet Union occurred in response to the debacle of Vietnam...
...And of course when the crunch came in Little Rock, he took the distasteful step of sending in the 101st Airborne Division to enforce desegregation of the high school...
...And for all of Khrushchev's bluster, the U.S...
...Not that Scammell whitewashes Solzhenitsyn...
...So much for Eurocommunism...
...Ambrose notes that shortly after Ike left the White House "a poll of American historians placed him nearly at the bottom of the list of Presidents...
...He is a skilled journalist who has thoroughly absorbed the anthropology of the Mexican people and who has intelligently applied this knowledge to the anguish of the present...
...And the men in the defense establishment were the biggest spenders of all...
...reader today can supply his own contrast with no fear that it will be too sharp...
...Even with Scammell the Soviet campaign to marginalize Solzhenitsyn has succeeded...
...The Chinese because of Quemoy and Matsu...
...But still, Solzhenitsyn did commit adultery, and did desert his first wife in her middle age, an act of injustice for which he has felt bitterly sorry ever since...
...Who would have guessed that the grinning dunce of Herblock's cartoons and Arthur Schlesinger's prose had been calling the shots on every major issue of foreign and domestic policy, from mutual security assistance to soil conservation, from arms control to interstate highways...
...Oh, the 34 THE AMERICAN SPEcTATOR AUGUST 1985...
...Probably only a John Kenneth Galbraith would still try to make the case--altogether discredited by a quarter-century's further experience with socialism--that the economic good times exacted too high a price from later generations...
...It was not an attractive quality in an otherwise immensely attractive man, but we should note that he worked as hard as any President in reaching decisions...
...The book, as I say, is closed and Eisenhower's choice turns out to have been an appalling mistake...
...Higher expenditures could only be met by higher taxes, but the federal government already absorbed far too much of the nation's earnings...
...the prophet who once refused to be silenced is now a celebrity-seeker who "fulfilled his self-chosen function of drawing attention to the subjects and ideas that preoccupied him and putting them on the public agenda...
...The longer he remained President the more intense grew his conviction that an uncontrolled nuclear arms race would bring catastrophe to mankind...
...No matter how complex a problem, Eisenhower's solution was always just a matter of common sense, and it irritated him beyond words that everyone else didn't recognize it as such...
...from the bright vision which Solzhenitsyn wrote so movingly about on his release from prison camp...
...It's not just that Eisenhower was thought to be lazy, he was widely regarded as plain dumb, a simple, even simple-minded, soldier being manipulated by far more clever and ruthless men--George Humphrey, John Foster Dulles, oil millionaires and the like...
...Then as now, power, not trust, was the central issue...
...His treatment of Solzhenitsyn's divorce and remarriage is in particular a model of balanced and charitable reporting...
...But if Eisenhower was right about defense spending, and indeed about most other matters of national security as well--Ambrose argues persuasively that he was at his incomparable best in "crisis management"---his record in the domestic area is open to a good deal of responsible criticism...
...How so...
...allIFe~ Americans have a history of producing innovative solutions to unsolvable problems, of creating new ideas for new tomorrows.., if we can break the sound barrier and develop machines to heal our hurts, isn't it possible that we can creatively solve the problem of the federal debt...
...This country of tragic contradictions is comprehensively examined by Alan Riding in his book, Distant Neighbors, for which Mr...
...Riding may likely be called the Hugh Thomas of Mexico...
...Do we know for sure how the world Would look today if he had said yes on any of them...
...9 Eliminate government waste 9 Set up spending limitations 9 Impose an across-the-board spending freeze 9 Permit a fine-item veto 9 Establish a Federal Debt Reduction Bank 9 Increase revenues through tax reforms 9 Lower interest rates 9 Sell or lease government assets 9 Provide tax incentives and solicit contributions 9 Encourage superproductivity THE POWER OF BEING DEBT-FREE...
...There were, Scammell insists, faults on both sides...
...Following the signing of the lndochina peace agreement in Geneva in July 1954, Eisenhower could choose either to abide by its terms and let all Vietnam fall to the Communists in 1956 or else commit American prestige and wealth to the creation of a permanently independent Republic of South Vietnam...
...enjoyed overwhelming nuclear superiority throughout the 1960s and into the '70s...
...All in all, then, a perplexingly mixed record on one of the most controversial--and consequential-- - ~ ~ ~ policy areas of his presidency...
...Had Eisenhower been more willing to trust the Russians, it would only have accelerated their overtaking of the U.S in strategic nuclear arms...
...That fabulous country has been ruined by its intellectual dishonesty...
...On any difficult question he gave the fullest possible airing to divergent views, listening carefully and patiently to discussions and absorbing reams of written material before reaching his "common sense" conclusion...
