The Eisenhower Era

...But it is possible to make some tentative judgments, which will give the Administration, now in a rather pathetic eclipse in the last months of an eight-year tenure, a standing in sharp contrast to the popularity which insured two sweeping victories at the polls over the most eloquent and persuasive champion of the Democratic party...

...Was the confusion after the U-2 disaster due to a confusion of counsel between hysterical aides and a President on the golf course...

...Perhaps the real pathos of the Administration's present anti-climax, which lights the last days of the Eisenhower Era with a soft autumnal light and shadow, is that these post-summit months were meant to be a real climax for the popular reign of the elected monarch of a great nation...

...But this moderately affirmative appreciation of the Eisenhower Era does not quite do justice to the pathos of the position of the once-popular President, nursing his wounds and those of his nation, inflicted by the resourceful Nikita Khrushchev on the occasion of the abortive summit conference...

...Fortunately, history, unlike drama, has no final chapter no ultimate climax and anti-climax...

...The minimal social securities of the welfare state and the empowering of the trade union movement, in the Wagner Act, to become a necessary counterweight to the other great center of collective power, the big corporation, were two of the many important forms of social legislation in which this transformation was expressed...

...So times change and prove that even Ike's services were not radical enough...

...What has happened since has been only anti-climatic...

...Did the President, who won general public approval for the first summit conference, turn out to be an insufficiently tough bargainer to gain some practical accommodation from the second conference...

...in fact, during the previous era when Eisenhower was conducting his "Crusade in Europe...

...The Taft wing of Republicanism was as reluctant to accept the fait accompli in foreign relations as it was to accept the realities of what is broadly defined as the "welfare state...

...Of course, the new leader of the Republican party did not fully bring the party abreast of the needs of the nation...

...The most obvious affirmative assessment will be that the Eisenhower Administration brought the Republican party within the realm of political responsibility...

...This was important because the business community, which it represented, was in danger of becoming irresponsible toward two great developments in our national life...

...It was prompted by World War II, which we were so reluctant to enter and into which we were literally catapulted by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor...

...Most of us are not technically competent to judge how great, if any, the "missile gap" is, just as we are not economically competent enough to estimate the significance of the fiscal policy in relation to the rate of advance in productivity...

...The Eastern Republicans—the "big bankers" if you will, as distinguished from the industrialists and bankers of the Middle West—were unable to defeat the FDR tradition until Eisenhower, with the aura of a war hero and the charisma of a "decent and well-meaning" man, was able to overcome the handicap and garner a majority of the votes...

...Was the popular President too confused in meeting the chicane of the resourceful Khrushchev...

...The other great change was in the international field...

...The Roosevelt Administration gave an affirmative answer and it was helped to make that answer effective by the Republicanism of which Henry Stimson is a convenient symbol...

...in other words, encouraging the wealth of the "private sector" by impoverishing the "public sector...

...The Eisenhower Era 'A hell of insecurity consoled by its comforts and failing in discipline and courage' By Reinhold Niebuhr It is certainly too early to anticipate the judgment of future historians about the significance of the Eisenhower Administration in the large sweep of American history...

...Was the man who insisted decently but rather sentimentally, "I will go anywhere, any time, in the interest of peace," less diligent than his much-praised late Secretary of State in preparing for that conference, though instinctively wiser than John Foster Dulles in desiring some settlement...

...In this case the nation achieved its climax of glory and power long before the Eisenhower Era...

...But we do know that the heir apparent to the Eisenhower Administration thought it wise to extricate himself from a slavish devotion to past policies by appeasing the left wing of the party, under the socially significant leadership of the Governor of New York, thus leaving the old Republicanism in the tender care of Senator Barry Goldwater...

...In this way the opposition party was persuaded to accept foreign and domestic policies first initiated by the Democrats...

...Legitimate questions may be raised about the adequacy of the philosophy of his first Secretary of the Treasury, who thought that "taking too much out of the economy" would create a depression, and who meant by "the economy" not our productive power, but our consumer needs or demands...

...Questions might also be raised about the adequacy of a fiscal policy concerned about the danger of inflation through an unbalanced budget, but not concerned about the danger of a static economy, in the vise of a tight money policy...

...If so, the symbol may also indicate an anti-climax for the nation which speaks rather pretentiously and glibly of its "moral leadership in the free world," while living complacently in a hell of insecurity, consoled by its innumerable comforts, and failing to take the political measures requiring discipline and courage which would make that leadership effective...

...Nevertheless, even his detractors must admit that he was a useful and gentle guide from the pre-nuclear to the nuclear age, at least for Republicans...

...One was the domestic development initiated by the New Deal in which the classical individualistic liberalism of both Adam Smith and the Founding Fathers was transmuted into a political policy relevant to the social realities and economic needs of a highly developed industrial civilization...

...Was this sad denouement perhaps caused by sentimentality, or by a decent impulse, not implemented by well-thought-out policies...

...Perhaps a better intelligence service would have informed him that the unity of the allies made it necessary for the Russian boss to sabotage the very conference he had so purposefully sought...

...and the question was whether we would assume world responsibilities commensurate with our power...

...Our new responsibilities ran counter to both the implicit pacifism of the business community and the explicit pacifism of the so-called "liberal left," whether based in agrarian or in trade union life...

...If so, the intended climax and the sad anticlimax of a decent but soft leader may symbolize both the essential decency and the love of ease of a great nation...

...Was an essentially decent President—who knew better than his various aides that a nuclear war is not possible and therefore that a not-too-peaceful coexistence must be made possible—not strong or diligent enough to control the bureaucracy of the Pentagon or the Atomic Energy Commission...

...We emerged from that war incomparably the strongest nation in the non-Communist world...

...One wonders, too, whether budget-consciousness may not have contributed to the admitted superiority of the once technically backward and despised Russian economy in the field of guided missiles, a superiority traumatically signified by the launching of the first sputnik...

...There is always a chance that we will grow into the wisdom and political resourcefulness demanded by our vast responsibilities, but not guaranteed by our previous rather too comfortable existence...

...The abortive, though laborious, good will tours reveal a leader sincerely desiring peace but failing to undertake the hard bargaining necessary to achieve the goal...

...Stimson significantly related the Republicanism of Theodore Roosevelt to the Democratic Administration of Franklin Roosevelt...