...In fact, Ambrose's own account of Khrushchev's destruction of the May 1960 Paris summit conference (using the U-2 flights as a trumpery excuse) is the best possible evidence of the Kremlin's intransigence...
...Whew...
...Riding has been writing since 1971 about Mexico for the Financial Times and the Economist, which he followed as Mexico bureau chief for the New York Times...
...Nor should it be necessary to add that the kind of work which filled those long hours was rather more wearing than figuring out a lead for today's column or marking exams...
...a very important book for America today: Available at fine bookstores everywhere Thomas Nelson Publishers Nashville, TN 37214-1000 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 33 Ambrose records Eisenhower's "own judgment, which he expressed on innumerable occasions," that his greatest failure as President "was the failure to achieve peace...
...Piling example upon example, Mr...
...As everyone who rived through those years recalls, Eisenhower was unhappy with the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education...
...All of them he measured by the yardstick of his own self-appraisal--and almost all of them came off badly, lacking that unique and indispensable combination of qualities he saw in himself: character, self-discipline, maturity, devotion to duty, and "common sense...
...When he left office, the tensions and dangers and costs of the Cold War were higher than they had ever been...
...Zurich and Vermont are as far as it is possible to be 'Western disparagement of Solzhenitsyn is fascinatingly documented in Solzhenitsyn in Exile, a collection of scholarly essays to be published in September by the Hoover Institution Press...
...Each Karl O'Lessker is senior editor of this journal, professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University, and senior research fellow of the Hudson Institute...
...What impact can transcendental realism have among readers for whom reality has stopped being transcendent...
...D EISENHOWER: THE PRESIDENCY Stephen E. Ambrose/Simon and Schuster/S24.95 Karl O'Lessker President Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House only a little over twenty-four years ago, but to those of us who are old enough to remember how things were in those days it sometimes seems an ice-age or two have gone by...
...As the guests were filing out of the dining room following a White House dinner shortly before the Court announced its 1954 decision, Eisenhower took Warren by the arm and said of the Southerners, "These are not bad people...
...Yet this was the same man who, as Ambrose notes, "had integrated the last of the armed forces' units, had integrated Washington, D.C., and the White House s t a f f . . , and had put through the 1957 Civil Rights Act...
...Mexico is a country that should be powerful and prosperous...
...In any case, who are we to demand impartiality when our own much vaunted liberal consensus has come to sound about as sensibly objective as the theology of Hare Krishna...
...Whether this constituted, as his critics claimed, an "abdication of moral responsibility" and thus served to encourage white Southern recalcitrance is still debatable...
...Did not the President fear a Soviet first strike...
...Brazilian-born, Mr...
...Powerful voices within the administration urged all of those courses of action and Eisenhower said no...
...and second, that despite ample opportunity to do otherwise he kept the nation out of war...
...But it is clear that Ike's personal sympathies rested with the segregationists...
...To what extent was this Ike's fault...
...At least "the sheer verve, the sheer courage, and the sheer ambition of the man commanded attention and admiration...
...One gets the sense of an incessant struggle within himself between the prejudices of his Kansas farm boyhood and preWorld War II army career, on the one side, and a bedrock sense of fairness and duty on the other...
...It is only when Solzhenitsyn is forced into the West that Scammell's resistance to liberal stereotypes crumbles...
...There is no evidence that Eisenhower's penny-pinching on defense helped produce the dangerously underfunded military that President Reagan found in 1981...
...Sure, Porfirio Diaz's long dictatorship fermented the sanguinary decade of revolution that began in 1910, and which implanted the neo-Marxist dogmas that have done so much to distort history and mortgage the future...
...And in fact there is little prospect that any startling new evidence will ever turn up, because with the exception of a few passages in national security documents and some unrecorded conversations between Eisenhower and Central Intelligence Director Allen Dulles, everything relevant to presidential policy-making from 1953 to 1961 is now available to scholars...
...His innermost feelings on race relations were perhaps best captured in an anecdote Chief Justice Earl Warren recounted many years later...
...Should we have nuked the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu...
...Time after time he refused to endorse the decision, on the grounds that it was a President's responsibility neither to endorse nor to repudiate a Supreme Court ruling, but only to uphold it in his executive capacity...
...He assumes, for instance, that what is called "social justice" can only be achieved through redistributionist policies managed by the state...
...Tracing the historical roots of our national debt, Robert Schufler and Paul David Dunn distinguished between responsible debt and sheer fiscal foolishness...
...It was this last which he regarded as 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 the transcendent intellectual virtue...
...Riding's conclusions, which are sometimes impaired by his liberal mindset...
...in which absolutely everyone knows that everything that one is told is (a) false, or (b) sheerest rodomontade, yet in which scholars, journalists, artists, and all other members of the intelligentsia cover the deceptions, paper over the sins, and extol the virtue of what is transparent to everyone as being a system of total moral and intellectual corruption...
...The best one could say about him was that he had overreached himself, "his v o i c e . . , growing shriller and less convincing as he tried to extend his range further...
...in which almost all public servants are crooked, from the lowest to the highest...
...But even more to the point is the biographer's reminder that, as with other such exercises, "any attempt to assess Eisenhower's eight years as President inevitably reveals more about the person doing the assessing than it does about Eisenhower [and] tends to be little more than a declaration of the current politics and prejudices of the author...
...he had no Negro friends and made no effort to hear the integrationist side of the issue...
...No longer, however, the sheer truth...
...But serious people on both the left and the right continue to raise questions about the long-term consequences of Eisenhower's national security policies...
...Perhaps we should expect moralists at least to avoid public immorality...
...Eisenhower's battle to keep a lid on defense spending encapsulates a good deal of what was most important and characteristic of his eight years as President...
...Moreover, his own passionate belief in the need for arms control had little support within the administration: At every step toward a limited test ban he had to fight an exhausting battle with the Atomic Energy Commission, the Joint Chiefs, and the defense establishment generally...
...Ambrose thinks his reputation will continue to rise, and I am inclined to agree...
...Everyone has his own measure of the distance between then and now--cultural, technological, biographical, political...
...The added emphasis is mine, but the facts belong to journalism's history...
...In the argument over Solzhenitsyn it has slavishly followed Moscow's line...
...Perhaps none is as startling as this: Through the last years of his presidency, as his biographer Stephen Ambrose reminds us, "Eisenhower was fighting virtually a one-man battle on holding down the costs of defense . . . . Not a single member of the White House press corps was on his side...
...The notion of cutting taxes in the absence of a budget surplus was to his mind despicable and ludicrous...
...Speculation about "the road not taken" makes more sense in connection with those few issues on which the book has, in effect, been closed--most notably, Vietnam...
...The problem with such questions is that there is no way of knowing what the consequences of different policies would have been...
...Oh, yes: Colonial Mexico was exploited by Spain, and for generations after pillaged by the ruling white aristocracy, which ineluded such fascinating patriots as the villainous Santa Anna, who lost the north to the United States yet had an equestrian statue of himself erected in the central plaza of Mexico City, with one hand pointing (as he said) toward Texas, symbolic of his determination to regain the territory, though wags at once noticed that the hand also seemed to be pointing to the national mint...
...he evidences little comprehension of, or sympathy for, the Cristeros, who were pitted against the Jacobin fanaticism of a revolution that burned churches, raped nuns, and tortured and killed humble priests...
...As we now know, there never was a "missile gap" as Ike's critics charged...
...I take exception to several of Mr...
...What will doubtless change over the years is the interpretation and assessment of Ike's motives and actions...
...Much of it he did with what political scientist Fred Greenstein has called a "hidden-hand...
...I took sharp exception to some of the evidence and many of the findings in Thomas's The Spanish Civil War...
...But the journalists and professors of the day were happy to believe in Ike's indolence and incapacity...
...The latter case is particularly revealing of both the man and the President...
...if you let them have their way they would spend the nation into bankruptcy and economic collapse...
...He led his peasant army into Mexico City demanding a return of the land to the poor (mainly Indian) from whom it had been wrested...
...2 DISTANT NEIGHBORS Alan Riding/Alfred A. Knopf/$18.95 Reid Buckley Imagine growing up in a country whose founding fathers are without exception morally blemished...
...Pushing him into the West turns out to have been Moscow's most brilliant stroke...
...The fact that they didn't, or at best only recognized it after he explained it to them, was merely further confirmation of his superiority...
...Leaving aside the slur about winning votes--it's hard to think of any President less likely to subordinate national security to politics-the question remains whether the Soviets in the 1950s were any more willing to sacrifice military advantage to "the cause of world peace" than they are today...
...In fact Ike was about as arrogant as a man can be, as confident of his own intellectual powers as he was contemptuous of those of most of the people he had to deal with...
...He chose to do the latter...
...Nor was there ever a realistic prospect that we and our NATO allies could or would have done much to redress the imbalance of conventional forces in Europe--nor what the benefits would have been had we done so...
...Less than a quarter of a century ago the nation's media elite were a pack of unreconstructed Cold Warriors, regarding the Soviet Union as a threat to world peace and the United States as dangerously unprepared for war...
Vol. 18 • August 1985 • No. 8
